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book awards
12/19/2009
The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom - an extract from Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award winning book
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A "rising star of Zimbabwean literature" according noble laureate to J. M. Coetzee, Petina Gappah writes (in her own words)
"about ordinary people living in a situation rendered extraordinary because of politics. I hope the stories tell you something about the
Zimbabwean character", she says, "the resilience, the tenacity, the humour. The desire to survive."
An excerpt from An Elegy for Easterly, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award winning book by Petina Gappah.
The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom. They look at Rosie's own lips that owe their reddish pinkness to artifice, they think, and not disease. Can Rosie see what they see, they wonder, that her newly made husband's sickness screams out its presence from every pore?
Disease flourishes in the slipperiness of his tufted hair, it is alive in the darkening skin, in the whites of the eyes whiter than nature intended, in the violently pink-red lips, the blood beneath fighting to erupt through the broken skin.
He smiles often, Rosie's bridegroom. He smiles when a drunken aunt entertains the guests with a dance that, oustide this celebration of sanctioned fornication, could be called obscene. He smiles when an uncle based in Manchester, England, calls on the mobile telephone of his son and sends his congratulations across nine thousand kilometres shortened by Vodafone on his end and Econet on the other. His smile broadens as the son tells the master of ceremonies that the uncle pledges two hundred pounds as a wedding gift; the smile becomes broader still when the master of ceremonies announces that the gift is worth two hundred million dollars on Harare's parallel market. He smiles and smiles and smiles and his smile reveals the heightened colour of his gums.. - from An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah
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progressive books
12/12/2009
David Cortright on Obama's shallow understanding of the priciples of Just War Theory
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"I found the Nobel speech disappointing," David Cortright wrote to Chritopher Hayes, The Nation's Washington, DC editor. "To use the Nobel dais to justify the use of military force is unseemly. The president's characterization of the historic role of US military power was distorted, and his interpretation of just war theory was incomplete." David Cortright has had a long history of public advocacy for disarmament and the prevention of war begining with the time he served in Vietnam and organized his comrades against the war. Currently the Director of Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, David Cortright has also been the executive director of The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy and co-director of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. In 2002 he helped to found the Win Without War coalition in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His full text to Chritopher Hayes:
The president asserted that US military policy has helped to "underwrite global security." More accurate would be an admission that many of our adventures have created global insecurity. Vietnam, the wars in Central America in the 1980s, the invasion of Iraq, countless interventions by the CIA--these and other actions have sown suffering and insecurity. The US has supported democracy in some settings but very often we have subverted democracy and overthrown legitimately elected democratic regimes, in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), etc.
The president invoked just war principles but showed a shallow understanding of the criteria. The most important principle of just war theory is a presumption against the use of force, a belief that war is almost always unjust and can be justified only under the most dire circumstances and only if strict ethical criteria are satisfied. He mentioned a few of the criteria, without probing them in depth, but did mention the standard of 'probability of success.' Under that criterion, the war in Afghanistan cannot be judged just, since there is very little probability that the war can be pursued to achieve military victory, however that is defined.
The president's assertions about Afghanistan did not acknowledge the fact that war is an inappropriate means of combating terrorism. The Rand Corporation study of 2008 on how terrorist groups end found that military force was responsible for ending terrorist groups in only 7 per cent of the cases. Political bargaining (43 per cent) and effective law enforcement (40 per cent) were the primary factors accounting for the end of terrorist groups. The military's own counterinsurgency doctrine calls for a campaign that is 80 per cent nonmilitary. The US effort in Afghanistan is the reverse, more than 80 per cent military.
Peace demands responsibility and sacrifice, yes, but it is built primarily through nonmilitary means. The president mentioned some of these, but he failed to mention that US foreign policy systematically undervalues these approaches. In Afghanistan the US is spending far more on military approaches than on development and humanitarian assistance.
-- David Cortright quoted by Christopher Hayes in A Practical Peace Advocate on Obama's Nobel Speech from The Nation magazine.
More on Just War Theory and Reassessing U.S. engagement in Afghanistan by David Cortright:
The initial United States military operation in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was widely considered a just war, a classic case of self-defense. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral message in November 2001 acknowledging the “right and duty of a nation and the international community to use military force if necessary to defend the common good by protecting the innocent against mass terrorism.” Today’s mission is more complex and uncertain, however, and demands a new ethical assessment. Its fundamental goals are the same, defeating Al Qaeda and preventing global terrorist attacks, and are certainly just. The related objective is also just: helping to build capable governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan that can meet the needs of their people and protect against violent extremism. The question about both objectives is not whether they are just, but whether they can be achieved through the application of military force. It is a question of means rather than ends.
U.S. military involvement in the region is based on three fundamental strategic assumptions: first, war is a necessary and appropriate means of defeating Al Qaeda and preventing global terrorist strikes; second, the Taliban is equivalent to Al Qaeda and thus a legitimate target of military attack; and third, NATO must fight and win a counterinsurgency war against the Taliban and related jihadist groups. The first two assumptions determined policy decisions in the weeks after 9/11, and they have remained at the heart of U.S./NATO strategy ever since. The third assumption evolved over time and drives the current long-term military commitment. In recent years a fourth strategic dimension has entered the equation—the extension of military operations to Pakistan. Each of these assumptions is highly questionable strategically and poses serious ethical dilemmas. -- from the opening paragraphs of No Easy Way Out Reassessing U.S. engagement in Afghanistan by David Cortright.
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progressive books
11/26/2009
Obama's rejection of Landmine Treaty lacks vision, compassion, and basic common sense
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"President Obama’s decision to cling to antipersonnel mines keeps the US on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of humanity. This decision lacks vision, compassion, and basic common sense, and it contradicts the Obama administration’s professed emphasis on multilateralism, disarmament, and humanitarian affairs." - Steve Goose, Arms Division director at Human Rights Watch
"We cannot understand this shameful decision. We cannot understand the Obama administration’s decision to not be transparent in this ‘review’ process of the landmine policy and we definitely cannot understand President Obama’s decision to continue with the Bush policy."
"This decision is a slap in the face to landmine survivors, their families and affected communities everywhere – especially because in just a few short weeks, he will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." - Jody Williams, 1997 Nobel Laureate.
While there is no evidence that landmines are designed like toys to attract children, children are attracted to landmines because they are easily attracted by unknown objects. The results can be deadly. Children in heavily mined areas may become so familiar with mines that they forget they are lethal weapons, a reversal, as one mine expert noted, of "the common perception of the 'hidden mine'". In northern Iraq, "rural children commonly use mines as wheels for toy trucks and go-carts; in Cambodia they play boules with B40 anti-personnel mines." Even where children recognize the danger of mines, "there can not be an automatic assumption that such knowledge will deter them from tampering with mines. Especially among young boys, the risk element itself may prove a fatal attraction. In Afghanistan they compete in throwing stones at PFM-1 'Butterfly' mines, the winner being the child whose stone causes the mine to detonate; similar behavoir has been observed in other mined regions. - from After the Guns Fall Silent: The Enduring Legacy of Landmines.
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book awards
11/22/2009
Those who saw him hushed: Let the Great World Spin, the National Book Award winner by Colum McCann
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"There's hardly a line in the novel about 9/11, but it's everywhere if the reader wants it to be", said Colum McCann speaking about Let the Great World Spin, the book which won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction. Set around
Philippe Petit's 1974 World Trade Center tightrope walk, Let the Great World Spin is an allegorical story inspired by 9/11, "a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s." A short excerpt:
Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke–stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper.
Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky.
He could only be seen at certain angles so that the watchers had to pause at street corners, find a gap between buildings, or meander from the shadows to get a view unobstructed by cornicework, gargoyles, balustrades, roof edges. None of them had yet made sense of the line strung at his feet from one tower to the other. Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary. It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn’t want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers, but they didn’t want to miss the moment either, if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched.
- an excerpt from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
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progressive books
11/15/2009
Robert Jensen: Of Turkeys and Holocausts
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Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.
In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately -- the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. - an excerpt from How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving and Learned to be Afraid by Robert Jensen. Read the entire article at Counterpunch.
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lit obits
11/8/2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908 - 2009, his works as a practical anti-racist manifesto
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"I don't know if everyone read the works of Lévi-Strauss as some sort of practical anti-racist manifesto, infinitely more efficient than big Satre-like declarations. But for me, his works had this effect. Given my working conditions, what I was doing, I was bound to be touched by his work. There was his beautiful text "Race and History", which was an important text and theoretical manifesto. What I see as even more potent, are the analysis operations themselves, which abstract from absurdity the things that were most stigmatized in particular by racism: things like rituals, wedding practices, or sexual traditions, etc... Without Lévi-Strauss's intention to rehabilitate anyone, the mere fact of making science was also a political act. In that way, it's the new figure of the intellectual who doesn't speak about everything, as a prophet would. Max Weber says: "A prophet is the one answering in a total way to total questions." Philosophers such as Satre are still admirable and can be also important: "The prophet speaks when nobody knows what to say anymore." Periods of crisis, etc. But at the same time, we were a bit tired of that kind of discourse, as prophets can often speak in the void, at the wrong time. So, someone telling us: "See, we can understand. We can analyse. There are conceptual tools, for understanding things that seemed incomprehensible, unjustifiable, absurd..." I think it was a very important thing." - Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on Claude Lévi-Strauss from youtube (translation).
"Lévi-Straussian structuralism turned on the notion that the human brain is essentially a computerlike organ operable only by a binary code. And Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that this basic binary logic is always the same everywhere, a universalist argument if ever there was one, framed in terms somewhat narrower than what anyone has ever attributed to Chomsky. And yet Lévi-Strauss--a student of Franz Boas, Ferdinand de Saussure and Karl Marx--understood his emperical investigations, collectively, as a demonstration of relativist, semiotic and Marxian principles. That is, his work tracks the same binary oppositions (up/down, high/low, in/out, hot/cold) across cultures and through history, but it also shows that those basic building blocks of human existence can be put together in any number of patterns, that they can be mobilized to very different ends. In Lévi-Strauss's opus, then,one encounters basic similarities in the context of larger differences: The irreducible element of culture are everywhere the same, but cultures are everywhere different." - from The Trouble with Nature by Roger N. Lancaster.
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lit obits
11/7/2009
Power exercised by man over his fellow man is always a usurpation, Francisco Ayala, 1906 - 2009
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Born in Granada on March 13, 1906, novelist and sociologist Francisco Ayala was one of Spain's leading intellectuals for the second half of the twentieth century. Ayala died Tuesday at age 103. He had long outlived the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco which had led him to flee into exile in 1939 and influenced, in the words of T. Rees Shapiro, "the enduring theme of his literary career -- the toxic effect of power". Although Francisco Ayala taught at leading American universities for over 20 years, very few of his works are available in English. He was the author, however, over 50 books and was the winner of many prestigious literary awards including the Cervantes Prize in 1991 and the Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters in 1998.
In Mr. Ayala's novels, characters trudged through lives of moral and political chaos. "Death as a Way of Life" (1964), initially published in Spanish a few years earlier as "Muertes de Perro," describes a South American country under a totalitarian government. Another of his works, "Los Usurpadores" ("The Usurpers," 1949), was a collection of short stories he wrote in Argentina and examines the immorality of the abuse of power.
In one story from the collection, "The Bewitched," a Spaniard during the Middle Ages spends his life fighting bureaucracy and trying to gain an audience with the king. When he is finally granted a visit with the monarch, he finds the ruler so mentally and physically handicapped that he can't speak coherently, let alone govern a country. Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was reported to have called the story "a masterpiece of Hispanic literature."
"The Inquisitor," another notable story in "The Usurpers," focuses on a grand rabbi who converts to Catholicism and is so fanatical in his prosecution and devoted to proving the purity of his faith he doesn't spare his only daughter from arrest when she denounces his work.
The book's theme, Mr. Ayala wrote in the introduction, was "power exercised by man over his fellow man is always a usurpation."
- from the Washington Post obituary by T. Rees Shapiro.
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progressive books
11/1/2009
If you think you'll to be rich someday, why resent million-dollar bonuses: Barbara Ehrenreich on Positive Thinking
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Barbara Ehrenreich on positive thinking as a system of social control:
When bad things happen to people you say, "Well, it's really your attitude that has to change."...You take people who have been really victimized, and I use that word advisedly, with cancer and with lay-offs from unaccountable corporations. And then you tell them, "Well, you just have to change the way you think." And that's very clever.
On the connection between positive thinking and the subprime-mortgage meltdown:
I have traced how positive thinking became the corporate culture in America. It was mandatory to be positive. So you had companies who would literally fire people for being negative, negative in the sense of maybe raising too many questions, maybe expressing a doubt. One example is the man who was the head of the real estate division of Lehman Bros. in 2006 and told his CEO that he thought the whole housing thing was a bubble and they should start getting out, and he was fired for that.
On positive thinking as an ideology that discourages indignation about extreme economic polarization:
If you think you're going to be rich someday, why would you be resentful of million-dollar bonuses or $10 million CEO salaries, you know? You're going to be there, so it would be against your own self-interest to stand up for your class interests.
On the alternative to positive thinking:
One of the major sources of misery in the world is poverty. We can do one of two things. We can tell poor people they need to change their attitudes, and there's a whole industry of that kind of thing -- motivational speakers that tell people to get over their bad attitudes towards wealth so it will just come to them. Or we can say, "What's the cause of this? How are we going to get together and do something about it?" And I come down on that side.
- excerpts from an interview between Emily Wilson and Barbara Ehrenreich from AlterNet.
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book awards
10/21/2009
Four Canadians tortured in the name of fighting Terror, Kerry Pither wins Ottawa Book Award for Dark Days
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Dark Days tells the story of a Canadian national security investigation gone wrong through the eyes of four of its targets: Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, Maher Arar and Muayyed Nureddin. The book chronicles how all four men were accused of terrorist links, detained overseas and subjected to brutal torture while being interrogated with questions from Canadian agencies. No evidence was ever produced to back the allegations against them and all were eventually released and returned to Canada.
"Most Canadians know about Maher Arar, but few know the extent to which there was a pattern behind his case -- that what happened to him happened to at least three other Canadians too," said Pither.
"All of these men are still working for justice, to clear their names and move on with their lives. For Arar, it's waiting for the Obama administration to accept responsibilty for its role and clear his name, and for El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin it's about waiting for an apology from the Canadian government for its role in their ordeals," said Pither. "And for all of us, it's about ensuring the changes are made to stop this from happening again."
- from the Dark Days Book Launch
The lock slid open and the door swung into the cell. Ahmad had to jump out of the way. The guard ordered him out and led him back upstairs into a room, where he tied a piece of rubber over his eyes.
Then the interrogation started. Someone said they’d received information about him and read out the names and addresses of his family in Toronto, the make and colour of his car, and its licence plate number. They knew his address, the man said, and read it out to him. He had the wrong apartment number, so Ahmad corrected him.
Then the beating started. Ahmad was punched in the face and kicked at. The men in the room screamed insults at him, his family, and his faith.
One of the interrogators leaned in and told Ahmad that they were going to bring Rola, the woman he’d been going to Damascus to marry, in and rape her, there, in front of him.
Ahmad was terrified — did they have Rola? He knew this kind of thing happened in Syria. He pleaded with them, saying that he had told them the truth.
“No,” the man yelled. “We need to hear something new!”
“I can’t invent something,” said Ahmad.
“No,” the man replied. “You can invent something.
Then things got worse. Ahmad was ordered to strip down to his shorts and lie on his stomach on the floor. In pain from the beating, he moved slowly. The men yelled at him to move faster as he struggled out of his shirt and pants. When Ahmad was lying down, the men grabbed his hands and handcuffed them behind his back, then lifted his feet up and tied his wrists to his ankles with a rope. He was like a sheep ready for slaughter, Ahmad says.
Ice water was poured all over his body, then he was whipped on his feet, legs, knees, and back with a thick metal cable. The pain was sharp and fierce, but the first strokes were the worst. After a few lashings, Ahmad’s feet and legs went numb, but that was what the dousing with ice water was for – to bring the feeling back. He could see the interrogators’ shoes from under the blindfold. The ones without the cable kicked him in the face and his back and legs.
Ahmad begged the men to stop, asking why they were doing this to him. They just laughed. “They were asking me to repeat my story, and I kept repeating what happened, and they said, ‘That’s not what we want to hear.’ They kept threatening me and mocking me and said they were going to inflict permanent injury – they said I wouldn’t be able to have kids later on.”
Ahmad lost track of how often he was taken down to his cell and back up for more torture but remembers that eventually he couldn’t walk and had to be dragged up and down the stairs. In his cell, without the blindfold, he saw his legs were covered in blood. His feet were too swollen to fit into his shoes.
“After I just couldn’t take it any more, I told them, ‘I’m willing to say whatever you want me to say,’” Ahmad recalls.
The men asked him about people he knew in Canada – including Abdullah Almalki and Maher Arar.
- excerpted from Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror by Kerry Pither (read a longer excerpt at kerrypither.com).
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lit obits
10/14/2009
The Potato that Became a Tomato, Playgiarist Raymond Federman, 1928 - 2009
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You're born a playgiarizer or you are not. It's as simple as that. The laws of playgiarism are unwritten, it's a tabou, like incest, it cannot be legalized. The great playgiarizers of all time, Homer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Diderot, Rimbaud, Proust, Beckett, and Federman have never pretended to do anything else than playgiarizing. Inferior writers deny that they playgiarize because they confuse plagiarism with playgiarism, not the same. The difference is enormous, but no one has ever been able to tell what it is. It cannot be measured in weight or size. Plagiarism is sad. It cries, it whines. It always apologizes. Playgiarism on the other hand laughs all the time. It makes fun of what it does while doing it. - Raymond Federman on playgiarism from An Interview With Ray Federman
No single writer of our age has captured the true spirit of Diogenes more than Raymond Federman. No, not even his old friend Samuel Beckett whom he idolises and quotes at every opportunity. But then Federman was the very first Beckettian. When his Ph.D. board challenged Federman that Beckett was a charlatan, he retorted angrily “You’ll see, Beckett will win the Nobel prize for literature in ten years time”---he predicted the exact year! Federman integrates all of the essential modes of cynical discourse: action, laughter and silence into his prolific writing. The victim who refuses to see himself as a victim, was given in that small closet not only the gift of life, but the gift to make others laugh---laugh at a world that he knows to be truly absurd, laugh at himself, laugh at The Laugh That Laughs At The Laugh. - from Raymond Federman: Cynic by Ian Cutler, author of Cynicism From Diogenes To Dilbert.
THE POTATO THAT BECAME A TOMATO
Oh! the potato
the po ta to
the po to ta
the pa to to
the to pa to
the ta to pa
the po to ma
the pa mo to
the po ma to
the ta po mo
the po mo to
the po to po
the pa to ta
the ma to po
the ma pa to
the to mo pa
the mo ta to
the to to ma
the ma to to
the to ta mo
the to ma ta
the to ma to
Ah! the tomato
ACRO
BATICS
Y
O U
give a work out
to your essential muscle
and all your other muscles
essentially
also get a work out
*****
***
*
therefore
exercise your
essential muscle
as often as possible
so that
IT
stays
I N
g
o
o
d
shape
to make
all your other
muscles also profit
- two of five anti-poems by Raymond Federman
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