Bloom’s Political Digest!

Howdy All,

First off, we’d like to welcome everyone to the NEW SITE! For readmattbloom.com is now . . . readmattbloom.wordpress.com (because Matt is too cheap to renew his domain subscription)!!! Be prepared for new and exciting content to – in the tradition of readmattbloom.com – come at you fast some of the time and at a trickle at others!

This week we bring you what may be a new series, which in itself is a new installment in a series of experimental series-es, entitled Bloom’s Political Digest. Matt was inspired by not only his nerdy interest in politics, but also by how much he cares about the current health care debate and trying to make sense out of it.

There are millions in this country who are dying or will die because they have no access to the current health care system. The debate on how to reform that system has been raging for decades and now it appears we have a president and a Congress that are willing to spend much time and political capital on contributing to a solution. If we as citizens of this country are not informed we will idly stand by while our government either passes horribly irresponsible laws or allows an incredible opportunity for beneficial change slip away.

Check out Matt’s take here:

http://newsflavor.com/opinions/blooms-political-digest-obamas-health-care-plan/

Thanks for reading!

McCarthy’s “The Road”

A beautiful blend of prose and poetry, The Road is the story and the intricately painted image of a postapocalyptic world in which hope is no longer a luxury.

The world is as dark as the ash falling from the sky. The earth is scorched and dead. A man and his son are traveling along a road on their way south because they don’t think they can survive another winter in the north. There are few survivors of whatever has destroyed the Earth as we know it, and the protagonists have reason to fear the others. Cannibalistic blood gangs travel the roads, too, in search of prey. Almost any place that might once have had food and clean water has been ransacked years before. In place of a long-absent wife and mother, the duo have only each other and the specter of death to acccompany them. They don’t know what they will find at the southern coast. They only know they must carry on, “each the other world’s entire.”

To say that this is a sad story would be terribly off the mark. It is bleak and it is dire, but McCarthy takes us right into the heart of the darkness and gives us ample time to adjust to it. As the protagonists have. This world is all the boy has ever known, and that is true for us, too. McCarthy doesn’t expose us to the pain of transition, the pain to which the father grows ever more numb over time. Instead he invites us to vicariously live for that which is absolutely essential to the human spirit – love, hope – and to root for the characters as they fight to find and maintain the fuels that are essential to the human body. McCarthy gives us life in its purest form, and reminds us how vulnerable everything else in the world is.

I liken this story to the section of It’s a Wonderful Life where George Bailey gets to see how his hometown would be without him in it. If you take the basic idea of that part of the story, expand it to the length of an entire novel and broaden the theme so it applies, not just to a small-town banker, but to the entirety of the human race, then you’re on your way into McCarthy’s world. What would we be without the comforts of civilization? Well, some of us would be monsters – openly, without the shame that being a monster within a stable society brings. But some of us would still have the ability to love, to show compassion and mercy. These things are worth rooting for. It is upon these traits that humanity bases its justification for society. Not our intelligence, our ability to amass wealth and power, nor on our insatiable taste for comfort. Just as we have no interest in seeing Potterville succeed in place of an economically inferior Bedford Falls, we have no desire to watch civilization be rebuilt in such a world as in The Road unless the good guys win. We are reminded what we are supposed to value in the human race. McCarthy shows us just exactly why the man and his boy are “carrying the fire”.

The Road has some of the most beautiful language I’ve ever read, which is a real feat considering the wasted world McCarthy is describing. The story is compelling and the relationship at its focal point moving. Its lesson – if McCarthy even meant for the story to have a lesson – is poignant, especially in these times of economic recession. We must take joy and find peace in that which always has real value. Where we love and are loved, where we find reason to carry the fire, no matter the state of the world around us, there is our hope.

Happy Good Friday,

Matt

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About

Mil Millington is a very funny Brit.

Things is a novel about just exactly what the title indicates, with a few small twists involving the disappearance of the narrator’s boss and his subsequent discovery of multiple criminal conspiracies to which he, along with his sudden promotion, is now an accomplice.

Pel Dalton and his German girlfriend Ursula have two children and live in one of worst neighborhoods of their English university town. They fight about car keys. Pel becomes the new acting Computer Team Administration, Software Acquisition and Training Manager in the university Learning Center after the former CTASATM Terry Steven Russell quits unexpectedly. Meanwhile Pel and Ursula decide to get a new house, and they fight about that. Pel discovers that TSR was into some illegal stuff that he doesn’t fully understand but decides to just wing it. He and Ursula fight about her parents, about roofers and gutterers, about a (hilarious) skiing injury. Pel is in the paper in connection with the underhanded activities in which the university is involved. He fights with Ursula about cheating on her, which he has not done. It’s merely hypothetical, but she’s pissed anyway. Ursula almost gets them both killed. Pel gets in so deep with the intrigue at work he doesn’t know what to do. How will it all turn out?

Well, not very interestingly, to be honest. As a storyteller, Millington is so-so. What makes the novel entertaining isn’t the plot. It’s not even really the characters, either; Ursula, for example, is a one-stringed guitar that plays only a series of shrill, screeching notes. Pel has about as much depth as, well . . . a comedian doing a stand-up act. What holds the story together is a serious of hilarious conversations between the two psychopaths at the fore, and between Pel and the other normal to semi-normal characters in the story. The best way I can describe the style of nonstop quirky humor is to call it literary stand-up comedy. It reads like a routine that uses a thin storyline just to give it structure. In other words, it doesn’t matter to the joke that there’s a horse walking into a bar. It’s what the bartender asks it that makes you want to hear it.

Don’t read Things for a great story involving mystery and intrigue. You’ll be disappointed. Read it because you never thought you’d laugh out loud at something you read and you want to prove yourself wrong.

Happy Reading,

Matt

Tom Robbins’ “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas”

You are Gwendolyn Mati. You’re a young, attractive Filipino-American stockbroker. It’s the early ’90s and the market is crashing this Easter weekend. Your boyfriend Belford is too worried about his lost French monkey Andre to pay attention to your financial concerns. You would settle for your psychic friend Q-Jo’s psychobabble for advice, except that she is missing. And the one man who may be able to help you, an ex-stock market guru just back from Timbuktu, is the same man whom you suspect is responsible for Q-Jo’s disappearance. Even if you can get past your suspicion of him, your inexplicable attraction to Larry Diamond and the way he seems to hypnotize you with his crackpot theories about an amphibious armageddon keep distracting you from your goal of finding fiscal security. Maybe you should just be a good girlfriend and ask Belford for money once you find his monkey on the streets of Seattle. Maybe the strange tarot card you found in Q-Jo Huffington’s apartment holds the answer to all your troubles. What do you do?

No, this isn’t a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. This is Tom Robbins.

My first Robbins experience was a real treat. This hilarious, intricate, sometimes awkwardly erotic mystery really got me smiling. Despite feeling a bit dwarfed intellectually by the vocabulary, I was delighted to be placed squarely behind the eyes of Gwen as she makes a wonderful series of foolish and morally dubious choices. Q-Jo Huffington is such an interesting character that the few pages she occupies is enough to carry her persona all the way through the story. Larry Diamond is fascinating as the long-winded, mind-reading philosopher who is absolutely enchanted by Gwen. Belford Dunn makes an excellent foil for Larry as the big-hearted dolt who trusts Gwen implicitly despite her not-so-subtle disdain for him.

The fast pace of a novel that takes place during a single weekend keeps you turning the page. The language is so well-crafted as to be called poetic, without producing the effect of a narrative that takes itself too seriously (quite the opposite, in fact). And on top of that, the social commentary in the face of an economic downturn happens to be quite poignant today.

Grab your dictionary and crack open Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas for a great, fun read. Don’t keep Uncle Larry waiting.

Happy reading,

Matt

John Updike: Starting from the End

I am a bit hesitant to admit it, but I picked up my first Updike book only a week ago. Too many less talented writers got my attention before that, I assure you. Halfway through it I awoke last Tuesday to learn that the acclaimed writer had passed away, defeated by lung cancer at the age of seventy-six. What began as a recent work of a living legend became suddenly the bookend of a life’s work (barring posthumous works to come, of course).

As I believe no true artist would want his death to affect his audience’s evaluation of his work one iota, I will share my thoughts on Terrorist (2006) completely, honestly and – as I would have under any circumstances – respectfully.

Updike had an awful lot to say in this novel. His characters represent American society in two distinct, yet often overlapping spheres: those who feel they belong here while criticizing the culture in which they exist, and those who don’t belong; who don’t want to; who won’t compromise who they are to take part in it. Representing the first group are a number of characters, though Jack Levy is the foremost. He is a non-practicing Jew in his sixties, from whose perspective the country has gone to Hell in a handbasket. As a guidance counselor he sees high school seniors make foolish choices and laments bygone days when people respected teachers enough to be guided. He complains of a culture that only offers the only opiate of entertainment and little of substance. He represents a sedentary, lifeless middle-class that exists only to consume. Jack’s Lutheran wife Beth is the bloated product of literal consumption, lazily conscious of her sad condition but oblivious to its cause. Beth’s sister Hermione (yes, just like in Harry Potter) is the one-dimensional, conservative Undersecretary of Homeland Security, who has a front-row seat to the grossly unrealistic task of fighting something as nebulous as terror itself. Jack relates to neither one so well as with his woman-on-the-side Teresa, an Irish-American artist whose promiscuity and sense of self-importance long ago displaced her ability to connect intimately with the world around her. We could call these four Team America – the force of disallusionment that has taken over Updike’s homeland – with Jack as its leader.

Representing the other sphere almost entirely on his own is Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy, an eighteen-year-old fundamentalist Muslim, son of a Muslim man he never met and Teresa Mulloy, Jack’s lover. Ahmad speaks of America as a country of devils who seek to replace God with idols of sex and material comforts. He takes note of the buildings decaying all around him in northern New Jersey, the result of the infidels’ neglect of the neighborhoods where marginalized people like him live. He rejects the college path Jack urges him toward in favor of a simple life in which he can listen for the will of Allah, as free from distraction as possible. He relates to his closest friend, Joryleen, only in that she speaks her mind as freely as he does, and cares as little what others think. Together, along with a few Islamist plotters, they are the Anti-Americans: disdaining the paths their conservative parents would choose for them in favor of what they believe in. For Ahmad, that means going to whatever lengths he believes Allah calls him to, regardless and even disdainful of his society’s ideas of right and wrong.

All of this is very interesting, yet as a story, Terrorist is a flop. Markedly little happens in the book. Jack tells Ahmad to go to college, Ahmad gets a job driving a truck instead. Jack sleeps with Ahmad’s mother for awhile. Ahmad’s boss gets him in on a plot to blow up a tunnel. I don’t feel like I’ve given anything important away yet; the only thing I won’t reveal is whether Ahmad goes through with it or not. That’s it. That is basically all that happens for 300 pages.

I think the real genious of this work would have been better expressed in an essay. All of Updike’s characters pontificate with language and voice better suited for nonfiction. In my opinion, the dialogue reads like Updike talking with Updike, and under the right lens, such a thing is fascinating.

I will admit that it was a treat to read a seventy-four-year-old celebrated writer’s reaction to an event that shaped my world view at a young age. I feel as though I better understand the disgust and helplessness felt by many older Americans in the wake of 9-11, while I simply struggled with disbelief and the formation of my political identity along with the rest of my generation. After half a century of both victory and loss in war, of scandal in the American presidency, of economic recessions, of constant televised news of rape and murder in our bedraggled communities at home and footage of starvation and discord around the world, and of working toward the betterment of the world in the midst of it all, American senior citizens simply watched their world crash in a single day. The leaders of 300 million survivors then took responsive action so quickly that by the time questions were being asked, answers were already being provided, whether right or wrong. It seemed wisdom was made obsolete.

Jack Levy – Jacob Levy – had not only over sixty years of life experience, but ancient history in his blood to boot, and it doesn’t seem to him that it matters to anyone. Updike showed us, through the interplay between his terrorist and Jack, that Ahmad is more in line with our youth-praising culture than he appears. Believing he has nowhere to turn for wise counsel, he turns only to himself, to his own view of his relationship with Allah, and assumes a position of authority in his terrorist plot.

I wonder if Updike died believing he, along with the rest of his generation, had lost his stake in his society. I don’t know. I do know, however, that what we believe as a society tends to become a reality. So do we believe that our baby boomers have a part to play, here and now, in determining the best course for the future? Will we allow a position of authority for them, as earned by experience and the measure of wisdom gained by it? Or will we shut them out in accordance with the idea that their ideas are entirely antiquated and ours are better?

I’ve begun my experience with Updike at the end of his career. I look forward to going backward, and discovering what his takes were on the world when he was closer to my age. May his work continue to inspire good discussion, long after his time with us.

Anne Tyler’s “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant”

The story of a broken family that tries its darndest to pretend it isn’t.

Pearl marries Beck Tull after she has resigned herself to being an old maid, and never quite forgives him for taking so long to meet her. Her cold perfectionism eventually drives him away and her stubborn denial prevents her from ever commiserating with her three children over the loss. Left to themselves, Cody, Ezra and Jenny – in order of descending age – cope with her emotional reclusiveness and silent martyrdom in different ways. While Cody lashes out, Ezra plays the door mat and Jenny seeks her mother’s approval above all else, at her own expense.

The children grow up to start families of their own or to fail in the attempt. In typical Freudian fashion, Pearl’s unswerving regard for Ezra leads Cody to the understanding that all women favor his younger brother over him. This idea becomes an obsession in the form of Ruth, the only chance Ezra has for marital bliss but for Cody’s plot to steal her away. It isn’t until the end of the book that his misplaced patricidal anger finally finds its true aim. Meanwhile Jenny, unable to liberate herself from her mother’s approval, dooms herself to the same fate. Her inability to be intimate stifles her relationships with three husbands, a biological child, several stepchildren, and even with herself.  Ezra champions the idea of bridging the distance between the members of the Tull family with the help of his restaurant. It becomes his life work to bring his siblings and mother together in an ongoing attempt to finish a meal together. In the end, his goal is only partially realized.

Anne Tyler’s husband is a psychiatrist, and it shows. Obsessive/compulsive disorder, depression, paranoia, denial, anorexia and projection (of personal fault onto another) all play such strong roles in this story that they might be characters themselves. The story often reads more like a case history than a novel. I got the sense from it that Tyler was running some sort of experiment in which she started a family in a petry dish, plucked the father out and recorded the results with detailed notes. She just didn’t draw me in, and it’s partly due to her writing style. She chose to write in third person limited point of view (she wrote about the perspective of one character at a time) while, in my opinion, maintaining her own documentary voice all the way through. I felt like her characters had some life in them, but there was no access to it through her heavy-handed narrative – the lid on the petry dish.

The format reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, which is a much more interesting read. Poisonwood is epistolary in format, so the characters really come alive through their own distinct voices as they chronicle their experiences in the Congo with an overbearing missionary father. Tyler need not necessarily have chosen the same format to be effective, but I couldn’t help but feel that the Tull children’s responses to their overbearing mother were little more than Tyler’s hypotheses. It felt too much like a textbook and not enough like life.

The part I liked most about the book was getting to know Pearl Tull and her children in the first half. Pearl was intriguing in the beginning, and Tyler really got me anxious to see what this scorned woman was going to do, how she was going to crack. I was enchanted by the rebel Cody and his obsession with his younger brother (and cared little about Ezra – he was boring) and by Jenny’s short-term fall from her mother’s good graces and the damage it caused.

But in the end, I found the story lacked focus. Tyler included too much about Jenny’s family for me to care. Ezra never provided very much thematic material except as a foil for Cody, while the rebel largely turned out to be a one-trick pony. I see almost no character development. Though I was asking the questions Tyler wanted me to ask in the beginning, by the end I didn’t care about the answers.

I haven’t read anything else by Tyler. If you have and recommend another work I might like better, please let me know.

-Matt

Rand’s Fountainhead

Hello, everyone. It’s Matt.

After a long hiatus, readmattbloom.com has returned with a new slant. There just isn’t enough of me to fill up a whole blog on a regular basis, so I thought I would start blogging about my responses to what others have written. Though I won’t always respond to comments, I welcome discussion.

I just finished The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand, 1943. Rand had some pretty lofty ideas to preach to us about the virtue of the ego – her own perspective on “selfishness” – and its importance as a foundation for human innovation. Conversely, utter selflessness is Rand’s great evil of modern times; she translates the word to mean lacking of self and finding one’s identity only in others.

Well, I love some of her more modest ideas. Howard Roark is the hero architect who stands by his convictions regardless of public opinion. His dedication to his work is admirable and the passion he has for it resonates with me as a creative person. Yes, have a strong enough sense of self that you can believe in your own work regardless of accolades. Beware the path of Peter Keating, who exists only as a parasite feeding off the approval of other characters - one of which seeks only to control him.

This character is the (initially) fascinating Ellsworth Toohey, who is the embodiment of Rand’s concept of societal evil. He espouses charity and the virtue of organization as the strength of the working class, but his not-so-hidden motive is to be the organizer and maintain power over men’s souls. If your sole motivation in life is to belong, Rand illustrates, then you are a potential victim of those who would abuse your sense of belonging. Toohey builds Keating up with empty words only to control him. Keating ends up even more an empty shell than he is at the beginning, in stark contrast to Roark, who stands firm.

Oh, but how far Rand goes! The way she glorifies man turns the concept of the importance of self into a religion. Her Superman - Roark, her god unto himself – is incredibly unrealistic and more than a little unsettling. He is obsessed with his work as a man in the act of worship, hardly stopping to sleep for the entire course of the book. He believes in the self so strongly that his initial expression of love for Dominique is to rape her, which she accepts as legitimate. She loves him all the more for taking her as he sees fit, and responds by being uncompromising in return. According to Rand’s heroes, love can only be adoration and ownership, while sacrifice for another is only pity, only a disservice to oneself and to the one pitied. I find this creepy and too extreme to be tenable.

Rand could have written a great novel about personal conviction, the creative drive and human passion in three hundred pages. However, she felt the need to expand the story another two hundred pages or so by throwing an unrealistic, disturbing love story into the mix. The novel, unfortunately, is around seven hundred pages – the last two hundred being the worst of all.

The proletariat feeds into the power of Gail Wynand’s New York Banner as the people buy up copy after copy of the pseudo-journalistic smut the paper produces. This is Rand’s picture of society, and she has a point. But the problem is that Rand begins to treat her readers just as Wynand does in the book: she rams ideas down our throats like we are idiots. After spending many chapters developing the intriguing characters of Toohey and Roark, and the ideas they represent, she makes the longest paragraphs of the book out of monologues from these characters that rehash everything you already know if you’ve been paying the least bit of attention. Character breaks down. Subtlety is out the window. It appears that she sees herself as a crusader - as she begins to preach even from the position of narrator, toward the end – like Roark, and yet she makes you feel like she has as little respect for you as Wynand or Toohey would. Listen! Acknowledge! Get this very extremely important stuff through your thick skulls! My ideas are so important, Rand seems to say, that I am going to articulate them with such long-winded exactness that there will be no room for you to extract any others from my work. She may have seen herself as Roark, but she apparently cared way more about what people thought of her than her hero did.

Her ideas of greater scale aren’t entirely without merit, however. I think we do have a growing problem in the United States of focusing on just getting people’s attention as a way of building wealth rather than through producing products according to need. This country is in economic peril because the perceived value of housing, stocks and even capital is plummeting, as is the value of most other existing goods and services with them. I myself make a living selling cell phones and building up the customer’s perception of the product’s value. I’m lucky that at this point in history, much of the public views cell phones as a necessity. Other workers suffer as the public views SUVs and light trucks as extravagant.

Rand wrote about innovation. One virtue of Roark’s I can get behind is that of producing according to necessity. The buildings he designs promote one ideal over any other: inherent practicality. They are unusual, but beautiful because Roark makes them at one with their environment, and in doing so enables the future tenant to be at one with it also. It takes a strong sense of self to create in this way. Our country does need to learn from Roark that the definition of practical has to be remade. To do something merely for profit, to sell that which is obsolete just to keep money flowing, is only practical on the small scale. We need innovators who will take chances on producing those goods and services which may not be immediately salable, but which now exist in response to tangible need. Not everyone at my company can be in sales, as I am. Some have the responsibility of producing technologies that actually enrich lives. I pray I get the opportunity to participate in such work at various points in my life, in whatever field suits me.

Rand was full of a little too much hot air, and I wish the writing had been better, but she at least understood this much: without Roarks, we die.

Here’s to the innovators. God bless.

Blowing Up the Space Needle

Bill’s been in Hollywood for years. He hasn’t found work in awhile and his agent, Deb, is very apologetic about that. But she has a new script she wants Bill to take a look at.

“Revolutionary stuff, right? Philosophical. People like to think. This’ll get people thinking, keep ‘em guessing. Because it’s so self-conscious, so real. Reality is doubting reality.”

“So I’m playing myself and doubting that I’m real, right?”

“Better.” Deb raised an eyebrow. “Read it again. See, you’re not just playing yourself, you’re playing yourself, playing yourself. You’re in the movie as yourself, and in the movie, you’re hired to play yourself in a movie.”

Bill laughed. “That’s what I thought it said. It seemed so silly, I thought I was reading it wrong.”

“Oh, no,” Deb said, looking very serious . . .

Find out how Bill and Deb blur the lines between reality and fantasy, between lucidity and confusion, between what is serious and what is very, very funny. “Blowing Up the Space Needle”, brought to you by apt.

The Fusion of Matt and Fusion

Yes, Matt Bloom is officially in bed with Big Fusion.

As if there were such a thing. If only there were such a thing. In reality, nuclear fusion is one of most misunderstood, least publicized and least funded branches of modern science. This is a travesty because it is the one great hope of our time. Nuclear fusion will mean clean, abundant, inexpensive energy, and it will revolutionize the world.

The only problem is, nobody’s talking about it.

Here at readmattbloom.com, we are. As much as we can. Just click on the Promise of Fusion tab at the top of the page to read, view and link to an abudance of information of what fusion is, what it means for the future of our world and why we need to take steps now to make it a reality.

How to Explain the Collapse of American Financial Markets to Your Kids

There once was a little boy named Wally. Wally was a very bad little boy because Wally was always disobeying.

Wally lived with his uncle, whose name was Samuel. They lived in a very big city called New York. Samuel had an apartment there in a very old building.

Samuel always told Wally, “When you go out to play in the street, don’t stray too far from home.”

But Wally wouldn’t listen. He loved to go far, far down the street. There was always something new to find and to bring home. One day Wally even found a shiny new quarter.

What do you think will happen to our little hero? Find out, HERE.