What I'm Reading Now

Posted more Montrèalicite here.

Especially John Lanchester's piece on toxic corruption in the banking system. I enjoyed Lanchester's novel, Capital.

One of the first great books on Weimar to be written in English. Also see  My German Question, Peter Gay's angry memoir of Germany in the 1930s.

How come there are so many Viagra ads in Hot Rod?

Karl May stays deep in the German subconscious. In the 1990s I was spending a lot of time on the Blood (Kai'Nai) and Peigan Reserves, in southern Alberta, and the most interested and involved outsiders tended to be German.  Have you ever been to Head-Smashed-In? There's probably a powwow there this week. Amazing. Amazing people. Southern Alberta is beautiful, that high plains country. Wind singing through fence-wire, that high lonesome sound the poet Larry Levis first noted in his Whitman. Ive heard wind sliding across the grassland in summer  with a sound like bedsheets tearing.