So, What Are You Freakin' Well Reading Now?

"Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World" by Trevor Paglen. Plus some other stuff. 

Just finished The Authenticity Hoax by Andrew Potter. Much of it covers familiar ground if you’ve read any of his other books, but it’s sharply observed and amusing. I winced more than once as I recognized myself among his targets. His thesis is that the authenticity that we have made a fetish of is what economists call a positional good. That is, the more I have, the less you do. If you buy organic food, I buy hundred-mile organic and you lose. The quest for authenticity is nothing more than the status-seeking of the 50’s repackaged for the counter-culture. Potter demolishes the yearning for a pre-modern idyllic past when our lives were more meaningful, and suggests we remedy the worst excesses of modernity rather than revolt against it.

Any short, popular book that tries to cover this much ground is going to have moments of oversell and weaselling. And while Potter has an eye for the telling anecdote, he really doesn’t amass much supporting evidence for his claims. He seems to feel that if he can situate a particular idea in Western intellectual history, he has either discredited or supported it, as he chooses. And the book is a bit diffuse. (You wonder whether Obama’s right about the effects of electronic devices. There are so many books, even by bright, academically accredited guys like Potter, that hang together at paragraph or at most chapter level, but lose steam over the long haul, to use a pre-electronic metaphor.)

Potter comes across as a supporter of traditional liberal optimism, which I guess would cast him as right-wing in this forum. Thomas Frank makes much the same points in a lot of his work but from a more leftish perspective. And he makes me laugh out loud. But Potter’s book has undermined some of my own beliefs with cool irony and encouraged me to come up with better arguments for some others. A quick, enjoyable read.

I stopped reading Ken Knabb's self-indulgent quasi-situ autobiography, Public Secrets,  and reached for With Every Mistake, a collection of Gwynn Dyer's articles from 2000-2005ish. 

I don't know if he's been such an influence on my own thought since the TV programme War (I saw him speak just before the US attacked the Iraqis in 1992, and I went through basic training in part to see if Dyer was right about its process) that his thoughts are mine, or if we merely agree on a lot, but I found what he wrote about Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine is pretty much what I thought then, and still think today.

One thing that's interesting now is the phenomena of household servants, nannies, cooks, maids, etc. I believe these are more conspicuous than trekking the Inca Trail or buying a tangerine for dessert. Conspicuous consumption is ever-changing, however, so it is no surprise that these mutations will continue.

I know (vaguely) that Pierre Bourdieu speaks of habitus, which might explain (theoretically) what you've just stated. Someone else might have to wade into that conversation. But I agree: I have a bit of beef with Potter/Veblen on this issue, too.

Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer. As he describes it, "a feel-good novel about interracial murder".

Bacchus, am now reading  Irish Country Girl, the 4th book in the series, love, love, love it.

Just finished reading the 2nd in the Alan Bradley Flavia de Luce series linked to above, it is an excellent read too and really it strikes me that it is a wonderful series for empowering young girls, and indicating a way that is not "sexy", am going to read them with my granddaughter this summer.

They are short, quick flowing, funny and compelling..

Its on my list   I read a lot of teen fiction ( a lot of the fantasy stuff is very well written) and they have a plethora of female protaganists who are very well defined

Hi Ripple.  No, I don't know off-hand if the quintet is complete.  I believe I heard Ali say that his other activities are keeping him from finishing.

Regarding Nuremberg Diary, here's the film on concentration camps that was shown in the trial.

Nazi Concentration Camps (Nuremberg Trial Film)

Bacchus;

Finished it, extremely good, neither of these series are my usual configerations in reading, as I tend to read non-fiction, classics,  sci-fi/fantasy like Pillars of the Earth, or anthropology fiction.

Occasionally, when I want to know what BS is being fed women, about every 2 years or 3, I will read a differing selection of romance novels. do this when I start hearing the same commentary about things from differing female demographics, where one would not think to hear the same things.

It works well to debunk the shit, when one hears it, as one is prepared ahead of time with a response that is at the same level of discourse that it was fed to them on.

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester. Lanchester is a witty and perceptive novelist. For the last few years, he's also been following business for the London Review of Books. This is his attempt to explain the Crash of 2008. Because his background is in literature, he's very good at explaining things to a lay audience, and gives you a brief course on double-entry bookkeeping, how to read a balance sheet, and eventually, how Credit Default Swaps work. The pace is brisk but never daunting.

According to Lanchester, the crash was a result of four things: a climate, a problem, a mistake, and a failure.

The climate was post-1989 capitalist triumphalism: "The population of the West benefited from the existence, the policies, and the example of the socialist bloc. For decades there was the equivalent of an ideological beauty contest between the capitalist West and the Communist East, both of them vying to look as if they offered their citizens the better, fairer way of life. The result in the East was oppression; the result in the West was free schooling, universal health care, weeks of paid holiday and a consistent, across-the-board rise in opportunities and rights....And then the good guys won, the beauty contest came to an end, and decades of Western progress in relation to equality and individual rights came to an end." Governments now genuflected at the altar of finance capitalism, and allowed the financial sector to write its own rules. Laissez-faire capitalism was no longer an option to be criticized and defended rationally: it was an article of faith.

The problem was sub-prime mortgages. As Lanchester explains, risk is not a bad thing for a financier. The higher the risk, the higher the return on investments. The trick is to find the right balance. Through the use of CDO's, bankers were able to take formerly high-risk mortgages, securitize them, and sell them on to other investors as if they were AAA-rated bonds. The risk had evaporated, but the rewards remained. Money flooded into the mortgage market, and canny speculators developed "ninja loans" (no income, no job, no assets), "liar loans" (applicants could state their own income), and "no doc loans" (the borrower produced no paperwork). By 2006, 60 percent of sub-prime applicants were exaggerating their income by more than 50 percent.

The mistake was the mathematical models that were developed to predict the likelihood of default or other upheaval in the credit markets. The formulae, elaborated over forty years by some of the bulgiest foreheads in the academy and the banking houses, were infinitely subtle, persuasive, and completely unmoored from reality. Bankers came to rely on abstract equations to assess risk rather than investigating borrowers' means and intentions. The results were predictable, if not to bankers: "The 1998 [Russian bond] default [which destroyed the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund] was a 7-sigma event. That means it should statistically have happened only once every 3 billion years. And it wasn't the only one. The last decades have seen numerous 5-, 6-, and 7-sigma events. These are supposed to happen, respectively, one day in every 13,932 years, one day in every 4,039,906 years, and one day in every 3,105,395,365 years. Yet no one concluded for this that the statistical models in use were wrong." The CFO of Goldman Sachs, David Viniar, claimed that the crisis was brought on by several days of 25-sigma events. "Twenty sigma is ten times the number of all the particles in the known universe. 25 sigma is the same, but with the decimal place moved fifty-two places to the right. It's equivalent to winning the UK national lottery twenty-one times in a row... Remember, what we're talking about here is a drop in house prices, which caused people with bad credit to have trouble paying their mortgages. That was turned into something that was literally the most unlikely thing to have happened in the history of the universe."

The failure was that of regulators and politicians: blinded by the apparent invincibility of the markets and their dazzling upward trajectory, they loosened restrictions and failed to heed the inevitable warning signs of collapse. Even the upper management of investment firms seemed to lose sight of the dangers ahead, not always because of their short-term greed, but because they genuinely couldn't comprehend the nature of the beast they had created.

We all know the result: as of mid-2009, the cost of the market bailout in the US had reached somewhere between 5 and 7 trillion dollars. "That number is bigger than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Apollo moon landings, the 1980's savings and loan crisis, the Korean War, the New Deal, the invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam War, and the total cost of NASA's space flights, all added together ---repeat, added together (and yes, the old figures are adjusted upwards for inflation)." Lanchester closes with a plea for a more reflective mode of life: "We have to start thinking about when we have sufficient --sufficient money, sufficient stuff --and whether we really need the things we think we do, beyond what we already have. In a world running out of resources, the most important ethical, political, and ecological idea can be summed up in one simple word: enough."

This is a book to read quickly the first time, then slowly and carefully. The writing is generally elegant and often funny, though the shifts in tone are sometimes a bit jarring. It's not an insider book, nor does it contain the sort of you-are-there prose that marks a lot of journalistic accounts: "Nigel ‘Chips' Carruthers watched the Nikkei ticker in disbelief, his Charvet cravat slowly losing its immaculate half-Windsor as the news seeped into his 24th-floor, rosewood-panelled office at Canary Wharf." It is a carefully argued, angrily funny account of the genesis of a classic bubble and bust. It also abounds in startling insights, like the similarity between value in finance and meaning in Derrida, or the difference between the tribes of business and industry, and why they are locked in mutual mistrust. I borrowed this book from our public library, but plan to buy my own copy so I can mark it up and shamelessly commit the best bits to memory for use in argument later.

I've just started reading the new translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Demons" (formerly translated as "The Posessed". It is his ficitonalized account of the murder of activist Ivan Ivanov by the young anarchist Sergei Nechaev in the 1869. It is a brilliantly witty and gripping book and his portrayal of the intellectual/activist scene in mid 19th century Russia bears striking similarities to the current movement in Canada. Wonder what that means...

Mmmm... yes. Sadly my history of this era comes more from drama and fiction than actual history (shame on me, i know). On that front i can strongly strongly (did i say strongly) reccomend the dramatic trilogy "The Coast Of Utopia" by Tom Stoppard. It includes as characters Herzen, Belinsky and Bakunin. Not to mention Pushkin, Turgenev and others.

(for Cz "H") Stoppard, who's an excellent playwright, seems to belong to those who are doing a fine job of erasing/misrepresenting radical 19th century Russian history. But, since the English have a lengthy history of Russophobia, I wouldn't make too much of it.

Edited to add: hmm. Stoppard has a Czech background. More opportunities for Russophobia.

Just read the originals, maybe some Georgi Plekhanov, and you'll be fine.

"Chomsky on Anarchism" and my brain hurts.

I started reading The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe last night. Along with Rebick and a collection of short stories on Mars, I have a good reading rotation going at the moment.

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemmingway

You can do that with film. Especially weak - i.e., typically American - films that are as easy to follow as a trail of crumbs.

Simply miss the first part - say 15 minutes or so - of a mystery. Then, figuring things out is more of a challenge.

I just finished Nuremberg Diary.  Keitel, Ribbentropp and Jodl were hanged for crimes similar to those committed by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Rice, Wolfowitz, Perle and Powel.  Goering was right about victors' justice.

Now I'm into Enemy at the Gates, by William Craig.  The history isn't bad, but the book isn't terribly well-written. 

I had a similar experience watching The Sopranos.

Eve's Bible

http://www.sarahforth.com/home/

I'll let you know when I reached that chapter. Yesterday i finished Fordlandia, a book recommended by heph.

Last week I read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. I've been scattering Raymond Chandler short stories among my reading lately.

I'm currently into chapter five of a collection of Chomsky's essays called Middle East Illusions. In this essay, written around 1973, Chomsky looks at how the left is accused of antisemitism and extremism for supporting the human rights of Palestinians.

Plus ça change...

Jose Saramago's Baltasar and Blimunda is like nothing I've read before in the detailed description of the cruelties of the Inquisition, the public spectacles.   This was apparently the first book that brought him to a world readership in the late 1980s, and the library here has just about all of his later novels...Cambridge has a large Portuguese population. 

Fortunately, the reader can look forward to the lovers' exploits, like finding  "the countryside is covered with white daisies and mallows, where they cover the path the travellers cut through them,and the firm heads of the flowers are crushed beneath the bare feet of Baltasar and Blimunda, who both have shoes or boots but prefer to carry them in the knapsacks until the road becomes stone, and a pungent odour rises from the ground, it is the sap of the daisies, the perfume of the world on the day of its inception, before God invented the rose.  It is a perfect day for their trip to inspect the flying machine..."

Just going through some John Le Carre books that my dad bought back in the 80s. Little Drummer Girl is actually a neat read. I like spy novels and all of that quite a lot.

I also picked up some more Joe Haldeman. I still haven't read his seminal work, The Forever War, but I did just re-read All My Sins Remembered and started reading Marsbound (I've been hankering for some some Kim Stanley Robinson, I must have read Red Mars like 20 times by now - so this book seems like an apt substitute by an author I love). I'm still trying to find a used copy of 'The Dragon's Egg', but alas, it has not appeared.

Good choice PB!

I just finished Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial bedrooms. Now reading the amazing Tama Janowitz's They Is Us - a wicked story set in the late 21st century - the world is run by a giant corporation, people are literally living in chemical wastelands, food in not food anymore and people have become immune to any form of political action. Interesting subplot going on that involved screwing with DNA to make weird animals.

CBC Radio listeners heard Barbara Kingsolver interviewd last night on her new novel, The Lacuna, in which she sets out partly to explain how the United States weapped itself in its flag and has since "refused new ideas." As one reviewer puts it:"The Lacuna is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate. Crossing two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the colour red, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World itself."

Kingsolver is the author of The Poisonwood Bible. I'm calling the library this morning.

I have just picked up Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins at the library book swap.  (In English.  It would take me too long to read in French.)  I hope to be the better for it. 

I read about Jack Fisher, namesake of Fisherville and Mt Fisher, who discovered gold on Wild Horse Creek near Fort Steele.

Then I read "Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot smaller" by Jeff Rubin [Chief Economist for some big bank for 16 years]. It almost completely SUCKED... but I read it all anyway. The premise is that when this recession is over, oil will return to "triple digit prices", and that oil has peaked and will therefore stay at high prices. From that comes the end of globalisation, esp. in that international trade will halt due to transport costs. So will air travel, and even a lot of car travel.

He barely mentions the alternative energy gig, or that electric cars could stabilise the electric grid, or using sails on big ship to cut fuel use, or any of the other fixes that are possible when we start to end the age of oil. When those alternatives takes the pressure off of oil as our only source of energy, the demand will be reduced and prices will fall accordingly... but he doesn't mention any of this.

Okay, so on to the really good stuff: I just picked up, from my local library, Mel Hurtig's "The TRUTH About Canada". We SUCK!! Canada is no longer what we think it is. We rank so low on education, health care, and other social indicators - mostly to the benefit of Big Business, which is making out like bandits. Financial equality is bad and getting worse every day as the elite wealthy control government and the economy [to their benefit only].

Happy Reading!!

Eat, Pray, Love.

Its a book title of a best selling book and now a movie with Julia Roberts *sigh* which Im sure makes the author sigh as well, tho not a happy sigh

The Mists of Avalon because it is such a wonderfully lush summer book.  I can't recall how many times I have read it, perhaps three or four,  but each time I am impressed by how she illustrates the mysteries that have been lost to us in the name of Christianity and in doing so reminds us that there are deeper mysteries than we know. 

I'm reading Nineteen Eighty-Four these days and pondering whether to inflict it on students next year.

Heck would have to  freeze over before I would consider Atwood.

I'm aiming at studying language use and recognising propaganda in everyday life.  Orwell would be replacing Dickens' Hard Times, which I use to reinforce the idea of class struggle.

Well, I'm technically not teaching class struggle, but I like to be able slide a few concepts in whenever I can.  Matewan contrasted with a film version of Germinal (the one I know has Miou-Miou, Renaud and the ever-present Gerry Depardieu) would be an intriguing idea.  Then again, it's not a film class.

I've shown bits of Oedipus Rex as background to Antigone, and Apocalypse Now to provide some context to Heart of Darkness...and I've even tried using the Calista Flockhart version of Midsummer Night's Dream to help the students imagine Shakespeare. 

Fences and Windows by Naomi Klein. Her description of the Left in 2002 sounds much like the Left in 2010, so far.

Hmmm, am going to have to get it in at the library if they do not have it, just finished reading the Secret of Shambhala, that mr remind had picked up at the trade shack a few months back.

Interestingly, at least to me, he spoke of things that Yogananda spoke of about Babaji.

It was an easy 101 read.

there is a women's circle here that practises some of the deeper mysteries lost to us through churchianity. The former mayor tried to run "those witches", even though they are not, per se...out of town.

We do have a ordained "shaman" from Lynn Andrews' Mystery School though. :D  Gobsmacked about that actually.

Welp, over the past week I got the hankering to read. So I finished up Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Then I read Childhood's Dream - a suggestion from Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Tom Wolfe's book is great and all, but Childhood's End was a far better read. 'The stars are not for man'.

I just one shot Farenheit 451 - just like I did with Childhood's Dream. I don't know how I had never read that one til' now.

Now what does the future hold?!

I HAVE been meaning to read On The Road...Pity the local library that has it is under renovations and acquiring said tome will be problematic for at least another month.

Mods alerted.

Why yes.

This Yibpl scoundrel is obviously trolling the book thread.

I'm highly offended and...I think...I'm going to...cry.

Oh, lately I've been going through some Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition source books. Been reading the Dungeon Masters Guide and Player's Handbook. And the ever fun Monster Manual.

Before you start reading that there tome, you must get hold of  Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray's "The Hunt" as well as as many Slim Gaillard recordings as you are able.  Then it's imperative that you injest some tea, spin said records and generally get your kicks while reading sad old Jack's novel.

at the cottage had  a mouldy copy of John le Carre's The Looking-glass War novel about,  briefly, a superannuated WWII spy found and retrofitted 20 years later to go over the Wall and find out about a Russian missile ... the anti-James Bond, for sure, with lots of seedy but realistic details about 1950s/60s era UK espionnage

otherwise,  I skimmed relentlessly , and at the country library were a number of unusual volumes I took down out of curiosity,

including Conrad Black's Duplessis, which is in fact his McGill master's thesis beefed up by access to Duplessis family archives, but includes some irreplaceable photos, for example 1950 federal-provincial conference at Quebece City with inter alia Tommy Douglas, Duplessis, Louis St Laurent, Joey Smallwood et cie in attendance -- what a gallery of characters

Looked also at Ignatieff's Isaiah Berlin, out of interest in the latter above all, but wanted to confirm that anecdote about Churchill inviting Irving Berlin, rather than Isaiah, to a dinner and sure enough, there it is in the section on WWII; adds to controversy about who knew what when about the Holocaust as Berlin was truly shocked to grasp the scale and methods of the genocide, as late as 1944-45...

 Now back to some actual reading after all that skimming, with esp. French political philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon's book about "political legitimacy", and how legitimacy is created through unmediated relations to the leader through symbolic acts (presence at a disaster, personal intervention in social dramas) in the new media age 

Catching up on my reading, I noticed a very perceptive review of Ill Fares the Land (see post above) in the Times Literary Supplement. I can't give you a link because Murdoch has decided that the Times group will be the guinea-pigs for his paywall experiment. The review is by the American sociologist Richard Sennett, a truly wise man who has upheld the virtues of public life and craftsmanship in previous books. He traces Judt's intellectual odyssey and his commitment to public thinking and speaking.

Here's the part that arrested me: "I have, however, one quarrel with Judt's testament. At its very end he declares 'socialism was about transformative change...socialism--under its many guises and hyphenated incarnations--has failed'. Historically this is certainly correct. Looking forward, his disillusion may ill serve us. There were socialisms before Marx, and alongside its deadly reign, and there will be socialisms in the future--micro-socialisms, if you like, from communal workshops to mutual benefit societies to food co-ops and job exchanges. These micro-socialisms have dwelt on co-operation rather than conversation [?], emphasizing the social in socialism; as micro-societies they have represented one way to deal with the capitalist beast--not to slay it but to resist it; in future they might be constituted online rather than face to face."

- interesting - I read the Rand books when I was in my late teens, early 20s, and was quite inspired myself - it was only when I got a bit older and wiser I realised how adolescent they all were - "Me Tarzan!! Look after self!!' and etc - in reality, in human communities, we look after one another, or the predators take us, as we realise as we get a bit older and see how the world really works. As Rand's modern neocons are currently stealing everything from us.

- by the way, Rand's book was The Fountainhead - who wrote this 'Fountain Head' you refer to? Can't seem to find any mention of it anywhere - your copy must give some more info ...

Hi, George Victor. Judt skates over the political economy--he is more concerned with the habits of mind that made the postwar consensus possible. He is at pains to point out that even right-wingers saw the need for a strong public presence in the market. Contrast that to our own times, when Americans with the IV of public money steadily dripping into their veins and financial death averted only by firm public action gather at Tea Party rallies to proclaim their rugged independence.

Don't know how your finances are, but Judt's book is meant to be an account of modern times without an ounce of spare flesh. It's a bit like a thoroughbred horse, grand for its purpose, but unsuited to hauling heavy cargo. If your library doesn't have it, you could try Inter-Library Loan, though that's sometimes a low priority for the pared-down staff at public libraries. Are you in the central SW? Hamilton Public Library has several copies. If you live in a contiguous area (Brant, Waterloo, Haldimand, Halton) you can borrow a copy using your reciprocal borrowing privileges. Might be your best bet.

Louise Brooks' autobiography: Lulu in Hollywood (1982).  A candid and literate reflection on the life and times of an unabashed hedonist, and the coterie of friends, acquaintances, and hangers-on that the silent screen actress and dancer encountered, in her blithe and obdurate celebration of the decadence that nearly consumed her.  A veritable 'pandora's box' (pun intended) of revelation, and honesty; a woman who I'd love to have met, at my peril.

Susanna Moodie's Roughing it in the Bush

Highly Recommended! It is the account of her life in the wilderness of Canada during the 1830s, after coming over from England with her husband and infant daughter. The sections on Aboriginal people are very interesting especially. She uses the language of the time, but has great respect and friendship for them and is not racist herself. (She actually met her husband at an anti-slavery meeting in England in 1830). 

re. al-Qa'bong; LOL!  

re. siamdave; pobodys nerfect.

Now I am reading Churchill and The Jews by Martin Gilbert.

The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life by Michael Dawson

The author has a brilliant blog as well.

I've been working my way slowly through Richard Sudhalter's Lost Chords: White Musicians and their Contribution to Jazz, 1915- 1945, but have to put it aside to read a library copy of Sniclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here.

I thought this passage was interesting, in light of the creation of "Freedom Fries" 60 years later: