Divinest Sense

I’ve been tagged by Medley (some time ago now, sorry) in this book meme, so here is my contribution.

Total Number of books I’ve owned
I have no freakin’ idea. In the hundreds, definitely. I went through and got rid of a bunch of paperbacks and stuff back in September, so the collection is almost manageable at this point.

Last book I bought
Zorro by Isabel Allende, for my mom

Last book I read
Parts of The Star Fraction by Ken MacLeod - bad, bad, bad. I generally don’t like science fiction that much, and this was tepid science fiction at best. A bad, pun-laden story jumbled together with rants on “Trotskyism” to make it seem relevant.

Last book I finished
The Corporation by Joel Bakan. Recommended.

Five books that mean a lot to me
This is a really difficult question, because I’m sure I’ll leave something out. Much of the impact of these books has to do with the age at which I read them.

1)Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Have I mentioned how much I hate science fiction? Well, this book is just awful. Heinlein rampages around a story like a horny wildebeest. That said, however, this book is important to me because when I read it at the age of 13, it opened my eyes to new ways of thinking about morality, intercultural differences, love, and sacrifice. And, of course, body paint and orgies.

2)The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago. I am a sucker for any interesting interpretation of the life of the J-man, and this one is particularly thoughtful and well-written.

3)The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. This bizarre little tale makes me WEEP. The chapter about the prince meeting the fox is one of the simplest and most beautiful characterizations of what it is to love someone.

4)The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. Showed me writing at its most plastic, writing as art, writing as a life force. A great book is not a set of instructions telling you what to think, it’s not an information dump. The human mind is not a refuse pile and should not be treated as such. A great book has a life of its own.

5)Beloved by Toni Morrison. Because it forces us to imagine, and try to comprehend, something that is unimaginable.

Five people I’d like to see to do this as well
Ummm, I think a lot of my friends with blogs have already been tagged, so I’ll extend this to anyone I know who’s got a corner of the web staked out somewhere and hasn’t written about books in a while.

Yet another reason I’m glad I no longer live in Texas. I could start a second blog just on that topic. Maybe I will.

On a visit to my country of origin this past weekend, my heart was warmed by Governor Rick “Almost as bright as Dubya” Perry’s down-home publicity stunt - signing a parental-notification law at a Christian school in Ft. Worth. He also signed a proposal to amend the Texas constitution to forbid gay marriage. (This is not part of the procedure for changing the constitution.)

Now, there are a lot of Christian private schools in North Texas, and a number of them are very highly respected. Calvary Academy is not one of them - it’s one of those places you send your kids if you believe that evolution is “just a theory” and that public schools have too many Mexicans, but you’re too busy with your clinic protests to home-school. So I guess what Perry’s saying here is that if you’re going to mix church and state for the sake of your re-election campaign, go whole-hog and find the most evangelical establishment that you possibly can. But in a move that no doubt disappointed all his “pro-family Christian friends”, Perry announced on June 4th that he would not be filming the event as originally planned. The footage was going to be used in a campaign commercial.

But, of course, it’s even worse than it looks. Kevin Drum elaborates on the cluster of anti-choice legislation, medical center refusal, and zealous fetal-murder laws that make it impossible for Texas teens to have any safe and sane options for ending an unintended pregnancy.

It’s really saddening to have such a constant barrage of reasons validating my aversion to Texas. The food is so dern good.

Update: The Baltimore Sun gets wind of the story.

Yes, this is a real poster on the MARC, Maryland’s commuter rail system. I have seen it with my own eyes. I wondered at the time whether it was some sort of guerilla art making a statement about the fun times we live in, but alas, no…

UPDATE: Here’s a possible inspiration for the poster. I guess when I said “Soviet” I spoke too soon!

Actually, to be serious, the MARC poster is a reference to the poster designs of the Constructivist movement in 1920’s Russia, which was a strong influence on later design movements - most notably Bauhaus, de Stijl, and the Italian Futurist movement. The strong diagonals, bright colors, metallic surfaces and machine-like shapes are meant as positive, bold statements about the limitless potential of a technological and industrial world. This fertile period of design happened after the Bolshevik revolution and before Stalin solidified his dictatorial power. Thus, the vision is not born out of totalitarianism, but encourages putting art, technology, and human ingenuity in service to society at large. The MARC poster’s slogan, however, reminds us of what happened next - when poster designs became a propaganda tool of dictators, meant to inspire fear and obedience.