character sketches:

dad: dead gook babies, father robbing tobacco money
Bulgakov's devil: "mmm cancer...no, your head will be cut off!"
Kundera himself
the prostitute and the brain surgeon
Polish grandmother in germany
KGB plant child
Tieber
Kolodesh]
Hofac re
Raynor
Jones

Delillo's rambling style, characters enter and exit without apparent attachment to the story

Musil's Man Without Qualities aspect of philosophical rambling as a privilege granted to one male and one female character

Temporal: cold war cul;ture, displacement of american-eastern european son,

political- neo fascist american state
revolutionary - Chavez, Chomsky, the hollow media juggernaut, thought control as enforced apathy, Winston Smith as an epithet in Circumference of Darkness.

culture and it's discontents: shitty writers drifting to the top:Grisham, Clancy, Steele, Patterson

Will Smith's I robot compared to Asimov's: the reality of the former being more entertaining than the latter and the pretension of pretending otherwise

characters:

lovable criminal
detestable liberal
terrifying reactionary
philosophical fundamentalist


childhood: learning to say the expected thing "Ican't even understand the words"

jargon and technology laden writing :circumference of darkness, James Patterson, Clancy --

Orwell, Huxley - Brave New World Revisited : PR industry, Soviet propaganda, the death of democracy with the rise of big media

alternate universe - shirley Macclaine, Stanislav Grof,

research trip to Auroville

responibele jobs and why they seem to preempt creativity, reading, and free thought
re: working for Alex and how it moved me to the right, BMW legal and how I couldn't see my day to day work until i was gone

previous blog post the enforced conformity, no make that the rewarded conformity that passes for education

the Underground History of AMerican Education

application to Penn and edgar Rice Burroughs, cultural elite? no one to ask abut a decent author, why not Lustbaderm why didn't I consider Hemingway? Football recruiting of SAT 1300 and higher

character sketch 1300+ SAT score linebacker cum killer cum criminal, Al Queda, Chechnya, Hemingway and teh Spanish revolution, South African PR ads in 1970's magazines.

Put Kundera and Delillo together - philosophy without preaching, thinking (Musil) without condescention. The characters must be taken seriously in their moments of levity and looked at askance when they are being serious ie. musil's Clarisse and her crusade for Moosburger.

Foucault, mental illness and identification with patients instead of colleagues, Skalifasovskaya, kindness, suffering, snappiong of something internally

The dream of all the music in the world in one place - this might be a good opening, late 70's miox tapes and record clubs, tower records and dreams of having all the music at your fingertips now Limewire. Reading in Russia, James Fennimore Cooper with Russian footnotes to explain American history of Indian massacres, how Soviet censors were a healthy antidote to American schools skipping over the ugly parts.

why war and peaced is a shitty book

Maxim Gorky - Mother and my sentiments while reading it as a young communist, the letdown of Gorky when he is exposed by Solzhenitsyn years later.

Rebelling against the Socialist party hierarchy and speaking the truth about the prospects for changing American reality through Socialist campaigns in elections

french and algerian girlfriends, Egypt, servants, the competition of cultures and how America makes everyone a whore