tales of copper city

The media and the war and everything else

Here's a book we should all read, by Greg Mitchell: So Wrong for So Long: How the Press and the Pundits---and the President---Failed on Iraq. Mitchell is Editor of Editor and Publisher the magazine of the newspaper business, and his book is a collection of his columns on Iraq.

Back in 2003, Mitchell was one of the few mainstream journalists to question the grounds for war.

The longer I study politics the more I see the mainstream media---the newspapers, television, and the pundits--- as the critical institutional failure in our democracy.

More on Spitzer

For a somewhat larger perspective on the Spitzer story, read this piece in Harper's by Scott Horton.

Reading short novels

I've recently started reading short fiction, books that I've either read before or want to read now. 

I started with Paula Fox's Desperate Characters, a terrific book written in 1970 about Brooklyn Heights during the 1960s.  Desperate Characters is one of the best-written pieces of fiction I have ever read. The thrill of the book lies with the precision of the language, each word and sentence sounding so perfect and true, as a husband and wife move through a few days living in a neighborhood in transition. The wife had been bitten by a big, stray cat she tried to feed on the back steps.

I followed up with Miss Lonelyhearts, by Nathanial West and Seize the Day by Saul Bellow.  Miss Lonelyhearts is one very strange book.

Then,  Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote, the book so different and so much better than the movie. Norman Mailer wrote that the sentences in this book are perfect.

I started reading again Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which I have read a couple of times before, and will finish it soon. 

The short novel is generally defined as a books that come in around 100 to 120 pages or so. The strength of the form is that usually the story takes place in a compressed period of time, usually days or a few months with a handful of characters.  Like the short story, the form allows the writing to shine through and the writing, when it is good, can be thrilling.

I don't know if critics classify Faulkner's startling novel, As I Lay Dying, as short fiction, but it seems so to me, and I find it among my favorite of his novels.

I have started Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, which is a little too long for the short novel, but still a powerful, haunting piece of writing.  And next on my list is The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain.