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book notes
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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progressive books
11/22/2008
Liza Mundy on Michelle Obama
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Award winning Washington Post journalist Liza Mundy is the author of the fascinating and scary book, Everything Conceivable How the Science of Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Our World, where she examines the multibillion-dollar fertility industry and the impact of assisted reproduction on individuals as well as society. Her latest book, however, is Michelle, an unauthorized biography of Michelle Obama, who soon will be the nation's first African American first lady. Last week, Liza Mundy spoke with Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow!:
Amy Goodman: You talk about how she moves on to Harvard Law School and how she actually ends up in the same building as Barack, though she wasn’t there at the same time. He was president of the Harvard Law Review, but she was working at Legal Aid, helping in the community.
Liza Mundy: Yes, I think this is such an interesting image. They both spent a lot of time in Gannett House, which, just as you say, the upper floors house the Harvard Law Review. And Barack Obama was the first African American president of the Law Review, and that was a major achievement and attracted national publicity and articles in The New York Times and the LA Times and really put him on the map at a young age and helped get him his first book contract, and he would use that to write Dreams from My Father. And so, he was on the upper floors, you know, rubbing shoulders with other editors and—you know, all of whom would go on to prestigious careers and be law clerks for Supreme Court justices.
But Michelle, when she was there, worked in the basement of Gannett House, and she was working for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. And that was also a prestigious position to hold, but she was working on behalf of poor people in Cambridge and surrounding counties, helping them with housing issues and child custody issues and, you know, pro se divorces and things like that.
And I think, somehow, that’s kind of a telling juxtaposition, because I do sometimes think that in her rhetoric, she—you know, he tends to be sort of loftier in his rhetoric, and she sometimes tends to be sort of more realistic and sometimes maybe a little bleaker. And I think that, you know, it just reminds us how in touch she is with people who have not fared as well as she has in the post-civil rights era. - from DemocracyNow!
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lit obits
11/17/2008
Jazz biographer Peter Levinson, 1934-2008
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It is one of the very few biographies of a musician I have read that not only told me much more than I thought I knew but compelled me to listen right away to the music again. - Nat Hentoff on Trumpet Blues: The Life of Harry James
One of the most respected publicists in the field of jazz, Peter Levinson had represented Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, Benny Carter, Charlie Byrd and many other jazz greats before he took up writing crtically acclaimed jazz biographies late in his career.
Trumpet Blues: The Life of Harry James came first in 1999,
followed by September in the Rain: The Life of Nelson Riddle in 2001
and Tommy Dorsey: Livin' in a Great Big Way in 2005. Puttin' on the Ritz: Fred Astaire and the Fine Art of Panache is scheduled to be published in March. Peter Levinson died on October 21 at his home in Malibu, California. He was 74.
It used to be the dream of every American boy to run away and join the circus. It never occurred to Harry James. He was born in to one....
[Harry, aged three was encouraged] to learn to play drums first so that he would learn the basics of rhythm, the foundation of all music. He became more and more accomplished as he watched and imitated other circus drummers. He began to develop a style of his own, exhibiting clevernes and originality. At four, he had become a "hot music" drummer and during a three-week-long illness of the bands's regular drummer was elevated to play the trap drums with the Christy Borthers Concert Band...With incredible ease, the child prodigy of the drums was able to play two one-hour-and-forty-minute circus programs on a daily basis. A tune called "Down Home Rag" became his featured number. - from Trumpet Blues: The Life of Harry James by Peter J. Levinson
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lit obits
11/10/2008
'My epitaph will be 'Curiosity did not kill this cat'' – Studs Terkel, 1912 - 2008
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Author, radio host, actor, activist and labor organizer, Studs Terkel died last week aged 96. Best known as the ground-breaking oral historian who, for decades, recorded the lives of ordinary working-class Americans, Studs Terkel was foremost in establishing oral history as both a popular and serious literary genre.
Beginning with Division Street: America in 1996, a book about urban unrest in the 1960's, Studs Terkel published numerous oral histories on such diverse subjects as working, race relatons, growing old, the Great Depression and the American dream. In 1985 he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Good War, his book examining World War II through the memories of soldiers and civilians.
Oral history or "guerrilla journalism", as he called it, was Studs Terkel's job and his calling. "I have, after a fashion, been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us," he wrote in his writes in his autogobigraphy, Touch and Go: A Memoir. "For lending voice to the face in the crowd ... My curiosity keeps me going. My epitaph is all set: Curiosity did not kill this cat. I took a vacation once - it involved a beach - and to tell you the truth, I had no idea what to do with myself. It was torture. Work is life. Without it, there is no life." Terkel interviewed his subjects on tape, then transcribed and "sifted". "What first comes out of an interview are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands," he wrote. "Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mould the gold dust." "The thing I'm able to do, I guess, is break down walls," he once said. "If they think you're listening, they'll talk. It's more of a conversation than an interview." Terkel succeeded because he he believed most people had something to say worth hearing. "The average American has an indigenous intelligence, a native wit. It's only a question of piquing that intelligence."
Following in the footsteps of Studs Terkel, Harry Kreisler is the creator, executive producer and host of, Conversations with History, an interview program and critically acclaimed online archive containing more than 360 one-hour interviews with distinguished men and women from all over the world who talk about their lives and their work. In a role reversal five years ago in 2003, Studs Terkel was the interviewee on Conversations with History. Here are two excerpts from his responses questions from Harry Kreisler:
click for full story
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book notes
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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book awards
11/3/2008
Mohammed Hanif on Guardian First Book Award for A Case of Exploding Mangoes
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"What are you most pleased with?" Mohammed Hanif was asked in a Guardian interview.
"No publisher in Pakistan," the author replied, "was ready to publish it because they thought it was too controversial. The Indian edition had to be imported into Pakistan, where I have had nothing but gushing reviews and very happy booksellers. I have even seen pirated copies, which is considered the ultimate compliment in Pakistan."
Look at the arrangement of fruit salad on my tormentor's chest above the left pocket of his uniform shirt and you can read his whole biography. A faded paratrooper's badge is the only thing that he had to leave his barracks to earn. The medals in the first row just came and pinned themselves to his chest. He got them because he was there. The 40th Independence Day medal. The Squadron Anniversary medal. Today-I-did-not-jerk-off medal. Then the second row, fruits of his own hard labour and leadership. One for organising a squash tournament, another for the great battle that was tree-plantation week. The leader with his mouth to my ear and my mother on his mind has had a freebie to Mecca and is wearing a haj medal too.
As Obaid used to say, 'God's glory. God's glory. For every monkey there is a houri.'
- from A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
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book notes
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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book awards
10/18/2008
Indian writer, Aravind Adiga, wins 2008 Man Booker Prize
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It is a fact that for most of the poor people in India there are only two ways to go up - either through crime or through politics, which can be a variant of crime. - Aravind Adiga, speaking to the BBC after being announced the winner of the 2008 Man Book Prize for his novel, The White Tiger.
Aravind Adiga has won the prestigous Man Book Prize because, according to Michael Portillo, Chair of the 2008 judges, his book "shocked and entertained in equal measure." "The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader's sympathy for a thoroughgoing villain. The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global developments with astonishing humour."
"What inspired you to write The White Tiger?" Adiga was asked in a Booker Prize interview after book was longlisted.
"The novel began as an experiment of a kind", the author replied. "Visitors to India from South Africa or Latin America often asked me why there seemed to be so little crime in India, given the vast (and growing) disparity in wealth between the classes - a condition that had led to much higher levels of crime in their countries. Why was it, I began to wonder, that even though rich people in India keep so many servants, and the servants have such regular and intimate access to their master's households, that the servants in India, by and large, stay so honest? What keeps the class system in place - and what are the conditions under which it might start to crumble? I began to think of a servant in Delhi who would, cold-bloodedly, steal from his master - and do something even worse to him. And imagining what that servant would think, and feel, and do, I began making notes that turned into this novel."
"The White Tiger has been described as a new vision of India with one reviewer calling it 'a witty parable of India's changing society'. How do you feel about that?"
"The White Tiger is not a political or social statement: it's a novel - meant to provoke and entertain its readers. The narrator is a tainted one - a murderer - and his views are certainly not mine. But there is something I'd like my readers to think about. I'm increasingly convinced that the servant-master system, the bed rock of middle-class Indian life, is coming apart: and its unravelling will lead to greater crime and instability. The novel is a portrait of a society that is on the brink of unrest."
"The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian." That's what I ought to call my life's story.
Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep -- all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.
The story of my upbringing is the story of how a half-baked fellow is produced. - from The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.
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book awards
10/10/2008
French novelist J. M. G. Le Clezio wins Nobel Prize for Literature
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An author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization - The Nobel Academy on Le Clézio
"It is said that you are a potential Nobel prizewinner," asked Tirthankar Chanda in a 2001 interview with Le Clézio. "Let’s imagine that you are awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature tomorrow. What would you like to say at the award ceremony?" Le Clézio's response:
"That’s a very hypothetical question! I don’t know for the Nobel prize but I know what I would like to talk about publicly. I would like to talk about the war that kills children. This, for me, is the most terrible thing of our age. Literature is also a means of reminding people of this tragedy and bringing it back to centre stage. In Paris recently, statues of women were veiled in order to condemn the fact that women in Afghanistan are denied freedom. That’s very good. In the same way, we should mark all the statues of children with a big red spot over the heart as a reminder that at every moment, somewhere in Palestine, South America or Africa, a child is killed by bullets. People never talk about that!" - from www.diplomatie.gouv.fr
Adam Smith: You write about other places, other cultures, other possibilities a great deal, and in particular you've written a book about the Amerindians. What is particularly appealing about their culture?
Le Clézio: Well, it's probably because it's a culture so different from the European culture, and on the other hand it didn't have the chance of expressing itself. It's a culture which has been in some ways broken by the modern world, and especially by the conquests from Europe. So I feel there is a strong message here for the Europeans … I am European essentially. So, I feel there is a strong message here for the Europeans to encounter this culture which is so different from the European culture. They have a lot to learn from this culture; the Amerindian cultures.
Adam Smith: You also write about the colonial experience a lot. Do you feel it's important for modern European culture to examine its past in this way?
Le Clézio: Yes, because I feel, it's my feeling that the, Europe, and I would say also the American society are – it owes a lot to the people that submitted during the colonial times. I mean the wealth of Europe comes from sugar, cotton, from the colonies. And from this wealth they began the industrial world. So they really owe a lot to the colonized people. And they have to pay their debts to them.
Adam Smith: The wide range of your writing is unclassifiable, but is there some unifying purpose in why you write?
Le Clézio: Mainly would be to be true to myself, to express myself in the most accurate way. I feel that the writer is just a kind of witness of what is happening. A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher, he's just someone who is witness to what is around him. And so writing is a way to … it's the best way to testify, to be a witness.
- from an interview with Le Clézio conducted by Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org, immediately following the announcement of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, 9 October 2008.
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progressive books
9/26/2008
Michel Hudson on The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway
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"Nobody wants to read how the bubble will break," writes Michel Hudson, author of Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, "at least, not until after it bursts. Can't you write a book on how you can make a million dollars off the coming economic collapse? That would be a winner, Prof. Hudson. But to tell people that they can't put aside savings and pay for their retirement 'in their sleep' is like telling them that they will have bad sex after the age of 50. It's a no-seller. Come back when you have good news."
Those with a 12-year memory will see George Bush as playing the role of Boris Yeltsin in Russia in 1996, paying off his campaign contributors by giving them all the economic surplus that the government could expropriate in the notorious “loans for shares” plan applauded and supported by Clinton Treasury Secretary (and current Obama advisor) Robert Rubin. (The moral: do we have a Putin in our near future to lock in the anti-democratic coup?)
How ironic all this is! Back in the 1970s there was theorizing that the Russian and American economies were converging. The idea was that both were moving toward more centralized state control, state financing, state subsidy, and a military-industrial complex. Nobody expected the convergence to occur Yeltsin-style in government giveaways to insiders to create a new group of financial billionaires – the “seven bankers” under Yeltsin in 1996, and Mr. Paulson’s Crony Capitalist gang today.
No economy can keep up with the burden of debts growing at exponential rates faster than the economy itself is growing. No economy can grow at steady exponential rates; only debts can multiply in this way. That is why Mr. Paulson’s $700 billion giveaway to his Wall Street colleagues cannot work.
What it can do is provide a one-time transfer of wealth to insiders who already have been playing the debt-credit system and siphoning off its predatory financial proceeds to themselves. The Wall Street bankers, brokers and fund managers to whom I’ve been speaking for many decades all know this. That is why they pay themselves such large annual bonuses and large salaries each year. The idea is to take as much as you can. As the saying goes: “You only have to make a fortune once in a lifetime.” They have been salting away their fortunes year after year, mainly in hard assets: real estate (free of mortgages), fine furniture, boats and trophy art. One last $700 billion heist and they can make their getaway.
- excerpted from Counterpunch by Michael Hudson.
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