I finally finished The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, which is an excellent and highly-recommended read (thanks for the tip, Tama!). Author Michael Pollan looks at the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants, focusing on four specific plants and related human desires — apples for sweetness, tulips for beauty, marijuana for intoxication, and the potato for control. The marijuana section was especially good, with ruminations on how the allure of pot might be explained through it’s ability to temporarily interrupt memory, and why that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting — on a process, that is, of subtraction.
Last week, I zipped through Live from Baghdad, a quick, enjoyable — though ultimately shallow — look at the 1991 Gulf War written by Robert Weiner, who was CNN’s Baghdad producer at the time. The book is a great fly-on-the-wall look at events in Baghdad in the months leading up to the start of the war, and of the first week or two of actual fighting. It’s a great read for anyone interested in television news, and is certainly timely (it makes current events seem like a bad Hollywood sequel). But it suffers from a lack of critical thinking as to the quality and consequences of CNN’s groundbreaking coverage of a war from within enemy territory. The author is dismissively laudatory in dealing with the issue, as if the mere fact that CNN was able to pull off such a feat is all that matters.
Finally, I read Gore Vidal’s Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, with a heavy heart. Vidal is one of my favorite authors. He’s written brilliant fiction (Myra Breckinridge) and superb non-fiction (United States collects the bulk of his terrific essays). But, as this somewhat dotty collection of polemics against the American empire shows, his famous wit and razor-sharp mind have lost a good measure of coherence. It’s disheartening that Vidal is not in fighting form when he’s most needed in the ring.
Currently, I’m finishing the final book in the amazing Gormenghast trilogy. Next, I’ll be opening either Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan or Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors (thanks for leaving it behind, Sam).