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book notes
1/16/2010
"Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom", Tracy Kidder and Peter Hallward on Haiti
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Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted.
- from the New York Times, Country Without a Net, by Tracy Kidder.
The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.
Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.
Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day". Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.
It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.
As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, points out: "Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses." Meanwhile the city's basic infrastructure – running water, electricity, roads, etc – remains woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government's ability to mobilise any sort of disaster relief is next to nil.
- from the Guardian, Our role in Haiti's plight, by Peter Hallward.
January 17 2010: See also from Common Dreams, Why the US Owes Haiti Billions – The Briefest History by Bill Quigley.
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Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment
by
Peter Hallward
Verso
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8/8/2009
Daniel Ellsberg on the 64th Aniversary of Hiroshima Day
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For a great many Americans still, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are regarded above all with gratitude, for having saved their own lives or the lives of their husbands, brothers, fathers or grandfathers, which would otherwise have been at risk in the invasion of Japan. For these Americans and many others, the Bomb was not so much an instrument of massacre as a kind of savior, a protector of precious lives.
Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective—as constituting just means, in effect just terrorism, under the supposed circumstances—thus legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day massacres in history. (The largest, also by the U.S. Army Air Corps, was the firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, which burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians. Most of the very few Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate in wartime.
To regard those acts as definitely other than criminal and immoral—as most Americans do—is to believe that anything—anything—can be legitimate means: at worst, a necessary, lesser, evil. At least, if done by Americans, on the order of a president, during wartime. Indeed, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction—and believes that it was fully rightful in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.
Even if the premises of these justifications had been realistic (after years of study I’m convinced, along with many scholars, that they were not; but I’m not addressing that here), the consequences of such beliefs for subsequent policymaking were bound to be fateful. They underlie the American government and public’s ready acceptance ever since of basing our security on readiness to carry out threats of mass annihilation by nuclear weapons, and the belief by many officials and elites still today that abolition of these weapons is not only infeasible but undesirable.
Every one of our many thousands of H-bombs, the thermonuclear fusion bombs that arm our strategic forces, requires a Nagasaki-type A-bomb as its detonator. (I doubt that one American in a hundred knows that simple fact, and thus has a clear understanding of the difference between A- and H-bombs, or of the reality of the thermonuclear arsenals of the last 50 years.
Our popular image of nuclear war—from the familiar pictures of the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—is grotesquely misleading. Those pictures show us only what happens to humans and buildings when they are hit by what is now just the detonating cap for a modern nuclear weapon. - two selections from Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years by Daniel Ellsberg.
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Hiroshima Notes
by
Kenzaburo Oe
Grove Press
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6/22/2009
J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye Inspires Possible Swedish Copycat
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The Associated Press is reporting that a newbook written by Swedish author Fredrik Colting is being scrutinized by a U.S. District Judge who is concerned about copyright infringement of J.D. Salinger’s iconic novel Catcher in the Rye. Colting’s book, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,was written to poke fun at Salinger’s “God-Author” public persona, according to Colting, but Judge Deborah Batts noted that she sees only close similarities between the stories, and not a clear separation or criticism, as Colting claims to have made of Salinger. In Colting’s version, a “Mr. C” escapes from a retirement home and goes on a journey that Judge Batts believes mirrors too closely the events that unfold for Holden Caufield in Salinger’s original work. Colting also published the book under a pseudonym that is undeniably close to Salinger’s real name: J.D. California.
Ironically, the Associated Press reports, Colting’s lawyer is accusing Judge Batts of banning the new book as she considers blocking its publication – it was slated to be released in the U.S. on September 15 – due to a copyright infringement. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which was published in 1951, has also been banned over the years.
J.D. Salinger is collaborating with Judge Batts, and according to The AP, his literary agent referred to 60 Years Later as “wholesale piracy.” Colting’s lawyer, however, considers the new work a valid sequel to the original.
The Catcher in the Rye has reportedly sold between 10 million and 35 million copies and is still considered to be one of the most iconic portraits of American literature. Time declared it one of the top English-language novels from 1923-2005, former U.S. President George H.W. Bush credits it with being one of the books that has inspired him over the years. According to Wikipedia, Catcher in the Rye was the most censored books in high schools and libraries between 1961 and 1982, but it has also become one of the most treasured and most widely taught books in the U.S.
This post was contributed by Caitlin Smith, who writes about online colleges. She welcomes your feedback at CaitlinSmith1117 at gmail.com.
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The Catcher in the Rye
by
J. D. Salinger
Back Bay Books
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6/13/2009
Ralph Nader on master woodworker Sam Maloof, 1916 - 2009
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You can't help but stroke the darn things - Jeremy Adamson,
curator a 2001 exhibition of Sam Maloof's work at the Renwick Gallery
of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Described by the Smithsonian Institution as "America's most renowned
contemporary furniture craftsman" and dubbed by People magazine as
the"The Hemingway of Hardwood," master woodworker and furniture
designer Sam Maloof died last month at the age of 93. Maloof called
himself a "woodworker". "I like the word," he once told a Los Angeles
Times. "It's an honest word.
"A measure of the man's spirit, writes Ralph Nader on Maloof, "is
reflected in these words about his work:
Craftsmen in any media know the satisfaction that comes in
designing and making an object from raw material. Mine comes from
working in wood. Once you have breathed, smelled, and tasted the
tanginess of wood and have handled it in the process of giving it
form, there is nothing, I believe, that can replace the complete
satisfaction granted.
Working a rough piece of wood into a complete, useful object is the
welding together of man and material.
The exquisite manual workmanship of Mr. Maloof is further stimulating
the questioning of the remoteness that modern technology visits on so
many people who spend hours in virtual reality, separated from nature
and its materials. Our country was built by craftsmen, artisans and
other workers who designed and made real things. High Schools offered
Shop Class, where students learned skills and the joy of creating.
These classes opened doors to a source of livelihood and pride for
budding artisans.
With the nineteenth century industrial revolution and mass production
employing masses of workers, these independent craftsmen tried to
remain independent contractors and not become what they called "wage
slaves" in giant, often dangerous, factories...
In a new book titled Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford,
the author bemoaned the closing at high schools all over the United
States of shop classes that taught the mechanical arts like carpentry,
woodworking, welding and other skills. They were closed to allow more
funding of computer labs. And because our throw-away society no longer
properly values the fruits of artisan labor.
Crawford goes on to argue and demonstrate what our society loses when
we make joining the paper economy the chief aspiration of the younger
generations or to use Robert Reich?s phrase to become "symbolic
analysts." Somebody has to keep the real world running maintained,
repaired and replaced?something we realize very quickly when things
don?t work in our households.
The draining of gratification from work in a techno-computerized
environment is a widespread condition for millions of people, apart
from the automated severance of their judgment and discretion by
command and control positions." -- from The
Craft of Sam Maloof
A Visionary Woodworker.
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Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
by
Matthew B. Crawford
Penguin Press HC, The
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11/23/2008
Haruki Murakami on running and dreaming
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"What compelled you to write a memoir?" asked Heidi Benson speaking to Haruki Murakami last month about his most recent book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
"I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It's a parallel thing in me."
"Readers are very passionate about your work. Why do you think fiction matters to people so much"
"That's a big question. I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching. Sometimes it's not easy. You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue. You cannot do that while you are asleep. When the dream stops, it stops forever. You cannot continue to dream that same dream. But if you are a writer, you can do that. That is a great thing, to keep on dreaming while you are awake." - excerpted from
What Haruki Murakami talks about.
Most ordinary runners are motivated by an individual goal, more than anything: namely, a time they want to beat. As long as he can beat that time, a runner will feel he's accomplished what he set out to do, and if he can't, then he'll feel he hasn't. Even if he doesn't break the time he'd hoped for, as long as he has the sense of satisfaction at having done his very best--and, possibly, having made some significant discovery about himself in the process--then that in itself is an accomplishment, a positive feeling he can carry over to the next race.
The same can be said about my profession. In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics' praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you've set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can't fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike. Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn't seek validation in the outwardly visible. - from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.
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What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
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Haruki Murakami
Knopf
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11/6/2008
Predicting the quality of a Barack Obama presidency by his ability with the pen
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Like many politicians Barack Obama is also an author. What makes him different is he's also a good writer. Most books by today's policies are glossy, self-serving, sometimes ghost-written puffery, which are designed to be sold as throwaway literature. Obama has written a couple of these books, and the best that can be said about them is that they're a cut above the usual tripe politicians slap between two covers. Earlier, however, way back in 1995, Barack Obama penned another book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, which is easily the most honest, daring, and ambitious volume put out by a major US politician in the last 50 years.
As its subtitle implies, this is not a book about politics per se, but Obama's struggle to find his racial identity and to understand the role of race in American culture and beyond. As the son of a Kenyan man and a white American woman, whose spent his earliest years in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, Obama's take on race is both personal and sadly universal. Equally as impressive is the fact that he doesn't disguise the book's more controversial and revealing aspects, as most politicians instinctively would have done.
Had Obama elected to be a full-time author instead of a politician I don't doubt that he would have become highly accomplished. Dreams from My Father is Obama's first attempt at a serious sustained narrative and it has many of the flaws one would expect from an emerging author, including some awkward transitions and, as he himself has admitted, a bit of long-windedness. These are minor flaws, however, in a work that
easily could have been the first piece of a very worthwhile literary life.
Attempting to predict the quality of an Obama presidency by his ability with the pen may seem a bit far-fetched to some. But in American politics there is a great deal of support for this. Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the most revered of all American leaders, was also one his century's greatest writers...
- from Presidents who write well, lead well by Rob Woodard.
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Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
by
Barack Obama
Crown
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10/29/2008
Paul Auster on writing and his latest novel, Man in the Dark
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I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle with another bout of insomnia, another white night in the American wilderness. - the opening sentence of Man in the Dark
"It's a dark night for Brill. But I think that most people when they have these bouts of insomnia - I think we've all had them - usually your thoughts turn to the darker moments of your life. It's not a cheery time, the experience of cataloguing your regrets, making lists of all the rotten things you've done in life, things you wish you haven't done, basically just examining the futility of your own existence. It usually gets better when morning comes, and I try to imply that at the end of the book."
"For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity."..."I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK then I type it up, because sometimes it's almost illegible and if I wait I might not be able to read it the next day. So I immediately type up the paragraph, see what it looks like on a clean sheet of paper, and then attack that sheet of paper with my pencil again."
- two excerpts from the Guardian's Paul Auster talks to Alsion Ford.
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Man in the Dark: A Novel
by
Paul Auster
Henry Holt and Co.
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9/16/2008
Jane Ciabattari on White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson
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DARE you see a soul at the white heat?
Then crouch within the door.
Red is the fire’s common tint;
But when the vivid ore
Has sated flame’s conditions,
Its quivering substance plays
Without a color but the light
Of unanointed blaze.
Least village boasts its blacksmith,
Whose anvil’s even din
Stands symbol for the finer forge
That soundless tugs within,
Refining these impatient ores
With hammer and with blaze,
Until the designated light
Repudiate the forge. - Emily Dickinson
"How many know that Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the radical abolitionist who was one of the "Secret Six" who supported John Brown's bold raid on Harpers Ferry, later became the literary confidant of the reclusive apolitical poet Emily Dickinson?" The question is asked by Jane Ciabattari, author of the brilliant short story collection Stealing the Fire, in her review of Brenda Wineapple's book White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Higginson is the question mark in this equation. Dickinson has been the target of more than a century of obsessive scholarly excavation...Wineapple makes a case for a parallel sensibility, iconoclasm, fanaticism and courage. She captures the intellectual and political climate of New England in the last half of the 19th century and sheds light on Higginson’s radicalism. “Braced by the righteousness of his cause—the unequivocal emancipation of slaves—this Massachusetts gentleman of the white and learned class had earned a reputation among his own as a lunatic,” she notes. - excerpted from book review published in truthdig by Jane Ciabattari.
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White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
by
Brenda Wineapple
Knopf
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8/6/2008
Ammon Shea on Reading the OED
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Ammon Shea is the co-author with Peter Novobatzky of two previous books on obscure words, Depraved English and Insulting English (now published together in one volume). Ten years ago he read his first dictionary, Merriam Webster's Second International. Now he has spent a year reading the twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary and his book, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, has just been published. Last Febuary, Ammon Shea was interviewed by John McGrath, the creator of Wordie.org, a most novel and curious social networking site. "Where did the idea of reading the OED come from?" McGrath asked.
When I first began reading dictionaries it was quickly apparent that reading a lexicon is considerably more fun than one might imagine. Once I'd established that it was enjoyable rather than onerous the natural next step was to read longer and longer dictionaries. I find few things in life more depressing than coming to the end of a good book; the OED was attractive in part because I knew that would take quite some time.
Also, whenever I looked up a word in the OED I would think of something else to look for, and then I would get caught up in the pages, a hour has gone by and although I've found some wonderful things I’m still haunted by the thought that the rest of this dictionary has other wonderful things in it that I haven’t yet read. So I decided that I would read the whole thing to sate my curiosity about all those unread pages. - excerpted from the OUP blog
Two favorite words with a chosen definition and comment by Shea :
Accismus - (n.) An insincere refusal of a thing that is desired.
As in: "No, please, I really would like for you to have the last donut."
Gobemouche - (n.) One who believes anything, no matter how absurd.
From the French words gober (to swallow) + mouche (fly). - cited by the complete review 's review
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Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages
by
Ammon Shea
Perigee Trade
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2/2/2008
20th-century art and literary history landmark, André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, on the block
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Only the word freedom can still exalt me. I consider it capable of sustaining indefinitely the old human fanaticism. Doubtless it satisfies my only legitimate aspiration. - André Breton, Surrealist Manifesto
Sotheby's has announced that the landmark Manifeste du surréalisme written by the French writer and poet André Breton, is up for auction along with eight other of the author's autograph manuscripts. Andre Breton was the founder and major theorist of the surrealist movement, one of the most influential currents of twentieth-century art and criticism. In the history of poetic thought, the 1924 publication of the 21-page Surrealist Manifesto was a revolutionary event of the first magnitude where dreams, madness and the force of the human imagination were championed over logic, reason and artistic rules.
Although it was originally meant as an introduction to the publication of automatic texts, in the course writing Breton expanded on his ideas and developed an original synthesis of psychological discoveries (especially Freud's theory of dreams) and poetic researches that has had myriad influences (good and bad) to this day in art, literature, film, psychology and all circumstances of life.
Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
This was Breton's definition of surrealism stated in the1924 Manifesto. It has since shown itself to be capable of extraordinary expansion.
(Note: André Breton died in 1966. Until four years ago, his home - which includes significant art works by Joan Miró and René Magritte as well as his autograph manuscripts - was held intact. It is a scandal that it is now being broken up and sold to the highest bidder instead of being preserved by the state as a museum. )
click for full story
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Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)
by
Andre Breton
University of Michigan Press
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