Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon

Copyright 2013, by Thomas Pynchon.

It took me until about page 77 before I decided that I could read this book. I almost gave it up. It's a mess of hip conversations, and it's set in 2001. But once I began to recognize the character Maxine as someone that I could actually care about, I wanted to keep reading, and find out what's going on. So I almost feel as if I skipped the first 77 pages.

This is from page 140:

"Madoff Securities. Hmm, maybe some industry scuttlebutt. Bernie Madoff, a legend on the street. Said to do quite well, I recall."
"One to two percent a month."
"Nice average return, so what's the problem?"
"Not average. Same every month."
"Uh-oh." She flips pages, has a look at the graph. "What the fuck. It's a perfect straight line, slanting up forever?'
"Seem a little abnormal to you?"
"...it's got to be a Ponzi scheme..."

And this from 143:

"Future of film, if you want to know--someday, more bandwidth, more video files up on the Internet, everybody'll be shootin everything, way too much to look at, nothin will mean shit. Think of me as the prophet of that."

From page 432:

"Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to web sites for what the Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping, gaming, jerking off, streaming endless garbage -- ... [this ellipsis is mine, as is the next. The ones in the following passage are from the text]
"...hashslingrz and them are all screaming louder and louder about 'Internet freedom,' while they go on handing more of it over to the bad guys ... They get us, all right, we're all lonely, needy, disrespected, desperate to believe in any sorry imitation of belonging they want to sell us... We're being played, Maxi, and the game is fixed, and it won't end till the Internet--the real one, the dream, the promise--is destroyed."

Falling Man, by Don DeLillo

Scribner, New York 2007. 246 pages. ISBN 1-4165-4602-2.

Don DeLillo wrote this book about a few people living in New York City at the time of the September 11, 2001 hijacked airliner attack on the World Trade Center. One of the characters, Keith, is a survivor of the Towers who walked out with his life, barely ahead of the collapse.

Keith, his wife Lianne, their son Justin, and many other New Yorkers are portrayed in this novel in a kind of shock-dulled atmosphere where the horror and bizarre intensity of so many sudden deaths has rendered normal life practically impossible, and at the same time so very valuable, so very dear.

The prose reads to me like ocean waves lapping at the shore. In and out, quiet but overwhelming in their persistent sound. (An earlier DeLillo novel is entitled White Noise. I don't believe I've read it, but I may have.) DeLillo is a master, I've not been disappointed by a word of his choosing.

Nothing is the same now. Whether it's our fault, or the fault of forces and persons beyond our control, we are indelibly changed, no longer innocent or naive.

A European (German?) man in the story declares that America's fate is to become irrelevant.

"...Soon the day is coming when nobody has to think about America except for the danger it brings..."

And later:

"...There's an empty space where America used to be."

The Falling Man of the title is a performance artist whose repeated work is to fall from high places, jerked to a stop by "... an arrangement of straps under the dress shirt and blue suit with one strand emerging from a trouser leg ..."

The One Percent Doctrine, by Ron Suskind

Deep Inside America's Pursuit of its Enemies Since 9/11
Simon and Schuster, 2006. 367 pages.

OK, Americans. Required reading.

Think Dick Cheney's a little creepy?

This is a dispassionate analysis of where America's been going for the last six years. It is remarkably unbiased, and sticks to high standards of journalism, i.e. reporting as opposed to pontificating.

But you can't simply not draw some conclusions.

We haven't just become paranoid, we've discarded basic tenets of our system of government under the banner of fighting terrorism and Al Qaeda. Our latest President enjoys his second term in office with one of the lowest approval ratings ever given a US President. There is little or no doubt that he is at the very least guilty of perpetrating an enormous lie about the reason for the Iraq war, and yet he remains in office, and out of prison.

Read this well-written account of what our security services have been doing, and how public servants have been forced to either sacrifice their integrity or resign while the Cheney-Bush juggernaut rolls on.