Right on the Big Things: Reading "Present Shock"

I was reading this book, where the main argument is that we are overwhelmed in the eternal present by technology, and I didn’t like some of the author’s gloss readings on the culture.  For example, he said that Bevis and Butthead was more about the music videos, where I thought they were filler.  He claimed that the movie Forrest Gump “Attempted to  counteract the emerging discontinuity of the internet age” (29).  My problem is that Forrest Gump came out in 1994.  I can’t easily find the stats, but I have a feeling that most people weren’t on the internet in 1994.  People still had Windows 3.1 and maybe had CompuServe or AOL with hourly rates if that. 

It may be a small point, and one that might be forgivable for someone writing about the 90s a hundred years from now, but stuff like that makes the strength of the arguments about things you don’t know about evaporate.  I was mad, because the hypothesis is interesting and he’s a strong writer.  So I did what anyone else would do.  I found him on twitter and told him he was wrong and we had a short conversation that didn’t resolve my feelings.  Then I read the rest of the book from an angry angle.

And it wasn’t until I was done with the book that I realized that what I had done, contacting him on twitter and so forth , actually vindicated his hypothesis.  It is rough living here, in the desert of the real. 

A Sharply hit Double: On "Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies".

Kluwe plays in the NFL (hopefully he gets another shot soon), but I am going to use a baseball metaphor.

This book came to me with two strikes against it.  Strike one is that the name of the book is “Beautifully Unique Sparkelponies,”  and strike two was the anti-jock bias that I seem to have.

Here’s where I should say that Kluwe hits it out of the park, but I’m not going to go that far.  It’s more like a sharply hit double in the gap.

This book is mostly essays about politics and football and life.  Reading it, I had trouble getting into it.  I fillow Kluwe on a well-known micro-blogging site, and I like his voice in those small bursts.  It has some issues scaling up, and early on, I wanted to abandon the book.  There are places the essays are over-writen and there is a whole essay about the process of writing –which is important for a writer to think about, but maybe needs to be put in a drawer until the Paris Review comes to interview you.  There’s also a later essay where one-ply toilet paper serves as a vehicle for an extended metaphor.

So I was ready to put it aside, but I did.  It may be juvenile, but Kluwe is also really smart.  I don’t say that just because he has the same politics I do or reads the same authors I read, but it builds in the book to a point where you can’t deny this guy’s smarts –  no matter what biases you bring to the reading.  There’s a short piece on punting that captures that important but ignored part of the game in a way that makes you rethink the punter’s craft.  Over the course of the book, it feels like he finds his voice.  That or I just became accustomed to his unique style and cadences.  I think that if I wrote a book, it would be a lot like “Sparkleponies.”  I hope it would be.   

Nothing to fear but your god: Reading "Man's Search for Meaning"

Within the covers of this book is a very moving, powerful story about survival and creating a reason to go on even when the worst is facing you.  That there were any survivors from the camps shows the resilience of the human soul.  That part is very, very good.  You should read it and be prepared to feel conflicted about your fellow man, who is capable of such highs and lows.

Also in the pages of the edition I have are two addendums.  One is an introduction to Logotherapy, a therapeutic method that Frankl was instrumental in developing.  Another is a “Case for tragic optimism”.   I don’t know what to make of these so much.  The narrative that is the core of the book is only 99 pages.  The other two sections feel like filler, and I don’t think they aided my understanding of the narrative any better.  I’m most concerned about the Logotherapy section.  It seems to have been highly influenced by Frankl’s life experiences, but I don’t know how useful it is.  The section was written in 1980, over thirty years ago now, and I worry that what was written then has perhaps been superseded by subsequent research and work.  The problem here is that I have no background in the discipline, so I can’t know. 

Basically, stop at this sentence: “The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear any more – except his God.”  Then  you will be just fine.