Michael Moore has a new book out…

….and I wish he’d shut the hell up.

There, I’ve said it.

“Mike’s Election Guide” (shudder at the folksy title) will not be read by me. Why? Well, it’s not only that having watched “Michael and Me” which showed his lack of affinity with any kind of truth, personal or political, or the fact that “Sicko” was just a cringe-fest posing as a documentary….although those things helped.

It’s the tone, dear reader, the tone.

Once upon a time, back when I thought Moore had something interesting to say, and was good at saying it, I signed up to his mailing list. This past week alone I have had three emails from him, one pimping the book and two others about the possible danger to New Orleans from Hurricane Gustav (one of which was a resend of an old message with plenty of “I told you so’s” tagged on).

What really gets my goat is his opinion that he is better than everyone else, including the people on his mailing list. This doesn’t sit too well with his carefully crafted image as plain ole Mike, man o’ the people.

Consider the following (copied and pasted from an email titled (“An open letter to God” sent 31/08/08, emphasis mine):

“Some of us tried to help after Katrina hit, while Bush ate cake with McCain and twiddled his thumbs. I closed my office in New York and sent my entire staff down to New Orleans to help. I asked people on my website to contribute to the relief effort I organized — and I ended up sending over two million dollars in donations, food, water, and supplies (collected from thousands of fans) to New Orleans while Bush’s FEMA ice trucks were still driving around Maine three weeks later.”

Um, thousands of fans?? Thousands of concerned citizens more like. I see no link between wanting to help out in times of (easily-preventable) disaster, and being a fan of Michael Moore. Yes, the man organised a charity, but people gave to it because they wanted to help people in New Orleans, not because they are sheep-like fans who donate to whatever he tells them to.

From the same email:

“So, yes, You have scared the Jesus, Mary and Joseph out of them, and more than a few million of your followers tip their hats to You.

But now it appears that You haven’t been having just a little fun with Bush & Co. It appears that Hurricane Gustav is truly heading to New Orleans and the Gulf coast. We hear You, O Lord, loud and clear, just as we did when Rev. Falwell said You made 9/11 happen because of all those gays and abortions. We beseech You, O Merciful One, not to punish us again as Pat Robertson said You did by giving us Katrina because of America’s “wholesale slaughter of unborn children.” His sentiments were echoed by other Republicans in 2005.

So this is my plea to you: Don’t do this to Louisiana again. The Republicans got your message. They are scrambling and doing the best they can to get planes, trains and buses to New Orleans so that everyone can get out. They haven’t sent the entire Louisiana National Guard to Iraq this time — they are already patrolling the city streets. And, in a nod to I don’t know what, Bush’s head of FEMA has named a man to help manage the federal government’s response. His name is W. Michael Moore. I kid you not, heavenly Father. They have sent a man with both my name AND W’s to help save the Gulf Coast.”

Again with the ego. And what is that very clumsy attempt at satire in aid of? On one hand he’s suggesting that God is sending a hurricane to disrupt the Republican Convention, and on the other sneering at suggestions that Katrina was sent to punish pro-choicers (any sentient being dismissed any and all such claims by celebrity evangelists as utter ludicrousness and doesn’t need to be reminded of them). You can have it one way or the other “Mike”, not both.

It would seem that poor “Mike” got a bit of a lambasting for that mail, as this morning (2/9/08) another email landed in my “non-priority” folder from the man himself. This one is called “Random thoughts from Michael Moore” and opens with a weird mix of bombast and defensiveness:

“Well, I guess God got my email and answered my prayer. Man, the power of the Internet! He even emailed me back! I’ll share that with you in the next few days. Proof there is a God in heaven? Never explain comedy or satire or the ironic comment. Those who get it, get it. Those who don’t, never will…”

Hmmm…. So because I think his arguments were specious, and ill-constructed, and his attempt at satire ham-fisted, I now have no sense of humour? Well, I can be cranky til I’ve had my first cup of coffee in the morning, but I also have been known to spew said coffee over my poor beleaguered keyboard when I come across something funny during my morning browse of the interwebs.

Here is another chunk:

“The Republicans held their convention in Chicago less than two weeks after D-Day. No one faulted them for that. In fact, it made Americans feel good that, no matter what happens, NOTHING stops Democracy. No retreat, no surrender…

So McCain and company used the hurricane for political advantage, to have an excuse to not have Bush and Cheney live and in person in St. Paul (Bush will appear Tuesday night via satellite). And he used the hurricane as a chance to release a potentially controversial story in the hopes that the hurricane would dominate the news and not many would notice. One hour after Gustav hit land, the McCain campaign announced that Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter is pregnant. I don’t want to say much more beyond this, as I agree with Barack Obama that “people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits.”

I do feel very sorry that this minor, this child, now has to have her privacy sacrificed because her mother accepted an offer to run for VP. Obama’s right — the children are off limits. I remember when John McCain cruelly trashed Chelsea Clinton when she was a child in the White House. He told reporters that she was “ugly” “because Janet Reno is her father.” Of course, McCain would like us now to accord Palin’s daughter the respect he wouldn’t give Chelsea.”

So much here… for a start, he has changed his mind totally about the suitability of holding a full Republican Convention while a natural disater is happening. They should go right ahead, it would be cowardly not to. Riiiiiight, and leave themselves open to criticism from everyone on the gulf coat who sees shades of being ignored like last time round?? I’m no Republican, but here he is criticising them for trying to do the right thing (albeit three years too late).

Onto the notion that the Mc Cain camp released the news of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy on a day it would be buried in the news. So he remembers the scandal from the UK where someone lost her job for suggesting 12/09/2001 was a good day to bury bad news? Paranoid much? A pregnancy is a pretty hard thing to hide, I’d imagine the news was released with approved spin to prevent it being sold to the tabloids by some opportunist – or maybe I’m naive.

Don’t get me started on the hypocrisy of stating that “children are off limits” and then following on to whine about how Bristol Palin has had her “privacy sacrificed” by her mother accepting the VP nod. So has every other child of a candidate in every presidential campaign in living memory – like Chelsea Clinton, Jenna Bush etc. This is not news. It is however the media that perpetuate this invasion of privacy – look to yourself “Mike”, if no paper printed news about the kids of candidates then this wouldn’t be happening.

As for reprinting the “joke” McCain made about Chelsea Clinton – which was just plain nasty (both the “joke” and the urge to retell as in a point-scoring exercise), I now know where “Mike” does his research. For one, he reads the New York Times and the Guardian, both of whom made mention in the past couple of days of a very off-colour joke told by McCain, and linked to Salon.com (here) where the “joke” was told as Moore quotes it (although with a caveat that there was no recording of it). The mainstream media at the time chose not to reprint the joke itself, and only recently have they been amenable to linking the decade-old Salon piece as a back-up for saying McCain made a nasty joke about Janet Reno and Chelsea Clinton (and by extension Hillary Clinton). What this says about press standards I’m unsure, but everyone reading those pieces had the option to click through to Salon, or not.  Moore is shoving it, in all its ugliness, in everyones’ faces. Thus proving himself a hypocrite of the highest order, all to knock McCain (surely there are easier ways to attack him? I think he still does not really know how many houses he owns….).

By regurgitating the joke in a mass mail-out Moore has proven he has no respect for Chelsea Clinton either, and the snide remark about how Mc Cain “would like us now to accord Palin’s daughter the respect he wouldn’t give Chelsea.” would imply that he has no intention of according Bristol Palin any such privacy despite his earlier assertion.

So tone, yes, ego, yes and hypocrisy even more so. It would seem that (from the evidence of his own mail-outs) Moore can’t hold on to an opinion, or a moral stance from one paragraph to the next, never mind one mail-out to the next. That is why I am thoroughly fed-up to the back teeth of the man, and have re-filtered his e-mails from “non-priority” to “junk”, and why I really won’t be reading his new book.

Democratic America both needs, and deserves, a better spokesperson than him. Good thing Obama is no slacker on the speechifying front.

“The most chilling thriller since “Silence of the Lambs”"

…turns out to be the most unconvincing thriller since “Hannibal Rising”.

I really dislike books that are knowingly overhyped.

In case you care the books in question is “The Final Days” by Alex Chance. Or Alex the Chancer judging by jacket blurbs like that. Don’t trust me? Check out the following (also from the blurb) “…a little mute girl with ghastly nightmares” (urgle, “girl” would imply “little” and the last time I read ghastly (aside from here) was in a Jennifer Johnston book, where I took it as proof of her anachronistic relationship with the times).

The rest of this book is as painfully over-written as the jacket. Subtlety is not Mr Chance’s strong suit. Mind you, neither is psychological accuracy, which is rather important if you’re writing a psychological thriller. You’d think. Irritating, non-realistic characters who witter on in constant psychobabble, the use of synaesthesia (a perfectly benign neurobiological disorder) as a mark of psychopathy, I could rant on and on, but the true mark of how bad this is, is that it is taking me days to plough through it. And I’m not sleeping at the moment so you’d think I’d fly through the thing. Nope. I’d rather stare at the walls. Not good.

Books from blogs part deux….

Since Diablo Cody has (deservedly) won her Oscar for “Juno” (while being backlashed at all over the net for her allegedly not-very-good-at-all follow-up “Jennifer’s Body” – google it yourself, if you care) – I feel it may be a good time to revisit the whole books-from-blogs thing…especially in light of the imminent Irish contribution from slightly famous Dublin blogger (as in he has won awards and has a much bigger following than me (ie thousands of people actually look at his blog every day) and even a wikipedia page, pointing all of the above out in order to cut the inevitable trolls off at the pass) Twenty Major.
The book is called “The Order of the Phoenix Park” (see what he did there, see?) and is a (takes deep breath) satire/adventure/escapade/avert-global-catastrophe-with-yer-mates type thing. All very well and good, since reading about his mates on his blog has always been fun. Sadly, it works best in small doses. The book comes across not so much as a satire but as a massive personal-grudge-settling endeavour, with his personal gripes and ham-fisted (nearly as bad as a Sindo journalist) similes that bludgeon politics into every available cranny of the text – those that aren’t concerned with how many times he wipes himself after taking a dump and other such “witticisms” that may amuse 14 year old boys. The plot, such as it is, isn’t too bad, in that there is one and it is quasi-amusing if a bit join-the-dots-y, but the pointless digressions into “hilarity” do nothing but undermine the story and grate on the reader’s patience. Well they grated on mine to such an extent that when I reached the end of it and realised there was going to be a sequel I groaned out loud…I won’t be reading it that’s for sure, it took me days to get through this one…
Or maybe I have no sense of humour (though I did check by watching “Black Books” and cracking open “A Confederacy of Dunces” to make sure I hadn’t temporarily misplaced my funnybone, apparently I hadn’t because they both made me (as Twenty would say) piss myself, as usual). Maybe the book will be a phenomenal success and he’ll be the new “Ross O’Carroll Kelly” a hero to the inner 12-year-old of the nation. Best of luck to him!

Oh shut up already about the light…

Ok, here comes another rant about a severe prose irritant that should be avoided at all costs. I just finished wading my way through Rick Moody’s “The Diviners”, and I’m still ticked off about his constant show-offishness and sub-Pynchon constant burbling about irrelevancies to show how clever-clever he is.

The opening sequence of the book goes on for (I kid you not) 14 (entire, closely printed) pages about dawn breaking and all the various things the light shines on as it travels around the globe. After three pages of “light breaking upon blah blah blah” I was grinding my teeth. I flicked ahead and discovered this self-indulgence was going to last til the end of the chapter. It took me three attempts to get there. All I learned was that Mr Moody knows about physics, knows who Richard Feynmann was and dearly wants to write like Thomas Pynchon crossed with Tom Robbins. I also learned that he fails miserably on that score.

On further reading (yes, I finished the damn thing, I am punishing myself for something, obviously) I discovered that not only does he like to showcase his soi-disant intelligence at every turn with meaningless discursions (like lists of psychiatric medications), but he underestimates his readers intelligence to such an extent that all his “themes” are not so much elegantly folded into the text but rather splattered all over it as though from a paintball gun.

Not a fun read. Which would be ok if it were any good…

I know I have a massive aversion to the McSweeney’s style of preening, “clever”, precious prose, but this one takes the cake. It even beats out Zadie Smith’s terrible DeLillo/Homes rip-off “The Autograph Man” in pointless reading stakes. And that is saying something. I’m consigning this one to the special (biohazard) bin marked “authorial wankfest” where it can moulder away in its own excreta. All 567 pages of it.

And now I’m going to read something good.

Books from blogs, a good idea?

Bit of a talking point this one.

I say it depends on the blogger, and what they intend writing about in the book.

Someone like Diablo Cody can take a pile of her own blog entries and shape them into a fabulous read like “Candy Girl”, but (as evidenced by “Juno”) she can really really write. (Yes, I could be slightly jealous. But that’s allowed because I’m also predicting “Juno” is one of those movies that will add phrases to the vocabulary of a generation. Like “Heathers” did. And it should too. So there.)

/edit/ rest of post deleted and will be restored at some further point in the future

Sickbed reading, or not…

Being laid up with a nasty bug gave me some time to plumb the depths of my pile of unread proofs at home. Most of them were so-so, as is usual, but there was one that really and truly irritated me. If I wasn’t already nauseous, it would have made me so. The culprit? A novel called “Spider” by Michael Morley which the good folks at Penguin are publishing this April. It’s a thriller set between Italy and the US about an ex-cop who can’t forget his last case (already with the yawning) and a serial killer (yes, the one from said last case). Now it was an uncorrected proof, so maybe this gripe will be moot by the time the edited version hits the bookstores BUT (warning, I am about to be pedantic here…) it drove me up the wall and back down again several times while reading it.

The problem? Omiscient narrators I don’t mind, hackneyed plots I can ignore, but two narrative strands (running concurrently) written in mixed tenses?!?!?!

/head explodes

The ex-cop’s life is in past tense and the serial killer’s is in the present tense. I’m sure I’m just being a fusty old pedant here, but how can one be past and one be present when they are both happening at the same time?

Please god, editor, someone fix this!

Mind you, it could be just me. Apparently a manager at one of our other branches is raving about it (in a good way).

I’m just raving.

As usual.

The dubious joys of uncorrected proofs…

This salvo has been a long time coming. Given that I’ve been selling books (and reading proofs) for over a year now, I am consistently amazed by the accolades heaped on authors who (simply put) cannot write.

To explain: an uncorrected proof is usually a bound copy of the manuscript sent to the publishers by the author, and rushed off the presses in an attempt to gain positive word of mouth for a particular book/author. These often come with big assurances to booksellers about the planned marketing spend on the finished work. So far, so good.

I have read many wonderful proofs containing just the occasional typo (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, “The Mistresses Daughter”, “Confessions of a Fallen Angel” etc…) where the authorial voice shines through in all its glory. It’s a joy, in these cases, to feel that you are getting in on something wonderful right at the start.

But then, there are the others. The rotten proofs, where the author can’t keep control of their characters (you read for a page and  a half before you can figure out which of the (way too large cast of) characters is speaking). And then you can’t remember for the life of you who they are in relation to anyone else in the book.  Or the ones that you wade through like you’ve been condemned to a hell of homophone calls, weird synonyms, and sentences that don’t go anywhere. To make matters worse, sometimes things are so mangled that you can’t even guess at what the word the author meant to use was.

Now, looking back over my nano-novel I can see how easy it is to misspell, or mistype, something when you’re writing at speed (my own most common mistake is to leave a letter out when the last letter of the preceding word is the same as the first of the next “almos there” for example) but to submit something as riddled with clunkiness and errors to a publisher, knowing that it’s going to be bound and sent off for a wodge of the book-selling community to read?? Methinks not.

Some of the stuff we get is like a sub-par first draft for something that could be interesting if a proper writer wrote it. The plot is there, but the writing is not.

And the worst part? Some of these are by best-selling, highly-praised writers.

There are best-sellers sitting in our proofs basket untouched, because none of us want to read them, having already been burned by mangled prose and half-assed first drafts. And when someone does dive in after a proof of something that’s flying off the shelves, their disappointment at the original puts them off hand-selling the finished work.

All hail the editor, they who make the unreadable mess into a polished end-product.

And pity the poor bookseller who gets to read work uncorrected by these unsung heroes.

Delusions of coherence

Being an atheist myself (given that I am a most irreverent reverend) I had hoped to enjoy “The God Delusion” if only in a slightly smug “Yeah, yeah, you tell ‘em!” kind of way…only I didn’t. There are several flaws to Dawkins’ reasoning (I’ll get to his hectoring tone later) not least among them the biological reductionism that actually exposes a central gap in his thesis. His insistence on Darwinism (no problems there) and equal insistence that man has evolved in terms of morality and civilisation past “needing” religion conveniently ignores the historical truth that religion (documented as far back as 5000 BCE) was the basis for morality and civilisation – in ancient Sumer all of mankind’s behaviour was imitative of that of their gods. Their myths taught moral lessons and their laws became the laws of man. We may not “need” religion now, but it played an extremely important part in our evolutionary process. He also missed the chance (presumably because it’s not his field of expertise) to attack modern religion from the roots, go back to Sumer and trace the three major God-religions of today back to their common ancestry, and see how things got twisted along the way. It’s a very common-sense and reasoned way to talk people around to seeing modern religion as just currently-sanctioned mythologies, but no he’d rather insult people and be sarcastic and nasty and alienate people by calling them stupid and deluded. Oh well. If that’s your cup of tea, fine, and Christopher Hitchens apparently is offering more of the same (with added bile). If you’re interested in something a tad more reasoned I’d recommend Karen Armstrong’s “A History of God” or “Myths from Mesopotamia” (Oxford Classics) or Raphael Patai’s “Hebrew Goddess” (for Ugaritic mythology).