I picked up Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point in order to see lives completely unlike my own. Americans view the military in various ways. Some view it as a noble cause, serving the country that has given them so much. Others think that the military is nothing more than a bunch og gung-ho conformists, eager to kill in America’s name ( I am somewhere in between I think). The one thing that I came away with when finishing this book, is that the West Point cadets are not that different from you or me. Yes, some of them are the jocks that we all envision, but some of the cadets portrayed in this books, bore a striking resemblance to people I know and I call friends. The author David Lipinksy was given full access to West Point and spent four years following one cadet class. He focuses on several cadest in particular and its their stories that he is telling. West Point is full of uniformity, disipline and regulations, yet the cadets voices emerge over this wall. The more interesting parts are the ones that follow the people who do not blend into the school, such as George Rash. He continually rides the line between staying and being “separated” from the school. He faces each challenge as it comes and you find yourself cheering him on while you read about his years there. This book is by no means a paean to military life and military school. Some of the cadets are only there because the school is free, though you have to serve for at least five years after graduation. Some come for the challenge, some to fulfill family obligation, some come because the army life appeals to them. This book has not made me respect the army an more than before, but maybe I have a newfound respect for those who choose a military career. The most interesting thing that Lipsky observes is that West Point has the happiest people he has seen on a college campus, maybe due to the fact that there is no sarcasm or irony among the cadets. They all look relatively the same and act the same, which leaves little room for that. I am not sure if I believe this, but I am willing to take Lipsky’s word for it. He spent four years on the campus and seems to have absorbed a little of the military polish himself, throwing around acronyms and such. This was a pretty fascinating book.

I am not sure who to attribute this too exactly. I found it in several places: first, Ed mentioned it And then I followed the link to Caterina, who got it from David Chess, who got it from a site called Long Story Short Pier, which I have never read, but looks really interesting. Anyway, the meme is this:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Well there is a pile of about 10 books in front of me on my desk, but I grabbed the one on top, 60 Stories by Donald Barthelme to find that page 23 only has 2 sentences on it. So I grabbed the one below it, a galley of David Foster Wallace’s new collection of short stories Oblivion. You will not be surprised when I say that the fifth sentence on page 23 does not start until the end of the page and indeed, runs onto page 24. But here it is:
Granted, the facilitator went on, this model he was so rapidly sketching for them was overly simplistic — e.g., it left out advertising and the media, which in today’s hypercomplex business environment sought always to anticipate and fuel these sudden proliferating movements in group choice, aiming for a tipping point at which a product or brand achieved such ubiquitous popularity that it became like unto actual cultural news and-slash-or fodder for cultural critics and comedians, plus also a plausible placement-prop for mass entertainment that sought to look real and in-the-now, and so thereupon a product or style that got hot at a certain ideal apex of the MCP graph ceased to require much paid advertising at all, the hot brand becoming as it were a piece of cultural information or an element of the way the market wished to see itself, which — Schmidt game them a wistful smile — was a rare and prized phenomenon and was considered in marketing to be something like winning the World Series.
Crap, hand cramps!

I flipped through the HarperCollins Spring catalogs today to see what was coming. As the backlist buyer, I don’t get to meet with the sales reps, so its the catalogs that tell me what to expect each season. I know I have said it before, but I am completely biased against chicklit. Its gross, silly, and underestimates women’s intelligence. Sure, its easy to read and might even provide interesting if not trashy stories, but come on. Try to read something else. I am a snob. Anyway, I came across a book by Mark Kay Andrews in the paperback catalog. She is a chicklit writer and I could tell without even reading the description. The cover itself tells you everything—a woman with a figure that cannot exist in real life, seen from the back dropping something in the trash. It has this amost 50’s look to it and of course the colors are pastel green and magenta. Check it out here. And then the blurbs. Even if I wanted to read this book, the blurbs would make me throw it back on the table, maybe even on the floor if no one were looking. Here are two examples:
‘You’ll want to bitch, bond and run through the backyard sprinklers in your underwear with them [the characters].’—Washington Post.

“Witty and sharp…light and frothy as a strawberry daiquiri.”—Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
Gross. I know there is a market for this stuff. I know women want to read about other women’s lives. But do they have to be so fluffy and light? We need to come up with a way to get the industry to change.

Thanks to Ed, I just read a pretty amazing short story by Jim Harrison in the New Yorker. Luckily, it’s available online.