Is Greater Than is an eclectic online journal examining the intersections of politics and culture, art and the free market, and science and technology.
FEATURED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Meet Twinkie Chan - An interview with the DIY renaissance woman–crafter, literary agent and Suicide Girl
Tags: books, fiction, preserving our independents
Preserving Our Independents: Summer Reading List
“Preserving Our Independents” has spotlighted people whose creativity, ingenuity, and commitment have helped keep indie publishing ticking. But what sorts of publications make these people tick?
I asked writers, publishers, booksellers, distributors, teachers, editors, and supporters of independent publishing — some of whom have been featured in this column, some who have not — to provide a list of recommended reads for summer. Their suggestions range from short stories to comic books, from classic fiction to contemporary poetry. There’s a book recommendation for “people who think they’re scared of Shakespeare” and one for people who cook with a cast iron skillet. Other publications feature beautiful illustrations (The Never Mind) and soaring titles (Oh Pure and Radiant Heart). And let’s not forget such vibrant inclusions as World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (an audio book read by Henry Rollins and Mark Hamill) and Thank You and You’re Welcome (an “entertaining volume of ‘Kanye-isms’” from the humble pen of Kanye West).
Yes, some of the items on the list are simply meant to inspire lighthearted literary recreation during the summer months. But in keeping with the reverential tone of this column, I’d like to give props to all the great stuff included below that was released by small presses on shoestring budgets. In fact, I encouraged participants to mention their own work — zines or books they’ve written, recent titles they’ve released — in hopes that you’ll seek out these fine publishers and publications, for summer reading and beyond!
So enjoy the selections below, and whether you’re embarking on an epic road trip, taking your lunch break in the park, or floating on a raft in the waters of Fiji whilst drinking a piña colada out of a coconut shell, may you never be without good reading material.
Without further ado, the summer reading list:
New from Is Greater Than labs: LOLARCHISTS.
Proving once and for all that they’re now in the extortion business, the music industry claims the decades-old , recording industry-subsidized, practice of broadcasting music on AM/FM stations constitutes piracy.
Climate change hero James Hansen warns that this is humanity’s "last chance" to stop global warming.
Like a Digg for Congressional bills, Open Congress is an exemplary example of how Web 2.0 can be used to sift through the realms of bureaucratic boondoggles.
Here’s a treat via Hulu: Classic NBC News pieces, including this 1957 interview with Martin Luther King, Jr:
Tags: fiction
The Pride
  photo credit: yaaaay |
1. Once, when I was still a cub, not more than four months old, my father took me to the edge of our pride’s territory, marked by his rank, generously administered urine, and said, “One day, son, you will be King of the Jungle.”
Even then, in my impressionable infancy, I could sense that my father was not well.
We lived in northern Kenya, in the semi-arid scrublands, with acacia plains and rocky hills and a brown river that disappeared and reappeared capriciously. None of us had even seen a jungle, much less fantasized achieving dominion over one. We were like any other pride — the children suckling and playing in the dirt, the women stalking the veldt for clinically depressed zebra too despondent to run away — but my father, his gaze fixed on the faraway mountains, clearly longed for something more.
“King of the Jungle,” he repeated, his eyes strained and yearning, hungry for whatever lay beyond the damp, demarcative grasses where he had relieved himself.
My father was the only male in our pride, a frequent bone of contention between my aunts, who hated him, and my mother, who defended him, albeit halfheartedly and more out of reflexive contrarianism than loyalty. Our family’s sororal bickering was constant, inescapable, but it grew most venomous at dinnertime, when we’d gather around the eviscerated carcass of a dik-dik or impala and my aunts would recall the many suitors who, thanks to the impassioned appeals of my mother, were regrettably spurned in favor of my guileless, freeloading, good-for-nothing father.
“Remember Charles?” Aunt Ruby said during one such dinner. “Healthy head of hair on that one.”
“Mmmm hmmm,” Aunt Nyanza concurred. “Charles.”
“Nice, firm flank too,” said Ruby, gnawing on a femur bone. “God, when I think of running my paws through that golden, lustrous mane . . .”
“Shut up,” my mother said. “Shut up.”
My father said that when he met my mother she was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, and he’d seen quite a few. He’d left his home in the Serengeti in the waning days of the wet season and had wandered for three years in search of a pride of his own, systematically rejected by every female from the Olduvai Gorge to Mount Kilimanjaro due to his laughable appearance and his weak, ineffectual roar. Having never had to hunt his own food before, my father found solitary living exceedingly difficult, and by the time he reached northern Kenya he was bleary-eyed, malarial, and meatless, a staggering skeleton draped with a mangy, slipshod carpet of a hide. When he first saw my mother, standing victoriously, radiantly over a freshly intercepted antelope, his mind raced to think of something clever to say, something charming, that would forever endear him to her heart, but instead he staggered to a stop, let out a pathetic, muffled groan, and passed out, ten meters away from the perplexed, amber-eyed beauty he was certain was his one true love.
When my aunts tell the story, they emphasize their immediate discernment of my father’s uselessness, unburdening themselves of any blame associated with our family’s subsequent, unrelenting misery. He first appeared to them as a sorry, slumped sack of bones dragged by my mother beneath the shade of a fig tree, and when he was deposited at their feet my aunts said, “You expect us to mate with that?” and spit indignantly in the dirt.
“Oh have a heart,” my mother said. “He’s starving. What do you want me to do, leave him to the buzzards?”
Tags: politics
Try Bush for War Crimes
Finally, a long-overdue discussion has entered the mainstream: the Bush Administration must be tried for war crimes for the intentional policies of torture implemented in the past few years.
This self-evident truth has finally made its way to the news cycle courtesy of Major General Antonio Taguba, who first investigated the Abu Ghraib abuse. In the preface of a Physicians for Human Rights report on the medical conditions of detainees, Taguba writes:
“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post gives a refresher on Taguba’s 2004 Abu Ghraib report:
In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.” He called the abuse “systemic and illegal.” And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.
Taguba’s sentiment jives with this weeks’ Senate investigation that stated the Pentagon demanded harsh interrogation tactics and that Abu Ghraib was the result of a systemic policy of torture demanded by the highest levels of the Administration. (Noted filmmaker Errol Morris makes this exact point in his recent documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, which examines many of the individuals who were involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal, whose actions were dismissed by the Administartion as aberrations.)
The Geneva Conventions are international law, not merely suggestions.Yet the Administration, as it has done with habeas corpus, has treated them as guidelines, as if they were an idealistic, academic exercise the nation is not bound to observe.
If this debate takes the same circuitous route that these things have in the past, Gen. Taguba will be once again dismissed by Bush and the neocon spin-doctors, like many generals who’ve had their decorous service to the country tarnished by Bush and his fellow draft-dodgers. Which would be a travesty, but far from the first.
It must be noted, thankfully, that the Administration does not define the discussion as much as it once did. Could the tide be turning? The LA Times notes that Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, has announced a conference to plan a war crimes trial targeting Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld et al.
Will we ever see Bush be tried? Doubtful of course, if historical examples of the fallout of Presidential malfeasance, such as Iran-Contra, are any indication. All the same, it’s become too easy to be cynical about whether justice will be served for the crimes of the Administration. This country has been run by wanton crooks for the past eight years. McCain and Obama will never call them to account, so the people must. Before only historians remember what they have done, let’s make our voices be heard, and at demand that Bush, Cheney and their Constitution-spurning cronies spend the rest of their days in jail. It may be a fool’s errand, but it’s a righteous one.
FROM LITERAGO.ORG: Hyde Park in the Fake News
There’s a discussion going on Gawker right now about the recent right wing attack on the fact that Obama is from Hyde Park. The post mentions the thoughtful, accurate rebuttal my hero (and fellow U of C alum) Thomas Frank wrote for the WSJ. Behold the hilarious inaccuracy of the Gawker post!
Bill Ayers wanders past the Milton Friedman Institute on his way to teach kids about the coming end of the bourgeoisie…(ed. Ayers teaches at UIC, you lazy New Yorkers)
But wait! It gets worse! Check out what the commenters were saying a mere five minutes after the item was posted:
Tags: fiction, novels, review
The Fun of Making Fun of the Rich
Consider this a time capsule piece. With $6 a gallon gas and when even (gads!) Ed McMahon and Evander Holyfield are feeling the mortgage crisis, there may not be any rich people left to make fun of by the end of the year.
But there seems to be a glut of fiction in the market in the past year poking fun at the upper crust, almost as if publishers have been trying to get in their Jay McInerney-throwback titles before it all becomes dated. From Janelle Brown’s Silicon Valley satire, All We Wanted Was Everything to Dana Vachon’s Mergers and Acquisitions, it seems to be cool as ice cream to play comic blueblood sport. One novel that does it better than the rest is Katie Arnoldi’s The Wentworths.
The Wentworths are a Southern Calfornia family with as many children as Mexican maids. The head of the family is the philandering septuagenarian Gus, who even when he’s feeling his age, manages to coerce his mistress into a little harmless fellatio, even when she’s late to pick up her kid from school. There’s Conrad, a Patrick Bateman-esque womanizer who only invites his girlfriends to dinner when he’s ready to dump them. There’s Norman, who’s so sensitive (read: homosexual) that he can’t leave the house. And there’s Becky, who has her husband Paul so badly browbeaten that he can hardly touch her without her written consent.
The plot goes something like this: when Conrad brings his latest girlfriend Angela home to dinner, the whole family knows the relationship is over. Unfortunately, this time, Conrad has messed with a girl who’s determined to become a Wentworth or kill trying. Once Angela tells Conrad she’s pregnant, a chain of events is set in motion that ultimately wreaks havoc on each and every family member.
The targets of her satire seem somewhat familiar, but Arnoldi’s style of sparse prose is pitch perfect and cuts at the heart of the soullessness of The Wentworths’ motivations without diminishing their ability to redeem themselves. For example, the novel is told from a number of different points of view, all appropriate to the character. Hypersensitive Norman’s first chapter is entitled “I am Norman Wentworth.” Clocking in a curt 255 pages, Arnoldi wastes no time to give this family what’s coming to them. And when the tragicomic ending comes, prepare to be surprised by the surprising amount of sadness you’ll feel for these horrible, horrible Wentworths.
Good ole Santa Cruz, it’s a hell of a playground: Peter Pan activists strike one for the resistance 
by smashing the window of "green capitalists". This is what happens when you have a preponderance of rich college students, playtime politics and an affulent, lily-white population. Move somewhere with real diversity, poverty and oppression and get engaged with political reality, kiddies — trustafarian anarchism is the fantasy football of political action.
Speaking of political reality: our President is on the air right now, urging to fix a problem he’s at least partly to blame for by removing limits on offshore oil drilling. With an approval rate at a record-low 24%, he’s pretty much at the "fuck it, let’s see what we can get away with in the next six months" period of his Presidency, isn’t he?
Perhaps not entirely unrelated: Time reports that the oceans’ dead zones — in which pollution has sucked all the oxygen out of the ocean water, rendering spots as dead as the moon — are growing.
A probe confirms that the Pentagon demanded the sort of harsh interrogation tactics McCain endured in the Hanoi Hilton. Former "maverick" McCain offers no comment.
How far we’ve regressed: the eight richest nations won’t even commit to making a climate target at the G8 summit
The L.A. Times offers a brief history of the album’s declining value
Give a healthy "screw-you" to Microsoft and Internet Explorer by downloading the sleek and sexy Firefox 3 today, and help create a world record for downloads in one day. The new browser is a huge leap forward — I’ve been using the beta for a few months — and fixes many of the annoyances of the previous iteration. It’s fast, lean, and with tons of intuitive updates, gives even the lightweight Safari a run for its money.
The Onion offers a glimpse into how heads of industry would like to speak to their customers. Which One of You Shitheads Stopped Buying Our Margarine?
No matter how outside of the system you might attempt to reside, the slumping economy will affect us all. Consumerist lists five sites with helpful day-by-day tips to weather the recession. Lowbaggers may already know many of these tricks, but there’s a few gems for people of any income level.
Telecom pressure and municipal bureaucracy scuttled most city-wide free wifi plans, but citizens in San Francisco are using repeating antennas to create DIY free wifi in the city.
New York Times takes a glimpse at the Internet of 1934. Really.
A tribute to progressive proto-blogger/zinester Izzy Stone
Amnesty International on the desperate situation for Iraqi refugees
Tags: music, reviews
The Black Angels Retread the Same Ground
ALBUM REVIEW: Having refined a signature doom-laden dirge, The Black Angels rose to prominence with 2006’s striking breakout Passover. Two years later, the Austin outfit is still channeling waves of feedback-drenched, portentous rock on their latest, Directions to See a Ghost, though the effect isn’t quite as powerful the second time around.
"Doves" mp3
The Black Angels break out of their well-defined sound at points, showing more rhythmic flair than seen on Passover, what was strikingly compelling on that album bears the mark of stasis on Directions to See a Ghost. The band does show some signs of progression — the lyrics are more affecting and personal than on the Vietnam War-themed Passover, and the swaths of far-out psychedelic guitar are applied much more liberally. And considering the disaster that was the hidden acoustic track on Passover, it’s a welcome surprise that they avoid acoustic meanderings here.
Without a doubt, The Black Angels have refined their drunken amalgam of Joy Division and Black Sabbath to a science. But considering how much promise band holds, it’s hard not to want the band to reach outside of its comfort zone more than it does here.
All the same, the band puts on a blistering live set. They’re on tour this summer, visit the band’s website for details.
VIA VAGABONDISH: Surviving the Suburbs, An Unconventional Travel Guide
As somebody who has spent the past few months traveling the United States, I can say by authority that the nation has evolved into one huge suburb with occasional outposts of culture and liveliness. On travel blog Vagabondish, Ben Hancock offers a helpful guide to surviving the suburbs. He writes:
On the list of destinations you’re pining to visit, I would bet there is nary a suburb to be found — or, at least, not one American suburb. There’s good reason for that; as we Statesiders well know, if you’ve been to one godforsaken strip-mall wonderland, you’ve been to them all. Yet somehow we all find ourselves in the suburbs every now and then: visiting family, business trips, or perhaps you even live in one (though, if that’s the case, you might’ve taken enough offense by now and stopped reading). It can be tough to not write these trips off as time wasted, to not be reduced to eating at Applebee’s and renting from Blockbuster.
Take a look at all of his useful advice
Tags: politics, technology
Net Neutrality For The Masses
Part one in a series on net neutrality and how it affects us all. Part two will examine Congress’ take on the issue, as well as the Presidential candidates positions.
As ISP’s quietly begin monitoring and barring certain types of web traffic, and some start to experiment with pay-by-the-bandwidth systems, the net neutrality fracas is going mainstream.
Google has been a strong proponent for net neutrality, as the company has plenty of its own vested interests — they don’t want to pay out of their pockets to have their pages delivered to you quickly. There are plenty of caveats when you align with a huge corporation like Google, but in cases like this it’s useful to have that sort of lobbying and legal power on the side of free speech.
Boing Boing reported this past weekend that Google is developing a net neutrality detector, by which users can find out if their ISP is barring — or slowing down — some of their traffic without telling their consumers, allowing us to be informed customers and citizens.
To date, the debate has remained largely within the realm of tech activists and lawyers. There are plenty of reasons why everyone should care about its implications. It’s instructive to examine, in laymans terms, what exactly net neutrality is and why everyone, from the tech-savvy, at-risk-youth (to paraphrase Dan Savage) to their grandparents should care.
This explanation of “net neutrality 101” from media activist group Save the Internet serves as a useful introduction to the concept:
I could only aspire to be this curmudgeonly: Gore Vidal in the New York Times Magazine:
You live in California , where last month the State Supreme Court overturned the ban on same-sex marriage . As someone who lived with a male companion for 50-plus years, do you see this as a victory for equality? People would ask, How could you live with someone for so long without any problems of any kind? I said, There was no sex.
Were you chaste during those years? Chased by whom?
Are you a supporter of gay marriage? I know nothing about it. I don’t follow that.
Why doesn’t it interest you? The same reason heterosexual marriage doesn’t seem to interest me.
Do you read a lot of contemporary fiction these days? Like everyone else, no, I don’t.
What scary right-wing nutjobs are saying online about what they’ll do if a black man becomes President. The Crazies and Obama.Via A Blog Around The Clock.
Free Press names its contenders for the 2008 Media Hall of Shame
This week in global warming news courtesy of Scienceblogs
"The house by the road becomes very quiet as THE TREES WHISPER MISCHIEVOUSLY." Shockingly, The Happening could have been even worse, according to an earlier script unearthed by New York Magazine’s Vulture blog.
Reason to sleep tight at night: nuke smuggler had missile-ready bomb plans
PETA continues to put the T&A back in PETA with their latest stunt. Are the Suicide Girls-esque efforts of PETA 2.0 an effective approach to reach a boob-obsessed populace?
Taliban fighters take over several Afghanistan villages
« Previous Entries
FEATURES
By Laura Pearson
The indie literati offers tips on this summer’s best reading
By Matt Gajewski
We lived in northern Kenya, in the semi-arid scrublands, with acacia plains and rocky hills and a brown river that disappeared and reappeared capriciously. None of us had even seen a jungle, much less fantasized achieving dominion over one.
By Paul M Davis
The Bush Administration must be tried for war crimes for its policies of torture and disregard of habeus corpus
By Leland Cheuk
One recent novel that mocks the rich better than the rest is Katie Arnoldi’s The Wentworths.
By Paul M Davis
Net neutrality is more than confusing tech-speak. It’s a battle for the only vestige of free media.
By Matthew Beck
Thomas Friedman’s position at the New York Times comprimises the intellectual integrity of the paper
By Laura Pearson
Former Kitchen Sink magazine staffers keep the deceased independent publication’s legacy alive
By Paul M Davis
Orchestral metal three-piece Russian Circles summons an epic cacophony
