I wasn’t set to go down the military history wormhole and start reading books about Iraq, but while I was going through one of the Henry Rollins journal books, he mentioned Buzzell’s memoir, and I picked up a copy.  Going into it, I knew nothing about it, none of the background, his history, and I never read his blog.  I didn’t know if he was a staunch anti-war type, or a flag-waving republican.  I didn’t even know if he lost his arms and legs from a car bomb, or if he was now a regular commentator on Fox News.  All I knew was that Rollins liked him, and the book was well-blurbed.  Even Vonnegut gave it a good blurb.  So I was hoping for the best.

Then I started the book, and found out that he’d kept a blog during his time in Iraq, and this was a book made from the blog, and my heart sank.  I hate when people repackage blogs into books.  One reason is that blog to book people rarely repeat their performance; they’re almost always one-shot wonders.  And I love to be proven wrong by this, but it’s just an issue with the format.  You put your all into a blog, every part of your life, and you only have one life, so you only get the one book.  Sometimes you get a follow-up, but it’s always the same book, the confusion and the grind of the post-blog-book world, dealing with publishers and press and all of that junk we don’t care about.  I especially don’t like the blog-to-book when I’ve already read the blog in question.  It’s like getting a greatest hits album from a band that’s got every single song you already have from them, and maybe a shitty live version of the one song you can’t stand to listen to anymore.

And yeah, part of my hatred for this is jealousy.  I’ve been blogging since 1997 here.  I did put out a book of the first three years of blog posts here, and nobody bought it.  I think I could probably get a decent book out of the thousand or so entries I have completed here, but I doubt it would sell.  And yeah, you’re saying, “but Jon, you didn’t go to Iraq and get shot at.”  No, I didn’t.  But it isn’t about the action as much as it is the character presenting it.  Buzzell presents himself in a way that makes him very likable to a certain segment of the population, and that translates into a story that people can relate to and that people will follow.  My likability… we’ll leave that for another discussion, although I think you know what my perception of that is already.

All that aside, the book is interesting because it’s hard to figure out who Buzzell is.  He’s this sort of boomerang kid, a former skate punk not into going to college and not into the popular scene like the rest of his high school.  He’s not pro-war or anti-war, but decides to enlist because it’s better than sitting on his parents couch or doing a data-entry job for nine bucks an hour.  You get the idea now that anyone volunteering for the army at a time when it was almost a guarantee to get sent into war was some bible belt Republican who loved God, guns, and George Bush.  And Buzzell shows that this isn’t entirely true, that you could come from some other background.

The story continues through basic training, on to a Stryker brigade at Ft. Lewis, up near Seattle.  A Stryker is a big 8-wheeled combat vehicle, way bigger and more armored than a Hummer, but not as heavy or treaded like a tank.  He worked as an M-240 machine gun operator, first as the guy hauling the ammo, then working up to the guy actually firing the thing.  Buzzell’s writing is solid; his two main influences are Bukowski and Hunter Thompson.  He only has some of the fluid poetry of Bukowski at his best, and it’s not the kind of rapid-fire manic energy Thompson wields, but fans of both authors would settle in well with his prose.  I think the unfortunate part of this blog-t0-book thing is that his earliest posts were not as polished or refined.  It seems like he just started to find his voice by the end of his time in Iraq.  So the additional stuff he wrote afterward, and any articles you find of his post-book are much more excellent in style and quality.  But the writing is solid enough, and it reads fast, so I appreciated that.

The politics of the book are mixed.  In some ways, it seems like Buzzell would be the typical W-following line-toter.  In other ways, you’d think he was some Berkeley radical anarchist more interested in throwing the system.  It’s hard to tell where his loyalties lie, and I have no problem with that, because I’m the same way.  I think if you adhere to the far left, you’re going to have problems reading this, hearing about shooting people and the implied cultural insensitivity here, like Buzzell’s insistence on using the term hajii to refer to any Iraqi people, which some would consider derogatory.  It’s probably a bit too war-porn for the die-hard Nancy Pelosi fan.  On the other hand, it probably contains way too many f-bombs for those of you who read the bible six times an hour.  (That’s a constant complaint in other reviews, and I honestly don’t give a fuck if he uses the word or not.)

Probably the one criticism I had about the book was that in places, the writing just showed us things, and it didn’t tell us about it.  I mean, it seems like, as an Amazon reviewer put it, he started with 50 pages of blog posts and pushed it out to a 350-page book.  And that’s fine, but there were times when he could have told us more about how he felt, or how things really looked.  Like, in the epic firefight scene that’s the keystone to the whole book, there are monumental things described with a single sentence.  Like, “The Pepsi bottling plant across the street was all up in flames.”  That’s it.  You could write at least a paragraph if not ten about the surreal situation of growing up drinking soda and then having that childhood image of the Pepsi logo transplanted to this giant factory in flames, the sounds of the timbers crumbling, the glow of the glass and plastic melting en masse… whatever.  He did a good job of documenting what happened, but didn’t cover as much how those things made him feel.

And maybe that’s deliberate.  I mean, the picture he paints is that he’s this tattoo-covered, party lovin’ dude that uses blackout drinking as a stock response to almost anything, suddenly thrust into war.  Maybe having feelings about the action goes against this tough warrior persona.  And maybe that’s why people identify with it.  I mean, nobody asks Chuck Norris how he feels about punching a guy in the throat, and more than a few people love them some Chuck Norris.  But I look back to some of the military memoirs or creative nonfiction that I like - for example, Tim O’Brien - and they add this third dimension, which makes you feel more like you can relate to the tension and drama.  Maybe he hasn’t had time to contemplate what went on. O’Brien wrote his books years after returning from the shit, and he had the distance; he wasn’t liveblogging the Vietnam War as it happened.  That’s why I’m curious about Buzzell’s act two, what comes after this book.

And yeah, full disclosure: I published John Sheppard’s verisimilitude work, Tales of the Peacetime Army, which I liked a lot more for the depth of the writing, although it wasn’t about the war of the moment, which is probably why it didn’t sell.  (I’m not trying to snake-oil you into buying a copy - go read it for free at the above link if you want.)  John also wrote the most excellent In Between Days, a novel about returning from Iraq and dealing with PTSD and the bleakness of America these days, which I keep saying is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.  But it also didn’t sell.  (Maybe John needs to get some tattoos and do some blackout drinking.)

All in all, this is a decent and quick read, although it made me have more questions than answers when I finished.  If you never read the blog, and you’re into reading military history, it’s worth a look.  It’s a good book.  Not great, but good.

In 2003, I made a list of every book I read that year. I haven’t done this since for a few reasons, although laziness is the biggest one.  Also, I don’t read as much as I should, and these lists are never accurate.  It’s like every top-100 record list by rock snobs that have Captain Beefheart on the list.  I can guarantee you that far more people listen to Boston’s first album than Don Von’s, and but people put him on the list because they want to look superior or act like they have a refined taste.  (For the record, I am listening to “More Than a Feeling” on repeat as I write this, something I do for hours at a time, until I decide to switch to “Don’t Fear the Reaper” or “Freebird”, or the Oakland SWAT team knocks my front door off the hinges because my neighbors have phoned in a potential Waco standoff, because there’s no other possible reason for someone to listen to side 1/track 1 of Boston - Boston 483 times in a row.)

Okay, so here is a partial list of the books I read in 2010 that you should read but probably won’t, because this post itself just broke the 200 word mark, and that’s way too long for anyone not on near-lethal amounts of ADHD medication.  Oh, in no particular order.

• Loner: Stories by John Sheppard - This is a story collection by my pal John Sheppard that contains three stories previously released in Air in the Paragraph Line, plus a story entitled “Loner” that completely blew me away.  John’s an incredibly underrated writer and the book is worth it for this one story.
• Meat Won’t Pay My Light Bill by Kurt Eisenlohr - Kurt is better known in these parts as the artist who painted the AITPL 13 cover, but he’s also an awesome writer.  This is a very Bukowskian novel about a punk named Lupus who wants to quit working and spend his time painting, and all hell breaks loose.  If you liked Post Office, this book is totally up your alley.
• There Are a Million Stories in the Naked City by Fiona Helmsley - This is a cool-sized pocket book that consists of 120 pages of creative non-fiction stories about Fiona’s days world of punks and strippers and heroin and a dirty, pre-Giuliani New York City.
• Awkward 1 - I first met Awkward Press editor Jeffrey Dinsmore during my brief stint in LA in 2008, which was right before he got Awkward up and running.  They’ve since done a more substantial second issue in 2010, which tells you something about my reading backlog.  This episode has five short stories about awkward occurrences, all of them great.  Each one is pretty innovate in how the story unspools, like Honor Rovai’s “Housesitting”, which starts off as a letter to a housesitter that quickly morphs into a crime confession.
• The American Book of the Dead by Henry Baum - A high-concept thriller about the end of the world as brought on by a far-right conspiracy by religious fundies in a Cheney-type style.  It’s a good plot that would (or will?) make a great movie, but is also noteworthy in that it was self-published and isn’t just another SKU number regurgitated from the entertainment-industrial complex.
• Air in the Paragraph Line #13 - I know I published it, and I wrote two of the stories, but I also read a metric fuck-ton of stories before selecting these, and I re-read everything here a million times during the production of the issue.  Todd Taylor’s “Banjo Alien Zen” is one of my favorites in here, as is Rebel Star Hobson’s piece about the insanity of working in a redneck-infested convenience store.

I didn’t buy as much this year because I re-read a lot of old books.  I moved, and in the process of moving, I tried to tightly prune my collection and dump books that had followed me across the country multiple times that I should have read but didn’t.  Also, I tried to nail down what I was supposed to be writing, or what I wanted to write, and a lot of that involved re-reading books important to me.  Here’s a partial list of what I re-read, all books worthy of purchase, if you’ve got that Amazon gift card from xmas burning a hole in your pocket:

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson - A panic Kindle purchase when I realized I was on the way to the airport for a cross-country flight and had nothing to read.  I practically inhaled this on the plane ride home, and it was just as good as the first half-dozen times I read it.
• The Risk Pool by Richard Russo - This is pretty much becoming an annual read.  Nobody paints a picture like this guy.
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick - Alternate reality we-lost-to-the-Nazis fiction at its finest, especially since all alternate reality fiction currently written is some right-wing wonk trying to get across some point about how paving roads is socialism.
• The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian - One of my favorite books about New York, even if there is a geographical goof about every five pages.

So what should I be reading in 2011?

It’s winter, sort of. The temperature has been consistently under 60 for about a week, aside from a weird day where it was 70. The 50-ish temps mean I switch coats to my leather jacket, which is always exciting to me, for like a day. I’ve written about this before, but I’m too lazy to look up the old posts. It’s always interesting to me, because after months of no jacket or a light jacket, the leather jacket feels like home to me. It’s so heavy, it feels like putting on armor. And the smell of the leather always brings back the memories of all these other points in my history, back to when I first bought my first leather jacket in 1993. (I’m now on my third.) So I like that, but in a few weeks, I’m going to wish I could trade the thing in for one of those Arctic parka things.

It’s really odd that New York has the most people wearing black leather motorcycle jackets compared to anywhere else I’ve lived, but I’m also given the most unending shit about my jacket, especially from people I work with. If you think it’s odd that a person would wear a black leather jacket, you’ve spent too long in the fucking Hamptons. Seriously, check out the other 40-some states some time. And yesterday, I was at a health food store (believe it or not, I take a shitload of vitamins and supplements these days, for fear that my immune system will slow down more and I will be exposed to all of the viruses and parasites in this city) and I completely forgot that I was wearing the hide of a dead cow in a place full of level 7 vegans.

And it’s weird that I even give a shit about that, and I think that the fact that I do is one of my biggest weaknesses as a human, because I care far too much what people think of me or my writing, and almost none of those people really give a shit about me at all. Like I spend a lot of time trying to contact authors of books I have read and enjoyed because I think that they would care about the opinion of a reader, and almost 99% of the time, they don’t even answer their mail. And I do that because I would hope someday that people would write me letting me know if they enjoyed my books, and that also seldom happens. There are times I believe in karma, mostly when a bunch of bad shit happens to me in one day, and I’m convinced that it’s all because I cheated on a precalculus test in 1989 or something. But then I think about the above construct, and realize that karma can probably be safely shelved away with all of the other religious theories in which I don’t believe.

I read a Jonathan Ames memoir called What’s Not To Love?, which was pretty hilarious and also made me think that maybe someday I’d like to write a straight-up memoir (as opposed to the Summer Rain-type autobiographical fiction thing.) And then we went to see the movie Running with Scissors last night, and that 90% unconvinced me. The movie was not bad, but it wasn’t really that funny to me. There were a couple of good lines, but all of them were in the trailer. It was an interesting movie, and some of the acting was great, but it just didn’t blow me away or anything.

This convinces me that I really don’t get the entire memoir genre that’s so popular, with Augustin Burroughs and David Sedaris and so on. I’ve tried to read their books, and they sort of drone on to me like a shopping list, but whenever I see a video or hear a reading of them, people laugh at all of these points that are supposed to be funny, and I don’t get it. I mean, the funny parts are amusing, and some might make me chuckle, but it’s not ha-ha funny to me. I’m sure it’s some sort of demographics thing, like the same reason that I find almost all of NPR completely unlistenable, but tons of intellectual types enjoy it 24/7. And the flipside is true - I don’t think it’s technically possible to be a fan of both this memoir genre and, say, Andrew Dice Clay. I absolutely fucking loved Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but I know a lot of people who thought it was about as compelling as films of botched colon surgery.

And I don’t give a shit in the sense that I bear no hostility towards that genre, and I can keep reading my stuff and ignoring their stuff, just like I do with country music, Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings films, and whatever Disney/Pixar animated film of the month has talking fish, toys, cars, or whatever. But the problem to me is that I really do want to write a memoir in some sense, and just by picking that type of document, I’m instantly compared to these writers. And I simply don’t know how to write stuff that would appeal to that audience. I seriously think it would be easier for me to lay down a dance single in a studio, or maybe paint a modern art masterpiece than it would be for me to pen a memoir that was compatible with those standards in any way.

There’s also the issue that I’ve never been beaten, in rehab, on the streets, or sold to my mother’s shrink. I grew up in a tri-level house in a sea of tri-level and ranch houses, all with identical aluminum siding. There’s a part of me that thinks that because I haven’t lived a really out-there life, I couldn’t write a book about my life that would be interesting. But another part of me thinks it’s not the events, but how you frame them and write about them that makes it interesting. So who knows.

The zine is almost done, sort of. I have enough submissions to equal 170 pages, which was the length of #10. I have a few pending submissions that will maybe bring it up to 200. The cover’s not done or even thought about (I have the idea, just haven’t done it yet) but each story is already laid out in FrameMaker, so I don’t have a huge project ahead of me. I got a couple of last-second stories that were absolute fucking genius, so I’m happy with what’s going into this one. I am still nervous that I’m going to have to mail out more free copies than I will actually sell, and that’s a pretty legitimate fear, since it always happens. I want it to sell a lot of copies, and not because I make like 34 cents a copy, but because I want a lot of people to read some of the good stuff in it. And I want all of the authors in it to get some more exposure. My hope has always been that Y number of writers comes to the zine with their own audience of size X (the people who buy their shit no matter what), and so Y times X buys the thing, but some of the fans of one writer say “hey, that other writer is pretty cool too” and they go out and buy their books or read their web site or whatever. Last time, a couple of people posted links to the zine on their blog, and one person actually went out and pasted the press release into a jillion discussion boards and web sites. But yeah, not as much synergy as I’d hoped for. We’ll see how it goes this time.

(I’ve vaguely thought about writing a press release for the zine, mentioning that this guy used to write for my last zine, just so it shows in a million web searches. I’ve wasted a ton of time talking to the press about the guy, which converted to about zero book sales. If some idiot can get a book deal because they’re a 17-year-old blogger from Harvard, it seems like the distant zine buddy of the FBI’s most wanted might at least get me a column in Salon. But, I know I mentioned above that I didn’t believe in karma, but I think trying to huckster the terrorism angle would probably be a bad idea in general.)

I’m leaving for Berlin on Saturday. I have not done a single bit of preparation. Sarah picked out a bunch of restaurants. I bought a book, but read like a page of it. Time to get busy on that, although I’m now reading a bio of a Vietnam helicopter pilot, which is a bit more interesting…

First things first: there will be a new issue of Air in the Paragraph Line soon, and I’m looking for contributors. The theme of the next issue will be Work (or lack thereof.) So if you have any fucked up tales of corrupt employers or savage burns you’ve pulled on The Man while at a place of business, send them my way. Click on the link above for more info.

I read Toby Young’s How to Lose Friends and Alienate People yesterday. There were several forces that prevented this from happening earlier; the biggest was that when I started working on an anti-self-help book in the fall of 2001, I decided that this would be the perfect title. I worked on the book for a couple of weeks, then sort of wandered writing-wise, and then this smart-ass writes a book with the same fucking title! So that pissed me off for several years. Then, for some reason, I read half of a blurb on a subway over someone’s shoulder or something, and somehow got the idea that Young was working in the fashion industry. I assumed that his memoir was some sort of Devil Wears Prada thing, and wrote it off. But a few people told me I should read it, and I also found a used copy on Amazon for ONE CENT, plus shipping. And no, the shipping wasn’t $28, it was like $2.

Anyway, I liked the book very much. His writing reminds me of Chuck Klosterman in some ways, although where Chuck might go off on obscure KISS trivia, Young goes off on obscure pseudo-academic history, which had the eyes glazing over. But the other stuff was great, because there’s something that I have in common with him, and it’s not as obvious to most people, which is that we’re both outsiders to New York, and the ludicrosness of the situation in Manhattan that would normally be endured by the fashionistas and aristocrats is something that we both notice, in an Emperor Wears No Clothes sort of way.

You’re probably wondering what the fuck I mean, so I’ll break it down for you. I grew up in an essentially classless environment in Indiana. Yes, there were cliques, and maybe some legitimate racial segregation, but the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor shopped at the same mall. The best golf course in Elkhart in 1987 was only marginally better than playing in a gravel driveway. People didn’t ‘summer’ or spend time in Europe. I don’t know who the richest kid in my graduating class was, but there’s a pretty good chance his or her house had aluminum siding just like mine. I’m not saying that the cruelness of children didn’t create great social divides among us; but I’m saying the income of the rich and the income of the poor was probably close to the amount I currently have in my checking account.

I showed up in New York in 1999, and it was a totally different world. The richest of the poor and the poorest of the rich were set apart by seven or eight digits of salary per year. Something that Young explained was that he came from this strict social class system in England, where you never moved above or below a certain level, based pretty much on who your parents were. And if you were stuck in the middle, why should you work hard to become the next Bill Gates? You never could, so keep slumming. Contrast that with New York, where everyone says there are no social classes, and the poorest guy can become the richest person in the world if he just pulls himself together and gets out there. Americans love to think this country is a meritocracy, and in some ways it is, but in New York, there’s this artifical aristrocracy, and it’s something I never really could digest properly.

A lot of people in New York do stuff not to do stuff, but because they think if they do it, that moves them a little closer to the top. The biggest example I can think of is summering in the Hamptons. The other example is how people don’t actually process movies or books, but usually only memorize that one catch phrase that coincidentally is also the first sentence of the New Yorker’s review. (Cases in point: Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential - every single person who said they read that book and didn’t said it was “the don’t eat fish on Monday” book, and that has so little to do with the actually the book, it’s stupid. It’s like saying the bible was the “how to build an ark” book. The other example is Bowling for Columbine, where EVERYONE I knew said “oh yeah, that movie’s about how horrible guns are,” even though it was about how horrible the news media is. Same goes for Fast Food Nation and the fact that everyone says the book talks about how horrible McDonald’s was, when it was actually pretty neutral about MCD and spent a lot more time picking at Jack in the Box and the cattle industry.)

There is such a strong groupthink in this city, it’s impossible to deal with. And the reason this makes this faux-meritocracy so hard to deal with is that the upper-upper-class believe both that “anyone can make it to the top,” even though they are probably at the top because of their parents’ money and influence, but they also simultaneously think that because they are at the top, they are there to stay and they can piss on everyone below them. That’s what makes Enrons happen, not Republicans or Democrats; it’s people so out of touch with reality that doing such horrible things seems normal. And that thought pattern trickles down through the tree until you have people in the upper-middle-class that think it’s okay to spend $800 on a purse because Carrie Bradshaw had one.

Toby Young also really had his finger on the dating situation here in New York. He said most women, knowingly or unknowingly, are just looking for the proper attributes that will produce a man that is marriage material, much like how you shop for a new car or hire someone for an office position. In the people that I met here during the fivish years I was single, almost all of them were looking at what I was, not who I was. And that sort of feeds into the above, in that a woman would rather date a bland guy who had a nice summer house than an interesting guy that her coworkers might think isn’t a good long-term investment. I’m just glad I somehow beat the million-in-one odds and found someone who wasn’t like that.

Anyway, book was good. I’ll pick up his next one now, although it just came out, so I’m sure it will cost more than a penny…

A quick update after lunch. I know I haven’t been writing in here at all, and there’s a reason for that, and it’s that I’ve been busy working on my next book. And when I have writing to do there, it’s hard to write here, because every word here is a word that could be there. Or something.

I’ve been stuck reading Raymond Carver lately, although I haven’t been reading at all, because I’ve been walking to work, and I can’t walk and read. I can walk and listen to music, but I’m sick of everything on my iPod, and I don’t want to buy any more music, because everything sucks, and I don’t really know what I like anymore. And I think I have been cured of collecting music, so I no longer have the need to keep buying shit just to buy shit.

Back to Carver, I read his collection The Cathedral, and about the title story, I swear I’ve read it somewhere else. Actually, I swear someone verbally read it to me. Maybe it was in a writing class back at IU. Maybe it was in a movie that I’m forgetting. I’m sure the story was anthologized everywhere, as it’s a popular one, but I don’t remember where I first saw it. Oh well.

If you read the drama on my livejournal about the bad review, I’ve almost completely forgotten about it. The reviewer was an idiot. That said, I wish more people would review my stuff. But who cares. All I know is I have to keep going on the current book. It’s my first book not based on my life, and the first with a real plot. Those are two points of contention, because the two most-asked questions of me are “why do you only write about Indiana” and “why don’t your books have plots like Stephen King”. The answer, by the way, to both of those questions is “go fuck yourself.” Equally annoying are the people who tell me “just write whatever, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have a plot or structure”, because those people have obviously never written a book. There has to be some structure or it won’t work. Captain Beefheart is a novel gimmick for about five minutes, but you can’t make a career out of it. I think he’s living in a van in New Mexico, trying to sell shitty paintings to tourists.

The weather is very nice here now. It’s good weather to walk home in at night, which I have been. I’m going to Wisconsin next weekend, so lots of cheese.