books Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

April rambling: humanity in motion

Metonymy and metalepsis

To Understand Global Migration, You Have to See It First. New estimates based on location data from Meta reveal a picture of humanity in motion.

‘60 Minutes’ Calls Out Paramount for Executive Producer’s Exit in Rare On-Air Rebuke; Has ’60 Minutes’ Run Out of Time? Shari Redstone’s Big Decision. The Paramount mogul is stuck in the middle of an impossible choice. Fight djt and blow up her $8 billion Skydance deal, or cave to the president and torch the most valuable news property in her media empire. Tick, tick, tick…

RFK Jr. & HHS: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Fraserherman: Why, yes, diversity is a plus.

In April in years ending in 5

1775: Ride Paul Ride – The 2025 Showdown between Patriots and Loyalists

1865: Lincoln assassination, end of the American Civil War

1925: The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was published, and Art Deco hit the international stage

1945: Hitler dies

1975: On April 30, “the city of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was taken by the army of North Vietnam, ending the conflict that had grown out of the Vietnamese war for independence from France and a proxy war for the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union.”

1995: The bombing in Oklahoma City on April 19 killed 168 people. There was a woman I knew who worked for an SBDC in OKC. Her building was right across the street from the Murrah Building. She suffered severe injuries from flying glass and other items that acted as shrapnel. She wrote a very moving story about her recovery the following year, which I published in a newsletter. Another aftermath story, about forgiveness, I wrote about here.

The usual weird stuff

Three R’s: Resist. Rebel. Rebuild.

The US intensifies its crackdown on peaceful protests. Forty-one anti-protest bills in 22 states have been introduced since the start of 2025, according to the law tracker.

DEI Programs Are Lawful Under Federal Civil Rights Laws and Supreme Court Precedent

Pope Francis shames the crap out of JD Vance in final acts on earth; Pope dies at 88

A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data

Team That Investigates Line-of-Duty Fire Deaths slashed; cuts will also halt a first-of-its-kind study of the causes of thousands of firefighters’ cancer cases.

US FDA suspends milk quality tests amid workforce cuts

Law Firms Made Deals. Now He Wants More From Them

Environmental rollbacks would boost pollution and endanger lives

Congress’s Biggest Financial Priority Is “Stablecoin.” What the Hell Is That? Instead of tackling crashing markets, Congress is pushing a crypto sector in which FOTUS’ family is financially involved.

FOTUS Demands Investigations Into Negative Approval Rating Polls

Hegseth blames the ‘deep state’ for his being so bad at his job

DEMAND ACCOUNTABILITY. IMPEACH. HIM. AGAIN.

FOTUS, dementia, and the duty to warn

Also

Space Monsters #1 Kickstarter: “An all-new horror/sci-fi/fantasy magazine in a cool new format! The initial 200 copies will be serial numbered on the back cover.” by FantaCo Enterprises LLC

A collection of Street Academy of Albany / Harriet Gibbons High School yearbooks

From the Books: John Feinstein’s Where Nobody Knows Your Name

Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook

My Mother, the Hollywood Scab

Wink Martindale, Prolific Game Show Host, Dies at 91

Will Hutchins, Star of ABC’s ‘Sugarfoot,’ Dies at 94

Jane Fonda is Far from Finished with Fitness or Activism

Oscars: Film Academy Establishes Stunt Design Award

Metonymy and metalepsis are two concepts that explain how we use substitutions in our speech.

Why are people never smiling in old photos?

The Oatmeal: Believe

Now I Know: Ben Franklin’s One Simple Trick to Save Sailors from Drowning and Maybe There Is an “I” in “Team” and The Childhood Terror That Turned Kind Of Nice and The Fashion Accessory That Prevents False Alarms and The Church of the World’s Oldest Tennis Ball

MUSIC

Lawyers, Guns, and Money – Warren Zevon

Traficano Rap – J Noa, LOWLIGHT

Streets of London by Ralph McTell

Tubthumping -Chumbawamba

Coverville 1530 The ABBA Cover Story V and 1531: The Buzzcocks Cover Story

Love In Real Life – Lizzo

Pump It Up -Elvis Costello & The Attractions

Annabel Lee – Sarah Jarosz

Purple Haze – The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Party at Ground Zero – Fishbone

A garden of flourishing paths by Jeffrey Mumford

We Are The World -USA for Africa

Eine kleine nachtmusik

How ‘Star Wars’ Is Changing Its Tune

Sunday Stealing is FAB

laundry detergent

For Sunday Stealing: “Since it’s Easter weekend, we’re going to keep this simple. We stole this from a blogger named Idzie, who called this the FAB. (film, audio, book) meme.”

There is such a blurring of the lines between movies and television shows that it’s challenging for me to categorize them. Also, I find it interesting that some people watch TV and films on their phones; I find this utterly unsatisfactory. I don’t wanna be tied to my phone. Adriana Diaz on CBS Mornings talked about watching a horror movie on her phone, occasionally covering her eyes. In my opinion, that’s no way to watch a movie. I want to watch a film on the big screen; failing that, on a television screen. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I watched many films on my laptop; it was an extraordinary time.

F.A.B.

F. Film: What movie or TV show are you watching?

Most of the movies I watch, I’ve blogged about on this site.

I watch CBS Sunday Morning, 60 Minutes, CBS Saturday Morning, Jeopardy, Abbott Elementary, Finding Your Roots, Grey’s Anatomy (been watching since the beginning), and Elsbeth (who was a character on the TV show called The Good Wife, which I used to watch religiously). I still watch JEOPARDY! and enjoy it when I get a clue that none of the contestants know: MYTHOLOGY $800: Stronger than dirt, this great warrior eventually went mad & killed himself.

A. Audio: What are you listening to?

Most of what I’m listening to, aside from the Coverville and AmeriNZ podcasts and the Heather Cox Richardson Substack, are YouTube videos, which I watch as well as listen to.

For instance, I watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which is on HBO, but I don’t watch it on HBO, but on YouTube a day or three later on my laptop.

I always watch Vlogbrothers. Sometimes, I watch The Legal Eagle, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, Trae Crowder Liberal Redneck, and Rick Beato.

B. Book: What are you reading?

I do a lot of grazing. Upstate Uncovered by Chuck D’Imperio. Searching for Solid Ground, a memoir by Reggie Harris. A bunch of reference books.

Sunday Stealing: Searching for Solid Ground

Patricia Fennell

This week’s Sunday Stealing is about books. I buy many more books than I read, or more specifically, than I finish reading. Books are often presented at the Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library’s Tuesday book talk. When it is an author talk, I tend to buy the book.

This Tuesday, December 3, at 2 p.m., at the Washington Avenue branch of the APL, musician Reggie Harris will discuss Searching for Solid Ground, the memoir he wrote with Linda Hansell. I will almost certainly buy it because I greatly enjoy Reggie’s music.

Has reading a book ever changed your life? Which one and why, if yes?

There are lots of them: Your Erroneous Zones by Wayne Dyer, which helped me become more assertive; Bartholemew and the Oobleck by Dr. Seuss, which speaks truth to power; Lying by Sissela Bok, which “challenges the reader to consider the effects of lying on the individual, relationships, and society”; and The Sweeter The Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, which is an interesting treatise on race in America.

Do you prefer to read fiction or non-fiction?

Nonfiction, although historical fiction, can work for me, too.

If you could be a character in any novel you’ve read, who would you be?

Yossarian in Catch-22.

Has reading a book ever made you cry? (Which one and why?)

Absolutely. Among others, I read The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Attwood in 1995, about a decade after it came out. I read it while in a book club at my old church. Almost all the people in the group were women, and the narrative was, to be understated here, untoward.

Started…

How many books do you read a year?

I started a dozen or probably even more. Usually, I read a chapter or three. Then I get a new book, and I’m attracted to that. I begin reading that instead and seldom get back to the previous book. I probably finished three this year. One of the things I’ve done in the FFAPL book review group is schedule myself to be a reviewer so that I must finish a book.

Name a book you had to read but hated. Why did you hate it?

The play Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare, which I think I had to read in college freshman English class, was a bloody piece that frankly bored me

If someone wrote a book about your life, what would it be called?

I had no idea, so I asked my wife. She suggested Roger That! I like it!

Have you ever written (or started to write) a book?

Yes, started.

If you could pick a book you’ve read to make into a movie, what would it be?

Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles by James Overmyer. It’s a story about a woman who ran a baseball team in the Negro Leagues.

What was your favorite book as a child?

I believe it was Message From Moscow (1966) by Brandon Keith, a novelization of the NBC television series I Spy.

What are you reading right now?

The Chronic Illness Workbook: Strategies and Solutions for Taking Back Your Life by Patricia A. Fennell, MSW, LCSW-R.

Book review: The Undertow

Ashli

Jeff Sharlet is an explorer. The Dartmouth professor shows sides of the United States that most of us don’t fully understand in his 2023 book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, one of The New York Times 100 Books of the Year. I picked up the book at the Telling The Truth 2023: THE STRUGGLE FOR AMERICA’S FUTURE event sponsored by The New York State Writers Institute on Friday, November 17, 2023, at Page Hall on the Downtown UAlbany campus.

He was paired with Juliet Hooker, a noted political scientist, who had a then-brand new book Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss, in a discussion of The American Backlash: “A conversation about the politics of revenge, and the impulse to punish ‘out groups’ who have made political gains — particularly racial, sexual, and cultural minorities, and women. ” Jeff’s book was about that, of a sort, but it didn’t mesh with the moderator’s questions.

Jeff delves into the religious dimensions of American politics as he did in The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, the 2009 book that inspired the Netflix documentary series. He does so by talking to people whom most reporters do not speak to, sometimes in perilous situations.

Asking the questions

As the Amazon review notes: “Jeff Sharlet journeys into corners of our national psyche where others fear to tread. The Undertow is both inquiry and meditation, an attempt to understand how, over the last decade, reaction has morphed into delusion, social division into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies―sometimes realities―of violence.”

The book is a series of essays, and the first chapter, Voice and Hammer, threw me off a bit. He wrote about Harry Belafonte and his participation in the American Civil Rights struggle. Belafonte told Jeff the tale of getting cash for the movement in the South involving a car chase. I heard Donald Hyman tell the same story when he reviewed Belafonte’s 2012 autobiography My Song for the Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library on November 7, 2023.

The second chapter, On The Side Of Possibilities, describes his time embedded in Occupy Wall Street encampments. I understand that he “remembers and celebrates the courage of those who sing a different song of community and an America long dreamt of and yet to be fully born, dedicated to justice and freedom for all.”

djt

But the next section of the book, in the Heavy With Gold chapter, starts with seeing the 45th president land in his large plane and one or more of his devotees hoping to punch a protester in the face. And little wonder, given the gory, painted as patriotic ramblings of djt.

In the chapter Ministry of Fun, men, presumably “of God,” glorify materialism, attracting Kanye West, Kardashians, and pro athletes with a theology mostly devoid of a Matthew 25 directive to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Instead, “lies, greed, and glorification of war boom through microphones at hipster megachurches that once upon a time might have preached peace and understanding.”

In Whole Bottle of Red Pills, there is “a conference for lonely single men [who] come together to rage against women.” From incels (involuntary celibate) to Paul Elam’s A Voice for Men, the manosphere loathes “women ‘leaning in,’ women in combat, women who have the gall to think that they too can be funny, or president.”

MRA, Men’s Right Advocate, is a “gluttony of the soul, while citing Scripture and preparing for civil war―a firestorm they long for as an absolution and exaltation. Political rallies are as aflame with need and giddy expectation as religious revivals.

“On the Far Right, everything is heightened―love into adulation, fear into vengeance, anger into white-hot rage.

The Trumpocene shows that “here, in the undertow, our forty-fifth president, a vessel of conspiratorial fears and fantasies, continues to rise to sainthood.” And he has mastered the “kidding/not kidding” motif.

Saint Ashli

In section 3, Goodnight Irene On Survival, the title essay is about the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, killed on January 6 at the Capitol, who is beatified as a martyr of white womanhood. Yes, a martyr, not unlike the White virgin in the 1915 movie Birth Of A Nation who leaps to her death rather than submit to the wanton desires of a Black man.

Jeff Sharlet then continues traveling east, analyzing the Ashli movement, even as he deals with the grief of the passing of his stepmother, the widow of his late father Robert, the father he started to live with after his mother Nancy died too young, at 45 on January 1, 1989.

Surprisingly, the last chapter was about the musical group The Weavers, Fred Hellerman, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, and Pete Seeger, the Peekskill riot in 1949, and their career ups and downs.

It is arguable whether the first two and last chapters “belong” here, as he tries to add some hope to the narrative, but the book’s core was extraordinary.

2024

Here’s an addendum from Jeff’s Substack page, Scenes From A Slow Civil War. In the July 15, 2024 post, One Nation Under Fist: “Consider Trump v. United States, the powers of a king now granted to the presidency, in anticipation of Trump’s return. Consider the sermons preached in Christian nationalist churches across the country on Sunday, declaring Trump spared by God for a higher purpose. Consider the widespread contemplation of the millimeters between life and death for Trump on Saturday, the public pondering of a breeze that might have ever so slightly altered the bullet’s course, or a tremor that might have troubled the assassin’s hand. ‘It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening’” Trump ‘truthed,’ and—” Expletive deleted.

“Those who claim calling Trump a threat to democracy is violent rhetoric are doing a kind of rhetorical violence to democracy, screeching it to a halt, making an ever-moving idea a static one, writing a banal and brutal ending onto a story that’s meant to keep going. The historian David Waldstreicher comments that for fascism and its enablers, ‘democracy is not a process, it’s just another word for the nation’—and the fist, under which it trembles.”

I should note that I’ve known Jeff Sharlet since he was six and a half years old. He lived in Scotia, NY, with his mom and sister Jocelyn. The morning after the Telling The Truth event, we went out for breakfast – he paid – and we talked for three hours.

[This is an edited version of the content of my book review at the Albany Public Library on July 30, 2024.]

Ask Roger Anything, especially this

blogging on a pizza

Yeah, I’m asking you to Ask Roger Anything because I do. But I’m seeking, especially this particular wrinkle. I would like you to list the names of bands or solo musicians, as many as you like. And I must name the ONE or maybe two or three favorite songs from the artist or group, and why.

I hope that your choices include folks from whom I know more than one song. Don’t ask me about Dexys Midnight Runners because I don’t know any other tunes, though I have heard some in the past.

It’s interesting to me that music, most of which I have heard before, is now more likely to make me emotional. Sometimes, it’s sadness but more often, it’s joy. One example is the end section of Surf’s Up by the Beach Boys, originally scheduled for the Smile album, but which appeared at the end of the Surf’s Up album.

Books

I linked to a meme on Facebook. “Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books, had this to say about home libraries: ‘It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones…

“‘If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice!'”

So you could make me cut my 2,000 or 3,000 books – I didn’t count them – down to (ouch!) 100. What would I keep? You could ask that.

Or whatever

There was an item on Quora recently. “Can you answer this question: ‘Can you explain the process of blogging on a pizza?'” I was tempted to respond that I tend to blog on media slightly more permanent than a pizza, but I didn’t know how helpful that would be.

But you can ask anything else as well. I will answer, more or less truthfully, in the next month. Please make your requests in the comments section of this post, email me at rogerogreen (AT) Gmail (DOT) com, or contact me on Facebook. Heck, I’m still on Twitter as ersie, more out of inertia. (This is why I don’t call it whatever.) Always look for the duck.