Non-Fiction – Page 2 – Ash Clifton, Writer

Books on Art: “de Kooning – An American Master”

On those rare occasions when I choose to read a big, fat, thick-as-a-brick book about a famous person, I usually pick one about a politician. David McCullough’s Truman is a great example. I tend to gravitate toward books about political figures because, in the course of reading about their lives, you also get a free history lesson. That is, the story of Harry Truman is also the story of World War II, the atomic bomb, Korea, the founding of Israel, and the Berlin Wall.

Biographies of artists are more problematic, for me. I just finished reading de Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. It chronicles the long life of the great painter—a life barely contained within the span of the Twentieth Century—in which de Kooning lived to be the celebrated, Grand Old Man of modern American art. He became, in fact, the only American artist whose figure and reputation approached those of Picasso.

What I’m Reading: “Codename Nemo”

( *** Spoilers Below ***)

When most people think of the archetypal techno-thriller writer, they probably think of Tom Clancy. He didn’t invent the genre, but with the publication of his 1984 mega-hit The Hunt for Red October, he took it to a whole new level of mainstream popularity. Henceforth, the pop lit shelves in bookstores and airport gift shops across the countries would be filled with works by Clancy and an army of his imitators.

And why not? The techno-thriller novel combines aspects of several other genres, including “caper” fiction (a group of determined men taking on a seeming impossible mission), science fiction (the “techno” part is often so cutting-edge that it is more like sci-fi), mysteries (there is always a hidden bad guy in the mix), and, of course, thrillers (duh).

I kept thinking of The Hunt for Red October as I read an excellent history book recently, Codename Nemo: The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and the Elusive Enigma Machine by Charles Lachman. It recounts the fantastical story of a visionary naval captain, Daniel Gallery, who comes up with a hare-brained plan to capture a German U-boat. He developed the idea while stationed at a naval base in Iceland, seeing the damage that U-boats could wreak. He also learned how to sink them.

What I’m Reading: “I am Spartacus”

(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.) I don’t want to jinx the man, but the fact that Kirk Douglas still lives is an unmitigated source of joy for me. If you believe, as I do, that movie stars become movie stars because of some internal life-force, whose aura is palpable even when projected onto a silver screen, then Kirk Douglas seems like the best proof of this theory.

At 101, Douglas is a living bridge to Hollywood’s second Golden Age—the 1940s to late 1950s. A bone fide movie start by 1949, Douglas was, along with other mavericks like Burt Lancaster, one of the first major actors to become a power-player in his own right. In an era when the Hollywood studio system traded actors like cattle, he formed his own studio and made his own films. He fostered young writers and directors—most notably, a brilliant, aloof young filmmaker named Stanley Kubrick.

Just How Freakin Big is the (Whole) Freakin Universe, for Freak’s Sake?

One of the coolest classes I took at U.F. was Intro To Astronomy, taught by a funny old German guy named Heinrich Eichorn who, I later learned, was Chair of the Astronomy Department. (Yes, this was back in those quaint old days when top-notch professors had to actually, you know, teach class. And not just to grad students!) While Professor Eichorn’s lectures tended to meander a bit, he had a genuine enthusiasm for the subject that students, myself included, could sense and respond to. I remember one particular class when, in one of his usual, off-topic asides, he said, “We know the universe is not infinite. If it were, then every point in the sky above us would always be as bright as a star.”

For me, this was one of those mind-blowing moments when one is exposed to the wisdom of the ages. In this case, it was that of another German astronomer, Johannes Kepler, who in 1610 realized that if the universe really were infinitely large, and infinitely old, then every line-of-sight direction one looks at in the sky should eventually hit a star. Thus, the entire sky should be as bright as (and, worse still, as hot as) the surface of a star. Nevermind the fact that most of these stars would be very, very far away. Their light would still have an infinite amount of time to reach us, and there would be an infinite number of them shining down on us.

We should all be broiling alive right about now.