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book reviews, mostly, but also Critical
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screen. If you're besotted by books, this may be the place for you.
The navigation links are over there on the far left. We're not finicky about
how we post stuff on his home page, so fresh material sometimes is in the
lower section.
Unemployment is heading toward 10 percent and predicted to
blow past that number before the year is out. (If you add in the
under-employed and those who got so discouraged that they didn't look for
work last month, you get up around 16 or 17 percent unemployment.) Meanwhile, ten big banks are
eagerly
paying back the money that taxpayers have loaned them. They’re eager to pay
back the loans so that they can get out from under government oversight and
be free once again to pay scandalously huge salaries. They say they need to
pay the puffed-up salaries to prevent those money managers from being lured
away by other banks or financial institutions. Those are the same brilliant
money managers who brought down the banks in the first place. Approximately
467,000 ordinary workers lost their jobs last month, and at the same time
wages for those who are still employed sank. The economic house has been
knocked to pieces and a total of 14.7 million innocent people have had the roof
collapse on their heads. Meanwhile, the guys blindly swinging the wrecking
ball get paid more and more. The figures quoted in this piece are right, but
there’s definitely something wrong here.
Lust is all the rage these days. At least that’s the way
it seems with so many high profile figures giving way to it. The
most
recent participant is, of course, Governor Sanford of South Carolina, the
family-values politician who, on Father’s Day weekend, deserted his family
and the whole State of South Carolina in order to rendezvous with his
Argentinean love. Well, those things happen.
Lust has its place in the list of the Seven Deadly Sins, but it’s not high
on the list. In fact, Lust is the least deadly. For you young,
happy-go-lucky souls who have forgotten, or never knew, the Seven Deadly
Sins are Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony and Lust. (And, for you
ancients who still recall a little Latin – Superbia, Invidia, Ira, Desidia,
Avaritia, Gula, and Luxuria. Reciting these sins in Latin gives them their
proper gravitas.) Whether in English or Latin, Lust comes at the very bottom
of the list, the least deadly of those sins. Keep in mind that being the
“least deadly” sin doesn’t mean it’s a virtue.
Click on the image to get a bigger view. And
click here to continue this odd but informative essay.
For an absolutely absorbing summer read which takes you
to distant places among incredibly diverse people yet at the same time makes
you think about today’s most serious philosophical,
social,
and economic problems, you can’t do better than Water Touching Stone.
Eliot Pattison’s new mystery again features Shan Tao Yun, the Chinese
investigator he introduced in The Skull Mantra. The scene is
Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province, a place nearly impenetrable to
foreigners because of nuclear missile installations and China’s ongoing
conflicts with the region’s native people, Uighurs, Kazakhs, and refugee
Tibetans. The new setting lets us experience desert sandstorms as well as
mountain gales, examine ancient underground irrigation systems as well as
huge secret cave paintings. We get 2500-year-old mummies, fascinating
artifacts, contemporary smuggling, and even a last roundup of horses.
Pattison does a superb job of dramatizing how helicopters have transformed
the old cat-and-mouse game between authorities and dissidents, much to the
advantage of the cats. The is a fantastic evocation of place, a complex,
exciting, multifaceted story, and a fascinating meditation on how the modern
world best destroys old cultures.
To see our review of Water Touching Stone,
click
here.
And for The Skull Mantra,
click here.
The author tells us that The Shadow of the
Sun isn’t "a book about Africa, but rather
about some people there—about encounters with them, and time spent
together." Well, that statement is overly modest.
The
Shadow of the Sun may be an impressionistic memoir, but it’s based on
half a century’s dense experience, and the author skillfully uses particular
events to illustrate larger issues. He makes a very humble but agonizingly
sincere attempt to capture the experience of radical difference, of living
in a place that is absolutely not Europe and among a highly diverse group of
people whose worldviews are utterly unfamiliar to Europeans. Implicit in
this exercise is his belief that the rest of the world cannot engage
fruitfully with Africa unless people come to have some understanding of what
Africa is and who its people are. This book is utterly compelling reading.
Kapuscinski’s broad analysis sand his passionate commitment to ordinary
people who just want to live peaceful lives is palpable. Check out our
review of
The Shadow of the Sun.
So the sad old man got 150 years. Bernard Madoff
may have defrauded his victims of around 65 billion dollars. That
figure
is uncertain — it's based on what the investors
thought they had in the fund when, of course, their money had not been
invested and was not growing. But if we take the 65 billion dollar amount
and divide it by 150 years, we can say that Madoff's jail time means he's
spending only one day in jail for every $1,203,703.70 that he stole. If he
actually stole less, each day in jail is worth less. Of course, a 150 year
sentence given to a man of 71 is the same as a life sentence. None of these
calculations will solace the thousands who were defrauded.
The original Ponzi scheme was concocted by flamboyant scam
artist Charles Ponzi in 1920 in Boston. A cheerful liar, Ponzi guaranteed
his
clients
a 50% profit in 45 days, or 100% profit in 90 days. To make it sound
plausible, he claimed he was doing a type of arbitrage with international
postage cupons, but there was no arbitrage, no infestments. He was simply
taking the money for himself and paying off his first dupes with money from
new dupes. The fraud is an old one and was practiced by scam artists long
before Ponzi, but his was so spectacular that his name became attached to
the scheme.
In Boston, people crowded into his office and lines of
hopeful investors gathered in the street outside. Boston's newspapers
reported the wonderous results of an investment in Ponzi's Securities
Exchange Company. Even though people knew that such returns were so
remarkable as to be, in fact, impossible, they kept coming until the
authorities closed in and scheme collapsed. The affair didn't last long and
most of the defrauded, at least at the beginning, had relatively little
money to invest. It's anyone's guess as to how much the dapper
get-rich-quick Ponzi took in -- somewhere between a few million and several
million in current dollars.
The big question today is how did Madoff’s gigantic scam go
unnoticed for so many years by the guardians of our investments. John Coffee
of Columbia University has suggested a relatively easy way for the
government to prevent Ponzi schemes. For a brief paragraph on that proposal,
click here.
If forgetting people’s names and habitually losing your car keys
has you scarfing down Gingko biloba to stimulate your
memory,
this book is definitely for you. First, it’s very reassuring.
Author Daniel Schacter is identified on the book’s cover as Chair of Harvard
University’s Department of Psychology, so you’re in the hands of a certified
expert, right? But more to the point, the author immediately announces that
none of the seven major categories of memory failure are the least unusual.
They happen all the time every day to everyone. Even young people, with lots
of blood pumping through their shiny new brains, suffer from all of them. If
healthy older people tend to endure certain kinds of memory loss or make
certain kinds of memory mistake, it’s sometimes because they have such rich
general memory banks.
You can read more about this fascinating and rather reassuring book in
Margaret Black's review of
The
Seven Sins of Memory.
"I'm opposed to a government option. Listen, if you like
going to the DMV, and you think they do a great job, or if you like going to
the post office and think it's the most efficient thing you have run into,
then you will love the government-run health care system that they're
proposing,
because
that's basically what you're going to have." - U.S.
Representative John Boehner, R-Ohio
While most of us find the US health care system inadequate, too
expensive and clearly in need of an overhaul, Representative John Boehner
complains about the Department of Motor Vehicles. Maybe that's a big problem
in his home state. But registering automobiles or drivers' licenses isn't
the job of the federal government.
As for the post office, what's Representative Boehner's problem?
The postal service handles millions upon millions of letters and certainly
does as good a job as any private courier company. By the way, you'll notice
that the existence of the United States Postal Service has not prevented
private capitalistic enterprises such as FedEx or UPS from making money.
John Boehner is Leader of the House Republicans and has been in the
Congress for over 18 years. If the government is doing a lousy job of
running things he's one of the people to blame. And if he thinks that
private-for-profit business always do a better job than his own government,
he ought to look around at the banking industry or the automobile industry
or the brokerage business or health insurance companies.
The vast majority of economists recognize the US stimulus plan as a
way to salvage our capitalist economy, but Representative Boehner has called
it "one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment." Decent
people can differ on lots of things, but that remark is a real puzzler.
In this “romance of souls,” the author’s effortlessly
inventive imagination explores the complicated life of two
young
people, both of whom have multiple personalities. The hero, usually under
the persona of Andrew Gage, is a kind, decent, and engaging young man.
Before the book opens, Andrew’s “father,” Aaron, has identified the many
personalities of the original Andy Gage, long since “murdered” by an abusive
stepfather. Aaron has introduced the different souls to each other and built
them an imaginary house by a lake where they now live more or less
cooperatively.
All this is fascinating and marvelously funny at times. Instead of groaning
in soggy clinical victimhood, the many souls of Andy Gage have transformed
themselves into an entertaining family of dramatic characters. Getting up in
the morning, for example, takes forever because it’s the one time of the day
when Andrew always gives the others a chance to use the body: Jake loves to
brush teeth, Seferis has an intense exercise regime, Aunt Sam and Adam
quarrel over the shower, Aaron dearly loves a good shit. Andrew’s landlady,
Mrs. Winslow, provides multiple tiny breakfasts to satisfy everyone’s
preferences (Adam: one-half an English muffin plus a bacon strip; Jake: a
small bowl of Cheerios and some orange juice; Seferis: only salted
radishes).
To read our review of this odd, but immensely satisfying imaginative tale
just Click
here.
The good news is that some of the banks that received taxpayer
bailout money are now repaying it. The bad news is the same thing.
The good news is that ten big banks will now pay
us
back $68.3 billion – that’s more than a quarter of the bailout money that
the nation’s banks have received since October. And we get the accumulated
interest on that money, too. The bad news is that by returning the money the
banks are now free to go back to the bad habits that bankrupted them in the
first place and nearly ruined the country’s entire financial system. Indeed,
bankers are openly gleeful at the prospect of once again paying their top
executives obscenely high salaries and perks. The ten banks returning those
funds are not in robust health – in fact they still have the
shelter of certain government guarantees – but they are eager to be free of
the taxpayer oversight that came with those bailout funds. If you're having
a bad day, we suggest you look at the good news and forget the rest.
(The image of the greedy fellow with his bag of gold coins comes from the amazing murals painted at Dartmouth
College in New Hampshire by the Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco. If
you're ever over by the college, stop in and take a look. They're truly
spectacular.)
It’s easy to forget that President Jimmy Carter tried but failed
to get a national health program, even though Democrats controlled both
Houses of Congress. Sixteen years later,
President
Bill Clinton waltzed into the Oval Office with a Democratic majority in both
Houses and put his wife in charge of creating a health care program.
Opponents of the plan demolished and derided it so thoroughly that the idea
of government sponsored health care was never mentioned again. Until now.
Now it’s déjà vu all over again! But wait, President Obama says it’s
different this time. He’s invited all sorts of people to come to the health
care bargaining table. And he was especially happy to welcome Karen Ignagni
of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the group that ran the misleading
“Harry and Louise” advertisements that helped destroy the Clinton plan.
Obama said he knew things were different when Karen told him, "We want to
work with you.”
Isn’t that what the fox says to the chickens? To find out what's going on in
Congress and what's happening to your health plan, read Gene Mirabelli's
brief but pointed
Congress Does Health Care.
If you've been reading these pieces, your eyes
may need a rest and your brain definitely needs to be refreshed. So
take a look at those irises. And take a lesson from them: like the lilies of
the field, they don't work a damn, they just enjoy the sun and the rain
equally, and they look great.
Cigarette packs are going to have new labels saying what toxins
are actually in the cigarette. For the first time
ever
the Food and Drug Administration will be able to reduce nicotine content and
control the chemicals in cigarette smoke. The first damning report on the
lethal effects of smoking tobacco came out in 1964, but the people who make
money growing tobacco or making cigarettes have succeeded in blocking the
FDA from acquiring this power until now. During those intervening years an
uncountable number of people have died prematurely of lung cancer, heart
disease and other pathologies created by cigarette smoke.
And
here's an interesting note. A few days ago a federal judge
sentenced a provider of medical marijuana in California to a year in prison.
California is one of thirteen states that permit the sale of medical
marijuana but, as you probably know, the federal government forbids such
sales, no matter how great the suffering of the afflicted patient. The
provider had sold the marijuana to an underage twenty-one year old.
According to the New York Times, "the judge talked at length about what he
said were Mr. Lynch’s many efforts to follow California’s laws on marijuana
dispensaries and the difficulty the judge had finding a loophole to avoid
sending him to prison." Indeed, the judge had reduced the sentence from a
mandatory five years. The full story is at the
New York Times site.
Penalties for selling tobacco cigarettes to minors vary from state to state,
and range from a minimum of zero dollars to a high of $2,500. Nowhere do you
end up in prison for that offense. (You can check these figures at
healthpolicyguide.org.)
Thirteen-year-old Caroline and her father live off the grid
in a gigantic nature preserve north of Portland, Oregon.
They're
eventually discovered and separated from each other. But tests show Caroline
to be extraordinarily healthy, intelligent, and unharmed sexually, so they
are allowed to live together again, now on a horse farm. But the pair
disappear from the ranch, and this time they are not found.
The novel thus far reflects a true story that attracted
author Peter Rock's attention. With their escape from the ranch, the novel
takes a harder edge, for the father’s competence rapidly dissolves in his
growing paranoia. While Caroline ultimately makes some accommodation to
society, even at the end she still keeps to the edges, carefully rationing
her connections with other people. My Abandonment is fascinating to
read and, for the most part, to believe.
Click here
for our review.
The Service of Clouds, tells a story that takes
place in the famous Blue Mountains just west of Sydney, Australia. Into this
spectacular setting comes the photographer
Harry
Kitchings, a mystic who seeks to capture the face of God in pictures he
takes of the region's amazing cloud formations. Kitchings literally appears
out of thin air over a cliff in front of our astonished young narrator,
Eureka Jones, who falls instantly in love with the man, his vision, and
photography. The year is 1907, and in the health spa town of Katoomba it
was, Eureka notes, "a romantic year. Men carried thermometers and dreamed of
women struck by lightning. Postmen hauled packets filled with love and human
hair. Women carried notebooks and pressed storms in them like flowers."
I'm delighted that Farrar, Straus and Giroux saw fit to publish this unusual
book, and I hope Falconer fulfills its promise in future novels. But it
saddens me to realize that much of the truly interesting new literary
fiction I've been reading comes from abroad. I suspect that most American
publishers would not have given this novel even a second reading, let alone
publication, had it come from some unknown American writer. Check out our
review of
The
Service of Clouds
Worried about the recent flu epidemic? Read this! With
Gina Kolata's Flu, all us closet hypochondriacs get two, quite
different but equally gripping, well-written
medical
tales for the price of one. The first story describes ten ghastly months in
1918-19 when an extraordinarily lethal strain of influenza swept the globe;
the second recounts the stumbling detective work involved in finding and
understanding the cause.
The 1918 flu infected well over a quarter of all Americans, unexpectedly
exterminating healthy, young adults in preference to small children or the
very old. More died of the flu than were killed in all our twentieth-century
wars -- World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. Coffins were stacked on
streetcars in Philadelphia, steamshovels dug mass graves, small towns were
emptied. World wide, the disease not only cut down the troops huddled in
French trenches, it stalked every continent, reaching from Arctic villages
to Samoan beaches. Over 100 million people died. Even the horrific Black
Death, the archetypal plague of European history, did not destroy at this
rate. Phenomenally contagious, this virulent strain of a commonplace
infection failed to kill even more because in 1919 it simply disappeared.
Click here for our
review of Flu
“Surgical air strikes.” That’s a phrase that’s
often used to describe air strikes by manned US planes with technologically
complex bombs, and US drones firing Hellfire missiles.
Generally,
the phrase reveals how little some people know about surgery and warfare.
First of all, surgery is an uncertain business with an uncertain
outcome, not infrequently accompanied by unintended consequences. And
second, an air strike’s primary goal is to smash things to pieces, and
smashing things, whether they’re buildings or people, is a very messy
business. Civilians are almost invariably wounded, abruptly amputated or
killed during many “surgical air strikes.” That’s what happens when you wage
war, whether it’s the Sri Lankan military battling Tamil military, Israeli
military battling Hamas military in Gaza, Pakistani military battling
Taliban military in the Swat valley, or US military in Afghanistan. These
words aren’t intended as a plea for pacifism. They’re simply a reminder of
what happens when you wage war.
Our maps display a nice clear line between Afghanistan and
Pakistan, but a map isn't the same thing as
the
place it refers to and the borderland between those two nations isn't at all
clear. What is becoming clear is that we can't keep our war in Afghanistan
separate and distinct from our alliance with Pakistan. The whole thing is a
confusing mess. Fortunately, Jack Slack can shine some light on the matter.
Jack's been interested in that part of the world ever since he was a kid
reading Kipling. He knows what's happened to empires engaged in fighting the
durable inhabitants of that hard mountainous region.
Click here to read Jack Slack on Problematic Pakistan.
Andrea
Barrett's short story collection, Servants of the Map,
contains six inward-focused stories that deal with subtle, persistent, and
sometimes wrenching loss, which leads, in turn, to transformative discovery
and new life. The author’s delineation of passion and desire is brilliantly
realized, and nowhere more compellingly than when her characters recognize
and fulfill their intellectual obsessions. For Barrett, intelligence plays a
role as seductive and alluring as the softest skin or hardest muscle.
Barrett can make the mind passionately visceral and the body a cool thought
projection. She is altogether a marvelous writer.
Click this
line to read Margatet Black's review.
Peter Orner’s The Second Coming of Mavala
Shikongo is billed as a
novel,
but it’s not. It’s a brilliantly evocative sketchbook that captures
not a story, but a time, certain people, and, most importantly, a place. The
time is 1991, when Namibia has just won their war against South Africa. The
people inhabit a minuscule Catholic primary school. And the place—the book’s
main character—is central Namibia, a desperately arid plateau utterly
desiccated by drought. Insofar as The Second Coming contains a plot, it
assembles around Larry Kaplanski, a young American who comes to teach at an
isolated rural school for boys called Farm Goas. The chapters are short—some
no more than one or two sentences, the writing terse, allusive, ironic. Most
of the book is perceived from Larry’s point of view, but others speak, and
there are a few old documents, such as the Germans’ 1904 order to the native
Herero people to leave their land or die (over 80 percent were killed). This
book is far richer and more cumulative than it appears at the start. A
curious and fascinating read. See our review of
The Second
Coming.
Mark Kurlansky knows the worth of salt, however mundane
and unromantic it seems, and has chosen to construct his latest microhistory
around it. Some years ago he selected a similarly
unprepossessing
fish to swim at the heart of his widely acclaimed Cod, and that
book turned out to be one of the most intriguing and entertaining little
histories to appear in the 20th century. In Salt, Kurlansky
attempts to replicate the oddball charm of Cod by employing the
same digressive narrative, heavily seasoned with anecdotes, recipes, and
old-fashioned illustrations. Here and there the old Kurlansky bubbles up, as
when he quotes a 17th century recipe for curing salmon which “would still be
good today, assuming a fifteen-year-old boy were available for long periods
of jumping.” But mostly he seems to be fulfilling an assignment. Having said
that, however, it’s nevertheless still true that Salt is a
cornucopia stuffed with all manner of delectable goodies. Check out our
review of Salt.
Recently
the Supreme Court ruled that a convicted inmate has no constitutional right
to a DNA test, even though such a test might prove the inmate
innocent. The conservative majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts,
ruled that "the challenges DNA technology poses to our criminal justice
systems and our traditional notions of finality are better left to elected
officials than federal judges." It's an odd ruling, since the underlying
issue is one of due process and, as a matter of jurisprudence, one of the
jobs of federal judges is to rule on due process.
Meanwhile, the FBI will be collecting DNA samples from
accused persons who have not yet gone to trial. The presumption of innocence
doesn’t matter. Already there are fifteen states that collect DNA from
people awaiting trial and, according to the
Boston Globe, a South Carolina
court ordered a DNA sample to be taken from a man accused of loitering.
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution says, “The right of the people to
be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants
shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and
particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things
to be seized.”
Hooray for the independent journalist. I just watched a
video made about a week ago of a speech by Dahr Jamail, an independent
journalist I've been following since the start of the Iraq war. He reminds
me of my long time friend, Fred Blonder, but from many decades ago when Fred
was Dahr's age.
Dahr
Jamail grew up in Texas of Lebanese heritage, and has written stories for
most of the major progressive publications like The Nation, Mother Jones, NY
Times etc. He's been one of my sources who write from inside Iraq. If you
don't want to devote 41 minutes to watching the speech he gave in a
Dorchester, Maine Unitarian church, ( http://pulsemedia.org/2009/03/14/dahr-jamail-bullet-proof-beemer/ ) let me give you it to you in a nutshell.
Why is our media, even under Obama, still not giving Americans an accurate
picture on the Iraq war?
Here's what's really happening in Iraq. Violence has
been reduced to about a dozen or so killings a week, bombs are still going
off almost every day, unemployment is soaring up to 70%. people are begging
everywhere, Fallujah looks as bad as it did at the end of the siege, over a
million Iraqis are dead from causes directly attributed to the invasion,
there's hardly any potable water, and electricity is about 2 hours a day in
most places.
The Surge is hardly responsible for the decrease in
violence, and even the U.S. military admits the Awakening Councils are the
major reason the violence is down. Who are they? They are the guys we've
previously known as the 100,000 strong, insurgent fighters, mostly Iraqis,
some al Qaeda, who are now on the U.S. payroll. Each fighter gets $300 per
week, and the boss sheiks, mostly gangster "John Giotti types" get weekly
payoffs from the U.S. military, in cash, on pallets stacked with $100
bundles of tightly packed bills. These guys are in the "Construction"
business for "rebuilding" Iraq, but there's no construction anybody can
notice being done.
Jack Slack has more hard facts about Iraq and you can read them by
clicking on
Hooray for the Independent Journalist.
When the great ice sheets retreated, many cold-adapted
animals followed them, closely pursued by Paleolithic human
hunters.
But eventually humans reached places where winter cold was so intense, and
food sources so negligible, that their movement north might have halted, had
it not been for the reindeer (caribou in America). At some point an
extraordinary kind of semi-domestication—more a temporary partnership—took
place. Reindeer travel enormous distances at such speed that the ancients
believed they could fly, a myth kept alive even today with Santa Claus. By
riding certain amenable reindeer and persuading others to draw sledges,
humans could keep up with the ever-moving herds, thereby maintaining ready
access to meat, milk, and the skins necessary for their survival. Reindeer
fur, with its highly evolved hollow hairs, is so insulating that the organs
of a dead reindeer will ferment beneath uncut skin, rather than freeze solid
as it will with other animals.
Thus begins our review of
The
Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia by
Piers Vitebsky. The author brings to vibrant life the challenging
environment of the Arctic and the centuries-old practice of reindeer herding
that the Soviet Union tragically tried to channel into collectivization. A
delightful and informative book. Click on the title to check out Ms. Black's
review
Under pressure from Congress, the Financial Accounting
Standards Board relaxed rules that stipulate that banks have to be honest
when it comes to reporting how much their assets are worth. The old rule
compelled banks to "mark to market" - that is, they had to say how
much
the assets would fetch if they sold them on the market. Alas, a lot of banks
have assets which nobody want to buy, such as the so-called "toxic assets"
connected to mortgage loans. So when they tote up their accounts, the
balance sheet is really unhealthy looking. But now a banker can say what he
thinks the assets would be worth if anybody wanted to buy them. All of a
sudden a banker can erase all those terribly low numbers and write in much
higher ones and—presto!—the
formerly insolvent bank shows a much happier balance sheet. You might try
that yourself. If you have stocks in your portfolio which have sunk 30 or 40
percent, simply write down what you think they'd be worth if buyers returned
to the stock market eager to buy those stocks. Your net worth will
immediately improve. Now go to the bank and try to borrow money against
those re-valued stocks. Prepare to be disappointed. (Hard to believe? Read
the sober account in the
New York Times.)
For you urbanophiles (OK, it's a neologism, all our own)
who love seasons in the city we posted a city street scene
in
winter, but that was months ago. Here it is again, reduced in size but
still looking chilly. The seasons have changed and this web site should too,
so below these lines you'll find the same street scene as it appears on a
rainy spring day. Getting away from your computer monitor and keyboard is
Good For You, even if it means walking down a rainy city street. Of course,
you should book mark this site before leaving. We don't want you floundering
around when you come back, desperately looking for us while you're still
soaking wet from your healthful walk.
Our
photo of a city stree on a rainy spring day is reminiscent (well, sort of
reminiscent) of Caillebotte's painting of a Parisian street on a rainy day.
That painter was interested in dramatic perspectives, and you can see deep
perspectives on display in his Paris Street, Rainy Day -- and in our
photograph, too. Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), who is often grouped with
the Impressionists, was a patron of the arts as well as an artist. He came
from a well-to-do family and could afford to indulge his wide ranging
interests, such as orchid horticulture, stamp collecting, sailboat racing
and ship design. Indeed, he more or less ceased being a painter in his mid
thirties and died in his mid forties. His reputation as a painter has grown
in recent decades, deservedly so, and his works will feed the contemporary
public's apparently insatiable hunger for Impressionist paintings. The Paris
Street, Rainy Day is in the Art Institute of Chicago. Next time you're in
Chicago, stop in and see the real thing. Meanwhile, we're stuck on our own
rainy streets.
The horrible hangover theory of economics has reappeared.
(We're not kidding.) The theory says that a financial binge must be followed
by a head-pounding, vomiting hangover, complete with recession or
depression. In other words, hangover theory views economics as a moral
drama. You can find discussions of this on the Web, but we want you to
re-read F. Scott Fitzgerald instead. He believed in hangover theory, too.
In
1945 New Directions published The Crack-Up, a collection of
articles and other writing by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by his friend
Edmund Wilson. The essays are worth reading at any time, but they have a
special resonance in our current economic collapse. Fitzgerald, best known
as a chronicler of the free-spending 1920s, the Jazz Age, wrote these
articles between 1931 and 1937. In other words, the writer who in many ways
defined the boom, wrote these pieces during the bust.
Fitzgerald was a moralist. One of the great ironies of his career is that he
was, and in large measure still is, regarded as a man who wrote about
beautiful rich people because he loved them and loved the way they lived.
It’s true his novels give us a display of upper-class beauty and wealth, but
they also reveal the dark, corrupting underside of riches. Fitzgerald
himself once said that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability
to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the
ability to function.” His best novels do exactly that.
Read a bit more about F. Scott Fitzgerald. (It's a
very short piece.)
Click here.
Have we mentioned our plot to rid the world of starving writers?
We buy their books! That way the writers get a pittance
royalty from the publisher and can eat better. Have you bought a book
recently? Try your local book store. They have some wonderful books. And if
you don't have a local bookstore (or if it happens to be 2:00 AM and you
suddenly crave a book) try Amazon
Economics isn’t science. Thomas Carlyle called economics
the “dismal science” and the name stuck. But it’s not dismal science. It’s
dismal history.
There
are no labs in the university’s Economics Department. It’s impossible to
concoct economic experiments the way, say, a chemist or a physicist composes
experiments. All the economist can do is look at what’s happening –- or,
more frequently, what’s happened -- in the real world. The deep scientific
name for this economic study is econometrics. The result is a Niagara of
statistics.
That’s why the financial pages in a newspaper resemble the sports pages.
They report what happened yesterday. The sports and financial pages are
filled with indisputable facts (the players, the corporations, the fund
managers, the team managers) and statistical records (strikeouts, defaults,
home runs, completed passes, interceptions, losses, capital flows, earnings
per share, wins and bankruptcies.)
People who are very clever with numbers sometimes make prediction as to
what’s going to happen in sports or finance. And if you’re the innocent
person who believes whole heartedly in what the deep-voiced sports
forecaster predicts, you should not venture near the stock market but keep
your money under your mattress.
To read the rest of this informative, entertaining and opinionated article, click
on
Economics and Head-butting.
We
really appreciate you're coming this far down the page. It shows your
dedication to interesting books and fresh ideas. Or maybe it reveals a wacky
obsessive curiosity. In any case, we think you've probably spent enough time
looking at the world through your computer screen and should take a look
outside, the real out-of-doors of the real world. But we know you won't do
that. So we're providing you with another image of it. To the right is a
photo we posted this past winter of a nearby orchard the morning after an
ice storm. The photo below is the same orchard this past spring.
Now, we know this isn't the same as actually getting outside and enjoying a
mind cleansing walk through a wild orchard. It's just a reminder. We've done
out part, you do yours. Bookmark us, then turn off your computer and go out.
At least look out the window.
Can
you imagine becoming enthralled with a novel in which the hero’s a
shy, courtly pedant who’s spent his entire life analyzing the strategies of
famous battles in order to find guidance for the proper conduct of life?
Trust me, Colonel Carlo Terzo, the gentle, extraordinarily knowledgeable
hero of Prince of the Clouds, will capture your heart and mind,
just as he wins the love of the dashing aristocratic spy Princess Emma
Svyatoslava. Lampedusa and his spectacular evocations of Sicily come to mind
when reading this beautifully translated novel, as does Italo Calvino’s
The Baron in the Trees. The flyleaf of Prince of the Clouds, a
bestseller in Europe, compares it to Louis de Bernieres’s popular novel
Corelli’s Mandolin. Myself, I think Gianni Riotta is leagues ahead in
wit, depth, meaning, and delight. Read our review of
Prince of the Clouds.
Help rid the world of starving authors! Buy their books!
Patronize your local book store and they'll love you forever. If you don't
have a local book shop, or if Borders or Barnes & Noble frighten you, then
try an online book store.
You can click on that.
The starving authors aren't fussy.
Talking about human sexuality always seems to generate
more passion and heat than sheer reproductive coupling could
possibly
warrant. Nowadays arguments ignite over whether men and women are really
polar opposites biologically, and discussions of gender, or the social
elaborations of biological sexual differences, can go thermonuclear. We
question what part of human sexuality is "natural," programmed genetically
from the first union of sperm and ovum. But we also know that we can alter
or deny biology. We try to figure out what part of sexuality our society
constructs, and which we can therefore, presumably, change. If evolution
programs us solely for making babies, then why have humans always engaged in
recreational sex? Fetuses have been photographed masturbating in the womb.
In The
Prehistory of Sex, Timothy Taylor, a British archaeologist,
launches us on an irreverent, amusing, and thoroughly researched exploration
of our sexual past.
Your local bookstore misses you! Go visit those nice salespeople who know where to find a good detective story, a book on trout fishing, a guide to Venice, or a very good novel. If it’s already too late to get to the book store, and if you’ve been banned from your local library, try Amazon.com. They have lots and lots and lots of books. Click on Amazon
Now for a few insistent phrases we’ll be happy never to
hear again. Ever.
We hear the phrase "harsh interrogation techniques" on the news every so
often. When it comes to water-boarding and other methods, there's a single
word that is more concise and to the point: torture. No need to be squeamish.
If we never again hear "reach across the aisle" we'll not miss it. The
phrase refers to the aisle separating Democrats and Republicans in
legislatures, but the words put us to sleep faster than a politician's
speech.
And let's do away with "perfect storm." Sure it's
tempting to say, "Oh, it's a perfect storm!" whenever two or three bad
things come together to produce a really truly very bad situation, but let's
not make a bad situation even worse by uttering that overworked cliché yet
again.
While we're at it, we can throw away "between a rock and a
hard place." Yup, we've heard that one too many times and it gives us a
headache.
"Wall Street and Main Street." We’d like never to see
them again in the same sentence. Or the same paragraph. Or, for that matter,
on the same damn page.
"Meltdown." Banks are in a meltdown. International
lending institutions are in a meltdown. Your retirement funds are in a
meltdown. Meltdown? You mean like what happens when the rate of fission in a
nuclear power plant become too fast the the rods overheat and the core
becomes so hot it melts down to China or explodes? Let’s dump meltdown, and
while we’re at it we can forget "toxic" securities, too.
(If you have a few phrases you'd like never to hear
again, send them in and we'll add them to our list.)
Consider the quill pen and the laser as writing
tools. Our review of the selected letters of John and Abigail
Adams
got us thinking. If you came across a two-hundred-year-old letter
you'd be
able to read it. All you'd need is light and your own eyes. But what about
today's email? What about other digital documents? If you archive documents
on a CD, how long will the CD last? Assuming you store the CD carefully and
leave it alone, maybe 20 or 25 years before it deteriorates. No one knows
for sure, because although there are ways of faking the passage of time in a
laboratory, the actual passage of time may produce different results.
Click here to
continue
Stamp out starving authors! Buy their books!
That's
our motto. And in celebration of summer, we suggest you
stroll over to your
local bookstore and buy something. And if your local bookstore sells cards
and trinkets and stuffed animals, we suggest you buy a book anyway. Patronize your
local book store and they'll love you forever. If you don't have a local
book shop, try an online
book store. Like, well,
Amazon