Decius wrote: There is not one damn thing that is new about Iraq. Occam's razor suggests that the people of this country just aren't down with the Republicans in the wake of Katrina, and the conservative pundit class is trying to save itself while diverting attention from that issue. I hope that's the answer.
I have two book recommendations for you. Recently I mentioned Political Fictions ($12 in paperback at Amazon). Over the weekend, I spotted We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, an Everyman's Library edition of the collected nonfiction of Joan Didion, including Political Fictions. The collection is only $20 in hardcover. From the Publishers Weekly review of PF: As the title implies, her focus is how the press, think tanks, political strategists and opinion makers conspire to create stories that reflect their biases and serve their own self-interest. Didion's willingness to skewer nearly everyone is one of the pleasures of the book. This book will offend many Democrats, particularly of the Democratic Leadership Council persuasion, and many more Republicans, but it is members of the press who fare most poorly. To Didion, they are purveyors of fables of their own making, or worse, fables conceived by political strategists with designs on votes, not news.
My other recommendation for today is David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. In particular I would like to quote from the entry on Godard which I reviewed today: Godard's collected works are an Encyclopedia Cinematografica, the insistence that all things exist only to the extent that they can be expressed in cinema. Godard more than any other director taunts reality. It is not that life imitates art, but that it is all art, all fictional as much as documentary, and it is cinema once any lens -- in camera or eye -- notices it.
Joan Didion and David Thomson | Two Book Recommendations | 
