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progressive books
9/19/2008
Tariq Ali on Barack Obama and The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power
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Tariq Ali on Barack Obama saying that he would have no hesitation in bombing Al Qaeda inside the country, "with or without" approval of the Pakistani government:
I think this was a big mistake that Senator Obama made. He will regret it, because I don’t think he was briefed on what the situation in Afghanistan is. You know, historically, every time the US occupiers are cornered in a country, they try and blame the neighboring country—the same in Vietnam when they started bombing Cambodia, saying it was Cambodia’s faults. The threats against Iran, even as we speak, and now the missions in Pakistan, the bombing raids in Pakistan, the killing of civilians in Pakistan, when the real crisis and the real problem is a war and an occupation inside Afghanistan which has gone badly wrong.
After all, it’s many years, Amy, seven years since 9/11. They have had that country for seven years, and with each passing year, the situation gets worse. They antagonize more and more people who live in that country, and they are incapable of winning the war. So in order to justify their failure to win the hearts and minds of most Afghan people, they are escalating the war into Pakistan, which is going to make conditions inside the Pakistani military very serious indeed, because there will be real anger.
And this report yesterday that there was a clash between Pakistani military and US helicopters trying to land Marines close to the Pakistan border, I think is probably accurate. The report comes from the Pakistani military; the US is denying it. But it’s a very serious situation.
Tariq Ali on his latest book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power:
The duel is a long struggle which has been waged by the people of this country, nearly 200 million of them, against a corrupt political elite backed by the military and the United States now for over fifty years. They have been struggling for basic sort of necessities of life: health, education, food to eat. And every time they have been frustrated, either by military coups backed by the United States or by corrupt political elites, of which Zardari is a prime example.
This is the most callous, uncaring elite you have in Pakistan today; they don’t care about the people. Human life is cheap. A figure I quote in this book, a UN statistic, that a majority of children born in Pakistan today are being born stunted because of malnutrition. Now, this, for me, is a horrific figure. And no government under the sun in that country has ever cared for the needs of the people or done much for them. And that is the duel which goes on. And the surprise is that more poor people don’t turn to religious extremism. It would be comprehensible, but they don’t do it.
- Tariq Ali from two excerpts from a DemocracyNow! interview
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book notes
9/16/2008
Jane Ciabattari on White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and 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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lit obits
9/15/2008
I think it's the best time to be alive ever and it's probably the best time to be a writer - David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008
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The apparent suicide of writer David Foster Wallace is a very sad loss for the literary world.
We excerpt a passage from a 1996 salon.com interview with the writer: "What's it like to be a young fiction writer today", asked Laura Miller, "in terms of getting started, building a career and so on?"
Personally, I think it's a really neat time. I've got friends who disagree. Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.
If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you're writing for other writers, so you don't worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you're communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way -- essentially television on the page -- that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way. What's weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature's current marginalization is the reader's fault. The project that's worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it's also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.
Part of it has to do with living in an era when there's so much entertainment available, genuine entertainment, and figuring out how fiction is going to stake out its territory in that sort of era. You can try to confront what it is that makes fiction magical in a way that other kinds of art and entertainment aren't. And to figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine. It's unbelievably difficult and confusing and scary, but it's neat. There's so much mass commercial entertainment that's so good and so slick, this is something that I don't think any other generation has confronted. That's what it's like to be a writer now. I think it's the best time to be alive ever and it's probably the best time to be a writer. I'm not sure it's the easiest
time. - from a salon.com interview with David Foster Wallace.
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progressive books
9/11/2008
Susan Jacoby on how anti-intellectualism is destroying America
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It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant. - Barack Obama
Susan Jacoby is the author of eight books, including
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search For Her Family's Buried Past. Her most recent book is The Age of American Unreason, "a brilliant, sad story of the anti-intellectualism and lack of reasonable thought that has put this country in one of the sorriest states in its history" (Helen Thomas, author of Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public). Jacoby was recently interviewed by Terrence McNally for AlterNet:
Terrence McNally: Misinformation may well have been the deciding factor in a close election in 2004. I worry not just about the lack of information and knowledge, but also the active disparagement of those who would even care about such things.
Susan Jacoby : Contempt for fact is very important.
I'll give you a great example that's already obsolete. At the end of the primaries, both Hillary Clinton and John McCain endorsed a gas tax holiday for Americans this summer. Every economist, both liberal and conservative, said this would do nothing to help matters. And when Hillary Clinton was asked by the late Tim Russert, "Can you produce one economist to support the gas tax holiday?" she said, "Oh that's elite thinking."...Of course, she doesn't believe it for a minute. It shows that a lot of politicians think they have to play to ignorance and label anything that goes against received opinion as elitism...
Terrence McNally: Richard Hofstadter's 1963 classic, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, described our anti-intellectualism as "older than our national identity." Yet our founders developed a form of government that demanded an informed citizenry. How do these two things fit together?
Susan Jacoby: That's really the American paradox. For example, there is no country that has had more faith in education as an instrument of social mobility. No country in the West democratized education earlier, but no country has been more suspicious of too much education. We've always thought of education as good if it gets you a better job, but bad if it makes you think too much.
Hofstadter was writing at the dawn of video culture, so he could not talk about one of the key things in my book. The domination of culture by mass media, video and 24/7 infotainment has been added to the American mix in the last 40 years. Video culture is the worst possible means for understanding anything more complicated than a sound bite.
- excerpted from AlterNet
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progressive books
9/10/2008
Paul Waldman on John McCain and the Media
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The syntactical structure of Republican language is often rather simple. Rudolph Giuliani's was once cleverly parsed as Noun + Verb + 911. John McCain's is Noun + Verb + P.O.W. Paul Waldman, Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America and coauthor of Free Ride: John McCain and the Media, had this to say following McCains's acceptance speech last week:
One of the most extraordinary things I’ve always found about the coverage of McCain, is that they always say how reluctant he is to talk about the fact that he was a prisoner of war, despite the fact that every single campaign he's ever run since he first ran for Congress in 1982 has been based on the fact that he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Even last night, on the floor of the convention, after this week of just endless retellings and retellings of the story of his captivity, one of the network reporters said, "Well, you know, his aides must have convinced him finally to talk about the fact that he was a prisoner of war, because he’s so reluctant to talk about it." He's not reluctant; he talks about it all the time. But yet, that narrative, like so many of the narratives about John McCain, has managed to persist, just as he and his advisers want it to.
- excerpted from DemocracyNow!
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book awards
9/3/2008
Edward Alwood wins Tankard Book Award for Dark Days in the Newsroom
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What makes the journalists stand out from others who were targets during the McCarthy era is that they worked in an industry specifically protected by the Bill of Rights - Edward Alwood from Dark Days in the Newsroom
Edward Alwood, an associate professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University in Hamden and author of the 1996 landmark history of history of how journalism has treated gays and gay issues, Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, has won the national Tankard Book Award for his book Dark Days in the Newsroom: McCarthyism Aimed at the Press.
Dark Days in the Newsroom traces how journalists became radicalized during the Depression era, only to become targets of Senator Joseph McCarthy and like-minded anti-Communist crusaders during the 1950s. Edward Alwood...
shows how McCarthy's minions pried inside newsrooms previously thought to be sacrosanct under the First Amendment, and details how some journalists mounted a heroic defense of freedom of the press while others secretly enlisted in the government's anti-Communist crusade. Relying on previously undisclosed documents from FBI files along with personal interviews, Alwood provides a richly informed commentary on one of the most significant moments in the history of American journalism. -from the publisher' s description.
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book awards
8/24/2008
Britian's oldest book prize to Rosalind Belben for Our Horses in Egypt
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Rosalind Belben has won the 2007 James Tait Black Memorial for Fiction. The winning novel, Our Horses in Egypt, is the story of a World War I war horse, Philomena, who was sold off in Cairo at the war's end, and her former mistress's quest to find her. A "radical experiment in narrative" and "a heart-rending account of the horses' experience in the Great War" (Stevie Davies for the Independent), Our Horses in Egypt is told from the perspective of Philomena the horse:
Her ears ached. She had her head down and her breath had stopped. Her ribs slowly swelled. She was trembling: her skin and flesh shook in great rivulets of fear. In front of her Corky was lying on his side, his head was nodding; as though he'd been dozing in a meadow. The chestnut was between them, and was dead. Philomena's rein vanished beneath the chestnut. She jerked her head up, but nothing gave. Eight other horses were down. A ninth was down but, dazed, with forelegs that were stumps.
Philomena blinked. - from Our Horses in Egypt by Rosalind Belben
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lit obits
8/15/2008
Mahmoud Darwish, 1942 - 2008
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The Israelis do not want to teach students that there is a love story between an Arab poet and this land. I just wish they'd read me to enjoy my poetry, not as a representative of the enemy.
He was the "most brilliant" Arabic poet, in the words of the late Palestinian American professor, Edward Said. Mahmoud Darwish's poetry was "an epic effort to transform the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed drama of return". Known as the Palestine national poet, Mahmoud Darwish has often been called the "the poet of the resistance" and sometimes "accused" of writing merely in defence of Palestinian mainstream politics. But Darwish always defied any strict definition of himself. He did write many militant poems of resistance; he also wrote many about love and death and many not so easily understood by readers and critics alike. "When I move closer to pure poetry, Palestinians say go back to what you were. But I have learned from experience that I can take my reader with me if he trusts me. I can make my modernity, and I can play my games if I am sincere."
The siege is lying in wait.
It is lying in wait on a tilted stairway
in the midst of a storm.
We are alone. We are alone to the point
of drunkenness with our own aloneness,
with the occasional rainbow visiting.
We have brothers and sisters overseas..
kind sisters, who love us..
who look our way and weep.
And secretly they say
"I wish that siege was here, so that I could..."
But they cannot finish the sentence.
Do not leave us alone. No.
Do not leave us alone.
Our losses are between two and eight a day.
And ten are wounded.
Twenty homes are gone.
Forty olive groves destroyed,
in addition to the structural damage
afflicting the veins of the poem, the play,
and the unfinished painting.
from A State of Siege, translated by Ramsis Amun
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book awards
8/10/2008
Michelle De Kretser wins New South Wales Premier's Book of the Year Award for The Lost Dog
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The Lost Dog is a love story set in contemporary Australia and mid-20th century India anchored by the search for a lost dog. "I think the book contrasts in some ways modernity, for want of a better term, and animality", author Michelle De Kretser said in a November BookShow interview with Robert Dessaix. "Animality not merely in the sense of the dog or an animal, but in the sense of bodies and time. I suppose that's the difference, isn't it -- modernity has a problematic relationship with time, because the modern is always now, it's merely a sequence of 'now' moments, of present moments, whereas what Tom moves towards I think, I hope, is a recognition of the value of time and of the way in which we live actually in time, although we want to deny that.
And I think that when I was writing the book I became quite exciting at some moments when I realised that -- you know, the story of the dog and our relationship with animals was meshing with the story of the woman's ageing, because I realised that what we really wish to deny in ourselves is our own animality -- by which I mean our bodiliness. We live in an era that is on the one hand completely obsessed with bodies, you know, fitness, diets, etc, etc. but all these are ways of controlling the body and denying it its natural function which is to change and to age and to decay. These are not pleasant things to think about, but you know they come to us all. And so I suppose that I was interested in the way that bodies bear witness to the passing of time and that we find this vaguely disgusting."
Afterward, Tom would remember paddocks stroked with light. He would remember the spotted trunks of gum trees, the dog arching past to sniff along the fence.
He cleaned his teeth at the tap on the water tank. The house in the bush had no running water, no electricity. It was only sporadically inhabited and had grown grimy with neglect. But Tom, spitting into the luxuriant weeds by the tap that November morning, thought, Light, air, space, silence. The Benedictine luxuries.
He placed his toothpaste and brush on a log at the foot of the steps; and later forgot where he had
left them. Night would send him blundering about a room where his flashlight swung across the wall, and what he could
find and what he needed were not the same thing. – from The Lost Dog
by Michelle De Kretser
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book notes
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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