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| 1443458686
| 9781443458689
| 1443458686
| 3.73
| 3,026
| Aug 20, 2019
| Sep 17, 2019
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really liked it
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When I heard about a new book of essays by Rachel Cusk, I had two conflicting reactions: one was joy and one was sadness. Cusk is one of my favorite a
When I heard about a new book of essays by Rachel Cusk, I had two conflicting reactions: one was joy and one was sadness. Cusk is one of my favorite authors. She thinks deeply and can straightforwardly, analytically discuss her perceptions in involving prose but her characters can also demonstrate wildly ditzy intellectual fadeouts. I was sad to think I’d never have the quietness of mind in the current worldwide political upheaval to read her work in peace. Then I saw a review by Clair Wills in the September 26 issue of The New York Review of Books. Cusk explained she also was experiencing a disconnection with something she is obviously attached to: writing. The review begins “Rachel Cusk is fascinated by silence. About five years ago she announced that she had given up on fiction. A prolific writer, she had by then published seven much-praised novels and three memoirs but, she explained, she was done with both genres…Fiction now seemed to her 'fake and embarrassing. Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous.’”Ah. She caught me again. That’s exactly the way I feel about fiction when the world is burning. Cusk doesn’t pander, doesn’t claim to be more than she is, and generally she stands firm on the ground she occupies but she does make tiny acknowledgements of fragility or uncertainty. Her opening essay, “Driving as a Metaphor,” starts out brassy with surety: “Where I live, there is always someone driving slowly on the road ahead.” We immediately get the impression this writer has much too many important things in her day without calculating in an extra five minutes for safety along a curvy coastline. Later in the same essay, she lets her attitude down a little and admits “At busy or complicated junctions I find myself becoming self-conscious and nervous about reading the situation: I worry I don’t see things the way everyone else does, a quality that otherwise might be considered a strength. Sometimes, stuck on the coast road behind the slow drivers while they decide whether or not they want to turn left, it strikes me that the true danger of driving might lie in the capacity for subjectivity, and in the weapons it puts at subjectivity’s disposal.”Ah, once again. How can one not read Cusk when she writes like this, writing whatever she claims she cannot write. We need this particular mixture of vulnerability and steeliness to reassure us we are not mad about the apocalyptic shakiness of what we’d taken as firm ground. She displays something of this heady teenagery cocktail of self-doubt and disdain in the title essay of her collection, “Coventry.” She describes boarding school and parents who could be aloof for reasons she never really understood. Their silence towards her she calls “being sent to Coventry.” Cusk may have felt she was sent to Coventry again as an adult by the reading public after her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, in which she gave voice to resentment over her divorce. But she was not wrong to concentrate on her own feelings in that memoir. How could she possibly know or consider her husband’s feelings in the midst of the personality destruction that is divorce? In the NYRB review, Claire Mills writes that Cusk “is not only willing to admit to her darkest instincts; she seems to revel in the anger they produce in others. How else to interpret the fact that—seven years after the ‘creative death’ that the response to Aftermath precipitated in her, she has republished the essay on which Aftermath was based in Coventry, her new collection of essays?”Mills’ interpretation of Cusk’s insistence on including this essay is not one I agree with. Were I to guess the reason, it would not be asserting Cusk persists in equating truth with honesty or truth as the opposite of stories. My guess would be that Cusk is asking us to think about truth and honesty, reality and fiction and see if there is much overlap. We are in the midst of a truth revolution, after all, and I feel quite sure she is just positing the question rather than supplying the answers. This book of essays is divided into three parts, the first of which includes new work and the longish essay “Aftermath.” Part II is called A Tragic Pastime and includes a discussion of the sculptor Louise Bourgeois and a discussion on women’s writing called “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” among other things. Part III contains reprints of essays published earlier, on Olivia Manning’s work, on Natalia Ginzburg, on Kazuo Ishiguro. Cusk knows her writing has a lashing quality sometimes. She is comfortable with that. I am, too. Hey, life is not always a basket of cherries. She has been nothing but forthright that she will write what she thinks and feels, and you should take it or leave it. She would prefer you do not slam the door on the way out, thank you very much. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 06, 2019
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Oct 14, 2019
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Oct 06, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0062666150
| 9780062666154
| 0062666150
| 4.04
| 6,733
| Jan 30, 2018
| Jan 30, 2018
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liked it
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Morgan Jerkins is in a hurry to become a well known writer and she is trying to get our attention in any way she knows how—jump-starting her celebrity
Morgan Jerkins is in a hurry to become a well known writer and she is trying to get our attention in any way she knows how—jump-starting her celebrity by being polarizing. She is young still, twenty-five now. I predict she will recognize her own sense of entitlement when she is a little older. But it is awfully hard to dislike someone so articulate and eager to participate in the big questions we face today. At least we know what she is thinking. The more I read by and about black women, the more I think this is a long time coming, a national therapy. As long as black women feel comfortable talking out loud about how they interpret the behaviors of the rest of us, we should be listening. Black men have been trying to tell us forever that black women are fierce. Well, white America is just about to find out how fierce. This book of essays gives insight into the experience of a young woman growing up, discovering her sexuality, despairing of her beauty, seeking a path to enlightenment. What kills me, after I saw a picture of her online, is that she is gorgeous, radiant with youth and health, and all we hear in this book is how afraid she is that she is not beautiful enough. Yes, her figure is a handful—an armful, really—but for plenty of folks this is a good thing. We get a perspective on black hair that I haven’t heard before. I have wondered about the fetishization of hair among black women. I could see they were traumatized about it, and made to feel as though their natural, soft, curly hair weren’t beautiful. Jerkins tells us black hair has always been a source of sexuality. That not only white people want to touch that corona of power—black men do, too. This makes enormous sense to me. Of course black hair is powerful, and sexy…which is why it must always be corralled in braids, or straightened. Even within these constraints, black women have managed to make an art of their hair. I won’t take that away from them. But I definitely think it is time to stop feeling badly about black hair. Natural hair makes a powerful statement, and it is a touch-magnet. Use it. Jerkins was brave alright when she gives us chapter and verse on her sexual fantasies. All of a sudden I’m glad I don’t have long straight blond hair, when most of my youth I, like Jerkins, yearned for that unattainable source of beauty, privilege, and class. But these are distractions, youthful stumbling blocks we place in front of ourselves. Jerkins had much more than blond hair to worry about when she attended an IV-League school where most everyone tries to act as though everything is under control. It is a privilege to attend Princeton, it has enormous resources. Fortunately Jerkins was able to take advantage of the access Princeton offers, but like many of her fellow students, she got confused by everyone’s seeming self-sufficiency. She didn’t feel self-sufficient—why does everyone look, act, sound so self-absorbed? This is the whitest thing Jerkins did…to take advantage of that bastion of privilege and not realize that it doesn’t automatically give one access to a job, or everyone else’s attention. But I wish her well. She’s brave. Fierce. She is far more willing to expose herself than I would be, say, and more willing to lay claim to her right to other people’s contacts. She’ll surely find a place in the conversation. Good luck with that. The final essays in the book felt exploratory, which is only right when the author is just getting started. Jerkins discusses a worthwhile French film by a white filmmaker, Girlhood, about young black girls in Paris. This is the third time in two months that I have read discussion about the appropriation of experience by someone only looking, not experiencing, certain events. I am not sure how I feel about this yet, so will just have to take onboard that this is a discussion which animates some people. Jerkins raises Beyoncé’s Lemonade special, how it is not exploitative but inclusive even while recognizing that "black women are not one thing.” Further, Jerkins shares the criticism bell hooks has aimed at Beyoncé for a “simplified worldview…a false construction of power.” This is a powerful argument that Jerkins does not deny, she merely says that not all of us have to be always fighting for something larger than ourselves. This is a particularly hard position to argue in light of all she said about Beyoncé’s army of musicians, followers, admirers. Without a doubt Beyoncé is magnificently talented. With great gifts come great responsibility. No? hooks has a good point. Beyoncé works enormously hard to stay at the pinnacle of her field, but even she can learn concepts that may be new to her and important to that army she commands to generate real power. Jerkins’ book did its intended work on me: I hadn’t seen the HBO video released when Beyoncé’s Lemonade album came out. I’m looking around for an opportunity to see it now. I want to read bell hooks’ essays discussing Beyoncé, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl again, to see what Jerkins calls “perhaps the finest example of satire by a black woman.” I’m interested. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 30, 2018
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Apr 02, 2018
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Mar 30, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0060959495
| 9780060959494
| 0060959495
| 4.33
| 1,448
| Jan 09, 2001
| Dec 18, 2001
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really liked it
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bell hooks was especially prolific in the early part of this century, publishing sometimes two books a year. This book, published in 2001, has two epi
bell hooks was especially prolific in the early part of this century, publishing sometimes two books a year. This book, published in 2001, has two epigraphs to set the tone. “Salvation is being on the right road, not having reached a destination.” —MLK, Jr.This is another of hooks' conversational books, not so academic that we stumble on the words or the concepts, but with clear sentences. Perhaps one day, with all the struggle for fairness, justice, and rights, black people will lead the nation and show the world how to resist domination. She quotes Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright who died so tragically young and who will nonetheless never be forgotten for her timeless play, Raisin in the Sun: ‘Perhaps we shall be the teachers when it is done. Out of the depths of pain we have thought to be our sole heritage for this world—O we know about love’hooks points out that “Baldwin and Hansberry believed that black identity was forged in triumphant struggle to resist dehumanization, that the choice to love was a necessary dimension of liberation.” In Chapter One, hooks lays out a spiritual crisis—an emotional and material crisis—in the black community, members of which are experiencing lovelessness. hooks wrote this is 2001, but it is something we can see clear as day in our society right now. “As long as black folks normalize loss and abandonment, acting as though is an easy feat to overcome the psychological wounds this pain inflicts, we will not lay the groundwork for emotional well being that makes love possible.”That just makes so much sense to me, and it is clear that some white and black folks don’t expect love from anyone, and they don’t know how to share it, either. Love does not play a part in their lives at all. hooks’ chapter headings in this book give us some idea of where she is going with the thinking in this book: The Issue of Self-Love Valuing Ourselves Rightly Moving Beyond Shame Mama Love Cherishing Single Mothers Loving Black Masculinity Heterosexual Love Union & Reunion Embracing Gayness Unbroken Circles Loving Justice On this 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, it is appropriate for bell hooks to praise what MLK got entirely right: that his love ethic is central to any meaningful challenge to domination. But what he missed, hooks says, is that although MLK addressed the need for black folk to love their enemies and oppressors, but he did not address enough the need for black folk to love themselves. hooks tells us that MLK and Malcom X were both assassinated just when they’d begun to hone a truly revolutionary vision of liberation, one rooted both in a love ethic and a willingness to resist domination in all its forms. But we’re still here, and we need that vision more than ever in this world of haves and have-nots. We are all foot soldiers in this battle for right. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 06, 2018
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Apr 06, 2018
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Mar 06, 2018
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Paperback
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| 1250039576
| 9781250039576
| 1250039576
| 3.92
| 29,452
| Mar 01, 2016
| Mar 01, 2016
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really liked it
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Ali Smith pointed me to Olivia Laing—I think she was planning to introduce her at a conference in Edinburgh. I knew nothing about Laing when I opened
Ali Smith pointed me to Olivia Laing—I think she was planning to introduce her at a conference in Edinburgh. I knew nothing about Laing when I opened this book to the essay about Henry Darger, “the Chicago janitor who posthumously achieved fame as one of the world’s most celebrated outsider artists, a term coined to describe people on the margins of society, who make work without the benefit of an education in art or art history.” It is very creepy and disturbing, the whole story of the three hundred paintings and thousands of pages of writing Darger left behind at his death, about sex and children and abuse and neglect. Laing’s description of it, and her close research into his life, reminded me of the work of New Yorker writer Ariel Levy: one doesn’t really want to read it, but once begun, it is hard to tear oneself away. This book itself is about lonely people, lonely artists, herself as a lonely person. Such a repellant topic; Laing notes the psychoanalyst Fromm-Reichmann, a contemporary of Freud, writes “Loneliness seems to be such a painful, frightening experience that people do practically everything to avoid it….Loneliness, in its quintessential form, is of a nature that is incommunicable by the one who suffers it.”Exactly, exactly, exactly, I want to say as I turn my attention away. It makes me uncomfortable, suffering from it or not. So why, then, does Laing want to write a book about loneliness? The truth is, if one can suffer through the sensation of skin-being-sanded while Laing chooses Edward Hopper to discuss during her own period of estrangement, alone in New York City, irreparably separated from her fiancé, her discussion of Hopper’s paintings and his life leave an indelible impression. Hopper met his wife in art school, and they each were forty-one-year-old virgins when they married one another. The chapter becomes a queerly voyeuristic biography of Hopper, his art, and his journal-writing wife whose painting was so derided by Hopper that she stopped painting and became his model. When Laing moved from Brooklyn to the Village—she can’t have been so lonely, by the way, that she didn’t just return to England unless she likes a little bit that sensation of sandpaper-on-skin—she turned her gaze on Andy Warhol. At first Laing detested his work but after seeing him struggling to speak in a biopic once, she realized his Pop Art, the repeating images in different colors, was the attempt of a lonely boy to fit in. "Sameness, especially for the immigrant, the shy boy agonisingly aware of his failures to fit in, is a profoundly desirable state; an antidote against the pain of being singular, alone, all one, the medieval root from which the work lonely emerges. Difference opens the possibility of wounding; alikeness protects against the smarts and slights of rejection and dismissal."Laing does not neglect Valerie Solanas, the shooter who nearly ended Warhol’s life, who was also “drawn to the excessive and neglected.” Solanas’s work on the SCUM Manifesto puts her smack dab in the middle of a resurgent feminist movement, and yet decidedly outside the mainstream headed by Betty Friedan. Laing provides context to and critiques of the work of Warhol contemporaries, photographer/artists Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, and demonstrates how their work fits in with the alienation developed through loneliness. Laing’s searing chapter on the AIDS epidemic reminds us how the scourge played out in New York, and how it enveloped Warhol and his milieu. The discussion of “Strange Fruit (for David)”, an art installation created by Zoe Leonard for Wojnarowicz in 1998, is somehow eye-opening, and mind-changing. The creepiness of that avant garde art scene melts to reveal the humanity and real pain in the expression of this art. So Laing’s own journey through loneliness becomes a meditation on loneliness expressed through the art of others. "It was the rawness and vulnerability of [Wojnarowicz’s] expression that proved so healing to my own feelings of isolation: the willingness to admit to failure or grief, to let himself be touched, to acknowledge desire, anger, pain, to be emotionally alive. His self-exposure was in itself a cure for loneliness, dissolving the sense of difference that comes when one believes one’s feelings or desires to be uniquely shameful."Laing’s skill on this difficult subject of outsider art keeps us curious and bearing our discomfort as she leads us to a deeper understanding of our human condition. "Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city…the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each other. We are in this together…What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open…"...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 2018
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Mar 03, 2018
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Feb 21, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0520030028
| 9780520030022
| 0520030028
| 3.33
| 6
| Jul 05, 1977
| Aug 04, 1977
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it was amazing
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This collection of novellas by some famous German writers includes important work done in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I was looking for a
This collection of novellas by some famous German writers includes important work done in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I was looking for a work by Heinrich von Kleist, whom a critic once called “greater than Shakespeare.” The novella "Michael Kohlhaas" is indeed special, and has lasted a very long time indeed. The last best film adaptation, was shown in Cannes in 2013 by French director Arnaud des Pallières starring the brilliant Danish actor, Mads Mikkelsen. This adaption, called Age of Uprising, closely follows the written novella. Von Kleist was a playwright first, a novelist second. The novella reads with the urgency of a screenplay: a rancher is bringing horses he raised to market when a new toll is demanded of him by a rich landowner. Kohlhaas does not have the money, so reluctantly accedes to leave some horses with their groom with the landowner as collateral that he will pay the toll. When he returns, the horses and the groom have been severely maltreated. After his wife is killed seeking redress, Kohlhaas plots revenge. Also in this collection are novellas by Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. Mann’s is close to my heart, describing as it does a young man who arranges his life so that he can partake of his small but adequate income to enjoy literature and the arts without working, until he comes upon something that he fears he has not the money to afford: a beautiful, eligible woman. Called “The Buffoon,” the novella describes a young man who did what he could to be happy, but discovered self-esteem was paradoxically the key to others’ regard. Each novella is preceded by a short introductory essay by the editor and translator Steinhauer, and his take on Kafka’s life and work is, in some sense, more interesting than Kafka’s short novella, called “The Hunger Artist.” A circus employs a man to fast for a period of time—no longer than 40 days. For awhile circus-goers are interested in a ghoulish way, feeling they need to see the fasting man every day, to see his deteriorating state of health. However, over time interest gradually fades for adults, and it is only the children who find irresistible the sight of a man in a cage starving to death by his own will. Popular attention shifts further, to animals rather than to the queer emaciated man. What then? The very first story in the collection is called “Love & Friendship Tested” by Christoph Martin Wieland and it has a very contemporary feel. A young man befriends two young girls who are each other’s best friends. One is very beautiful and one is very competent and steady. The man marries the beautiful one and remains friends with the steady, competent one when she also marries. The beautiful one wants to continue being admired by everyone, making her husband jealous. Eventually he decides he would rather have the competent steady one as a wife and convinces the husband of the other to divorce his wife and switch…the story goes longer but I don’t want to ruin the plot. These few novellas are so strong I feel sure Steinhauer chose the others so they wouldn’t be overwhelmed with these few, but I did not get to read them all. This collection reads like a classic, the work never going out of style, the best of an earlier generation of great German writers. In his introductory essay, Steinhauer places his German work in the context of the Italian, French, and Spanish work at the time. It is rare to find so companionable a guide as this, as I have discovered only a few surefire collections in my travels. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 23, 2018
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Mar 20, 2018
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Feb 16, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0735223912
| 9780735223912
| 0735223912
| 3.99
| 165
| 2017
| Jan 02, 2018
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it was amazing
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Coetzee is among my favorite Nobel Prize winners. There is a deep vein of humor in his work—so deep we may never break into overt laughter—but a vein
Coetzee is among my favorite Nobel Prize winners. There is a deep vein of humor in his work—so deep we may never break into overt laughter—but a vein that is fast and cold and refreshing. These essays are criticism for the work of others, and choosing the order from among the selections is a rare delight. In Nemesis, one of a series of novels written by Philip Roth, Roth confronts the idea of a plague visited upon a city, in his case “the polio summer of Newark in 1944.” The reader is unsure for most of the novel who is writing. A voice belonging to Arnie is describing the life and inner thoughts of another person, a man called Bucky Cantor. "The novel is an artfully constructed and suspenseful novel with a cunning twist towards the end." Reading Coetzee read Roth is revelatory. Another essay highlights my second encounter with the work of Heinrich von Kleist, whom another author I admire has called greater than Shakespeare. Heinrich von Kleist wrote in the early part of the 19th Century, and died by his own hand at age thirty-four. Von Kleist was a playwright foremost and wrote prose fiction for money, thinking it a very inferior art form. His “Michael Kohlhaas” story has lasted two centuries, lately resurrected every couple of years with new film treatments, i.e., The Jack Bull (1999), and Age of Uprising (2013). I understand that story is now considered a novella rather than a short story; I was able to discover it reprinted in Twelve German Novellas, translated and edited by Harry Steinhauer. Hopefully that's up next. On the subject of Samuel Beckett, Coetzee breaks his musings into four separate essays, one concerned with the young Beckett, one on Watt, and one on Molloy. His final essay “Eight Ways of looking at Beckett” completes his examination. So thorough and intriguing are these essays, they could be used as the basis of a university course, with students reading Beckett (in the original French if possible) and Coetzee’s observations. Why did Beckett begin to write in French? "Part of the answer must be that by 1946 it had become clear to him that France was and would in future be his home. Another part of the answer was that the French language was hospitable to a savage directness of tone that he wanted to cultivate."What I find so intriguing about his analysis of Molloy is that Coetzee finds the soliloquy assigned to Molloy "…is not the voice of an individual, a ‘character’ (in this case Molloy), but the communal voice of much of Beckett’s fiction from Molloy onwards. It is a voice that seems to echo, or take dictation from, another remoter and more mysterious voice… "Coetzee moves on, sharing facts about fellow citizen Patrick White who on most counts is considered "…the greatest writer Australia has produced, though the sense in which Australia produced him needs at once to be qualified: he had his schooling in England, studied at Cambridge University, spent his twenties as a young man about town in London, and during the Second World War served with the British armed forces.”Patrick White’s fiction was too difficult for me to grasp when I first encountered him, and I see in Coetzee’s discussion so many reasons why White escaped me. This delicious substantive critical analysis mixed with well-chosen highlights from the author’s biography is perfectly intelligible to someone not steeped in the tradition of criticism. White wrote of an adult world outside of my experience. I was more at the understanding level of his Kathy Volkov, a thirteen-year-old girl in The Vivisector, “for whom White draws—a little too closely at times—on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.” Coetzee does not discuss the work of David Malouf (born 1934) or Thomas Keneally (born 1935) in this work, but does discuss the work of their contemporary of whom I have never heard, the so-called fiction writer, Gerald Murnane (born 1939). Murnane was of Irish Catholic descent and suffered for it. His work was apparently awash in self-criticism, uncertainty, fear, and lacked the standard features of novels. In his later years he admitted, “I should never have tried to write fiction or non-fiction or anything in-between. I should have left it to discerning editors to publish all my pieces as essays.”The extraordinary range of Coetzee's essays, covering writers from every continent over five centuries, is the least of its astonishments and delights. What we appreciate most is Coetzee’s deep reading and enlightened presentation, his enjoyment of untangling the mysteries of great and not-so-great writing, and the fact that not for a moment is he dismissive or forgetful of the ordinary human failures we all share. All of the essays have been previously published, many in The New York Review of Books. Others are mostly excerpts of Introductions written for reprints of his subject’s work. In one of his essays on Patrick White, Coetzee discusses White’s insistence, before he died in 1990, that his unpublished papers be destroyed. They were not. Coetzee suggests authors who know their executors will not comply with their wishes do the deed themselves before they are too infirm. He has thought about his own legacy, I suppose. I wonder what he will choose to do. ...more |
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1
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Feb 13, 2018
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Feb 16, 2018
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Feb 02, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 1594206252
| 9781594206252
| 1594206252
| 3.82
| 7,882
| Feb 06, 2018
| Feb 06, 2018
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it was amazing
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The essays in this book have been published before, mostly in the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, but it is quite something to see and r
The essays in this book have been published before, mostly in the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, but it is quite something to see and read them all together. One has the impression of a very talkative, precocious teenager who notices ceaselessly, has opinions on everything, and is curious what you think but wants to get her view out there first, in case you change her mind. The flexibility of her mind and her fluency is the remarkable thing. Reviewers and other novelists will find this collection important for how Smith structures her arguments, what she chooses to focus on, what she says about point of view and novelistic structure. When one desires particularly bright conversation but doesn’t have it to hand on an ordinary day, this collection is just the thing to provide food for thought. I listened to the audio, produced by Penguin Audio and read oh-so-brilliantly by Nikki Amuka-Bird. This is a wonderful way to digest Smith’s ideas, the essay form particularly good for a commute. It took long time to finish the collection, so some of my favorites come from the end simply because I remember them better. But I do remember one near the front called “Dance Lessons for Writers,” which had particularly beautiful descriptions of the dance moves of Michael Jackson and Prince, Baryshnikov & Nureyev. Here’s Baryshnikov on Fred Astaire: “I was very star-struck, I hardly spoke. But I watched his hands all the time, they were like a lesson in themselves,—so elegant.”Smith discusses the comedy marriage of Key & Peele in “Brother from Another Mother,” the comedy duo who grew their audience during the Obama presidency. “…Subject to all the normal pressures of a marriage,” their routine has reached its natural end, but while it was going on it poked fun at attitudes of whites while raising issues faced by blacks. It led us into a more mature understanding and way of interacting by highlighting the ways “blacks” are often not black at all, but mixed and even mostly white. Time to drag one’s consciousness into the 21st Century, America. There is a whole section called “In The Gallery,” in which Smith discusses art, including the first time she noticed art at her mother’s apartment and later, going to museums or to other parts of Europe in search of art. Her father, she points out, was always a natural viewer of art, not intimidated by the notion that an ordinary working man should not be able to comprehend art. He stood in front of a painting or sculpture and could say what he saw or how it affected him. He taught his daughter with her fancy education something about naturalness. She attributes some of that naturalness to her father’s love of John Berger and his 1972 TV show Ways of Seeing. In “Love in the Gardens” Smith’s discusses inviting her father to Italy with money from her first book. He’d wanted to spend more time in France, she found out later, but she was young and insistent on Italy. They visited gardens and cities positively overrun with tourists. He hardly took a picture, and he was an amateur photographer. Later, after her father had died, Smith went to live in Rome and found a place he would have loved. Why hadn’t we spent more time in Rome she wondered, as she took in the beauty of the statutes and the women. He would have loved it here. One of the best reasons to pick up the hardcopy of this book are the photographs reproduced. When Smith is discussing a particular piece of art, she may include a reproduction, or perhaps a photograph both she and her brother picked out of her father’s collection independently of one another, a photograph of a newspaper-carrying father kissing his toddler upon his return home from work, while the mother, wearing a skirt and pumps and a chignon, watches television expressionlessly. It is titled "The Family is a Violent Event." One of the last essays is about Justin Bieber, the pop music star, and Martin Buber, long-dead Jewish philosopher. Smith imagines a meeting between the two and discusses both in the context of Buber’s 1923 I-Thou and I-It essay. Not being familiar with Buber’s essay, I listened kind of clueless and the very next day came across another reference to Buber’s essay, of which I could say quite a little bit, gratis Smith’s introduction. And a real meeting of minds when, in “Getting In and Out,” Smith talks about how "black is now cool," and how "white people want to get inside & walk around in black skin" now. But she elegantly demolishes the notion of how one “appropriates” experience by noticing it, by speaking of it, by writing about it. I had withheld my judgment on arguments about appropriation, all the time wondering how one can possibly NOT want people to understand, empathize, and yes, write about another’s experience as though it were their own. Smith makes the logical argument that a mixed person then cannot speak about the experience of someone with darker skin, though both have been labelled black, and what about someone who looks white but is, in fact, mixed? Will they have to pull out their credentials for all to make a decision whether or not she will have the right to speak of or even imagine the black experience? I loved this book of essays and think England has got themselves a national treasure who can both write and think. ...more |
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1
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Mar 28, 2018
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May 27, 2018
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Jan 31, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0735225028
| 9780735225022
| 0735225028
| 3.80
| 5,872
| Jul 18, 2017
| Jan 01, 2017
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really liked it
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Yuck. Steve Bannon has a twisted sense of the world. One wonders how he got from the Navy & Harvard to the raving, unshaven ideologue he is today, but
Yuck. Steve Bannon has a twisted sense of the world. One wonders how he got from the Navy & Harvard to the raving, unshaven ideologue he is today, but one guesses it was because he discovered good looks, money, and brains weren't enough to make him happy. But one could use these things to blow up the world. [image] Steve Bannon at Harvard Joshua Green undoubtedly deserves at least four stars for being able to write and having the material no one else did. But I'd been following pretty closely this past year and really had a hard time spending another nanosecond thinking about this creep who can go to his grave without a single person to mourn him. One thing that hadn't been entirely clear to me was the whole Fox News fight & subsequent ass-licking but I see it now through Green's careful, annotated timeline. I also hadn't been aware of the role of Bannon's Government Accountability Institute (GAI) in discrediting Hillary's candidacy. That was useful to understand. And, of course, the explicit statement by his colleagues and underlings, "Truth and veracity weren't his top priority. Narrative truth was his priority rather than factual truth." I am going to have to call on other GReaders to tell me about the title of the Afterword: Kali Yuga. I sort of see Kali Yuga defined on Google as four stages of man's development & consciousness in Hinduism...please don't tell me Bannon is applying this...like he even cares. It could be that Green himself is applying the prophecy, which states that in the longest, and darkest, stage of Kali Yuga is the expectation "A person is considered unsuccessful and unholy if he does not have money, and the society will accept hypocrisy as a virtue." But that is from a quick search and not from deep understanding. Anyone else figure this out? What a twisted man. ...more |
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not set
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not set
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Dec 10, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1479849944
| 9781479849949
| 1479849944
| 3.89
| 3,593
| Feb 20, 2018
| Feb 20, 2018
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really liked it
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Noble began collecting information in 2010 after noticing the way Google Search and other internet sites collect and display information about non-whi
Noble began collecting information in 2010 after noticing the way Google Search and other internet sites collect and display information about non-white communities. Her results dovetail with other studies (e.g., Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil) positing that algorithms are flawed by their very nature: choosing & weighting only some variables to define or capture a phenomenon will deliver a flawed result. Noble wrote this book to explore reasons why Google couldn’t, or wouldn’t, address concerns over search results that channel, shape, distort the search itself, i.e., the search “black girls” yielded only pornographic results, beginning a cascade of increasingly disturbing and irrelevant options for further search. In her conclusion Noble tells us that she wrote an article about these observations in 2012 for a national women’s magazine, Bitch, and within six weeks the Google Search for “black girls” turned up an entire page of results like “Black Girls Code,” Black Girls Rock,” “7-Year-Old Writes Book to Show Black Girls They Are Princesses.” While Noble declines to take credit for these changes, she continued her research into the way non-white communities are sidelined in the digital universe. We must keep several things in mind at once if the digital environment is to work for all of us. We must recognize the way the digital universe reflects and perpetuates the white male patriarchy from which it was developed. In order for the internet to live up to the promise of allowing unheard and disenfranchised populations some voice and access to information they can use to enhance their world, we must monitor the creation and use of the algorithms that control the processes by which we add to and search the internet. This is one reason it is so critical to have diversity in tech. Below find just a few of Noble's more salient points: An early e-version of this manuscript obtained through Netgalley had formatting and linking issues that were a hindrance to understanding. Noble writes here for an academic audience I presume, and as such her jargon and complicated sentences are appropriate for communicating the most precise information in the least space. However, for a general audience this book would be a slog, something not true if one listens to Noble (as in the attached TED talk linked below). Surely one of the best things this book offers is a collection of references to others who are working on these problems around the country. The other best thing about this book is an affecting story Noble includes in the final pages of her Epilogue about Kandis, a long-established black hairdresser in a college town trying to keep her business going by registering online with the ratings site, Yelp. Noble writes in the woman’s voice, simply and forthrightly, without jargon, and the clarity and moral force of the story is so hard-hitting, it is worth picking up the book for this story. At the very least I would recommend a TED talk on this story, and suggest placing the story closer to the front of this book in subsequent editions. For those familiar with Harvard Business Review case studies, this is a perfect one illustrating issues of race. Basically, the story is as follows: Kandis's shop became an established business in the 1980s, before the fall off of black scholars attending the university "when the campus stopped admitting so many Blacks." To keep those fewer students aware that her business provided an exclusive and necessary service in the town, she spent many hours to find a way to have her business come up when “black hair” was typed in as a search term within a specified radius of the school. The difficulties she experienced illustrate the algorithm problems clearly. “To be a Black woman and to need hair care can be an isolating experience. The quality of service I provide touches more than just the external part of someone. It’s not just about their hair.”I do not want to get off the subject Noble has concentrated on with such eloquence in her treatise, but I can’t resist noting that we are talking about black women’s hair again…Readers of my reviews will know I am concerned that black women have experienced violence in their attitudes about their hair. If I am misinterpreting what I perceive to be hatred of something so integral to their beings, I would be happy to know it. If black hair were perceived instead as an extension of one’s personality and sexuality without the almost universal animus for it when undressed, I would not worry about this obsession as much. But I think we need also to work on making black women recognize their hair is beautiful. Period. By the time we get to Noble’s Epilogue, she has raised a huge number of discussion points and questions which grew from her legitimate concerns that Google Search seemed to perpetuate the status quo or service a select group rather than break new ground for enabling the previously disenfranchised. This is critically important, urgent, and complicated work and Noble has the energy and intellectual fortitude needed to work with others to address these issues. This book would be especially useful for those looking for an area in the digital arena to piggyback her work to try and make a difference. Ms. Noble gives a 12-minute TED talk here. ...more |
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Dec 06, 2017
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Feb 10, 2018
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Dec 06, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1476780153
| 9781476780153
| 1476780153
| 3.15
| 302
| unknown
| Mar 07, 2017
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it was amazing
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The cavalcade of sexual harassment accusations beginning with the Weinstein revelations brought the writing of Stephen Marche to my attention. In an o
The cavalcade of sexual harassment accusations beginning with the Weinstein revelations brought the writing of Stephen Marche to my attention. In an op-ed piece published in the NYT (Nov 25, 2017), Marche asks us to confront “The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido.” “The men I know,” he writes, “don’t actively discuss changing sexual norms…Men just aren’t interested. They don’t know where to start.” If anything were designed to intrigue me, it would be this conundrum: that men cannot or will not or are not interested in fruitfully engaging on anything about gender roles except where to stick it. Marche makes reference to the fact that of all the people who interviewed him about his new book this year, The Unmade Bed, only a minuscule number were men. “A healthy sexual existence requires a continuing education,” he writes. I am remiss here, only discovering upon reading his work recent studies which determine that gender can only really be defined on a spectrum. I hadn’t realized this was accepted thought, or becoming so (though GR friends have told me before). I haven’t kept up with my continuing ed in this field, including the apparently widely quoted study result “that men who do housework have less sex than men who don’t, and men who do more traditional ‘work around the house,’ like yard work, have more sex than men who don’t.”That’s me not keeping up, though the results don’t particularly surprise me. Why it is so is what makes Marche’s work interesting. Marche began his fascinating perspective on our changing gender relations with a chapter on mansplaining, a term inspired by an essay of Rebecca Solnit to describe someone who insists upon detailing a concept his listener knows more about. In “How Much Should a Man Speak?” Marche suggests that the mansplainer bore at a party or at work is probably the end result of years of cultural training to make men more willing to express their thoughts—a weird perversion of intimacy. Maybe. I think we might have more examples of mansplaining as just straight-on sexist thought, though like he says, men also experience mansplaining. We’ll just have to agree that such behavior in conversation describes a deeply insecure personality and view each on a case-by-case basis. This book came about when Marche left his teaching position in NYC to move to Toronto when his wife landed a high-powered, high-paying job as editor of a national magazine. His role as house husband became far more family-centric once his son and eventually his daughter were born. Never strong on the role of housekeeping (“my gonads shrink into my body a bit”), Marche describes how he came to think about his marriage, fatherhood, and sexuality. There are many moments I would describe as deeply insightful, perfectly thoughtful continuing ed which actually includes notes from his wife, the editor, giving her perspective of his comments. But what if men are not interested in reading about what he has learned about changing gender roles? Maybe now is the time to point out he has a chapter on pornography, including a description of the image that first electrified him. But there is also the notion that “Masculine maturity is inherently a lonely thing to possess. That’s why maturity and despair go together for men. The splendid isolation of masculinity has emerged from so much iconography—the cowboy, the astronaut, the gangster—that almost every hero in the past fifty years has been a figure of loneliness. Current pop culture is even more extreme: it doesn’t merely celebrate the lonely man; it despises men in groups. That contempt runs counter to male biology. Men, every iota as much as women, are social creatures who live in a permanent state of interdependence and require connection for basic happiness. In periods of vulnerability the male suicide rates spike.”The cover blurb on Stephen Marche describes him as a cultural commentator. He is that, every bit as much as the feminist writers he critiques. In his NYT piece, Marche suggests that some people think “men need to be better feminists,” but in this book he tells us “the world doesn’t need male feminists…It needs decent guys.” That sounds right by me. Finally, I leave you with one of Marche’s paragraphs I know you will enjoy, given the exposure men like Louis C.K. have chosen as their contribution to the gender conversation. “Diogenes the Cynic masturbated in the marketplace and called it philosophy. Of all the wisdom available in ancient Athens, his was the earthiest, the most practical. He refused to condemn the body out of social propriety. If he was built to ejaculate, he should ejaculate, and therefore he ejaculated where everyone could see him. The Athenians loved him for his frankness, which provoked laughter as much as disgust. When asked why he masturbated in public, he answered, “Would that by rubbing my belly I could get rid of hunger.” Diogenes offered the pagan view of masturbation: Why be ashamed of the easiest expression of masculine desire? Why fear the erasure of male sexual appetite by the lightest, the most harmless of gestures?”...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 03, 2017
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Dec 05, 2017
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Nov 30, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1627796312
| 9781627796316
| 1627796312
| 3.72
| 4,490
| May 02, 2017
| May 02, 2017
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it was amazing
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Coming out at this time of year, Pamela Paul’s memoir is reminiscent of a commencement speech, albeit book-length and one just as interesting for the
Coming out at this time of year, Pamela Paul’s memoir is reminiscent of a commencement speech, albeit book-length and one just as interesting for the parents as for the graduates. It is a blast to listen to an obsessive reader share her thoughts on books, her travels and travails. Bob is her lifelong companion and record, her Book of Books, the place she can note what she has read. It gives date of completion, and, because Paul tried to read books about the countries or cities she visits or lives, we deduce a sense of location. It is her book of memories then, a record of where she has been. Paul was the single daughter born into a family of seven sons. Despite the expected in-house torture and rough-housing, her psyche remained remarkably intact, though her parent’s divorce may have had more effect than discussed here. She did emerge as a reader, an introvert, and from a young age wanted to write. In this book she has boldly decided to write about what she’s read in the context of her life, and astonishingly, it is interesting. We enjoy retracing her faltering steps as a burgeoning adult, in which she recalls with uncommon accuracy the embarrassed and confused feelings of a teen. France plays a large role in Paul’s life. Although her American Field Service (AFS) experience in a small town in suburban France was not as she imagined, it set the table for her next visit and the one after that. Eventually she found a family in France that became a second home, a family that subsequently attended her weddings and met her children. This kind of close long-term relationship defines Paul, I think. We all have trajectories, but not all of us cultivate the path as we go so that it becomes personal, the impact felt on both sides. Paul’s decision after college to go directly to Thailand without the usual scramble for underpaid work at home was prescient but daring. She’d not get another chance to see that part of the world with any depth, though the China portion of the trip gave me the screaming heebies. It sounded perfectly horrendous, completely uncomfortable, filled with sickness and incomprehension. The China trip was her father’s idea, and it never became hers. The unmitigated disaster of that trip reminds us that we have to own our journey, start to finish, for us to manage it with any kind of finesse. There was a marriage that lasted a year. The utter heartbreak Paul experienced does not lacerate us: from the moment she begins to speak of her first husband we are suspicious. She is much too happy much too soon. Love is one thing. Blindness is another. In my mind I modify Thoreau to read: beware all enterprises that require giving up a large, rent-controlled flat in New York City... "…the minute a subject veered from the fictional world, the private world, the secluded, just-us-on-top-of-the-mountain world, into the greater, grittier territory below, the nonfictional world, my husband and I had serious differences…Even when we each happily read those same books about the perfidy of man, we read them in opposite ways…this kind of book contested my essentially optimistic view of the world rather than overturned it…whereas for him, the world really was that bleak, and the books proved it."Here you have, folks, a political difference so profound it can break nations in two. Ayn Rand’s work became Paul’s personal standard for judging viewpoints. Paul admits--she who practically worships books--that she threw one of Ayn Rand’s books in the trash after reading it, so that no one else would be polluted by its ideas. I laughed. I did the same thing, though I contemplated burning it before I did. In my tiny garage-turned-apartment in New Mexico, I wrestled with Rand’s horrifying vision of a society of go-getters and decided that to burn her book would invest it with too much significance. I loved reading about Paul’s poor dating experiences after that. She was inoculated against irrational exuberance after her divorce, but she still wanted intimacy. She manages to share with us chortle-inducing instances of “okay, I’ve had enough of that” with some of the men she met later. My favorite might be the time a boyfriend convinces her that he’d been to the Grand Canyon before and so can show her “the best way to see it.” Har-dee-har-har. This memoir is a great example of smart and funny, gifting us many moments of remembering our own worst histories and reinforcing for younger women coming along that our judgment may be the only thing separating us from a much worse time of it. Pamela Paul is now books editor of The New York Times and no longer has to struggle to find the coin to buy a new book. She is the best kind of editor for all of us because she is has read widely and acknowledges the draw of genre fiction while communicating her admiration for the range of new nonfiction that helps us cope with our history and our future. She is also an interested and informed consumer of Children’s lit and Young Adult titles, which aids me immeasurably since these are not my specialty and therefore necessitate me seeking assistance from a trusted source. Access to all there is out there comes with its own set of stresses, but Paul has extended her reach by asking some of the best writers in the country to read and review titles in the NYT Book Review, and to talk about their selections on the Book Review Podcast, available each week from iTunes as an automatic download. Her guests and her own considered opinions help to narrow the field for us. This is a great vacation read, not at all strenuous, yet it is involving. Imagine the unlikeliness of the concept: an introverted reader and editor writes a book about her life…reading…and it is interesting! Totes amazeballs. It occurs to me that Goodreads is one big Bob. I’m so glad Paul put the effort in to share with us: big mistakes don’t have to be the end of the world. It depends what happens after that. See what I mean about commencement? ...more |
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1
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May 18, 2017
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May 22, 2017
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Apr 11, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0374203032
| 9780374203030
| 0374203032
| 3.93
| 12,944
| Apr 24, 2012
| Apr 24, 2012
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really liked it
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Michael Sandel is a storyteller. His stories are amusing ones like those in Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, bu
Michael Sandel is a storyteller. His stories are amusing ones like those in Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, but Sandel’s stories urge us to look deeper: to look meaning rather than just personal gain. Perhaps not everything should be for sale. Sandel’s stories make us wonder what our responsibilities are in the marketplace economists have made for us. He prods us to ask ourselves if the world we have is the one we want. Judging from the reaction of the populace to the presidential election in 2016, I would guess most of us have are not satisfied with what we have wrought. The good news is that we can make different choices. We just have to think about it. Do we want advertising for McDonald’s on public buildings, schools, or police cars? Do we want someone betting how soon we will die so as to take advantage of our life insurance policies? Do we want a cash payment to store nuclear waste near our homes? Sandel presents these real, documented offerings to us and shows us what the outcomes have been. This is an easy, non-taxing read. There are no references to philosophers and only the barest rudiments of what is called economic theory, and yet the work is permeated with “the stuff” of these two disciplines. It is the raw materials, the everyday dilemmas with which we need to work. I have seen some of Sandel’s examples from newspapers in recent years, but there were still several I never encountered before. Like the one about the school in Israel where the parents kept showing up late to pick up their children. The teachers levied a fine for parents late for pick-up, and transgressions actually increased. The parents began to regard the fine as a fee. When school officials removed the fine a couple of months later, transgressions increased again. It became the norm to disregard the pick-up time, and more parents became aware that others were transgressing. They began to think it was okay to make the teacher work overtime. In this case, I guess I would suggest making the fine really punitive, not merely suggestive, to see if that made a difference, though exceptions for real excuses would have to be considered. Sandel had me laughing and cringing: what about hunting Atlantic walrus in Canada? Atlantic walrus had become so rare in the 20th Century that Inuits were the only ones allowed to hunt them. Inuit leaders asked the Canadian government if they could sell some of their walrus quota to big-game hunters for $6,500. ”[Big game hunters] for not come for the thrill of the chase or the challenge of stalking an elusive prey. Walruses are unthreatening creatures that move slowly and are no match for hunters with guns…C.J. Chivers compared walrus hunting under Inuit supervision to ‘a long boat ride to shoot a very large beanbag chair.’ The guides maneuver the boat to within fifteen yards of the walrus and tell the hunter when to shoot…The appeal of such a hunt is difficult to fathom…[but] markets don’t pass judgement on the desires they satisfy.” Another desire Sandel discusses is prostitution, something that has been in the news just this week when France decided to fine buyers paying for sex. Apparently legalization of prostitution in the Netherlands has led to gang control of the business, and in Germany human trafficking has continued unabated. Sandel asks whether we can really still bare-facedly argue that sex between “consenting” adults when one is paid is without moral ramifications. “Certain moral and civic goods are diminished or corrupted if bought and sold:” prostitution could be regarded as a form of corruption that demeans women and promotes bad attitudes toward sex. This is the argument used in Scandinavian countries, and now France. Towards the end of the book, Sandel quotes two economists who believe that virtue and love are scarce resources. (Among some of us, I am sure that is true.) He points out that some philosophers have taken another view: that civic virtue dies if it is not nourished, practiced, and that it grows, not depletes, with every instance of it. Love similarly. Love is not something we should preserve, but spend at every opportunity, for its return is exponential. Sandel wades into many hot-button issues and calmly explains alternate ways of looking at a problem. He is clear enough for first year college students, even high school students. His moral and ethical ways of thinking allow us to challenge current thinking about issues facing us today. I preferred Sandel’s book on Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do? but hope he will keep writing. One day, perhaps, the thinkers among us will conclude “free-market” economists really have no clothes and that money is not our only currency. ...more |
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1
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Apr 06, 2016
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Apr 08, 2016
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Apr 03, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1433201992
| 9781433201998
| 1433201992
| 3.94
| 13,607
| Jul 01, 2007
| Jul 01, 2007
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it was amazing
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Tim Weiner deserves enormous credit for amassing such a huge and detailed body of information for us to look at and judge the CIA. He writes history t
Tim Weiner deserves enormous credit for amassing such a huge and detailed body of information for us to look at and judge the CIA. He writes history the way I prefer to read it: chronologically. When characters appear before or after their moment in the limelight, Weiner tries to keep them in context of events happening contemporaneously. This is a huge aid to both our understanding and to our judgment. That having been said, this was a difficult book to read/listen to because of the poor assessment of the Agency, because of the accretion of evidence of mistakes and incompetence, because of the massive amount of information readers get about how the Agency operated at different times under different leaders with different mandates. The easy solutions to repairing or overhauling the Agency when they have done something spectacularly inept--or not done something, like prepare us for 9/11--have all been tried, each unsuccessful in its own way. Weiner has given us the material with which to begin to understand what we as citizens have tasked (and funded) the Agency to do and to ask ourselves if this is still a valid and do-able goal. Soliciting secrets held by foreign governments can be very difficult work. Most of the time those secrets are revealed because individuals have a reason for wanting to impart the information, a reason that may have little to do with money, though money often does grease the wheels. The information could be disinformation. It takes an unusual person who is willing to use their language skills and familiarity with other countries to live overseas undercover, to deceive, steal, and manipulate their way to secrets. “It’s a dirty business.” [Richard Helms] It would seem the very nature of the work would predicate a small clandestine field arm, therefore limiting the size of the analyst arm. Weiner starts with the genesis of the Agency, an outgrowth of the Office of Strategic Services which parachuted agents behind enemy lines in WWII Europe to sabotage the enemy and influence the course of the war. While it was put about when speaking with the American public that an Agency that could understand the intent of hostile nations would be better prepared against attack by those nations, really its model was not merely listening, but acting. Immediately upon its conception, a result of the predilection of Agency leaders and because powerful men, including presidents, found the secrecy aspect of the Agency irresistible, the Agency became an instrument, not simply of “intelligence” but of covert action. And every president sought to change (even wanted to abolish) the Agency when its failures became politically unbearable. The truth is that a spy agency that operates in secret has also often withheld their secrets from the president and his council of advisors. Worse than that, sometimes they tailored the information they gave to the president to suit his predilections. Weiner gives examples of successes amidst the roster of failures of intelligence. The CIA muscled the Taiwan government into abandoning its plan to develop a nuclear weapon; they managed to cripple the Abu Nidal organization through disinformation; the CIA stymied Soviet attempts to steal corporate software by implanting bugs into targeted software. And Weiner seems to admire, or at least not coruscate, certain CIA officers like Robert Ames, the Arabist scholar-spy memorialized by Kai Bird in The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames and who was killed in the Beirut embassy bombing in 1984. Weiner also gives a pass to Robert Gates, former CIA director and Secretary of Defense under two presidents. Weiner acknowledges the extraordinary patriotism and selflessness of certain agents in the field, who tried to accomplish their missions despite the dysfunction at home. It is easy for us to forget that the Agency was only started after WWII, in 1947. Before that, we used to get intelligence through journalists, businesspeople, and embassies. We did not usually attempt to influence events except through pressure at national levels, among statesmen. When it began, The Agency was obsessed with Soviet power around the world and a balance of that power. Even then our intelligence was faulty, subject to political jostling, and influenced by the fears of our government. Although revolting to learn, it does us no good to turn away from Weiner’s assessment of these years, since millions of Americans before us have made their indignation known and demanded better. It forced changes in the Agency, which was decimated after the fall of the Soviet Union, which caught the vast arsenal of analysts completely by surprise. The Agency underwent several RIFs in its history, and it was even thought that outsourcing to private contractors would provide better intelligence. The result was higher prices for intelligence and less control over agents. Weiner talks us through the failures of several directors, and their determination to make the Agency great again: Charges of too big, too small, too old, too young, too restrained, too wild have all been dealt with in the way one might expect a large bureaucracy might try to change its image. None of the changes have really worked. Finally, because presidents have had difficulty relying on the CIA for accurate information, they now call on a plethora of different agencies for intelligence which are run mostly by former military men, and much of the CIA's capabilities are outsourced. What is undeniable is the secrecy of the organization has come close several times in its history to ruining us. Outside threats are one thing, but many times the Agency was operating to contain threats we created through fear. The reason our democracy has succeeded as long as it has is because we have managed to maintain some kind of public accountability through transparency. Weiner asserts that Soviet leaders knew before the Berlin Wall fell that the lies and secrets their government kept from their people ultimately ruined them. A large and secret bureaucracy takes on a life of its own that cannot have adequate oversight. It becomes a danger rather than an aid. Despite his dire assessment of the Agency and its current capabilities, Weiner does not advocate its abolition. He acknowledges it may have an important role to play in spite of the difficulty of its mission and the difficulty of finding the right personnel. He suggests that it may one day be refashioned to fit the needs we have with a leadership that can shape and control it. Until then, however, it is a liability we rely upon at our peril. The fact that we now experience violence and terror from non-state actors might predicate more changes for the CIA. More agents has been the simplistic solution loudly proposed by at least one presidential candidate (Marco Rubio), but we already know that is hardly likely to produce the desired results. The CIA has always been plagued by its inability to recruit and retain good personnel because of its image and history but also because covert work is very hard to accomplish successfully. It may be time to reduce the size of the Agency once again, which may seem counterintuitive in this time of diverse threats. Getting vast numbers of analysts or agents unsuited to the task is probably not going to yield the kind of information we wish we had. I remain skeptical that a large bureaucracy can produce intelligence beyond what a large news organization can organize and analyze. I wonder that we have the hubris to influence events in allied countries, or to organize the defeat of leadership in countries with which we are not allied. I have no argument with obtaining information, as long as that information serves to better prepare us for changes which affect us. I note that the largest changes which are bound to affect us profoundly in immediate years, e.g., climate change, do not seem to have registered a blip on the government radar while we scurry to contain events which will not have as great an impact on us. It looks like a kind of overheated masculine-style delusion predicated on fear rather than the rational measure of risk. Therefore, before eliminating the organization entirely, perhaps we should bring it back to its earliest roots during this time of terrorist insurgency. Keep the organization small and flexible and covert, like our enemies’ organization. Covert undercover work may have been useful during WWII, but it didn’t work well after that. The CIA did real damage to countries around the world by involving themselves with regime change predicated on fear whipped up by our leaders. Surely the American people have progressed beyond that, even if some of their self-proclaimed leaders are still caught in the dark ages. Weiner told us nearly everything, but he didn’t tell us what became of the analyst(s) who were responsible for the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, reporting that it was a weapons cache. I listened to the Blackstone audio production of this book, read by Stefan Rudnicki. It was beautifully produced and read, and though Rudnicki mispronounced some people and place names, those mistakes did not obscure understanding. This is a real masterpiece of journalism. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 20, 2016
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Mar 04, 2016
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Feb 20, 2016
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Audio CD
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| 0805093036
| 9780805093032
| 0805093036
| 3.96
| 404
| Aug 01, 2010
| Aug 17, 2010
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liked it
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Looking for the philosophical underpinnings of the necessity for U.S. leadership in the world, I came to Chalmers Johnson through Perry Anderson’s boo
Looking for the philosophical underpinnings of the necessity for U.S. leadership in the world, I came to Chalmers Johnson through Perry Anderson’s book, America’s Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers. This series of essays Johnson wrote from 2004 through 2009 for TomDispatch.com, a website that features very loud criticisms of the government (and everything else), mainly describe Johnson’s distaste for U.S. militarism around the world, including massive numbers of bases on foreign soil. About three-quarters of the way through these repetitive essays I was exhausted with Johnson’s shrill argument. He has an academic’s surety of the correctness of his own ingrown opinions. That’s not to say I disagreed with him completely. First, I learned a few things that I didn’t know before: I wasn’t aware, for instance, that the CIA has largely outsourced the operations part of its intelligence collection. Why then, I wonder, does Republican candidate for President Marco Rubio spout on about “increasing the size of the CIA to improve intelligence”? If intelligence collection is run largely outside the Agency, that would just put more power and money into the hands of the corporations that do the work, e.g., Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) headquartered in San Diego, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CACI International. I knew protection and fighting (to some extent) had been outsourced. I wasn’t aware that intelligence was outsourced, though I would have thought that was a “neat idea.” I agree with Johnson that the CIA should be dismantled, but some intelligence can and should still be collected, compiled, and analyzed. If large corporations are merely recreating an extensive bureaucracy that mirror what the government did in the past but at greater cost and less accountability, it doesn’t seem such a wise idea. We would have even less oversight and guarantee of institutional depth and knowledge. Certainly there have been documented abuses by these groups during Iraq’s Abu Ghraib chapter which indicate problems with execution of U.S. intentions, and adherence to U.S. values. Johnson’s proposition is worth considering: that we leave intelligence analysis within the purview of the State Department, and collection within the myriad other organizations set up now to do that very thing. Another thing Johnson has pointed out which I did not know is that most countries in Latin and South America (and South Korea!) apparently loathe America and want nothing to do with their military bases or anything else. Johnson says it is a result of people in those countries learning of “dirty tricks” played there by U.S. agents in the past to influence elections and business decisions. Abuses committed by the CIA have largely been tasked to them by the White House in various administrations, which just goes to show that power, especially secret power without oversight, can have a pernicious effect on values. Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter (1977-81), whose books I have reviewed lately, was so focused on Russian containment during the lead up to Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, that Brzezinski ordered the sale of arms, missile launchers, defensive weapons, etc. to the Afghan mujahideen, which gradually evolved into Al Qaeda’s strongest allies and foot soldiers there. A number of other secret coups and involvements by the CIA have changed the course of many countries’ histories, usually for the worse. We have to ask ourselves if the outcomes had been equally bad without our involvement, would that justify those illicit actions on behalf of our government? I think it is just wiser to stay on the side of our values. It is easy to forget that the United States only created the CIA in 1947 after WWII as a result of the successes of the OSS behind enemy lines. A recent film by the son of CIA Director William Colby, “The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby” (2011), dramatically illustrates the origins and almost immediate problems issuing from secrets created and held at the highest levels, to say nothing of the enormous damage done by double agents. We owe the organization nothing. We tried it and it did not work well. There is no reason we must perpetuate a bureaucracy that fails so spectacularly (witness the exquisite failures of the organization under the leadership of George Tenet during Bush II). Johnson reminds us that Tim Weiner spent twenty years researching the CIA for his book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, which I suppose I need to read before I condemn their bones to the dust heap of history. That’s next up, along with Johnson’s earlier trilogy starting with Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, his bestseller originally published in the year 2000. It has gone into a second edition, with updates dating to 2003. In closing, I wish Johnson was less of an academic in his writing and more of a reasoned scholar, if all he is going to do is talk about what needs to be done. If he were making the decisions, I wonder how he would manage. I dislike his tone intensely, even when I agree he has made a point. And I heartily disagree with his notion that Andrew Bacevich, another slaphappy and shrill academic, should be Secretary of Defense. If that’s the best he can come up with, may he retread old arguments ad nauseam to his band of the converted. ...more |
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| Feb 07, 2015
| Apr 14, 2015
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liked it
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An old friend of mine who is a life-long Marxist and an academic recently reconnected, and when he read that I have been mulling over the way the Unit
An old friend of mine who is a life-long Marxist and an academic recently reconnected, and when he read that I have been mulling over the way the United States has been conducting its foreign policy, he suggested I read this book. British historian and political essayist Perry Anderson is a Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles and a former editor of the New Left Review. Anderson bounds through American foreign policy in the twentieth century, masterfully sketching the outlines of “Washington’s drive for global hegemony.” Anderson is persuasive, especially since many of us now are not intimately familiar with the periods he discusses and he can leave out messy and contradictory words, actions, policies, and intentions of the actors and their administrations. Anderson looks at the results of policies rather than stated intent (not a bad thing in itself) and reviews recent literature published by former foreign policy administrators (Kissinger, Brzezinski, Kagan), and academics (Mead, Layton). Anderson quotes Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1949-53) as saying (not for public consumption): “…Congress is too damn representative. It’s just as stupid as the people are; just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish.” This point has been made an infinite number of times by those frustrated with the process of democracy, and, I might add, is heard often these days among observers of the American election for president. I sympathize with Acheson, frankly, but neither he nor I would choose a different system, or a different country. It is enlightening for any student of a particular discipline to encounter someone with quite different ideas, especially if one is dissatisfied with current thinking on a topic. What really astonished me was that I had never heard of several of the folks he mentions as “those to honour”: Christopher Layne, David Calleo, Gabriel Kolko. He also mentions Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, and Noam Chomsky in his select group to honor, of whom I have heard. I dislike Bacevich for the very reason I tend to dismiss Anderson himself. Both Bacevich and Anderson are academics, and academics tend to talk among themselves and pat themselves on the back for their wise pronouncements or otherwise shrilly denounce colleagues for holding different opinions. But they pontificate to themselves. Their arguments bear almost no relation to actual diplomacy, or the day to day scrum of running a country. Unless their ideas are brought into the White House with an administration, there is no chance these folks are going to be listened to because their bombast and hurled insults make their comments hard to hear. Anderson makes the point that “the literature of grand strategy forms a domain of its own, distinct from diplomatic history or political science…individuals moving seamlessly back and forth between university chairs or think tanks and government offices.” Thus the administration also talks to itself. It does seem to be so, and no matter that I personally revile Anderson’s and Bacevich’s style of heated rhetoric and detestable arrogance which makes it difficult for me to read their ideas, they are talking about something in which I am deeply interested, and which has ramifications for the way I vote for America's leaders. Anderson, who sneers at the “thinkers” of his title, discusses Obama’s role as “executioner-in-chief,” and quotes Ben Rhodes, formerly speechwriter, now National Security Advisor: “What we’re trying to do is to get America another fifty years as leader.” This is also Hillary Clinton’s stated goal. This idea is exactly what I am wondering about. Is American primacy and leadership in the world in the American populace’s best interests, or in the world’s best interests? The answer is not as obvious as it might seem. It may appear to be so, but I can’t help thinking that despite our enormous wealth and resources, we cannot have all the answers for the rest of the world. We don’t even have the answers for our own country. Surely “primacy” is not the point. Or is it? What does that even mean? Does it mean we get to extract resources to support our own wellbeing? Does it mean we must bolster or support the rest of the world? What are our obligations as leader? Despite my difficulty reading this discussion which mentioned so many works I have not read, and so many people of whom I have not heard, I did order Christopher Layne’s The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present to see if I can understand slightly more. ...more |
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Jan 24, 2016
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Dec 25, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 1627797513
| 9781627797511
| B015WA0D72
| 4.11
| 18,628
| May 15, 2014
| Oct 20, 2015
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it was amazing
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This memoir in the form of a graphic novel by Riad Sattouf is positively terrifying. It only takes an evening to read, and I can guarantee you will no
This memoir in the form of a graphic novel by Riad Sattouf is positively terrifying. It only takes an evening to read, and I can guarantee you will not want to put it down. A cartoonist and former contributor to Charlie Hebdo, Sattouf now has a weekly column in France’s L’Obs. This graphic memoir is translated from the French by Sam Taylor and published in 2015 by Metropolitan Books, and tells of Sattouf’s early childhood in France, Libya, and Syria. The memoir is terrifying for what it tells us of the consciousness of a Sunni Arab man and his extended family, as well as the conditions in the cities of Tripoli and Homs. Sattouf engages our sympathies immediately by starting out his descriptions from the eyes of a blond two-year-old, who we might expect to be perplexed wherever he was, being new to the world. But this turns out to be the perfect vehicle for presenting the things he sees, hears, smells, and experiences with a disingenuous honesty (though, I must admit, the consciousness of a child). It is as disarming as it is damning. We laugh and cringe at the same time. Sattouf is choosing what to tell us about his upbringing with the consciousness of an adult. He shows the peculiarities of early education in France, and Syria. Both have failures, as a system. It’s a wonder we survive at all, but less surprising that we exhibit the flaws we do. He has a finely honed skill for cutting away the extraneous, and revealing the kernel of his experience. He makes it laughable, but at heart, it is also terrifying. Riad’s Syrian father, Abdul-Razak, is the first of his family to read and is (therefore?) considered a great scholar in Syria. He is sent to study history at the Sorbonne and manages to wed an unworldly French student, Clementine, who is studying in Paris. Clementine is from a small village in Brittany and when they both graduate, Abdul-Razak accepts a position teaching in Tripoli, Libya. You have got to read this to enjoy it. I don’t want to spoil your fun. It sounds just about what you might expect with Qaddafi in charge, only even worse than you could imagine. The family returns briefly to France, and then pack themselves off to Abdul-Razak’s home village outside of Homs, Syria. By this time Riad has a new dark-haired brother, but his own hair is still blond. He is teased (and beaten up) mercilessly in Homs, where the children harass him with expletives while calling him “Jew.” Conditions of everyday life in the 1970’s in Syria sound positively crushing in this period Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s father, was in charge. Riad’s family was Sunni; Assad was Alawhite. Segregation by religion, by sect shouldn’t surprise me, but the extent and result of it is stomach-roiling. Riad’s dear father, Abdul-Razak doesn’t sound more enlightened, for all his education. I am reminded of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in which Dawkins writes of early childhood inculcation into any religion as one of the most damaging things that can happen to the impressionable mind. One cannot help but agree when one sees what it has done in cultures all over the world. In this part of the world hatreds last for millennia, perhaps due largely to childhood inculcation. Riad’s father buys him a plastic revolver as a toy. “All boys like weapons,” he says. Does it follow, I wonder, that all who like weapons are still boys? What Riad captures in this work is the deeply ingrained and insufficiently informed nature of the racism and sectarianism in each of the countries in which he has lived. He also captures realistically grim pictures of living conditions in each country, as well as the good bits: in France, we see an education system that seems to work well for enrollees; in Libya, we see ancient ruins by the sea that evoke history better than many other ruins; in Syria, we see the memories of a school-aged Abdul-Razak bring him back to a simple life. But each is a comfortable deception that people feel comfortable telling themselves. Family ties were more important than whether your relatives were good people or not, and obligation takes the place of generosity. Riad’s drawing skill is such that one can envision the environment quite clearly. It is better than a photograph since Riad can add the elements he wishes to emphasize. In the New York Times review of this title, as well as that in the New Yorker magazine, called "Drawing Blood", we learn that Riad has a few more installments planned for this series, and I look forward eagerly to other adventures as he grows older. He has a viewpoint that is not all sarcasm. He so far has spared his mother, who comes across as a bewildered alien in a hostile environment. Riad’s work has the sting of criticism, but since he presents it through the eyes of a child, adult readers are meant to add their own gloss, knowing what we do about the perceptions of a child. Let’s see what he comes up with next, enjoying this and making up our minds later about whether he oversteps the mark. ...more |
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Nov 05, 2015
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Nov 06, 2015
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Oct 17, 2015
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Kindle Edition
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| 0307984761
| 9780307984760
| 0307984761
| 3.63
| 4,065
| Jan 28, 2014
| Jan 01, 2014
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it was amazing
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Rebecca Mead manages to sort George Eliot’s personal life from her fiction, enlightening us on both: "[Eliot’s] most straightforwardly autobiographicaRebecca Mead manages to sort George Eliot’s personal life from her fiction, enlightening us on both: "[Eliot’s] most straightforwardly autobiographical character is Maggie Tulliver, and as a grown woman Eliot discussed with a friend the ways in which The Mill on the Floss was inspired by her own history. Everything in the novel was softened, she said; her own experience was worse."This nonfiction is a hybrid of criticism and biography, but I argue it may be best viewed as a series of connected essays. It can’t be strictly chronological but at the end of each chapter Mead leaves us with a large conclusion and insight that would stand alone but only leaves us wishing to know more. Mead was able to lay out with ravishing clarity the twists and turns of a long-ago life, pair it coherently with the novels that were the result of that life, while at the same time making us interested in the life and work of Mead herself. Many of us have a favorite novel, but perhaps not so many of us revisit it at different stages in our life to see how our perceptions have changed and what it means for our understanding, and for our judgment. One of the loveliest true things Mead shares with us is how her distaste for the "sad, proud, dessicated" Middlemarch character of Casaubon waxed and waned through the decades she revisited the book: "He is a frail creature tortured by his own insufficiencies…Once Eliot was asked whom she had in mind as the original Casaubon; in response, she silently tapped her own breast. As I read Middlemarch in middle age, [Casaubon’s] failures and fears no longer seem so remote or theoretical to me as they once did, when I was in my Dorothea youth."Mead begins by telling us she wanted to understand why some people considered it the greatest novel in the English language, but she was also simply captured by its relevance and urgency though written nearly one hundred years before her birth. She wanted to see how Eliot’s life shaped her fiction, and how that fiction might have shaped Mead herself, it being a lens though which she looked at life time and again. What a large task for even an experienced biographer! But Mead was a journalist, and this may have been her salvation: "how to ask questions, how to use my eyes, how to investigate a subject, how to look at something familiar from an unfamiliar angle." Even so, what Mead has done is nearly mystical in its containment and inclusion. When describing Eliot’s beginning consciousness of an artistic life, Mead tells us Eliot "greatly admired the novelist George Sand: 'I shall never think of going to her writings as a moral code or text book,' [Eliot] wrote to a friend…'I cannot read six pages of hers without feeling that it is given to her to delineate human passion and its results…that one might live a century with nothing but one’s own dull faculties and not know so much as those six pages will suggest.'"Yet in the very next paragraph Mead admits she’d never read George Sand. I haven’t either, though I have tried in youth and again lately as an adult…I just couldn’t manage it. The experience reminds me that all of us find our inspiration in such disparate and (can I say?) unlikely places. We are all working within our own limited spheres and with "dull faculties" but it turns out finding inspiration has as much to do with the inspired as it has to do with the object of that inspiration. Much has always been made of Eliot’s looks and yet she managed to make a life so full of love she wondered if she had enough in her. In middle age (when she was thirty-two), she was pursued by George Henry Lewes, a man married in law only, and moved in with him, adopting his name to fit in better with society. She was brave in spite of social constraints, and had enough fierce intelligence to know that her life was her own to live. "One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy," Eliot wrote to a friend. Her long liaison with George Henry Lewes ended only when he died twenty-four years later. Such boldness and intellectual courage Eliot displayed in her unconventional life. Eliot, born in 1819, died in 1880, only eight years after finishing the fourth book of Middlemarch. It had been published in eight five-shilling installments from December 1871 to December 1872 and was received with great acclaim among the general populace. The critics were, well, critical. Lewes died in November 1878, and seventeen months later Eliot married John Walter Cross, a man younger by twenty years. Both Lewes and she had known Cross since 1869 and had addressed him as "nephew." She had her reasons, she told a friend, and once again proved her independence of thought and great social courage. Now for my admission: I have never read Middlemarch, though I think I might try now. I especially liked the final sentence of that novel, which Mead tells us was not always as it appears in the books. It went through drafts until finally Eliot thought she said what she’d intended. Below, it reads to me like a sad but painfully true kind of epitaph: "But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been in half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." I listened to the Blackstone Audio of this, very well read by Kate Reading. I filled in parts I remembered with the hardcover, published by Crown. ...more |
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Jul 04, 2015
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Jul 13, 2015
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Jul 04, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 0393048462
| 9780393048469
| 0393048462
| 4.36
| 687
| 2001
| Nov 01, 2001
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it was amazing
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Isaac Babel was Russian, killed in 1940 by firing squad at 45-years old for “being a member of a terrorist conspiracy.” Let us make no mistake: he was
Isaac Babel was Russian, killed in 1940 by firing squad at 45-years old for “being a member of a terrorist conspiracy.” Let us make no mistake: he was killed for his stories. Those stories and other writings are collected here, in this volume edited by Nathalie Babel with an Introduction by Cynthia Ozick. I came here looking for a reference dropped by Sam Lipsyte in The Ask in which a legless soldier of the Iraq war calls his prosthetics “my girls.” Lipsyte tells us his character copies a soldier, Vassily, in a Babel story. This new translation dated 2002 has such a sense of the absurd and contemporaneity it doesn’t seem possible it is 100 years old. Lipsyte’s reference to Vassily, I assumed, was buried in the Red Cavalry Stories, themselves filled with pitiless carnage paired with jokes: “So there we were making mincemeat of the Poles at Belaya Tserkov…we got cut off from the brigade commander…no less than a hundred and fifty paces away, we see a dust cloud which is either the staff or the cavalry transport…off we rode. They were eight sabers. Two of them we felled with our rifles…The horse that the Big Ace was riding was nice and plump like a merchant’s daughter but it was tired. So the general drops his reins, aims his Mauser at me, and puts a hole in my leg…Forgive me for butchering the story in my attempt to show you the shocking nature of Babel’s razor-sharp humor. It is not a long story, three pages or so, and this book is filled with more very short stories, also edgy, always pointed. This translation of the complete works gives short introductions to each series of stories or other work, and in one we learn about the Red Army campaign: “In late May 1920, the First Calvary of the Soviet Red Army, under the command of General Budyonny, rode into Volhynia, today the border region of western Ukraine and eastern Poland. The Russian-Polish campaign was underway, the new Soviet government’s first foreign offensive, which was viewed back in Moscow as the first step toward spreading the doctrines of World Revolution to Poland, then to Europe, then to the world…Babel chronicled this campaign [in which he was a war correspondent] in his Red Calvary stories…” [--Nathalie Babel]The campaign began in May 1920 and by September of that year, the soldiers still alive were straggling back in failure. The stories were first published in magazines throughout the 1920s before being collected for a volume in 1926. They grew out of a “1920 Diary” in which Babel recorded his “firm Socialist convictions, his sensitivity, his horror at the marauding ways of his Cossack companions, his ambiguous fascination with ‘the West and chivalrous Poland,’ his equivocal stance toward Judaism, with feelings that fluctuate between distaste and tenderness toward the Volhynian Jews, ‘the former (Ukrainian) Yids.’” [--Nathalie Babel]By publishing his stories throughout the 1920s in magazines, Babel kept the disastrous military campaign in the public eye. Dangerously for him, Babel often used the real names of commanders, including Budyonny, who was destined to become a Marshal of the Soviet Union, despite his uninspiring leadership in the field so hilariously portrayed by Babel. In 1926 Babel responded to criticism that he used real names to document the absurdist atrocities committed. I give you a short version of one of his last for the Calvarymen series: A Letter to the Editor Strange as it may seem, when I was reading the stories I began to feel a connection with the way we produce humorous TV serials today. Babel’s voice is so unique, hilarious, and humane that he would have been a huge success in Hollywood. The campaign against Poland and Ukraine was a painful reminder of the limits of coercion, and Babel created characters that live in our imaginations and gave them speaking roles that highlight his taste for the absurd. Imagine my delight, then, to discover that Babel also wrote screenplays, which are included at the end of this collection. Films in the 1920s were silent films. Babel apparently wrote a screenplay version of his Red Calvary story “Salt,” which was made into a movie in 1925, directed by Pyotr Chardynin and produced by the Ukrainian State Film Company. Babel also wrote subtitles for and screenplays based on the work of others. In 1926 the silent movie “Roaming Stars,” loosely based on Shalom Aleichem’s novel of the same name, Babel wrote the screenplay and subtitles, transforming King Lear’s daughters: Part Two In Babel’s screenplays, actors do not even have to speak to be funny. Babel pokes fun at everything, everyone. This play does not have a happy ending, however, the fact of which has parallels with Babel’s other work. After his success with the Red Cavlary stories, Babel traveled, wrote stories, and published dispatches from the field: Georgia (1922-24), and France (1935). In one dispatch from Georgia, Babel muses about ‘Muslim Seminaries and Soviet Schools:’ "Influencing a person’s soul requires vision and circumspection. Under the difficult conditions of the East, these qualities must be multiplied by ten and pushed to the limit…[The Mensheviks] imported the guileless ardor of shortsighted national chauvinism into the tottering kingdom of the Ajarian Mullah. The results were not surprising…Mistrust has been fanned in the Muslim peasants, and passions burst into flame…the Menshevik school…undermined the authorities of its founders but also gnawed away at the basic foundations of the culture…" Russians have always known the power of the written word. Babel was exceptional in his understanding, his honesty, and his skill. He does more with a handful of Cyrillic characters and two pages than most people can manage in a book-length novel. He was dangerous. He is still dangerous to those who think they can’t be seen to make mistakes. Sorry for all the extensive quotes, but Babel writes better than I do. Here is an interview with the amazing Peter Constantine. And thanks to Sam Lipsyte for bringing me to this place. I never did find that reference to “my girls.” ...more |
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Jun 23, 2015
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Jun 23, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 0062282719
| 9780062282712
| 0062282719
| 3.93
| 114,306
| Aug 05, 2014
| Aug 05, 2014
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liked it
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I don’t exactly recall when I first came upon the name of Roxane Gay, but it may have been when I was looking over the book made from blogposts by the
I don’t exactly recall when I first came upon the name of Roxane Gay, but it may have been when I was looking over the book made from blogposts by the essayist and thinker Rebecca Solnit, called Men Explain Things to Me. A critic of that book mentioned Gay and then I came across her name a couple more times in different contexts in quick succession. Intrigued by the opportunity to hear a literate black woman’s take on popular culture, and having recently been made especially aware of my lack of overlap, knowledge of, and understanding of the lives of black citizens in the United States, I ordered this book. I am keenly aware, too, that one literate black woman, articulate though she might be, is simply that: one literate black woman and not the voice of a generation, a culture, or a sex. Gay’s writing reflects the contradictions and confusion of a real person. That may be her appeal, and her strength. Gay is almost unfiltered, giving herself permission to be humorless about rape, slavery, use of the ‘N’ word. Her opinions on everything from reality television to unlikeable central characters in novels and movies add to a fruitful debate about what really informs our culture. She thinks, and takes the time to tell us what she thinks. She has permission to change her thinking—would relish it, I trust—if someone had a better, more convincing, more nuanced argument. Best of all, I liked the short blogposts at the end of this book in the section called “Politics, Gender & Race.” In these, Gay discusses “The Racism We All Carry,” acknowledging we all have beliefs formed on impressions of race. In “A Tale of Two Profiles,” Gay compares the investigative reporting of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, with that of Trayvon Martin, the black teen murdered in Florida. She asks if it is queer that in-depth “looking for the good” reportage had been done for Tsarnaev while “looking for bad” had been done for Martin. In “The Alienable Rights of Women,” Gay explains again to those that “still don’t get it” that the burdens of reproduction fall on the woman in the pair, and therefore she should have some say in how it all comes down. Finally, in “The Politics of Respectability,” Gay insists we stop pointing to the exceptions who have managed to penetrate the color bar but look at the teeming masses who are having trouble making that leap from the lowest level to the highest. Gay’s pronouncements on matters of culture do not have the stamp or weight of convention. She does not constrain herself to write only about the best literature, the finest examples of music or TV, or what will become our classics in film. She talks about what is spilling out of media machines every day…those things we actually watch, or wade through helplessly to find “the good stuff.” For this reason I sometimes found the arguments aimed elsewhere, at an audience with whom I share a world but not a culture. I have a limited appetite for arguments about the relative merits of reality television shows, though I can see how this may inform some. Opinionated bloggers, myself included, are sometimes best in small doses, when they can prick the conscience by criticizing (both good and bad) things they see, thus arming readers with support for their own views or by challenging long-held but not sufficiently-examined positions. I applaud Roxane Gay for thinking and writing and know she is learning as much as we are by taking the time to do it out loud. Brava! ----------- a year or two later P.S. Listened to a podcast of her talking to Phoebe Robinson and I realized exactly what I didn't like about this book. She has a sense of expectation that is hard to take. Let me get this right: "I don't mind the responsibility of people looking up to me...But you don't know me." Yep. ...more |
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Apr 10, 2015
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Apr 17, 2015
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Jan 30, 2015
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Paperback
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| 1608463869
| 9781608463862
| 1608463869
| 3.83
| 79,743
| Apr 14, 2014
| May 20, 2014
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really liked it
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I liked the title of this and truthfully I thought it would be Solnit relating or interpreting the difference in how men and women approach an issue,
I liked the title of this and truthfully I thought it would be Solnit relating or interpreting the difference in how men and women approach an issue, a problem, a situation. I can always use that, tone-deaf as I tend to be, as I have taught myself to be. I am curious about how men think, but that is all. I don't weight it differently...or at least I hope I don't weight it less than my own view. This short book of essays or blogposts is rather thoughts from a female point of view which I am already most familiar with, and I applaud Solnit for clarity and wit, and in the later essays, a certain depth of understanding. In the first, eponymous essay Solnit tells us of something all of us (those of any race, creed or sex) may have experienced before when someone to whom we are speaking underestimates (or misunderestimates, as George W. would say) their conversational partner, raving on about something about which they know only a little and about which we may know quite a lot. It sometimes happens to women in the company of men, but it also happens to men which is perhaps why this essay feels so pertinent and fresh to all that encounter it. Solnit's other essays on how women function, or do not function, in the world are well-argued and instructive, and her extension from that to other injustices we create in our world, i.e., wage inequities, the fear of damage from nuclear reactors or weapons, inequitable marriage laws, make a certain sense. I especially liked her look at the case of the IMF's Dominique Strauss-Kahn since I haven't heard anyone else's take on that since it happened. What a ridiculous example that was of overweening self-regard and lack of fear of prosecution. He didn't, in the end, get away with it but it was a close-run thing. As sometimes happens in the nature of things, this book came to me at the same time I was introduced to some thinking by Hannah Arendt as a result of the 2013 Margarethe von Trotta film in her name. Arendt is a writer of such depth, eloquence, and profundity that Solnit comes off as fledgling. But I think Arendt would say Solnit is on the right track, and would celebrate and encourage, and perhaps even use her ideas, as Solnit says Sontag did, as the starting point for deep discussion. She mentions the website TomDispatch.com for giving several of her essays wide circulation. Looking at that site it looks like a hotbed of political dissent and discussion, and a useful spur to creative disagreement. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 22, 2014
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Nov 24, 2014
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Nov 22, 2014
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| 3.73
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really liked it
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Oct 14, 2019
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Oct 06, 2019
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| 4.04
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liked it
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Apr 02, 2018
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Mar 30, 2018
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| 4.33
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really liked it
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Apr 06, 2018
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Mar 06, 2018
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| 3.92
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really liked it
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Mar 03, 2018
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Feb 21, 2018
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| 3.33
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it was amazing
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Mar 20, 2018
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Feb 16, 2018
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| 3.99
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it was amazing
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Feb 16, 2018
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Feb 02, 2018
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| 3.82
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it was amazing
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May 27, 2018
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Jan 31, 2018
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| 3.80
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really liked it
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not set
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Dec 10, 2017
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| 3.89
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really liked it
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Feb 10, 2018
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Dec 06, 2017
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| 3.15
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it was amazing
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Dec 05, 2017
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Nov 30, 2017
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| 3.72
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it was amazing
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May 22, 2017
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Apr 11, 2017
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| 3.93
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really liked it
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Apr 08, 2016
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Apr 03, 2016
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| 3.94
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it was amazing
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Mar 04, 2016
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Feb 20, 2016
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| 3.96
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liked it
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Feb 15, 2016
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Jan 25, 2016
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| 3.99
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liked it
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Jan 24, 2016
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Dec 25, 2015
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| 4.11
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it was amazing
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Nov 06, 2015
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Oct 17, 2015
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| 3.63
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it was amazing
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Jul 13, 2015
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Jul 04, 2015
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| 4.36
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it was amazing
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Jun 23, 2015
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Jun 23, 2015
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| 3.93
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liked it
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Apr 17, 2015
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Jan 30, 2015
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| 3.83
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really liked it
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Nov 24, 2014
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Nov 22, 2014
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