Inappropriate Content: 50 in 05©

Last month was a bad month to die; the only people I know who were aware that Prince Rainer of Monaco had died were people who have actually, at some point, been to Monaco; I've met librarians who didn't know Saul Bellow had kicked it.

Speaking of Saul, I've fallen behind in my “50 in 05©&3148; posting. Not in the reading, fortunately; just in keeping track of it on the blog. I have a bout a half-dozen half-finished reviews of a dozen different books floating around, and if I were a disciplined writer I'd actually finish one of them. But I'm a much more disciplined reader than writer, so while I work my way through one of Saul's lesser known works and Chris Rice's third novel, here's a quick list of everything I've been too lazy to finish writing about:

#10 1876 by Gore Vidal. Ulysses S. Grant got so attached to sending troops into the south, he decided to do it again near the end of his presidency. Ruther-fraud B. Hayes isn't my president! Mary McDonnell is!
#11 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. In the snobby, intellectual homosexual community, it is impossible to like both Gore Vidal and Truman Capote; they are opposites. Kurt Vonnegut is also the opposite of Gore Vidal—but in a good way. Vonnegut eschews rich people, excess verbiage, obscure detail, and all the other hallmarks of Vidal's style, in order to ask essentially the same question: “America—what's up with that, anyway?”
#12 Empire by Gore Vidal. By the turn of the century, Washington, D.C. is turning into the gossip-rich imperial capital Vidal spent most of his twenties pretending he hadn't grown up in. People like John Hay, Henry Adams, and Henry James run about, blissfully unaware that in just one short century, people will hear the name John Hay and say, “wasn't he that guy from The Love Boat?” Later William Randolph Hearst and Theodore Roosevelt get into some old-school shit.
#13 Rights from Wrongs By Alan Dershowitz. At some point in March 2003, I picked up a copy of a macroeconomics textbook to see if I could read a college textbook for my own personal edification. I could not. Or maybe it was just a mistake to choose macroeconomics—Alan Dershowitz's book has two distinct advantages over macroeconomics textbooks. First, Dershowitz's theory on a secular basis for human rights is—to me, at least—completely new, and from the perspective of someone who hasn't read his other books, it makes a lot of sense. Second, it's not three hundred frakin' pages long and filled with phrases like “consumption adjustment,” which sounds like a primitive treatment for T.B.
#14 Candide By Voltaire. I have read Voltaire's classic before, but this is a different edition, with some new letters and different translations of “Zadig” and “Micromegas.” As usual, I found Voltaire's fiction ten times more enjoyable than his philosophical work; thought there was an essay called “Tolerance” that described the brutal torture of a 62-year-old Protestant man after his son committed suicide and the townsfolk got in a pitchfork-and-torches sort of mood. Heh. “Tolerance.” What a cut-up.

I think that's everything. I had a whole essay comparing to Vidal to Vonnegut somewhere, too. If I can find it, I'll rework it and post it. It's not like I have a job or anything taking up my time. (I did put a resume in at the FBI today—seriously—but I don't expect anything to come of that; they may not be that smart, but they're not that crazy.)

So far, I have found Saul Bellow's—all his obits called him the “master of wit”—novel Dangling Man to be unerringly gloomy—but it's a good, gloomy. Chris Rice's Light Before Day, meanwhile, is agreeably bitchy; deadpan, too:

He grabbed the remote, found an eleven o'clock news broadcast, gave me a look, and raised the volume. The two of us sat there as an eighty-one-year-old woman described what it was like to have her arms ripped off by her nephew's pit bull. When the reporter asked her what the worst part of the experience had been, the woman replied, “Losing my arms.”