Tetchy touchpads and bookish blatherings.

[uvula_fr_b4]

Thanks to my desktop PC's increasing debility -- hey, it's a veritable museum piece, considering the fact that I bought it brand-spanking-new at end of the summer of 2004 (*grumble, grumble*) -- I was finally nudged into purchasing a laptop. It's refurbished, and it has Windows Vista (*boo, hiss*), but the price was right. Maybe someday I'll even get used to the keyboard. (It's better for QWERTY-typing than most netbooks, but I'm still fat-fingering typos all over the place with it.) The bloody touchpad, though -- mmm, it's better than most I've encountered, but it's almost too good; I've found myself whisking folders hither and yon without meaning to. Probably not a good idea to try to learn the intricacies of Vista and acclimate myself to a muy-twitchy touchpad at the same time.

Anyhoo, thought I'd mention the bookish newsy bits I stumbled across yesterday (Thursday, 8 October):

1. NPR's Fresh Air devoted most of its air time yesterday to an interview with David Hoffman, who was flogging his new book, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (NY: Doubleday). It sounds really good -- almost like a real-world John le Carré or Len Deighton novel (le Carré has in fact given it a favorable blurb) -- and it also sounds as though it'll make you sit back and reflect with astonishment, "Hey -- all that skulduggery, all of those micrometer-thin close shaves, and we're still alive." I'd come to the conclusion years ago that the real reason why Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb has such enduring power and is the only film that stays as funny on repeated viewings (if it doesn't actually become funnier....) as on first exposure, is because it's essentially a documentary. F'r instance: that bit at the end where the Soviet ambassador reveals that his country has built a doomsday device to launch and/or detonate every single nuclear missile on the planet in the event of an attack on Russian soil? Hoffman confirms that the Soviets, and now the Russians, had/have such a device; it's apparently still active. It's called "Perimeter," and the way it works is there are three officers ensconced in a secret, small bunker designed to be nuke-proof, receiving all of the military data vis-á-vis a (real or perceived) nuclear attack by the U.S.; if they are convinced that the top brass of the Kremlin and/or the Russian army have been or are soon to be wiped out, they are supposed to launch special rockets that will somehow launch all of Mother Russia's nukes at the U.S. But, wait; it gets better. Just as in Dr. Strangelove the Soviets never bothered to actually tell the Americans that they had a Doomsday Machine, so too with the real-world Soviets/Russians; Hoffman castigates this decision just as Peter Sellers' ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove (who was based in part on the futurist and nuclear war theorist Herman Kahn) castigated the Soviet ambassador: if the other side doesn't know that you have a Doomsday Machine, then how can it possibly serve as a deterrent? You can read a transcript of Terry Gross' interview with David Hoffman here; or you can listen to the interview here.
   
   
2. Yesterday it was announced that a Romanian-born German author whom I'd not heard of, Herta Müller, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She specializes in showing the corrosiveness of the regime of the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu on ordinary Romanians; only four of her novels have been translated into English thus far. The most recent one to have been published in English -- The Appointment (2001) -- sounds the most interesting to me, based on Motoko Rich's piece in the New York Times yesterday (on-line edition), wherein she cites Peter Filkins' review of it in The New York Review of Books ("Ms. Müller use[s] the thuggery of the government 'as a backdrop to the brutality and betrayal with which people treat one another in their everyday lives, be they spouses, family members or the closest of friends.'”). Her latest novel, Atemschaukel (translated in the Reuters article announcing the award yesterday as "Everything I Possess I Carry With Me"), which has yet to appear in an English edition, is up for the German Book Prize, which is scheduled to be announced next Monday, 12 October. Atemschaukel is about "the exile of German Romanians [of which Ms. Müller is one] in the Soviet Union." The BBC reported that "Her father served in the Waffen SS during World War II. After the war ended, her mother was deported to a work camp in the Soviet Union for five years." At minimum, it sounds as though her life has ample material for an absorbing and affecting biography; I'm even more intrigued -- and apprehensive -- by Julian Evans comparing her writing, in The Guardian, to Kafka's. (I read The Trial in high school; while I'm glad that I read it, the fact that I've not read any more Kafka, not even The Metamorphosis -- even though I've read a dozen or so of William S. Burroughs' books -- is, at minimum, a big mauve flag as to how much I enjoy reading him.)
   
   
3. Speaking of "Wild Bill," I didn't realize that this is the 50th anniversary of the first publication -- by a French pornographer (...) -- of his magnum opus, Naked Lunch, until I heard a story about it on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday. (I'd also forgotten that one of the book's defenders at the U.S. obscenity trial was John Ciardi, whose translation of Dante's Inferno I'd read for pleasure one summer between, what, my junior and senior years in high school? Amazing.) I might have to fish my rumpled copy out of storage and re-read it; if not this year, then quite possibly next. I can still remember laughing myself hoarse when I first read it; while the NPR piece mentioned that the title "Naked Lunch" was the contribution of Burroughs' jerkweed chum Jack Kerouac, it did not relate my favorite Kerouac-related anecdote: namely that Kerouac went to Burroughs' lair in Tangiers, and wound up typing up Burroughs' densely-written manuscript in marathon sessions. Kerouac slept only intermittently; he wound up having surrealistic nightmares thanks to his reading what he was typing, and he woke up screaming, "BILL!" Burroughs coolly looked at Kerouac -- quite possibly taking a slow drag on a cigarette, á la his most memorable character-cum-avatar, Doc Benway -- and rasped, "Just keep typing, Jack; just keep typing." (I've yet to read Kerouac and I've no real burning desire to do so any more; however, if I do read him, I most likely will read Doctor Sax, which Kerouac wrote while living with Burroughs in Mexico City in 1952. You can't tell me that Doctor Sax isn't based at least in part on Burroughs....)
   
   
4. The new issue of The New York Review of Books (22 October 2009; Vol. 56, No. 16) has a review essay by Norman Rush on the recently published concluding novel to James Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy, Blood's a Rover; the preceding books in the trilogy are American Tabloid (1995) and The Cold Six Thousand (2001): the former just might be my favorite Ellroy novel (although White Jazz, the concluding novel of his L.A. Quartet, runs it a close race); the latter was so stripped down and choppy as to be nearly impenetrable in spots and, ultimately, damn near Burroughsian (and no, I don't mean Edgar Rice Burroughs, wise guy....), and was probably as close as I ever care to come to a full-bore case of malaria -- or the DTs. While the review essay was mostly enjoyable, I was annoyed at Rush's blabbing of what sound like some crucial turns in the plot, and then primly declaring, "In fairness to readers I won't say more about this". Uh, the spoiler alert comes BEFORE the big reveal, not after. If, like me, you have a copy of Blood's a Rover safely tucked away in your domicile and you're just trying to clear a chunk of time to settle into it, you might want to give Rush's review a miss; or, at minimum, save it as a "pdf" or print it, but wait until after you've read BaR before perusing Rush. Caveat lector.
   
   
5. Finally, yesterday's edition of American Public Media's Marketplace had a brief interview with the author of another non-fiction book that sounds as though it might help one find one's way around Ellroy's oeuvre, John Buntin's L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City (NY: Harmony). Buntin has apparently organized his book around the conflict between L.A.'s most (in)famous police chief, William H. Parker (who was one of the behind-the-scenes prime movers in the short story "The Trouble I Cause" in James Ellroy's Destination: Morgue! L.A. Tales [2004]) and Jewish mobster Mickey Cohen; you can either listen to the interview or read a transcript of it here.