'Checkpoint' targets the president

[seemslikeadream]

'Checkpoint' targets the president

By Linton Weeks

WASHINGTON POST


In Nicholson Baker's new novella, "Checkpoint," a man sits in a Washington hotel room with a friend and talks about assassinating President Bush.

It's a work of the imagination and no attempts on the president's life are made, but the novel is likely to be incendiary, as with Michael Moore's documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Flush with the headline-generating success of "My Life," by Bill Clinton, Alfred A. Knopf is planning to publish Baker's work Aug. 24, on the eve of the Republican National Convention. "Checkpoint" is 115 pages long and will sell for $18.

In the book, two men -- Ben and Jay -- meet at the fictional Adele Hotel and Suites in Washington. It is midday. They eat a bag of bagel chips and order lunch from room service. They talk into a tape recorder.

more
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/9045752.htm?1c

different link

Checkpoint, though, is clearly something else. According to the Post's account, its two protagonists, Ben and Jay, talk down and dirty about the Bush administration into a tape recorder during an in-room lunch at a Washington hotel. Jay announces he's going to assassinate the President, and the men proceed to talk about both why and how he might do such a thing.

By the sounds of it, the novel is hardly The Anarchist's Cookbook - the fanciful methods the two men consider to take out the most powerful politician on the planet include using radio-controlled flying saws. Another tactic they discuss is a remote-controlled boulder made of depleted uranium. Ben asks Jay: "You're going to squash the President?" Jay also has a gun and some bullets, but the book appears to cover its tracks somewhat by having Ben express extreme misgivings about using them. "If the FBI and the Secret Service ... come after me because I've been hanging out with you in a hotel room before you make some crazy attempt on the life of the President," Ben says, "I'm totally cooked."

More incendiary than Jay's assassination fantasies, in the end, may be the deep expressions of anger against the administration the book dwells on. In that respect it is not unlike Joseph Heller's 1979 novel Good as Gold, which included an extended rant against Henry Kissinger. The difference, though, is that Kissinger had been out of power for two years when Heller's book was published; Mr Bush is in the middle of a bruising re-election battle.

Jay says he hasn't felt so much hostility against any other president - not Nixon, not Reagan. Jay says of Mr Bush: "He is beyond the beyond. What he's done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the prisons. It's too much. It makes me so angry. And it's a new kind of anger, too." At one point, he calls Mr Bush an "unelected drunken OILMAN" who is "squatting" in the White House and "muttering over his prayer book every morning." At another point, he calls Mr Bush "one dead armadillo".
more
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=536594

[Robbien]

1. This should be and interesting and funny book

"You're going to squash the president?" Ben asks Jay.

and the flying buzz saws is a unique concept also.

[seemslikeadream]

2. "rusted hulks"

Jay says he hasn't felt so much hostility against any other president - not Nixon, not Reagan. Jay says of Mr Bush: "He is beyond the beyond. What he's done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the prisons. It's too much. It makes me so angry. And it's a new kind of anger, too." At one point, he calls Mr Bush an "unelected drunken OILMAN" who is "squatting" in the White House and "muttering over his prayer book every morning." At another point, he calls Mr Bush "one dead armadillo".

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are described as "rusted hulks" and "zombies" who have "fought their way back up out of the peat bogs where they've been lying, and they're stumbling around with grubs scurrying in and out of their noses and they're going, 'We - are - your - advisors.'"

Jay expresses outrage at the munitions the United States armed forces have used in Iraq, including an updated version of napalm. Jay says of the Iraq bomb material: "It's improved fire jelly - it's even harder to put out than the stuff they used in Vietnam. And Korea. And Germany. And Japan. It just has another official name. Now it's called Mark 77. I mean, have we learnt nothing? Mark 77! I'm going to kill that bastard."

The title of the book is taken from an incident at a checkpoint south of Karbala last year, in which US forces opened fire on a Shia family of 17 travelling to southern Iraq to seek a safe haven. Several family members died, including two young girls decapitated by the gunfire.

another link
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=536594

[Window]

9. Sounds interesting/funny.

.

[seemslikeadream]

10. Check out who the author is

post #8

[MrBadExample]

3. Gah!

Eighteen bucks for 115 pages?

No wonder people aren't buying many books these days.

[cliss]

4. Jeez. That's some book.

I think Mr. Baker could be in some kind of trouble if he publishes this book.

In case anyone's wondering why BeelzeBush has an entire ARMADA of security when he travels, this is why. Sheesh. What a destructive man, to whip up the hatred of an entire world. I'd go back to drinking, if I were him.

[seemslikeadream]

6. will be published in August

Nicholson Baker's "Checkpoint," in which assassination is discussed but never acted upon, will be published in August
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13374-2004Jun28.html


"Americans, Ari Fleischer ominously warned, "need to watch what they say, watch what they do." Patriotic citizens were supposed to accept the administration's version of events, not ask awkward questions.”

[librechik]

5. Bartcop wrote a novel?

the language is certainly derivative of his style. Did they also call em the walking hand job or Chimpy McCokespoon?

ha ha--saw this one coming, didn't you? Wish I'd whipped it up myself: 115 pages for a novel? That's a couple of week's posts on DU for me!

[seemslikeadream]

8. Understanding Nicholson Baker

Understanding
Nicholson Baker
Arthur Saltzman

Investigates the complex and controversial reputation of the writer lauded by Vanity Fair as "the best writer of our generation"


Understanding Contemporary American Literature, Matthew J. Bruccoli, series editor

In addition to being celebrated as a prose miniaturist for such works as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, Baker is widely viewed as a best-selling highbrow eroticist for Vox and The Fermata. In Understanding Nicholson Baker, Arthur Saltzman engages these provocative fictions as well as Baker's renowned nonfiction to show how his seemingly disparate works derive from and demonstrate an unremitting zeal for explicit detail, along with descriptive obsessiveness and linguistic virtuosity.

Through close readings of Baker's work—including his 1998 novel, The Everlasting Story of Nory—Saltzman provides not only an introduction to a sublimely spirited writer but also a systematic appreciation of the rewards of his writing. Taking issue with reviewers who have labeled Baker a minimalist, Saltzman argues that the novelist's work has none of the poverty or predictability that the term suggests. He also defends Baker against charges of chauvinism and vulgarity for Vox and The Fermata, maintaining that the intricately detailed passions of these erotic novels are in accord with the intricate detail in The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. Saltzman contends that voyeurism is a natural extension of Baker's other obsessive attentions.

Saltzman describes Baker's nonfiction as a similarly inventive, unpredictable, and minutiae-oriented body of work. He offers analyses of U and I: A True Story, a quirky homage to John Updike, and of The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber, in which Baker visits his witty erudition on subjects ranging from the history of punctuation to the treasures of library card catalogs. Saltzman concludes that Baker is consumed with fundamentals—from arriving at a drugstore, to getting a baby to sleep, to rooting out the history of a plastic bottle or a bit of slang—and that Baker's aim is to revise the very nature of literary adventure.
more
http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/Sp99/3303.html

[librechik]

11. thanks for the link, seemslikeadream

I'll check them out(Baker and biography)

[seemslikeadream]

12. It really suprised me about the author!

Thanks for the interest.

[daleo]

7. It seems like a simple case of free speech

Unless terrorists and assassins are going to be looking for useful tips about the construction of radio-controlled flying saws and remote-controlled boulders made of depleted uranium, this doesn't seem to indicate any real danger to shrub.

However, the U.S. military might well pick up on some of these ideas and spend a few tens of billions on prototypes. In that sense, the book may prove to be dangerous.