They aren’t dying wishes, because they’re still alive. So here are a few selections, with commentary, from the “living wishes” of what some prominent baby boomer celebrities would like to do before they die, as posted on MSNBC.com:

STEPHEN KING, Author, 59 (Above)
One of the world’s best-selling novelists, with more than 25 top sellers under his belt, King has built a loyal fan base of millions by consistently scaring them. His latest, “Lisey’s Story,” came out in October last year.

“I’d like to outlast George W. Bush’s second term of office.”

TO-DO LIST

1. To live to see George W. Bush tried for crimes against humanity.
2. To fly in space—orbital would be fine—and to write about it.
3. To see “American Idol” canceled.

I don’t care about #3, but I’ll join him in the other two.

JOAN JETT, Rocker, 48
A member of the Runaways when she was only 15 and lead singer of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Jett is one of the original bad girls of rock and roll—who doesn’t drink or smoke, is a vegetarian and reads ancient Hindu philosophy in her downtime. Her record “Sinner” came out in June.

“Accept what is going on and grow with it and adjust to it.”

TO-DO LIST:

1. I’d like to go to India and Africa, do some serious traveling.
2. To somehow combine my love for animals, nature and children.
3. To learn a language. I took French in school, but I didn’t like the teacher so I learned nothing.

Nothing stopping her from doing #1 — just book a show or two in those regions and more than pay for it. No problem with #3; she already knows a language: English. (Unless she means learn another language.) As for #2, perhaps she could combine these things by taking my kids and dog to the park on Sunday. That would “somehow” combine her interests. In fact, if Joan is going, not only will I go as well, I’ll even drive and pack lunches. Joan: Email me. I speak your language.

ERIC BOGOSIAN, Playwright, 53
This monologist and playwright became a household name in the late ’80s with the movie version of his play “Talk Radio,” then buffed up his Angry Young Man status with stinging monologues like “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” and “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee.” Fast-forward 20 years. Eric Bogosian still writes plays and dabbles in Hollywood movies, off-Broadway productions and TV, lately as Capt. Danny Ross on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.” His work is speaking to a new generation: “SubUrbia” got revived last fall and “Talk Radio” starring Liev Schreiber opens on Broadway next month.

TO-DO LIST:

1. Learn to speak Armenian.
2. Master the yoga posture Eka Pada Koundinyasana.
3. Read The New York Times headline US FORCES LEAVE IRAQ TODAY.

While I’m thrilled to see a playwright on this list, I’m unconvinced that Eric Bogosian is — or ever was — a “household name.” Perhaps in his own household. The households of others? Not so much. What I like about his list is its specificity (plus, I like saying “specificity” in my head while writing): unlike Joan, he doesn’t want to learn “a” language; realizing that he already knows at least one language, he wants to learn Armenian. He doesn’t just want to take up yoga; he wants to master a certain position. He isn’t waiting for nebulously defined charges against the quote unquote president, he wants a definite action with legitimate reporting of it. Given his mindset (concrete actions and goals), Bogosian should be in business. Or running the government.

Speaking of someone who once ran the government, or at least part of it, here’s the list of doctor-by-telepathy Bill Frist, who once inaccurately diagnosed Terri Schiavo over a video feed so that he could wring political capital from it:

BILL FRIST, Former Senator, 54
Frist served two terms as Senate majority leader before relinquishing his seat in November. A physician for 20 years, the Tennessee native has traveled to Afri-can nations to set up a hospital and provide medical care since 1997. He plans to leave for his next trip—to Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Sudan—on Jan. 30.

“Medicine as a currency for peace—it’s not just a mantra, it’s something I live.”

TO-DO LIST:

1. Continue yearly trip to African regions without health care to perform needed surgery.
2. Fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, and work to provide clean drinking water to poor areas.
3. Treat heart problems in gorillas at D.C.’s National Zoo.

Bill, I am with you on #2. If you can find some way to do that in what we euphemistically call “developing” countries without 90% or more of the aid going to strongarm thugs with submachine guns who hide under the rubric of “government,” all the better. Because sadly, I think that’s job number one in most of these areas. With regard to #3, I share your concern about these gorillas as well as their gorilla kin and indeed the entire ecosystem that supports them, in the wild or not. But I don’t remember you as much of an environmentalist. Have you had a change of heart (no pun intended), now that you’re so far removed from the levers of power? Wish you’d had it sooner.

With regard to #1 on your list, though, there is simply nothing anyone can do about it. You say you’d like to “continue yearly trip to African regions without health care to perform needed surgery.” Sadly, as a former Senator it doesn’t matter where you go, you’ll have health care. I wish we could make this dream come true for you by taking it away, but you’ve got it for life (just as the benefits and entitlements due convicted felons who happened at one time to be in Congress continue to roll on). If it’s any comfort, there are 45.8 million Americans without health care; I only wish you were one of them.

Some teachers of writing disdain genre writing. I’m not one of them.

I’m not one of them because it would be hypocritical of me as a consumer of comic books, pulp novels, the occasional horror or science fiction or Western novel, to turn up a nose at genre. Samuel Beckett spent his idle hours reading detective novels, so who would I be to judge? Turn up a nose at badly written genre? Sure. But because of what it is? No. In some way, to do so seems close to racism: prejudging books by their packaging.

I’m also not someone who disdains genre because I don’t know where to draw the line. Is “The Road” a horror novel, a science fiction novel, or literature? (All three.) How about some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories? Was Edgar Allan Poe a “genre” writer? And wasn’t “The Turn of the Screw” a gothic horror novella?

Toward the end of his lifetime, Philip K. Dick found the mainstream — i.e., the mainstream of popular readers. He found it because the film version of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (“Blade Runner”) brought attention to his work. What he didn’t find was literary acclamation, and the people who hold the reins on that call it “mainstream.” It isn’t. It is the niche (literary readers) of a niche (book readers). (Proof is the LA Times’ lack of a link to the Book Review section.)

Today’s L.A. Times includes a fine review of Dick’s recently published but 54-year-old novel “Voices From the Street.” (The link may require registration.) Reading between the lines, the book doesn’t sound particularly well-written or well-paced. (Years ago I blithely commented to good friend and mentor Rich Roesberg that “nobody reads Philip K. Dick for the prose.” Rich later told me he didn’t know what I meant until the next time he picked up a Dick novel and saw exactly what I meant.) As a longtime admirer of Dick’s themes and obsessions (if not always the word choices in its execution) I will probably read this book; I doubt it is the masterpiece that I still believe “Confessions of a Crap Artist” to be, but I hope it’s at least as entertaining as the meandering but nonetheless gripping “Mary and the Giant,” long out of print and which I was fortunate to discover in a second-hand book shop in Utah (!) for eight dollars.

The photo in today’s Book Review shows Dick seated cross-legged holding a copy of “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said,” not one of his best novels. The front of each of his shoes reveals a wide hole along the bottom. I think Dick’s attraction to the literary mainstream was one of class, but also one of cash. (There is an apocryphal story of Dick ordering horsemeat for his dog only to ingest it himself.) We live in an age of wonderful irony, only the latest being this: In 2007, it is overall the genre writers with lucrative writing careers and the literary writers who scrabble to make ends meet. Philip K. Dick, in being ahead of so many in his own time, died too soon to enjoy the benefits of the true mainstream.

Here’s the latest installment on this ongoing (but dying?) feature of my blog.

Why might it be dying? Because today represents the first time in six days that I’ve read the Los Angeles Times. This is Very Bad News for them. Not because I am in some way a significant readership in myself, but because I represent their most significant readership: inveterate newspaper readers. That would certainly include me. Since boyhood I’ve read the paper on a daily basis, sometimes fighting for sections over the breakfast table. That is probably what propelled me into journalism (that, plus the opportunity to see my name quickly put into print). In my teens I was getting published in fanzines, and then magazines, and in my late teens I was getting published in newspapers. I became a beat reporter, then an entertainment reporter editing his own features, then a copy editor, then senior copy editor, then the production editor of a daily newspaper, all before hitting 25. I love newspapers, and until today I hadn’t read one in a week. If I’m going to drift away so easily, what can print editions forecast about casual readers?

Reading the print edition of today’s L.A. Times has reminded me of a few conclusions I’d previously made:

1. The “news” in the newspaper isn’t news. The Times was smart enough to put a story about the quote unquote president’s detente meeting with Democrats deep inside the first section. Why deep inside? Because I read this story online from another publication yesterday afternoon. A full 24 hours later it carries all the newsworthiness of the Hindenburg disaster coverage. With some news stories, 24 minutes later feels too late.
2. Features and “uncovered news” are more interesting, whether or not they’re relevant. I read the story about the Arizona councilman who won’t give the pledge of allegiance because he’s protesting the war in Iraq. (I don’t like the war in Iraq, but I don’t like sitting out the pledge of allegiance either. Evidently I would fit right in with his constituents, who are hopping mad.) I also read the feature “She earns more, and that’s okay.” At times, that has been the situation at our family HQ here and I was interested in the experience of others. I’m also hooked on Steve Lopez’s column, especially his recent string of columns about — you guessed it — LA’s impenetrable traffic situation, which has engendered the paper’s Bottleneck blog (which here includes a picture of the 405 on Friday).
3. On a related note, there seems to be no home-page link on the Times’ site to its own Book Review. I searched up and down. That’s sad. In a way, I don’t blame them — I think we can guess the extent of people’s interest in the books section if they’re not even reading the paper — but in another way (the way that thinks of newspapers as needing to benefit the community) I think it should be there. If you click on “All Sections,” a sitemap comes up that links to Books, but there is no direct link to Books from the home page, and so nothing to make you think about using the Times site to read about Books. Even after using that link to go to the Books section, I can’t find a link to what I want to link to here: A review of the “new” Philip K. Dick book. The only way to find it, finally, is to do a search of the website — and this obscurity is perfectly ironic given that the piece is also about Dick’s desperate desire to be accepted in his lifetime as a mainstream writer.

I’m going to write about this review, and Dick, in my next post. But first here’s my conclusion with regard to the Times: the paper’s readership (as well as its staffing and coverage) is shrinking. Its online environment is encouraging, but lacking. So to truly “read” the L.A. Times, one needs to read both editions (else I would never have seen the Philip K. Dick piece, for one) — and it is asking us to do that in an era when we have less time than ever to read either edition at all.

Remember my outrage over the cooked-up panic to immunize pre-teens against STDs (so that Merck can boost its bottom line)?

The state of Texas, of course, has become the first to adopt.

And even the news media has made the connection to the lobbying effort. I can’t resist quoting these few paragraphs:

Merck is bankrolling efforts to pass state laws across the country mandating Gardasil for girls as young as 11 or 12. It doubled its lobbying budget in Texas and has funneled money through Women in Government, an advocacy group made up of female state legislators around the country.

Perry tied to Merck
Perry has ties to Merck and Women in Government. One of the drug company’s three lobbyists in Texas is Mike Toomey, Perry’s former chief of staff. His current chief of staff’s mother-in-law, Texas Republican state Rep. Dianne White Delisi, is a state director for Women in Government.

The governor also received $6,000 from Merck’s political action committee during his re-election campaign

Gee, I wonder how that “Children of Men” future comes about…?

I will be very very curious to see how parents in Texas feel about Britney Ann getting injected so that Merck winds up healthier.

Daniel Radcliffe is going nude and Harry Potter fans are alarmed. Mothers are threatening boycotts of the next Potter film!

Is the actor doing this for purposes of exploitation? No, to play the troubled young man in Equus, a wonderful play that has been with us for 35 years. (And which I saw two years ago in a stunning production at East West Players, brilliantly directed by Tim Dang and starring George Takei. Please note: In general I use the word “brilliantly” only sparingly. It’s a remarkable play, and this was a remarkable production.)

I have no idea if Radcliffe can pull off what is a very challenging role — and do it eight times a week. I don’t believe he’s ever had a stage role before, let alone one that plumbs these emotional depths. But the idea that he is “betraying Harry Potter fans,” which seems to be a recurrent theme in the media coverage, is ludicrous. Perhaps he might like to do other things in his life — like act.

It’s refreshing to once in a while say “over my dead body,” especially when you truly mean it. So here goes:

Over my dead body is my daughter going to get an experimental new drug cocktail just because Merck has succeeded in lobbying some state government to mandate it.

My priorities in life are simple. Here they are:

1. My family’s health
2. Everything else

Given this perspective, you can understand my immediate reaction: Here’s a huge pharmaceutical company looking to enrich its bottom line under the guise of “protecting” my daughter’s health. (No, they didn’t single her out — but keeping her front of mind creates a certain governing perspective as far as I’m concerned.)

By the way, in case you missed it, here’s what this is really about: Merck has been searching for a new drug market that it can completely own with its own patented drug. Click here to see the latest story about their 58-percent profitability plunge. Connect the dots and you get the suddenly pressing issue of immunizing pre-teen girls.

Will any of the presidential candidates stand up to big pharma? Because that’s who I’m newly interested in supporting.

In an interview on Salon, notorious word-twister Frank Luntz, whose past counsel has been to push for “tax relief” rather than “tax cuts” and who proposed substituting “personalizing” Social Security over “privatizing” it (and whose biggest success was in repositioning estate taxes as “the death tax”) has bold advice for the quote unquote president with regard to the State of the Union: Be believable.

I realize that when it comes to believability I’m old-fashioned. For the most part I like my believability to be linked to facts, particularly ones I can believe. Only occasionally do I fall back on pure belief, belief unsupported by facts, as with my belief in the inherent redemptive nature of art — even though Picasso was a thoroughly unpleasant person, Hitler was a scenic artist who later got up to some very mean business, and Francis Bacon painted grotesqueries like this. Irrespective of this blind spot — and it looks like one I’m filling in — I like belief to be based on facts.

The quote unquote has never needed the facts. His belief has been pure. God talks to him. I wish He told him better — or truer — things, but there it is. I wonder if now Luntz wants the quote unquote to be “believable” in a factual way. If that’s what he’s prescribing, both men would be better saving their breath, except Luntz is no doubt thrilled for this media opportunity. I’m betting the quote unquote, though, will wish he were somewhere else tonight, like under the covers. At least, that’s what I believe.

If the republic needs him, Newt Gingrich says he’s willing to ride in and save it.

You just don’t see this sort of selflessness every day.

It’s always fascinating to see how you turn up in someone else’s writing. And by “fascinating,” I mean distressing. As a dramatist, I’m entitled to the truth as I create it, and other people’s views (particularly of stories involving me) just get in the way of that. Here’s a case in point.

Remember my good friend Doug, of “Doug’s Reading List“? Yesterday, a year and a half after the creation of The Reading List, and six weeks after my posting it here, he sent a broadcast email with his version of how the list came to be created:

Back when we were planning to go out via sailboat, I asked a well read friend of ours, Lee Wochner, to give me a list of his “take to the desert island” books. I expected him to spend a few minutes banging out his top-of-the-head top ten list and leave it at that. But to Lee, books are the essential currency of our humanness, the primary record of our civilization and any personal list of favorites to be the ultimate opening of the kimono – the baring of the ultimate soul – the absolute and total revelation of who you are as a person.

Most people today would feel that way about recommending their top 10 rental DVDs or best episodes of Friends or favorite American Idol competitor. Books, and reading, have slid from their place of honor in American culture, as a quick glance at literacy rates and market share & revenue numbers for publishers & newspapers will reveal.

I used to feel just as strongly about books as Lee does. Everywhere I ever lived I dragged every book around I’d ever owned, except for the complete collection of original 1st edition Ian Fleming James Bond paperbacks I’d received from my uncle Doug and loaned to Jay Buckles in 1974 and never got back and my large format anniversary edition Harold Head comic book that disappeared into Dan Norenberg’s Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon in 1976 and never returned. Not that I’m resentful and have a hard time letting go or anything.

My woodworking project in high school was a bookshelf. I dragged that around too, and showcased prized books in feature locations around my room, and later, houses. Although many things you wore, watched or discussed reflected who you were, I always believed that nothing told your story like your books. Whenever I visited someone who was a reader, who had books around their place, I always took a long, lingering trip to the bathroom and spent as much time as possible scanning their shelves to a) see if I recognized anything I’d read that validated my existence and provided a connection and b) see what I hadn’t read that defined my gaps and the differences between us.

My first big purge of books was when we moved to California. I sold the bottom layers of my library at our garage sale in Hudson, WI. I had them all laid out on our cargo trailer, which they filled mostly two deep, spines up. After the sale I pulled the trailer down to our used book store in town to sell a few of the remainder to the owner, then took the rest to the local retirement home and hospital for their libraries. It was a traumatic experience. I haven’t forgotten that either, and have spent the intervening six and half years fine tuning a long, complex and very tenuous logic chain that makes my wife entirely responsible. Not that I hold on to things like that or anything.

When I told Lee about the garage sale his expression clouded and he looked at me like a traitor to the cause of literacy and higher thought. The sale, the abandonment of books – the very thought of it – visibly turned his stomach. I would have had the same reaction not two weeks before I’d done it.

The next big purge was when we dispersed our worldly possessions in preparation for this upcoming travel. I sold some more at our garage sale, but donated most of them. I gave my dozens of sailing books to Jimmy Sones, a friend who also nurtures a dream of one day sailing over the horizon. The rest that I really treasured I put in a cargo trailer and drove out to my son, Adam, also a reader, in Minnesota. He put them on the bookshelves that I gave him, which were made by his grandfather as his high school woodworking project back in the early 50s. My dad’s shelves were much better made than mine, and of the two (mine went a long, long time ago), I’m glad I kept his around for such a suitable family heirloom moment.

So, at this point, I am essentially bookless. Aside from a few wilderness medicine books, survival manuals and some guidebooks, I have only a handful, most written by friends.

This is a very strange place to be for a kid who read, on average, at least four books a week for most of my childhood.

So, I need your help. I need your “take to the desert island” list of books so I can stock up for these travels.

When I asked Lee for his list he ended up spending over nine hours on it (see it here: Doug’s Book List ), which I guess is about what I would have invested if someone would have asked me this question prior to the Great Book Purge.

You, on the other hand, do not need to invest that much time or energy.

The expedition vehicle we ended up with is not a 53’, 35,000 lb. cruising sailboat. It isn’t all that big and is already at the limit on weight. Consequently, we don’t have a lot of capacity for me to drag along books. So, your list can, and needs to be, short.

If you could only take a backpack full, what books would you take to a desert island?

Be well,
Doug
—————————————-
Douglas Hackney
dhackney@egltd.com
www.hackneys.com/travel

(You’ll note that I have helpfully included Doug’s email address and website should you wish to draft your own Doug’s Reading List and send it. To him.)

As I’ve written here before, I’m glad to call Doug a friend. He’s a smart person who repeatedly puts his energies into helping the world, usually in a direct fashion, one person at a time, whether it’s clearing debris post-Katrina, donating books to a burned-out store in San Diego, or gifting tools to a would-be motorcycle mechanic in India. I admire Doug. Doug is good people. Which is why it saddens me all the more to see how memory loss is afflicting him at such an early age.

In Doug’s version, Doug tells a tear-stained Lee that the imminent sailboat departure of he and his wife affords the retention or acquisition of no more than 10 books. Lee cannot imagine the world reduced to a mere 10 books and with a darkened brow associates Doug with the “Friends” culture. From “Anna Karenina” to “Friends” to… WWF rebroadcasts on a 2″ iPod screen… it’s a downward voyage, led by Doug’s divestiture of his library. Doug isn’t on a heroic quest, but a fool’s odyssey — one Lee succumbs to joining.

Here’s Lee’s version:

Doug bemoans to me his lack of a degree in literature (completely understandable — the bemoaning part) and asks if there might possibly somehow be some way that I could provide him with a primer — a list of bare essentials that will allow him to escape cocktail-party chatter with only minor stabbings from cocktail toothpicks and in the meantime enlighten him in the non-Biblical literary underpinnings of Western civilization. What we’re looking for here is work that is both relevant and popular in such circles, or which will enable Doug to steer the conversation back to safer shores. (Which provided the reasoning behind my “Hold your own at a dinner party” sub-list, “i.e., the 11 most-discussed, most-influential works of modernist literature at this time; impress your friends, astound your enemies. Comprehensive? By no means. Will these 11 provide enough artillery to cover your weaknesses? Absolutely,” and why the list features Kafka, Beckett, Camus, Sylvia Plath, et al.)

These two origin stories differ greatly, as you see.

In the comics, it has always irritated me when origin stories are recooked. Supergirl goes from being Superman’s cousin as well as the only other Kryptonian to escape the planet’s destruction to being either a shapeshifting protoplasm or a human being with the same Earth name as Supergirl but now infected by the protoplasm, back to being Superman’s cousin but from another dimension, and so forth. I can’t follow it and I don’t like it. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I read none of these related comic books.) Iconic characters and iconic stories are iconic for good reason: The original version carries a deeper truth, one that tells us something about ourselves. Who was the alien Superman, after all, but a Jew, sired by Jews, newly Americanized, someone who had escaped the destruction of his own planet and was now eager to represent his new nation in the battle against Hitler and the forces of genocide and oppression? To suddenly, if briefly, recast him as a cyborg, as DC Comics did in the 1990’s, is lunacy. Forces of reasonable goodness still merit representation; cyborgs deserve nothing.

I feel similarly about the two origin stories now competing for primacy with regard to “Doug’s Reading List.”

In Doug’s version, he can transport only so many books, so he needs a desert-island reading list. We’ve all seen that story. In fact, we’ve heard that story as well, as with radio programs like “Desert Island Discs.” It doesn’t take us very far. It’s about economy of scale, and that is a story lost on a nation of strivers and dreamers.

In my version, Doug is seeking the wisdom of the ages and turns to me for guidance. (This version clarifies why the endeavor is worth nine hours of my time.) Doug is much like the Indian motorcycle repairman who only needs the tools. I draft the list, provide options oriented around Doug’s own goals (“desert island” is there, as well as “succeed at cocktail party,” and further reading choices), as well as a point-by-point explanation of why some titles were chosen while others left off. Ideally, Doug adopts the list and, armed with newfound insights gleaned from this reading, transcends the material to lend new perspectives on what he’s read and on what surrounds him in our world.

To me, that is an American story, and in the six years I’ve known Doug I’ve come to associate him with what we think of as American ideals: mid-Western, commonsensical, hardworking, successful, generous, populist, honest. He may believe that his story of the list is correct — it may even be correct — but it’s not right. It’s not right for Doug, and it’s not right for America.

For two reasons, Sigmund Freud is the bane of my existence: 1. As a culture, we’ve become consumed by psychobabble that weakens our thinking; and 2. Because this psychobabble has so thoroughly infested our culture, it is almost impossible to have a conversation without resorting to this very same psychobabble. It’s a frustrating tautology. If you want to see it in action, clock how lengthy a conversation you can have before one of the speakers falls into the following language:

• saying someone else is being “defensive” (even when previous generations might have said they were “responding to criticism,” especially logical fallacies)
• calling someone’s desire (or their achievement of that desire) “wish fulfillment,” as though results magically appear from wishes and human will had nothing to do with it
• being accused of “projecting” when others are being criticized
• calling someone with standards “anal”

and so forth.

(And right now, I’m sure that some people reading this are thinking that I’m either projecting or being defensive.)

What really drives me bananas, though, is the sort of blithe characterization novelist Jane Smiley performs over on Huffington Post of the quote unquote president. More appropriately, her blithe characterization troubles but doesn’t surprise me — this is what novelists do: characterize people. What’s upsetting is that dozens upon dozens of readers of the piece are confusing it for “insightful analysis.”

I’m not a fan of the quote unquote president or of his invasion of the wrong country. (When he invaded one of the right countries — Afghanistan — I was a supporter.) But 500 words of literary assumption — about his psychology, and the psychology of his colleagues — does not equal penetrating analysis. It equals one of two things: literature, or psychobabble. To think it something else cheapens the language.

Or maybe I’m just being anal.