The three pieces which I think will stay with me the longest were (1) some excerpts from a blog written by an American soldier in occupied Iraq about what it was doing to his soul to be shooting people every day 2) a wry essay by the Canadian David Rakoff about his decision to become a U.S. citizen which reminded me oh-so-painfully of my own naturalization process ten-ish years or so ago and 3) a commencement address given by David Foster Wallace, in which he encourages the listeners in his ultra-accessible-yet-super-smartypants prose to attempt to live in what I (not he) would describe for brevity's sake as a state of grace, allowing yourself to imagine kindness and love and goodness in all sorts of places in order to not let the grind of daily tedious adult life get you down. all of which, of course, made infinitely more poignant by the fact that he was ultimately unable to keep himself from falling into total despair (he talks about contemplation of suicide in the address, but in such a way that you feel reassured, aha, he has managed to figure out the secret that really makes life Worth Living, and it just tears you to pieces to think that such a fantastically nice brainy inspirational guy as that (and he must have been nice, he must have) should have been unable to get himself out of the depression hole. as in, what hope is there for the rest of us if he can't do it?
but i digress. like i said, i don't _want_ to like dave eggers, because there is sort of a too-cool-f0r-school ironic hipster thing about his prose, but i really, really do like the fact that he devoted so much of this book to bridging the gap between the u.s. reader and the average muslim joe-on-the-street (one of the chapters, for instance, is the new iraqi constitution, and there's another essay which is a piece of american propaganda which was published in an iraqi newspaper purporting to be written by an iraqi. etc.). I tend to switch off a little bit with serious news sources re: Iraq at this point, and will be the first to admit I still am fuzzy on the differences between Sunnis and Shiites (for instance), and I wouldn't be able to find Fallujah on the map without a little bit of hunting, but little glimpses of regular life in Iraq are nothing short of totally engaging, and it's clear that his purpose, while obliquely arrived at, is dead serious. Respeck, as Ali G would say. i'm definitely going to check the other books in the series out: respeck for the SF public library as well, comrades. I heart the SFPL.
