The Bigger Bang

This fall I picked up my first Steven Hunter novel, Hot Springs. I'm a snob when it comes to thrillers -- I only read Elmore Leonard and Alan Furst -- but I loved his column on the DC Sniper a few years ago. As a gun enthusiast, he wrote a smart piece on what we know about the sniper who terrorized Washington DC after 9/11: he was a good shot but not a great shot; he chose stationary targets and he was stationary himself when shooting. It was the best kind of article: you were instantly smarter after reading it and couldn't wait to parrot some of the best lines to family and friends.

Hot Springs is about Earl Swagger, a former Marine who is recruited to clean up the Arkansas hot spot after the war. It's hard to read the book and not see a young Nuck Nolte -- tall, haunted, and ready for action -- in the role. It's hard to think who could do this right now becuase we're in a weird era of action stars: could Will Smith or Colin Farrell play a man who has seen too much on Iwo Jima? Who has the square jaw these days? No one comes to mind.

One thing about Hunter is he knows guns. He writes about Colts and Brownings the wat James Joyce wrote about Dublin and John Updike wrote about housewives in the 60s. Hot Springs -- read it now.

Closer But No Cigar

Yuk yuk yuk. Rented Mike Nichols' Closer from the library the other day and semi-enjoyed it. It was billed as Carnal Knowledge for the new millenium and it's true that it's about some spectacularly good looking people leading miserable lives. I guess Clive Owen's character is Jack Nickolson's woman-hater but Owen was more of a softy. He at least has feelings beyond self-pity, which seemed to be the fuel for Julia Roberts' adulterous photographer and Jude Law's pathic obituary writer/novelist. Natalie Portman played a fragile and elusive stripper -- she seemed to realize how lucky she was to be in the movie. Rent it for the cool photography and Clive Owen's randy doctor. His online sex chat with Jude Law is worth the rental price.

Outrageous 2006 Predictions

This isn't going to be a good year for Hillary Clinton. Sure, she'll be re-elected to the US Senate from her home state of New York without breaking a sweat, but 2006 will be the year the anti-war faction becomes a full-fledged wing of the Democratic Party.

They may make up one-third of registered Democrats and they won't be searching for third party candidates like Ralph Nader. Instead, they'll stay inside the old party and shun anyone who voted for the war. This is bad news for Hil, who stands by her vote. Even if she switches sides and deamnds that the troops come home now, it will be seen as too calculated.

So who runs? Russ Feingold is on everyone's lips and Al Gore seems poised to think about this seriously. I see Howard Dean throwing his hat in the ring after he steps down from the party leadership role this year. Paging Dr. Dean.

Satellite Radio Days

The media have discovered Howard Stern again the week before he says farewell to terrestrial radio and starts his new gig at Sirius, the satellite radio station. The coverage has been glowing and there are a few interesting things to note: it seems like each interviewer from the mainstream media asks the same question: doesn't the FCC cencorship implore you to be more creative? Stern refuses to see how he can be more clever and I loved one complaint he made to Newsweek: the threats of hefty fines have forced him to curtail his show. "I haven't had a porn star on the show in six months!"

Two installments on The Today Show, a glowing profile on 60 Minutes, two pages in Newsweek plus cover stories in New York and Esquire. If I were the editor of a magazine that covered this story, why not write the non-Howard profile? Interview Opie and Anthony on Sirius' competitor XM? Ask them about what Stern can expect. Did they drop off the media radar because practically no one has satellite radio? Will his contract depend on signing up new subscribers? Is the freedom all that wonderful when you have fewer listeneers? Does the joy of using the F word fade after a while?

And another story idea: I want to go over to satellite and listen to Stern and his two channels but the company isnt making it easy for me. Why? The handheld Sirius devices are ugly and expensive. $349 for a lousy looking handheld? Why don't they hire the guy who designed the iPod and get him or her to work on a snazzy handheld version? To make matters worse, XM has a handheld device that costs $149.99 and isn't too bad looking. Hmmmmm. XMmmmmmmmm.

Giving One Pinter Pauses

"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

Ah, the words of a Nobel winner. Yassir Arafat? Jimmy Carter, you ask? No, the man of letters, Harold Pinter and winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature. If the Swedish Academy wanted to praise an artist's work while smashing the US in a single choice, they could not have done better than old Mr. P.

Of course, not every decision and policy of the US has been successful or 100 percent noble but the playwright's screed begs the question, if we are such vile scum, why is the United States still standing? The biggest guns? The old USSR had some heavy artillery and yet it fell to the wayside after 80 or so years of torturing its citizens. The empty promise of the American Dream? Not so empty because people are dying to come to this country each and every day. The NYTimes Magazine had a fascinating article about 30 year-old Jordanian man. He was conflicted: does he travel to the US and work for Microsoft or does he join the Jihad? Decisions, decisions.

Pinter sees the US' glass not only as half empty but the liquid stale and putrid as well. This is one odd switch between the Neocons and the New Left: The Neocons are now the pie-in-the-sky dreamers (the Middle East can support a democracy!) while the New Left are the sticks in the mud. Ask many Lefties about deposing Saddam and trying to establish a democracy and someone will soon say, 'some people cannot be run by a democracy.' Imagine if Dick Cheney said, "some people cannot operate a VCR."

(Yes, yes, a VCR and a democracy are two different things but just because a people do not have experience with free elections does not mean that they naturally want a vicious dictatorship.)

It's a shame that Pinter cannot see the good that America has done to for the world: we share our technology and hope; we want democracy to flourish and we have a nasty habit of liberating people from the vice of fascism. This last fact misses the ailing Pinter, who, if the Americans had not joined the fight in WWII, would certainly have a Nazi swastika on the corner of his typewriter paper when he wrote his first play in the early 1960s.

Congratulations to Harold Pinter. Brilliant playwrite and a perfect dupe of the Nobel Committee.

Murtha of a Nation

Rep. John Murtha intrigues me. His background is heroic, his idea for pulling troops from Iraq is suicidal but his role in Hilary's future is interesting. After a few months of Cindy Sheehan's shaming of the president, her dingbat idea is catching fire. Even Republican Senators are wondering that three years of a shooting war is too much for a country to bear, even though casualties haven't reached the levels of the morning of D-Day. How, one has to wonder, does the junior senator from New York handle this growing anti-war spasm?

Hillary Clinton, an anti-Saddam hawk, cannot be happy. She has heard the intelligence report since the mid-90s, she has sat on intelligence committees, and met with hindreds if not thousands of soldiers, reservists and airmen in her tour of military bases in New York. How does a neocon - yes, a neocon - convince the anti-war, bring them home, no blood for oil Left that she is their chice for the White House in '08.

Easy: she can't. Expect Hillary to go to the other side to join Sheehan, Murtha and countless other senators and representatives from both the right and left who have lost their stomach for the war. It's over. Expect to see politicians on listening tours so that they can vote to bring the troops home.

The O'Hara Factor

English Major Bears His Soul: I've tried to read Appointment in Samarra at least three times and I couldn't make it past the third page. I hate to admit this but I am a font queen -- if the book is ugly, the font too small and the paper too ugly, I usually give up. And because most of John O'Hara's work is out of print and only promoted in a poorly packaged collections, the publishers are practically daring readers to discover this amazing writer. Appt in Sam is well worth the wait and is designed for readers who have lived a little. I've heard and read several critics say it is the true Jazz Age novel instead of The Great Gatsby and they are right. Appt in Sam is about class, drink and desperation while F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about longing, true love, and limitless wealth -- all things teenage future English majors dream about. Talk about playing to the back row. If there is a list of great American novels, Appointment in Samarra should rank between Couples by John Updike and The Human Stain by Philip Roth.

I'm Famous! (and kidding, if you're humor-impaired)

This is me, on the 'perils' of gay marriage. Enjoy

Syrup Blogging, Baby

Last Friday, co-workers mentioned a terrific smell wafting through our SOHO office while they worked late the night before. Like maple syrup or fresh pancakes, they said. The NY Times even had a short, only-in-New York story the next day but there might be something serious at work here.

All last week, workers at Grand Central Terminal had their smell detectors out and running. These are long, thin aerials that hang from the entrance ways to the lower section of GCT, on the subway platforms and even on small carts in the middle of the main floor. What for? They track a colorless and odorless gas that officials release to test the flow of air where thousands of people walk through each hour. So if Al Queda releases a poison gas, the people in charge can see or predict where the gas will flow.

Why not test the release of a gas outdoors and check the log of phone calls to 911? No need to make it smell like rotten eggs -- which might panic the public -- but something homey and re-assuring.

Me, I like cinnamon.

Un-Savvy Boob

Yesterday was a good day to be a reporter. Instead of writing or editing a story about trading platforms, networking or asset management, I wrote a breaking news item about a strip club. Why? The CEO of networking firm Savvis is disputing a credit card charge at a strip club to the tune of $241K.

The editor of our sister newsletter asked me to write it up so I went to work. I called Savvis three times for comment plus I sent an e-mail to the communications director. No reply.

I then called Scores, the high-end strip club that gets tons of publicity as Howard Stern's favorite place to blow off steam. I interviewed Lonnie Hanover, the club's publicist, and he couldn't have been nicer or more professional.

My favorite reply came when I asked how many dancers entertained the Savvis party of four back in October 2003. He said that he didn't recall but that "there were so many."

Sadly, my fellow editor removed one from my story, which went like this:

"On the morning the story broke, Savvis had yet to add a link to the NY Daily News story on the firm's In the News section on the company Web site."

Here's the Yahoo News story. Waters should cover it in our December issue.

Miller's Crossing

Yesterday's four-page autopsy of the Judith Miller affair was odd. It felt like a hit piece from the very beginning with an anecdote about one of the Times star reporters getting her facts wrong. The first paragraph has Miller misspelling Joe Wilson's wife's name as Valerie Flame. Nice anecdote but it subtly shows that some in the Times newsroom would like Miller gone, thank you very much.

The piece seems thorough in nailing Dick Cheney's chief of staff as the official leaker of Plame's identity but that Miller and others were told she was an analyst and not an operative. If that's true, then no crime was committed. Just DC gossip.

But what of Miller -- does she leave the Times? They certainly cannot fire her even though her reporting on WMD was erroneous and boosterish. She went to jail for 87 days, for goodness sakes. As much as they'd like to dump her, that's no way to treat a lady.

Network News

Okay, I bought a home networking kit at the height of summer and after three, maybe four attempts, it is now finally working. I'll spare you the gory details but I am now typing this from my kid's PC. Wireless, baby! After the Motorola techie helped me set-up the network and set-up some security, I asked the wrong question.

"So, I can share files between the two PCs, right?"

"Well, no sir. You'll have to call Microsoft for that."

"But it's a home network. You should be able to share files, right?"

"This unit is only for sharing Internet access. Microsoft will help you with file sharing."

Great, now they tell me. Still, it is pretty neat.

Somebody Stop Me

I am in the Ft Lauderdale Airport waiting for my flight and I have no book with me. A book dilemma this profound should be making my hands shake. Actually the book I finished -- The Other Hollywood: An Oral History of the Porn Film Industry -- is in my garment bag in the hull of some 757 and I have nothing to read. Nothing. I was going to bring a paperback but nothing appealed to me. Gods and Generals? The kid is a decent writer compared to his dad, who wrote The Killer Angels but this sequel is just leaden. Junior's book on the Mexican-American war was much better but the name escapes me.

So do I buy a book? The selection is awful, all Grisham, Grifton, Steele and Patterson. I feel my brain shrinking just looking at the covers. The bookstore does have the new Zadie Smith but I doubt I can justify $25 for a new book. I loved her White Teeth -- just amazing even if it was a touch over-praised -- and this one has received glowing reviews as well. If it were in paperback, I'd scoop it up.

Maybe I'll just tap out some notes for my novel. I have an idea about a guy who gets a vasectomy and it launches the mother of all mid-life crises. Not based on personal experience but I see a slim, comedic novel about a happily married man with three different girlfriends. Who has the time for this much madness? Me, I hope to have the time to write the damned thing. How's this for a title: Snip.

Snip by Phil Albinus. I like that.

Henry Frickin' James

As an English major, I had no guilt about skipping over the works of Henry James. I tried to read The Bostonians and settled on the movie for an exam back in he late 80s, and more than a few critics write that James was an acquired taste.

So it's odd to report that I have read Daisy Miller and Washington Square and have my sites set on The Wings of the Dove. To bone up on my James -- you said bone up -- I have been reading Colm Toibin's The Master, the recent novel about James living in Europe around 1896. It's a fine novel once you realize there is absolutely no action. Zilch. Instead, you get to see an artist search for his stories and attempt to live his cloistered, stuffy life.

I only wish it came with hyperlinks. Toibin goes through James' life and offers episodes where real life inspires novels and stories. Thank to the Barnes & Noble introduction to Daisy Miller and Wings, I have a decent sense of his life and literary output but it would be great if I could click on a word, a name or a passage and be able to read where this fits in the writer's life and cannon. That would be neat.

One enterprising editor/publisher should release an annotated copy of this novel with information on James and his works. Think of it like the director's commentary on a DVD.

The Wings of the Dove, on deck after The Master.

Raunch Dressing, Not on the Side

The review of Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs in today's NY Times Book Review triggered some thoughts. Levy expands her New York Magazine article on the rise of Girls Gone Wild, magazines like Maxim and Stuff, and porn stars appearing everywhere outside their movies on regular shows and music videos as if it were normal. Well, according to Levy, it is normal: America has been pornified.

Jennifer Egans' review mentions one omission of the book's argument and might have missed another. Egan says Levy spends scant time on Madonna, who turned sex into self-empowerment ever since 1984. That's sad. Because the singer/video star has done a lot to move the ball down to the end-zone. No one exploits me but me, was her mantra. (Or is that womantra?) Also, I wonder if the young's acceptance of this lite porn stems from the shrill, humor-free days of the late 80s and 90s when people were politically correct to a fault.

I took three feminist courses at SUNY New Paltz in 1988-89, and these were deadly serious areas unless you were mocking men. So far, so shrill. After the Anita Hill hearings, lawyers and human resource consultants entered the fray. Telling a woman she looked nice in a sweater could be a litigious offence and the days of humor were over. I sat in on my share of HR seminars on how to be a sensitive co-worker and managers. Thank goodness the Internet boom rolled around so we could concentrate on making money.

Egan's review does not mention the feminist left's melding with the Christian right in its views on pornography. Even though both sides have different views on modern women -- kitchen vs. the board room -- they could both easily hate Hugh Hefner, Howard Stern, and even Victoria's Secret. Like the flimsy bras in the pages of those monthly catalog, something had to give.

The so-called third wave of feminists hated Christian prudes and the smelly feminists of yore. Howard Stern was a free-speech liberator, Hugh Hefner made sure his Playmates were treated well, and a whole raft of magazines from London came in with bad jokes and pics of models and actresses in bra and panties. Where was the victimization? Jenna Jamison looked healthy, drug-free and all-American to most people.

The Man Show debutted and rose in the ratings around the time that America read The Starr Report and expressed shock and acceptance. Bill Clinton looked like a serial humper from Day One and besides, the economy was roaring. Why jinx it? The Man Show was fighting against the notion that being a guy had been a bad thing for more than a decade. Pictures of cleavage, bodily function jokes and reviews of beer seemed almost elevating back then. It was.

There is a downside, though. I like my subscription to Stuff and one day would like to write captions for those magazines, but why is it so hard to find clothes for my daughter that doesn't like the laundry pile from a Vietnamese brothel? Does my listening to Stern and Opie and Anthony's antics mean that my daughter has to dress like a hooker?

Parenting Chronicles - Volume XII Chapter XXXVII

Driving back from my nephew's party on Long Island, Nora complained that she had to go the bathroom. She was whining and in deep distress that she might wet her pajamas and car seat. We were on the Sprain Book parkway, probably the darkest busy road in lower New York - no lights but the full moon. Again she said she had to go and bad. It was going to be a disaster.

I spotted some lights behind some black trees and got off. Couldn't name the town but there was a gas station nearby. We ran in and asked for the bathroom key.

We have no key, the attendant said. "I asked the owner four times and he won't drive the key over."

We left for McDonalds, which was down the road from the gas station. I backed into the guard rail that protects the pump and made sure I didn't hit a Lexus or that gas was puring out of the stall.

Nora was crying and moaning.

But when we pulled into the McDonalds' parking lot, she started to giggle. "I have to tell you guys something," she said between laughs.

Regina knew the answer but I was already unbuckling my seat belt.

"I PEED my car seat!" she squealed and out came peals of laughter.

I got out to check the back of the minivan -- perfectly fine in the parking lot light.

Back in the car, the two boys are asleep and Regina and Nora are laughing at her accident.

We drove home and she relieved herself like a racehorse outside the car door. More giggles.

Good times.

Falconer

Before leaving for Lake George, I looked for a book to take with me. It had to be slim, smart and I didn't mind if it was something I had already read. I brought John Cheever's Falconer, which is supposed to be his great novel. That's not much of a stretch because he will always be known as a short story writer thanks to his epsiodic novels. All in all, Falconer was good, if strange. It definitely probably read better when it came out in the mid-70s and if I remember the glowing reviews, it might have been over-praised for two reasons: Cheever had finally quit the sauce and delivered a full-length novel that didn't read like a collection of short stories. It was compelling and it was always nice to be in the hands of a writer who knows what they're doing. The scene where Farrugt realizes that he has beaten his drug habit without even realizing it -- the prison medical team had been feeding him a placebo -- was wonderful and quiet in this loud rambunctious novel.

Lake George, Late Summer

After two weeks of humid weather, high temps and some awful news from New Orleans and Mississippi, it's great to be back at Lake George with the family and Regina's sister, her two nephews and one girlfriend. The weather has been amazing and we spent the day switching between the pool and then to the lake and then back to the pool again.

This morning, Regina took Nora and Timmy to the local pancake house while I watched Matthew swim in the pool. While he was wading in the whirlpool, a plane flew overhead at around 150 feet. Then a helicopter flew along the lake at seagull altitude. If that weren't entertaining enough, I saw an Indian with full headgear and war paint in a canoe by the motel's dock. He lifted his musket and BOOM fired into the air. The ducks in the water didn't seem to like the entertainment. The Indian then chatted with a few people on the dock before paddling off.

Tonight we played miniature golf. Nora and I both had a hole in one -- the triumph of luck over skill!

Speaking of skill, both Nora and Matthew can doggy paddle like champs. It's been a good summer.

Hillary -- Too Conservative?

Cindy Sheehan's main target just might be Hillary Clinton and not W. The grieving mother of a fallen Iraqi soldier has stepped to the head of the line of the anti-war movement and she could be the face for this growing and passionate crowd. And the people behind her -- Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, Air America, et al -- realize that for every person who agrees with them, three people are repelled. Cindy is the face of this movement, which could break big.

Why is this bad for Hil? Easy: the anti-war left won't vote for another Washington candidate who supports the war. Liberating 25 million citizens from a brutal dictator and building a democracy in a region that only knows theocrats and dictators isn't worth the lives of US soldiers to these people. If this movement gains momentum, the next Democratic candidate had better be against the war from the beginning. Paging Dr. Dean.

Sheehan has incredible stamina. She has turned her grief into a megaphone against this president, but so far, the mainstream media's coverage has been fawning. She will have to either stand by or explain her remarks that her son died for Israel, OBL is an alleged terrorist, and the war in Afghanistan was a mistake too. If she loses the loony left-speak -- seriously, can anyone stand next to Michael Moore and not spout this paranoid nonsense? -- she could be the Martin Luther King Jr of the antiwar crowd. With a book tour, a glowing documentary, honorary Ivy League degrees and the money of Lefties, she could win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Instead of the man who liberated the Iraqis and tried to bring democracy to the oppressed.

Not Very Christian

It's been a pretty bookish summer, so far. I've knocked off John Updike's Marry Me, Alana Feurst's The Polish Officer, Elmore Leonard's Toshamingo Blues, as well as Gore Vidal's Julian and Henry James' Daisy Miller. The last two were startling. Julian was terrific though not nearly as great as I, Claudius but as the young emperor who tried to bring back Hellenism while his nation was in the throes of Christianity, he made some strong arguments for his faith. I've made a point of not reading James and I don't feel bad about my decision at all. After finishing Daisy Miller, however, I can't wait to go onto Washington Square and then onto Portrait of a Lady. I also have my sights on The Wings of a Dove because I loved the film version with a rather nekkid and racktacular Helena Bonham Carter. Man, I am so deep.