The Holidays

Jack, Pete and I are all back in Florida for a week or so. Gas prices are low so Pete and I drove with Lemon and got in the day before Christmas eve. Jack was shredding the pow pow in Vail and flew in on Christmas eve.
This is the first time I have been home in 10 months, which come to think of it, might be the longest I have ever been away. Leading up to the trip back I was pretty excited about it.
Spending time with Pops and Sis is something I miss terribly. The two of them are an anomaly. Their relationship is like no other father-daughter relationship I have ever known, in the most positive of ways. They laugh and cuss and piss each other off and take care of each other and protect one another. They are perfect.
Winston has been in town as well and has been kicking it at the rompin room with us since we got back. We have had some interesting nights so far.
The night we got it we went to the Old Venice Pub on the Island where my old friend Dan Macmillan tends to the bar. Dan is a bit older than me, say 10 years, I think. He was the first person besides my father that liked Jazz and Kerouac. He also listened to the Minutemen. A well rounded cat. When I was very very young, like 8, he was friends with a guy named Rusty Rustemeyer, a friend of my parents who lived in the rompin room for a while before it was the rompin room. When we met again almost a decade later, it freaked him out. "I smoked weed with your dad while you played basketball," he said. "You were a little kid."
So we went to the OVP. We thought we might run into some people from high school but that it wouldn't be a bi deal. We would have a few beers and get our homecoming started on the right foot. 40 minutes later Winston was pissing at the bottom of the stairs because he couldn't stand to wait in line in that chamber of broken dreams. It was a fucking wake-up call. I saw everyone I never thought I would see again once I moved up North. With a few exceptions, most notably Josh Sinibaldi, who was ostensibly my very first friend in this world, who is getting married to long-time swetheart Megan Archer in a week or so, it was terrible. People have graduated from college, gotten strung out on drugs, gone to rehab, had kids, bought houses in North Port (the worst place in the world)and for the most part are miserable, working for their parents or crashing in their old bedrooms. It is true what the say: You can't come home again.
So the next night we decided to just go with it, to smother ourselves with the ugliness of our roots, an exercise in deprivation. We played ping-pong and watched racist rednecks bob their heads above their Budweiser to Kanye West and 36 Mafia. Strange, sad Irony haunts these parts and it makes is disparaging.
But then their was Christmas. We woke up and I made a pretty reat breakfast that consisted of Jack's favorite: Biscuits an Gravy with scrambled eggs. Then we opened the presents that each of us were able to scrape together with our respective finances. For the last few years we have all become a rather engaged family, always finding new periodicals and books to share with each other. Christmas is a giving and taking of knowledge and right now the tree is surrounded with books ranging from "Obamanomics" to several issues of seminal literary magazines such as The Antioch Review, Tin House and The Paris Review. If you walked into our ouse, you would think we were much more high-brow than we really are.
BShort came over a little later and we embarked upon a culinary journey of Biblical proportions. We made a turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, sweet potato mash, mashed taters and gravy, cranberry sauce and croissants. I have never cooked a turkey. I assumed that it would be a disaster but fun. Strangley, after the bird was cut and everyone had taken their first bite, we all agreed that it may very well have been the most delicious turkey we have ever tasted. And everything else was great, too.
Then Elle came to town. At that point in my home stay, I was ready to lose it. Elle's arrival was something I was looking forward too very much, a coming up for air as it were. I drove up to Tampa the day after Christmas to shoot photos of her and Amanda for Cakeface. Sequins and Boleros and Steak and Shake was involved.
The next night Jesso drove up from MIA to meet up for a DIY performance at Amanda's High School dance teachers house, in her garage. It was really neat, seeing something like that in a very upper middle-class neighborhood. It was the equivalent of a early-90's basement hardcore show and everyone seemed to enjoy their piece.

Elle came home with me that night, back to the rompin room to see what my existence was comprised of for most of the 23 3/4 years I was alive before we met. We spent a day and two nights at home with the family. We took Lemon to the dog beach. We ate sushi and saw a movie. We went on a Florida date. She felt the whit talcum of Siesta Beach between her toes. We had a very nice time. Then she flew home. I drove her to the airport Monday morning and left for New York. This blog is public domain and is supposed to be representative of the person i try to present myself as to people. Serving that function, it leaves little room for vulnerable statements. But, casting that aside, I must say that I miss Elle. I will not go into detail but know that it is not pretty. She is going to Mexico on the 4th which means that we will not see each other for another 2 weeks. Not good.
To round out the experience, Kayla had her last operation to rid her of kidney stones yesterday at All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg. I will one day write about my experience there, when Kayla was born, and almost died from a heart defect. I will write about the Ronald McDonald house and about why people who oppose Universal Healthcare should be forced to sit and watch these families suffer. I will also write about the strange bottomless feeling you get in your stomach walking around there, looking at the ground in the parking lot and seeing the remains of abandoned pacifiers and toys. It is strange and tragic and at times beautiful. That hospital is a testament to Science's beauty and to the utter improbability of a benevolent God existing. No benevolent creator would allow such gentle souls to suffer pointlessly. No God would allow such things to happen to children.
But Kayla is fine now. She had a really rough day but she is ok. We are watching Gilmore Girls. That's what I will be doing a for a while now.

Happy New Year everyone. Lets make it a good one.

Government by Contractor Is a Disgrace

Many jobs are best left to federal workers.

• By THOMAS FRANK

Back in 1984, the conservative industrialist J. Peter Grace was telling whoever would listen why government was such a wasteful institution.

One reason, which he spelled out in a book chapter on privatization, was that "government-run enterprises lack the driving forces of marketplace competition, which promote tight, efficient operations. This bears repetition," he wrote, "because it is such a profound and important truth."

And repetition is what this truth got. Grace trumpeted it in the recommendations of his famous Grace Commission, set up by President Ronald Reagan to scrutinize government operations looking for ways to save money. It was repeated by leading figures of both political parties, repeated by everyone who understood the godlike omniscience of markets, repeated until its veracity was beyond question. Turn government operations over to the private sector and you get innovation, efficiency, flexibility.

What bears repetition today, however, is the tragic irony of it all. To think that our contractor welfare binge was once rationalized as part of an efficiency crusade. To think that it was supposed to make government smaller.

As the George W. Bush presidency grinds to its close, we can say with some finality that the opposite is closer to the truth. The MBA president came to Washington determined to enshrine the truths of "market-based" government. He gave federal agencies grades that were determined, in part, on how abjectly the outfits abased themselves before the doctrine of "competitive sourcing." And, as the world knows, he puffed federal spending to unprecedented levels without increasing the number of people directly employed by the government.

Instead the expansion went, largely, to private contractors, whose employees by 2005 outnumbered traditional civil servants by four to one, according to estimates by Paul Light of New York University. Consider that in just one category of the federal budget -- spending on intelligence -- apparently 70% now goes to private contractors, according to investigative reporter Tim Shorrock, author of "Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing."

Today contractors work alongside government employees all across Washington, often for much better pay. There are seminars you can attend where you will learn how to game the contracting system, reduce your competition, and maximize your haul from good ol' open-handed Uncle Sam. ("Why not become an insider and share in this huge pot of gold?" asks an email ad for one that I got yesterday.) There are even, as Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group in Washington, D.C., told me, "contractor employees -- lots of them -- whose sole responsibility is to dream up things the government needs to buy from them. The pathetic part is that often the government listens -- kind of like a kid watching a cereal commercial."

Some federal contracting, surely, is unobjectionable stuff. But over the past few years it has become almost impossible to open a newspaper and not read of some well-connected and obscenely compensated contractor foisting a colossal botch on the taxpayer. Contractors bungling the occupation of Iraq; contractors spinning the revolving door at the Department of Homeland Security; contractors reveling publicly in their good fortune after Hurricane Katrina.

At its grandest, government by contractor gives us episodes like the Coast Guard's Deepwater program, in which contractors were hired not only to build a new fleet for that service, but also to manage the entire construction process. One of the reasons for this inflated role, according to the New York Times, was the contractors' standing armies of lobbyists, who could persuade Congress to part with more money than the Coast Guard could ever get on its own. Then, with the billions secured, came the inevitable final chapter in 2006, with the contractors delivering radios that were not waterproof and ships that were not seaworthy.

Government by contractor also makes government less accountable to the public. Recall, for example, the insolent response of Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, when asked about his company's profits during his celebrated 2007 encounter with the House Oversight Committee: "We're a private company," quoth he, "and there's a key word there -- private."

So you and I don't get to know. We don't get to know about Blackwater's profits, we don't get to know about the effects all this has had on the traditional federal workforce, and we don't really get to know about what goes on elsewhere in the vast private industries to which we have entrusted the people's business.

President-elect Barack Obama, for his part, seems to be aware of the problems. He has promised to make public the amounts contractors spend on lobbying and to "reform," in general terms, the contracting system. But much more is required.

What Mr. Obama must give us is a Grace Commission in reverse, a massive investigation of the entire history of government by contractor. It is time for accountability on a grand scale, and only government has the power to deliver it. This is one job that cannot be contracted out.

Write to thomas@wsj.com

About Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank was born and raised in Kansas City. He graduated from Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas (1983), and from the University of Virginia (1987). He founded The Baffler magazine in 1988, and he edits it to this day. He has a PhD in American History (U. of Chicago 1994) and is the author of three books, all of them having to do with the cultural inversions of our times: The Conquest of Cool (1997), about the advertising industry; One Market Under God (2000) about the myths of the New Economy; and What's the Matter With Kansas? (2004) about the red-state mindset. His book about conservative governance, The Wrecking Crew, was published in 2008.

A survey.

Elle thinks Lem looks like Kermit the frog. I say Gollum. What do you think?

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son [or sun] of York

So I have not been updating this with any personal information for some time. I am sorry, though I doubt many have felt deprived. It has been a busy few months and these sorts of public endeavors, these masturbatory activities, have been (rightfully) the first to suffer neglect.

Here is what has been going down.

1.) Rhode Island

Jack and I took a weekend trip to Rhode Island last month. The family Attias was celebrating the 40th anniversary of den mother Nicole's presence on this planet. We piled Lemon in and spent the weekend playing in the crisp winter sun of RI. Nikki had a wonderful party where I partook in some puffs and ate myself into slumber. It was not pretty. Whoever brought the ribs, I offer my sincerest appologies. I could not help it.

2.) Thanksgiving

Jack and I returned to our humble little slab of gentrification for 24 hours, whereupon we left again for Virginia. Pops and sis flew up and met us at our Grandmother's house in the woods of Scottsville. To say that the time spent there, listening to my Grandmother tell stories of my father's adolescence, watching her, in turn, listen to my Father's telling of his debaucherous youth, alomst all of which was news to her, some 35 years later, was incredible. We watched Lemon chase, and get chased by, cows. We ate delicious food and enjoyed the warmth of Family without any drama, any fake smiles or disenginuity. It was truly something special.

3.) Brooklyn.

The winter has snuck up on us. I surfed yesterday and was quickly reminded of the comitment required to surf in New York during the winter. We have stopped riding bikes almost completely and I have begun to enjoy the subway again.

Jack and Cory celebrated their birthdays recently, 22 and 21 respectively. Though, if I may mention, no cake has been eaten. Anyone interested in providing cake for the wayward children of Brooklyn may do so. We can all use more cake.

4.) Writing, publishing and submissions.

I have been writing non-stop, it seems, both for class and not. I am enjoying it more now than ever, a welcomed change in attitude given the cost of tuition here at New School and my pursuance of a degree in Creative Writing.

We are getting good submissions for the next issue of Umbrage. It will be interesting to see how the magazine changes with the addition of so many new voices.

I have written a story that is not about young boys and debauchery that I like. You will see it soon, God willing.

5.) People.

I met someone new, just recently, who has made it all-too dificult to be misanthropic. I am thankful for this. Anger is consumptive and destructive and does nothing for my well-being, my art and for the household. I am happy, I think.

Good looking out.

AA GoogleSmacintosh

Extremely Cloying & Incredibly False

Why the author of Everything Is Illuminated is a fraud and a hack

By Harry Siegel

Why do people wonder what's "OK" to make art about, as if creating art out of tragedy weren't an inherently good thing? Too many people are too suspicious of art. Too many people hate art. —Jonathan Safran Foer, on why he wrote a 9/11 book. Call me a hater, then.

It's bad form to call a living writer corrupt and debased, which is why I begged out of a review I'd been assigned of Jonathan Safran Foer's highly touted debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated. The book struck me as an admixture of shtick and sentiment, the most self-involved work about the Holocaust since Maus, with all the gravitas of Robin Williams' Jakob the Liar. I understand how a young man could write such a book, but not why he would have it published, and certainly not how it could be acclaimed as marking the arrival of a major new talent. (The $500,000 advance, and later nearly $1 million for the movie rights, and another $1 million for the follow-up, may have helped.)

There's a story I heard that a former student, a man in his 20s, bumped into Barbara Rose, the cruel and wise art critic and teacher, and began telling her how well things were going for himthat he had an agent now, successful shows under his belt, patrons, the whole nine yards. Rose shook her head and asked him, "How can someone so young be so unambitious?" and went on her way.

Having "read" Foer's latestif that's what one does to this cut-and-paste assemblage of words, pictures, blank pages and pages where the text runs together and becomes illegibleit's time for bad form.

Foer isn't just a bad author, he's a vile one.

Much has been made of the flipbook with which Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ends, a series of pictures of a silhouette falling from the towers, rearranged so that as one turns or flips the pages, the figure ascends instead of falling. Some advice to our young author: Don't walk the streets naked and complain that no one takes you seriously, and certainly don't write a book culminating with a flipbook and then complain that your words aren't taken seriously.

To be fair, such neglect might be in Foer's best interests, since the book is an Oprah-etic paean to innocence and verbosity as embodied by Foer's latest saintly stand-in (there was a character named Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything Is Illuminated), nine-year-old Oskar Schell, who has a business card, speaks French, walks the city at odd hours by himself, writes letters to Stephen Hawking and other luminaries, knows more facts than any of the adults he speaks with, flirts with women, is a vegan, an atheist and otherwise equal parts unbelievable and unbearable. Foer, I should note, is a Jewish atheist, wrote letters to Susan Sontag when he was nine, and otherwise sounds like he'd make unbearable company, though perhaps not as much as the obnoxiously precocious, overeducated brat Schell. If Foer is beginning to sound like a minor Saul Bellow character (think the masturbating uncle in Mr. Sammler's Planet), he has only himself to blame.

The child compulsively invents. ("Another good thing would be if I could train my anus to talk when it farted" in the first paragraph, and so on for the next 200 pages.) Schell narrates much of the book, and Foer's proxy is fond of such figures of speech as "heavy boots" for depression (at least 15 times) and "VJs" for vaginas, alongside lengthier banal incantations such as, "I gave myself a bruise" and, worst of all, "zipping myself into the sleeping bag of myself."

The plot is a series of contrivances that free the nine-year-old Schell to walk the city by himself in a shaggy-dog quest for the meaning of a key his father, who died in the towers, left behind. This is mixed in with an epistolary saga involving Oskar's grandparents, a woman who serves as still another Foer stand-in and a man who can't write, but only speak, leaving the reader in a hall of mirrors reflecting nothing but Foers and stock characters who reflect back the wonderful-ness of the author.

Eventually, the Schnells' stories converge into one absurdly convenient superstory, saturated with meaning, from which we learn such lessons as, "You cannot protect yourself from sadness without also protecting yourself from happiness," "'I do not want to hurt you, he said' 'It hurts me when you do not want to hurt me,' I told him," and "I spent my life learning to feel less."

And those quotes are all from one, not unrepresentative page.

Most of all, we learn the search, not the treasure, is the thing, which readers may recognize from the pages of Robert Fulghum's classic of inspirational mush All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

Like many lovers of faux innocence, Foer seems to have a soft spot for incest. At one point, the grandmother recalls lying in bed with her sister in their youth, the two of them kissing, with tongue. "How could anything less deserve to be destroyed?" she, meaning Foer, asks us. This refrain is repeated near the book's end. Sisters kissing, young children walking city streets unaccompanied; it's a wonderful life for worldly nafs.

But bad people, presumably ones who hate art, like Bush and Bin Laden and Foer's critics, ruin it all. It's with the hope of redeeming ourselves from history, of returning to the wonderful mysteries of youth, where things are "extremely complicated" yet "incredibly simple" that the novel ends:

Finally, I found the pictures of the falling body.

Was it Dad?

Maybe.

Whoever it was, it was somebody.

I ripped the pages out of the book.

I reversed the pages, so the last one was first, and the first one was last.

When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky.

And if I had more pictures he would have flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would've poured into the hole that the plane was about to come out of

We would have been safe.

And then the flipbook, which, like the other illustrations, serves no purpose but to remind us that this is an important book, and what a daring young author this Foer is, offering us authenticity, a favorite word of his. In an interview, he explained that "Jay-Z samples from Annieone of the least likely combinations imaginableand it changes music. What if novelists were as willing to borrow?" Yes. Jiggaman and "Hard Knock Life" are surely what the novel needs.

Foer is indeed a sampler, throwing in Sebald (the illustrations and Dresden), Borges (the grandparents divide their apartment into something and nothing), Calvino (a tale about the sixth borough that floated off, ripped off wholesale from Cosmicomics), Auster (in the whole city-of-symbols shtick), Night of the Hunter (the grandfather has Yes and No tattooed on his hands) and damn near every other author, technique, reference and symbol he can lay his hands on, as though referencing were the same as meaning.

And with the same easy spirit in which he pillages other authors' techniques, stripping them of their context and using them merely for show, he snatches 9/11 to invest his conceit with gravitas, thus crossing the line that separates the risible from the villainous. The book's themesthe sense of connection we all feel when the coffee or acid hits and everything is illuminated, the brain-gurble and twitch and self-pity we all know better than to write abouthave nothing to do with the attack on the towers, or with Dresden or Hiroshima, which Foer tosses in just to make sure we understand what a big and important book we're dealing with.

Having brought up these big ideas, Foer falls back on a catty pacifism that he doesn't quite admit towhy risk sales?but which shines through: "This is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing." This is Quakerism at its most debased, D.H. Lawrence's idea that we should let the Nazis wage war, tolerate them as a mother does an immature and violent child. Violence is bad, Foer says, let's not have it.

All of this brings to mind the infamous post-9/11 issue of The New Yorker, in which author after author reduced the attack to the horizon of their writerliness, epitomized by Adam Gopnick's comparing the smell to smoked mozzarella. I was at Ground Zero, so didn't hear about the issue for weeks or read it for months (or smell mozzarella at all), but I understood both why such words were vile and how writers curled into what they know. They felt that the world had become too large and ill-contained to do anything else.

Likewise the Voice, which came out with an issue on Sept. 12, which I did see, with a shot of a plane striking a tower and the headline "Bastards!" The paper was unable to stop the presses, and so inside was the usual rigmarole, save for an editor's note lamenting the forthcoming loss of our civil rights and descent into hate. They, too, retreated into what they knew best. Which I suppose is a good light in which to see the Voice's recent praise of Foer as "a new sort of literary warriorvirtuosic, visionary, ingenious, hilarious, heartbreaking."

Last week the Atlantic announced that from here on in, it would be publishing fiction only once a year, in a special issue. Once upon a time, Playboy supported a whole generation of worthwhile authors, from Shel Silverstein to Isaac Bashevis Singer and a host of talented goys, too. Before that, Sports Illustrated published Faulkner. Now, there's The New Yorker and the Paris Review and little else, and the consolidation of publishing houses has nearly wiped out the mid-list author, leaving young authors with just one chance to write that great book before they get dropped, and just a handful of editors deciding who gets that one shot at the brass ring. With the decreasing number of outlets for quality fiction, each season's "young stars" find themselves praised regardless of the quality of their workthere's a common readership for Lahiri and Eggers, even though she's brilliant and he's anything but.

The writers who make it get treated as symbols. Whitehead gets compared to Ellison, because they're both black; Lethem writes a book about race invisibility, but since he's a white boy, no one thinks to mention Ellison. In the same vein, Foer is supposed to be our new Philip Roth, though his fortune-cookie syllogisms and pointless illustrations and typographical tricks don't at all match up toor much resembleRoth even at his most inane. But Jews will be Jews, apparently.

Foer, squeezing his brass ring, doesn't have the excuse of having written the day or the week after the attack. In a calculated move, he threw in 9/11 to make things important, to get paid. Get that money son; Jay-Z would be proud. Why wait to have ideas worth writing when you can grab a big theme, throw in the kitchen sink, and wear your flip-flops all the way to the bank? How could someone so willfully young be so unambitious?