Sunday, September 19, 2004

Posted here Sunday, September 19, 2004 at 9:50:36 AM     Books in the NYT this morning. The place of nature http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html But as magnificent and successful as they are, there is something wrong with the peregrine. That's why Tennant is in that old airplane, a guest of the Army Chemical Corps, which is trying to figure out where these falcons go when they migrate. The Army wants to know because in the tissue and bones of these tough little birds resides the residue of the millions of gallons of pesticides that keep American farms productive. Falcons are at the top of their food chain, which means they eat creatures that eat the insects that ingest the deadly chemicals. This accumulation of poisons has brought the peregrine to the brink of extinction. The Army studies the falcons not because it loves them, but because it hopes to figure out what is going to happen to them, and by extension to us, and to prepare for the worst. and from Joce Carol Oates OYCE CAROL OATES'S gravely ambitious new novel is set at Niagara Falls, and you practically need a rain slicker to read it. As usual, Oates pours out her story in great cascading sheets of prose in which words, sentences, paragraphs, even chapters often seem as insignificant individually as drops of water in the massive falls, their only function to contribute, by sheer volume, to the persistent fine spray of actions, perceptions and metaphors that is this writer's idea of a novel, and to the constant dull roar of Meaning that ''The Falls,'' like all her fiction, aims to generate.   Her method, that is to say, has always been to overwhelm, to awe, to wear her readers down with the relentless pounding of her sensibility. But enough. Niagara Falls is such an apt metaphor for Joyce Carol Oates's force-of-nature aesthetic that the temptation to elaborate it further is nearly irresistible. In that direction, however, lies madness -- which, according to one of the book's epigraphs, attributed to a Dr. Moses Blaine, happens to be a possible consequence of allowing oneself to linger too long in the mysterious presence of the falls. Writing a hundred years or so ago, Dr. Blaine identified ''an uncanny effect called the hydracropsychic,'' a ''morbid condition'' that has been known to ''render even the will of the active, robust man in the prime of life temporarily invalid, as if under the spell of a malevolent hypnotist,'' with the result, in the direst cases, that ''the unfortunate victim throws himself to his doom if he is not prevented.'' ********

	Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Posted here Tuesday, August 24, 2004 at 8:44:10 AM     Another must read.. http://www.logosjournal.com/west.htm an analysis of the needs of real democracy now. excerpt.. Democracy matters are frightening in our time precisely because the three dominant dogmas of free-market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism are snuffing out the democratic impulses that are so vital for the deepening and spread of democracy in the world. In short, we are experiencing the sad American imperial devouring of American democracy. This historic devouring in our time constitutes an unprecedented gangsterization of America—an unbridled grasp at power, wealth, and status. And when the most powerful forces in a society—and an empire—promote a suffocation of democratic energies, the very future of genuine democracy is jeopardized. And as for solutions   No democracy can flourish against the corruptions of plutocratic, imperial forces—or withstand the temptations of militarism in the face of terrorist hate—without a citizenry girded by these three moral pillars of Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope. ********

	Sunday, June 27, 2004

Posted here Sunday, June 27, 2004 at 5:28:44 PM     Timothy Garton Ash Americans can still do these good things in the world, but they don't have unlimited time. As time goes by, the power of the United States will fade. As time goes by, Americans will be less and less able to shape the world around them. We cannot know how long this time will be, but it may be no more than 20 years. In those 20 years, however, Americans have a historic chance, working with Europeans, to lay the foundations of a free world. from http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1234540,00.html   he is writing a book called free world published jluy 1 by penguin, he wants to organize the civilized internationalsits around the world. He estimates them at 1 billion people. An interview audio is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_aod.shtml?nightwaves_fri for a week ********

Posted here Sunday, June 27, 2004 at 5:11:09 PM     I've been reading Infidels: the conflict between Christendom and Islam 638-2002. The deep message is that jews, arabs, chiristians, reviled each other, borrowed slogans from each other, methods of fighting from each other, and remained irreconcilable. Economic pressures and slogans and fear make a bad combination. The slogans gain their energy by putting categories of defilement under religious ategories and this leading to violence and war to protect us from them. We all know this, but the depth and horror of it leaves me wilted. a review from the guardian http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,6121,1221931,00.html ********

	Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Posted here Wednesday, June 23, 2004 at 11:00:29 PM     Larry McMurtry reviews Clinton's book. At last an adequate review. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/books/review/0623books-mcmurtry-clinton.html illiam Jefferson Clinton's "My Life" is, by a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography - no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States for eight years. Clinton had the good sense to couple great smarts with a solid education; he arrived in Washington in 1964 and has been the nation's - or perhaps the world's - No. 1 politics junkie ever since. And he can write - as Reagan, Ford, Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, to go no farther back, could not. ********

	Thursday, June 10, 2004

Posted here Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 9:16:23 PM     Ancient education - how did it work? Here is Erasmus getting ready to tell us about Folly http://www.ccel.org/e/erasmus/folly/folly.html But I would have them whom the lightness or foolery of the argument may offend to consider that mine is not the first of this kind, but the same thing that has been often practiced even by great authors:  when Homer, so many ages since, did the like with the battle of frogs and mice; Virgil, with the gnat and puddings; Ovid, with the nut; when Polycrates and his corrector Isocrates extolled tyranny; Glauco, injustice; Favorinus, deformity and the quartan ague; Synescius, baldness; Lucian, the fly and flattery; when Seneca made such sport with Claudius’ canonizations; Plutarch, with his dialogue between Ulysses and Gryllus; Lucian and Apuleius, with the ass; and some other, I know not who, with the hog that made his last will and testament, of which also even St. Jerome makes mention. How did he learn so much, what way of taking notes, of remembering?   ********

	Friday, June 04, 2004

Posted here Friday, June 04, 2004 at 10:28:39 AM     First report.. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/04/national/04clinton.html Clinton, on the Road Again, Stumps for a Book, Not a Seat By STEPHEN KINZER HICAGO, June 3 - Bill Clinton is back. The former president kicked off his first book tour on Thursday with a wide-ranging speech here that touched on his great-uncle Buddy, the National Rifle Association, William Butler Yeats and political attacks "that would have blistered the hair off a dog's back." Mr. Clinton spoke to a hall packed with more than 2,000 booksellers just weeks before the release of his memoir, "My Life," which is to be delivered to bookstores on June 22. Sonny Mehta, editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf, which is publishing the book, said the first printing would be 1.5 million copies. Mr. Mehta called the book "the fullest and most nuanced account of a presidency ever written" and promised that "our author is going to work enthusiastically to assure its success." If the Chicago speech was any indication, Americans are in for another round of Mr. Clinton's storytelling, homespun philosophy and political insights. But Bush-bashers may be disappointed. Mr. Clinton was remarkably conciliatory toward the Bush administration, portraying it as trying to find a new political paradigm in a swiftly changing world and gently chiding those who are horrified by the nation's course. "You shouldn't worry about this," he said. "What's going on has happened before in America, and it should be no particular cause for concern to you." The closest he came to criticizing President Bush was when he asserted, "Politics is not religion, and we should govern on the basis of evidence, not theology." That line won the biggest applause of the evening, some of it evidently coming from listeners who were disappointed that he did not take a more critical tone. Mr. Clinton said he had written his book in longhand, filling about 20 notebooks. He said his editor, Robert Gottlieb, had considerably influenced its contents, at one point telling him he could not write at length about his favorite movie, "High Noon," and at another point asking him, "Did you know any sane people as a child?" Although he spoke warmly about old political rivals like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich, Mr. Clinton did show a flash of anger when he mentioned Kenneth W. Starr, the special prosecutor who investigated him. He said that while writing about his confrontation with Mr. Starr, he had to take a four-hour break to calm himself. "I don't spare myself in this book," he was quick to add. "I take on a lot of water for not just the personal but the political mistakes I made." Mr. Clinton said his book told two sets of stories. "You could almost look at it as two books," he said. "The first is the story of my life and the story of America and how my life interwove with America's story." This part, he said, deals with his rural upbringing and political coming of age, with special focus on the 1960's. "If you look back on the 60's and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat," he suggested. "If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican." The second part of the book, Mr. Clinton said, is "almost like a diary of the presidency." He said there was "a lot of policy in it, some will say too much." "I tell the story as it happened to me," he said. "I want people to understand what it was like to be president." Once notorious for his lack of discipline, Mr. Clinton did something he said Mr. Mehta had told him not to do: tell stories from his book. Most were from his childhood, including one about a fat and unattractive schoolteacher who told his students that he began every day by looking in the mirror and telling himself, "Vernon, you're beautiful." He joked that some of the Arkansas characters he describes might have come from a novel by Gabriel García Márquez. "There's a lot of personal stuff, even in the White House years," he said. "I try to tell how this little story is part of America's big story." Mr. Clinton said his book concluded with reflections on "how I think my philosophy should operate in the post-9/11 world." "A lot of presidential memoirs are dull and self-serving," he said. "I hope mine is interesting and self-serving." ********

	Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Posted here Wednesday, June 02, 2004 at 10:29:56 AM     Frm Brad deLong, finding a review by Keynes of Trotsky. Quoting Keynes, http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001717.html He assumes that the moral and intellectual problems of the transformation of Society have been already solved--that a plan exists, and that nothing remains except to put it into operation. He assumes further that Society is divided into two parts the proletariat who are converted to the plan, and the rest who for purely selfish reasons oppose it. He does not understand that no plan could win until it had first convinced many people, and that, if there really were a plan, it would draw support from many different quarters. He is so much occupied with means that he forgets to tell us what it is all for." ********