London Underground trains look strange from this angle, completely devoid of context and tradition. I’m still in the study, the one with big windows seven stories up that overlook Wembley, with the rest of the city in the background. There’s a tube station out here, about a quarter of a mile directly in front of me, but it’s an above-ground station. The trains seem gigantic when you’re underground waiting for one, crashing through tunnels that they fill completely, stretching the length of the platform. From up here, on the surface, they look like short snakes that don’t belong anywhere.

But who cares about that? Today is a glorious day, for it is not yesterday. Yesterday was one of the most miserable days of my life. No joke, man. Yow! I spent it bleeding and exhausted and hooked up to wires. There was a blood-oxygen monitor I wore on my finger that looked and felt roughly like what happens if you put a clothespin on the end of your index finger, which made it nearly impossible to type. Instead I watched retarded movies (as good as it gets, for some reason, and the darjeeling limited) and read some waiting for it to be over. Fortunately, it is over, because that is how time moves. Today I am done with procedures and am free to- well, wait around indoors and eat crap food, but progress, not perfection, has long been a credo.

I don’t think I’ve had a day in a study that was as frustrating as yesterday. If there had been another like it to follow, I don’t know if I’d still be in here. I may have taken a pro-rated check even after ingesting 350mg of some epilepsy drug and walked my ass to that short snake 400km in front of me and gone home. The whole experience leaves one feeling completely inhuman, and not in that cool, Danzig sort of way, either.

Today, though, I am showered and free of wires, my hands unencumbered and my mood improved.

And that’s enough of that. No one ever wants to read about a study when you’re cheerful. Then it’s weird and boring. i’m locked up but it’s cool, i have a nintendo ds and plan to do some writing.

How ’bout books? We haven’t talked books in a while. I’ve read three this past week, because it has been a good week for reading.

I finished dreams from my father and the audacity of hope by Barack Obama, as well as things the grandchildren should know by Mark Oliver Everett, who plays in a band called EELS. They were all memoirs, to some extent, but audacity of hope less so than the others.

dreams from my father is fantastic, a real heavyweight look at race and community and family, at being lost while still believing at your core that you will be found by the people you need, and that you’re mostly likely to find them if they need you, too. I don’t care what office the author is running for, it’s a real book, nothing like the crap that politicians have ghost-written for them most of the time. It was written and published in ‘95, when Obama had yet to run for any sort of elected office, and it shows- there’s none of the easy hedging and inoffensive triangulation that marks those sort of books. He comes off very sincere and very thoughtul, with good ideas and an interesting process of coming to them. The sad parts are genuinely moving, and it’s a story, one that begins and middles and ends, with characters and events that happen that mark the passage of time in a real way.

In short, dreams from my father is a literary memoir, a book that I’d recommend to most people to read for pleasure, regardless of how they feel about the Presidential aspirations of its author.

I wouldn’t make that same recommendation about the audacity of hope. It’s a good book, and I picked it up the day after I finished dreams from my father partly because I wanted a sequel, but it’s not one. It can’t be expected that it would be- it was written in 2006, after he had reached the Senate, before he had formed his exploratory committee regarding the Presidency. The voice is the same, largely, as dreams from my father, and he still comes off as thoughtful and sincere. But the structure makes it boring at times, and formulaic. Basically, the way it works is Obama will talk about a theme- faith, or family, or race, or opportunity, one of those big, broad ideals that his opponents mock him for. He’ll talk about it as an ideal, then talk about some concrete examples of his own life that reflect that; from there, he outlines ideas that explain how he’d like to change things. It’s a good formula, and his ideas are often worth considering (he’s quick to note, additionally, that they’re all just ways of thinking, and not a concrete policy plan), but it doesn’t reach the literary ambitions of his previous book.

It does some other things, though, that are worth talking about. One thing Obama reflects on quite a bit is how the position he’s in- or was at the time of writing, being a wildly popular sitting Senator with the expectations of much of the country on him- can and have changed him, in ways that aren’t always for the best. He talks about getting rides on private planes and how they’re amazing and make life so much easier, but how the people who come up to him at airports when he’s flying coach tell him things that he needs to hear, too, and how he’s made it a point to try and strike that balance.

He doesn’t always succeed at it, and I’m okay with that. The fact is, we all know that politicians- especially Senators and Presidential frontrunners- aren’t like us. They aren’t even like themselves. The Barack Obama who wrote dreams from my father isn’t the same one you’re casting a vote for today in Texas. He can’t be. We’ve all seen mr smith goes to washington, or we at least get the gist of it- when you go in expecting that you’re going to be able to change things, you end up changed as much as anything. Gaze into the abyss, etc.

So what’s refreshing about the audacity of hope is that Obama doesn’t try to come off like he’s still Barry from the block; he doesn’t ignore the new position that he’s in, he doesn’t talk about it like it’s normal, and he doesn’t insist that he knows what it’s like for people who aren’t in his position anymore. What he does do is question, throughout the book, if he’s losing something important because of it, if he’s still going to be in a position to do some good even after all of these things happen to him.

That’s encouraging, because we all know that it’s going to happen that way. I can’t vote for the guy on the basis of who he was without questioning who he is now. There isn’t a candidate in the world, ever, who you could do that about, from George Washington on. The best we can hope for, then, is one who questions it, too.

dreams from my father displayed a thoughtful person in search of answers; the audacity of hope confirms that, with his circumstances and place in the world changing, that core of thoughtfulness and self-reflection is still a vital part of his character.

There’s a part of the audacity of hope where he talks about religion, and finding his faith. I’m not really into god and all that stuff, so I expected I’d kind of groan through it, but I think it’s a good example of the way he’s thoughtful, both as a nominee and a writer. There’s no and then the baby jesus touched my heart with his little glowing hand moment; instead he explains, simply and clearly, that he decided to put his faith in something as a choice, a decision he made because he could. There’s no mysticism to it, no burning bushes or moments where suddenly everything just makes sense- it’s just a choice, and the way he writes about it makes it clear that he’s as thoughtful about this as he is about everything else.

It’s a good book, the audacity of hope, but it’s a book about politics by a thoughtful politician. I thought that I should read it through, regardless, because I’ve attached myself pretty fully to the Obama train, and I wanted to have as much information as possible. To be certain, I don’t agree with everything he says or stands for- I don’t even agree with a lot of what he says in the book- but I trust that he’s thought things through, and his decisions are motivated by more than the lizard brain.

But this is a books entry, not a politics entry. So things the grandchildren should know- um. It’s a book; I mean, it’s got words in it and everything. I read it in a couple of hours while I was checked in here, and I didn’t hate those hours or anything. But man, it’s a let down- Everett is one of my favorite lyricists, and he writes as unpoetic a book as I’ve ever read. It reminded me a bit of i need more, Iggy Pop’s autobiography, which was written verbally- basically Iggy did a bunch of speed and sat by a swimming pool and told stories that were then assembled into a book. Everett typed his, I think, but it’s still written in that kind of neurotic, i’m just gonna be straight with you tone, which is fine if you’re analyzing complex issues and breaking them down for an audience of laymen. If you’re a pop star writing about your sister’s suicide, though, I’d like to feel a bit more, and when all you write on the subject is dude, she died, it’s hard to be moved.

Everett’s life is fascinating, though. All of the reviews, I’m sure, talk about the tragedies of it, which makes sense (there’s not much else there)- his father was a radical physicist who corresponded with Einstein from a young age and was laughed out of the scientific community for theories that, a few years after his death, became the hot new shit in theoretical physics; his mother was largely absent from his life until his chronically-suicidal sister finally managed to succeed in killing herself; they managed to build a relationship at that point, just as she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He went from being part of a family of four to being the last one alive within a matter of years. His extended family was distant, except for a cousin who worked as a flight attendant and was working on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11th. Among his close friends were Elliott Smith. You see where I’m going with this?

And all of that’s really interesting, if the author isn’t seemingly purposefully disassociating from it as it happens. Which is, you know, a reasonable reaction, except that he wrote a book about it. I don’t blame him from not wanting to really explore these things, but don’t charge me fifteen quid for a book on the subject if you’re not willing to.

There are a couple of funny rock star stories in there, though. One involves collaborating with Tom Waits. Waits calls him up because apparently he’s a fan, and Everett works up the nerve to ask him if he’s willing to contribute to a record he’s working on. Waits agrees, but only via mail, if Everett can send him a four-track tape of the song, he’ll add his part. So Everett buys a four-track machine that matches Waits’, records his parts, and sends it to him with detailed instructions of what he wants him to do. Tom Waits ignores the instructions entirely, erases the vocal take, and records himself stomping on his bathroom floor and making crying noises. You don’t tell Tom Waits what to do.

But the book’s short on that, and long on breezy depictions of personal tragedy without much emotional heft. A disappointment, for sure, but not as bad as the darjeeling limited.

And it’s lunchtime now. Lunch in here is always two sandwiches of your choice, selected the day before. Two sandwiches is too many, and neither of them is very good. I figured out yesterday, though, if I take a cheese sandwich and a chicken sandwich and combine them, I might be able to have a single satisfying one. Wish me luck- these are the experiments I conduct in here today.