Fark pointed me to this site that has seven odd renditions of the Mario Brothers theme song, including the one below:

I think this novel is Steve Yarbrough’s best so far. I read The Oxygen Man and The End of California for a class the other year, and they both made for interesting discussions, but with Visible Spirits he’s tapped into his best raw material (like he did with The Oxygen Man) and crafted it well (like The End of California). Set in 1902, it’s about a white drifter who comes home, discovers his brother is mayor of the small Mississippi town where he grew up, and a black woman holds is the town postmistress. The two brothers have a family secret that goes back to Reconstruction, and the town erupts in conflict over race and class. It’s like a melding of Larry Brown’s Father and Son and Tom Franklin’s Hell at the Breach, certainly a good read for folks interested in southern literature or historical fiction.

I read some news article a while back about Keith Olbermann, which thanks to the internet got me reading about Edward Murrow, which led me to put this movie on my Netflix queue. It’s about a group of CBS newsmen responding to Eugene McCarthy in the 1950s. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on here, and I think one of the more interesting aspects of the movie is its point of view. It doesn’t really take us out of the newsroom, except for a few brief snippets, so we as the audience don’t get any of the larger picture. It seems to match the presentation of Murrow and Fred Friendly, who used juxtaposition to create arguments. Likewise, we as the viewer are left to pick up on the argument (if there is one) based on what we are and aren’t privy to. I also think it’s a good study of why historical fiction is interesting. There’s so much history, and most of it is boring. That’s right, I said it. Why would I spend my time reading about this or that figure, learning about what this or that group of people did in their free time, when I could be reading Shelby Foote’s 3000-page history of the Civil War, or watching a movie about Edward Murrow? History is only interesting because of the way it resonates with us (the reader or viewer) now, and Good Night and Good Luck makes a pretty good argument for comparing the mid-2000s to the 1950s–the terror, the government secrets, the poor treatment of the accused, the complacency of the media, etc.

I think Steven Landsburg was the first to write a fun layman’s guide to economics (The Armchair Economist), and he’s back with this book, an expansion of some of his “Everyday Economics” articles at Slate. I’ve been reading a lot of these kinds of books, and this one is pretty good. It’s less an introduction to economics (the way Naked Economics or The Undercover Economist is) than a collection of musings that applies basic economics to stuff going on in the world. For instance, in the title essay, he uses probability math to argue that if sexually timid people had just a little more sex, they’d reduce the spread of AIDS (because there’d be more non-infected people having sex). He admits that if they started having too much sex, the odds sway back. One of my favorite essays is his explanation of why misers like Ebenezer Scrooge are actually the most charitable people (because they hoard all their money, which helps keep prices and interest rates low, and they aren’t using resources like turkeys and butlers that can now go somewhere else).

The overall thesis, if there is one, is that logical thinking and basic economic principles undercut a lot of conventional wisdom (like misers are uncharitable). Some of his premises are wild and absurd, but they make logical sense, which makes you question what you know. Landsburg admits when he’s stuck–for instance, he doesn’t like government intervention, but he does spend quite a bit of time arguing for taxes and subsidies to create incentives, which makes him uncomfortable. And none of these essays are meant to be academic arguments, so he makes some leaps without fully explaining every nuance to death, but it’s still a fun and intellectually stimulating read, and I hope (but doubt) someone will put some of his solutions to practice. For instance, he thinks everyone should have two votes on election day: one for your home county and one for any place you choose. That way, politicians would have an incentive to curb pork spending because the rest of us could vote them out.

My buddy Brian (“Catfish”) sent me this about hipsters. I only skimmed it quickly, but the author sounds like he kind of fits in with this crowd, but also has the distance to criticize them (maybe that’s ironic because one of his critiques is that they’re ironically detached):

n many ways, the lifestyle promoted by hipsterdom is highly ritualized. Many of the party-goers who are subject to the photoblogger’s snapshots no doubt crawl out of bed the next afternoon and immediately re-experience the previous night’s debauchery. Red-eyed and bleary, they sit hunched over their laptops, wading through a sea of similarity to find their own (momentarily) thrilling instant of perfected hipster-ness.

What they may or may not know is that “cool-hunters” will also be skulking the same sites, taking note of how they dress and what they consume. These marketers and party-promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.

Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

Nine years ago I was a senior in high school, and made one of the first decisions that would start to define me as an adult. I decided that since I was kind of socially awkward and didn’t really fit into any group, I’d just stop trying to fit in somewhere, which ended up making it pretty easy to fit in everywhere and making me a lot less awkward. I was reading George Carlin, so my first step was to give up “cool” t-shirts and just go with solid colors, which I kept up until quite recently. The point wasn’t to be cool. The point was some kind of realization that wearing a Shorty’s skate shirt still made you a walking billboard, even if it didn’t say Abercrombie & Fitch on it.

When I got down to Charleston as a freshman, I hung out with a lot of people who seemed to have similar thoughts, mainly liberal arts majors (theater people, creative writers, painters). Back then, downtown Charleston was a neat place. Half the students had that poor, bohemian homeless look about them, and a lot of them smoked too much pot and went surfing or met in the park for a drum circle. Then they graduated (a lot moved to Asheville), and by the time I graduated (2005) the dynamics there were a lot different. A lot of girls had frog glasses and Eskimo boots, for instance, and one of the popular local bands, Jump Little Children, had changed their name to Jump and were pandering to the high school girls who crowded the front of their shows. They wore tight pants and desperately wanted to be bigger than they were, rather than wanting to make decent music. One of their opening bands, Tinker’s Punishment, changed their name about five times and became a classic “hipster” band, although by the time I left hipster was already a somewhat offensive word, with its sheen of inauthenticity.

But I don’t think “hipsters” were the problem, or ever changed. “Scene-sters” is the new term, the group that embraces the “prepackaged cultural livelihood” and that clutters up bars with their unpleasant stank. The above author had one thing right: hipsters (at least the ones I knew as a freshman in college) didn’t stand for anything as a group. They were just hanging out, as any group of similar people might. It’s the Scenesters–the group that tries too hard to cultivate “just hanging out”–that made hipsters worth writing about in the first place.

This book holds up better than I thought it would. I remember a professor spending a lot of time pointing to the scenes of children standing around hungry by a stewpot and talking about sentimentality. But if you skim those spots, this book is great. Every other chapter is a short, omniscient “interchapter” that pulls away from the characters, and some of those are full of fantastic writing.

I had the Viking critical edition, so I read some of the essays in the back, and Steinbeck’s process for composing this novel was interesting. He spent years and years too angry about what he saw in California to write with any objectivity (though I suppose critics might say he didn’t pull back enough as it is), but then he sat down one June and wrote it in a little over a hundred days. He kept a diary, and his notes are full of doubt all the way to the end, things like, “I just don’t know what I’m doing.” I had a poetry professor once who talked about the importance of doubt as an artist, a willingness to go places you don’t understand, to stand on footing you’re not comfortable with. Steinbeck’s notes show he was in that place when he wrote this novel. I was a bit awed that he wrote it so fast, but he later told people he wrote it in a hundred days after ten years of planning.

As far as Hemingway adaptations go, I think this movie’s the best I’ve seen. It was well-structured, and translated well to the screen (the confined space and time helped). It’s about a band of republicans waiting to blow up a bridge during the Spanish civil war. The director of The Kingdom said he thought of the structure of that movie as a giant arrow slowly being drawn back, with an explosive release at the end. I’d say the same metaphor applies to For Whom the Bell Tolls. While I was never bored, the ending was surprisingly intense.