The Politics of random reading

As a random reader, I feel no compunction to finish a book unless it is fiction and the story engulfs me.

I read a great many books this way, more than people who feel a compunction to complete what they've started.

Boswell's Life of Johnson (vol. 1) which I purchased two years ago at a used bookstore in Santa Barbara (the one patronized by Jonathan Winters) is a great random read. By random, I mean a book that rewards a reader no matter where the reader enters or exits.

There's a surprising amount of political talk, mostly by Dr. Johnson, that might be applied to Mr. Obama and the expectations raised by his victory almost 4 years ago:

     We were so weary of our old King, that we are much pleased with his successor, of whom we are so much inclined to hope great things, that most of us begin already to believe them.  The young man is hitherto blameless; but it would be unreasonable to expect much from the immaturity of juvenile years, and the ignorance of princely education. 

Noam Chomsky's new book is Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance (City Lights Books, 2012), short pieces collected from Chomsky's on-going writing for the New York Times Syndicate. Particularly pointed are Chomsky's remarks on Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, the January 21, 2010 Supreme Court ruling that government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections, and the assassination of bin Laden. As usual, a reader of Chomsky doesn't know whether to laugh or cry--laugh at the blatant malfeasance of most institutional power or cry over its cruelty--but the way of the Chomsky worldview stays lit by his insistence that we remember that "the number one job of any goverment is to control its own population."

The Robert Hass edited The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa (Ecco, 1994) is always at hand and may be relied on as a departure from everything unessential.

             Year after year

on the monkey face

        a monkey face

                               (Basho)

I watch tv much the same way I read, content to begin watching but not necessarily to complete what I've begun.

Last night Gordon Brown, the former British Prime Minister, who looked like he'd just eaten two pounds of prime ribe and Yorkshire pudding, gave compelling testimony on CSPAN in the Inquiry into Phone Hacking and the British Media, while over on Golf Channel the experts were picking their favorites to win the US Open.