Reads.

Wendell Berry's A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural
Henry Giroux's Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability
and David Foster Wallace's uncompleted The Pale King



What are you reading?

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;

whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.

Finished Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale, and am now too wound up from the chase to sleep.

I'll confess Chapter 32, Cetology, charmed me the most.

I could live in its growing countries forever.

Sometimes, always hesitantly and with appropriate embarrassment, I am a person who reads “readers.” Right now, I am reading The Edward Said Reader, not because Edward Said’s eloquent and impassioned arguments don’t warrant my extended attention and I only want the highlights in a “best of the Beatles” kind of way, but because I am a busy young woman and sometimes I need an in. I read three books at a time, an old habit dating back to my freshman year of high school. Usually, you can count on me to carry at least two of these three books at all times. As I type this, I realize that this week I am reading four at once (not recommended): Edward Said, Noam Chomsky’s Profit Over People, All the Devils Are Here, and The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (it seems ominous to relate)—a truly lighthearted assortment. Usually, I off-set two heavy-hearted books with one sillier one. Last week, the mix included Chris Hedges’ Death of the Liberal Class, Dani Rodrik’s The Globalization Paradox and Mary Roach’s thoroughly delightful, can't-recommend-it-enough Bonk.

I am itching to read Chris Hedges’ new The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress. The waiting list at the library is ten deep. I never used to be a book buyer, but my patience for long waits runs thin. There are too many essential (and immediately essential) reads out there. If I’m convinced that I can’t wait for the substance of a book to hit me, I’ll trek to the Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative and buy it.

Rain threatens tomorrow morning’s farmers market but I’m still looking forward to baking bread, listening to The Civil Wars, running errands on dusty ripped-up Willy Street, and catching up on two weeks of missed Daily Show episodes while I scrub my suddy way through a mountain of dishes. I want a garden of my own, but otherwise I'm content.


What do your weekends look like?

Jane Eyre.

I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.

JANE EYRE. CHARLOTTE BRONTE.

I am excited to see this film, but more excited and grateful for the reminder to reread the book itself.

This is a lovely spiritual victory over urbanization.

Zagreb has its own quality. It has no grand river, it is built up to no climax; the hill the old town stands on is what the eighteenth century used to call a moderate elevation. It has few very fine buildings except the Gothic Cathedral, and that has been forced to wear an ugly nineteenth-century overcoat. But Zagreb makes from its featureless handsomeness something that pleases like a Schubert song, a delight that begins quietly and never definitely ends. We believed we were being annoyed by the rain that first morning we walked out into it, but eventually we recognized that we were as happy as if we had been walking in sunshine through a really beautiful city. It has, moreover, the endearing characteristic, noticeable in many French towns, of remaining a small town when it is in fact quite large. A hundred and fifty thousand people live in Zagreb, but from the way gossips stand in the street it is plain that everybody knows who is going to have a baby and when. This is a lovely spiritual victory over urbanization.

REBECCA WEST. BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON.

The miracles of endurance and ingenuity.

They have lost sight of the importance of process; they have forgotten that everything which is not natural is artificial and that artifice is painful and difficult, that they should be able to look at a loaf of bread and not realize the miracles of endurance and ingenuity that had to be performed before the wheat grew, and the mill ground, and the oven baked. This condition can be brought about by several causes: one is successful imperialism, where the conquering people has the loaf built for it from the wheat ear up by its conquered subjects; another is modern machine civilization, where a small but influential proportion of the population lives in towns in such artificial conditions that a load of bread comes to them in a cellophane wrapper with its origins as unvisualized as the begetting and birth of a friend’s baby.

REBECCA WEST.
BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON.

The slippery brilliance of fish.

Along this promenade walk many Moslem men, mostly youths, some Moslem women, who usually come to sit in black clutches of three or four in the grass under the fruit trees, and many gypsies, men, women and children, who pass through the more stolid Moslem crowds with the slippery brilliance of fish.

REBECCA WEST. BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON.





I am glad I am not rushing this book. It's been two months and I've restrained myself so that several hundred pages still stretch out ahead of me.

The right number is not enough.

From Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

To join in a large number after death is to be dissolved into a stream of anonymity... It is to be abandoned by history, which begins from the assumption that each person is irreducible. With all of its complexity, history is what we all have, and can all share. So even when we have the numbers right, we have to take care. The right number is not enough.

Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life. We must be able not only to reckon with the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual. The one very large number that withstands scrutiny is that of the Holocaust, with its 5.7 million Jewish dead... but this number, like all of the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one.

Some of its houses spoke.

Some of its houses spoke, by lovely broken woodwork and tiled roofs fistulated with neglect, of a vital tradition of elegance strangled by poverty. There were lilacs everywhere, and some tulips. There was nobody about except some lovely children. From the latticed upper story of one of the houses that were rotting among their lilacs there sounded a woman’s voice, a deep voice that was not the less wise because it was permeated with the knowledge of pleasure, singing a Bosnian song, full of weariness at some beautiful thing not thoroughly achieved. They became credible, all those Oriental stories of men who faced death for the sake of a woman whom they knew only as a voice singing behind a harem window.

REBECCA WEST. BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON.

It's autumn. I am thinking all the time about the young woman I want to be, and how far I have to go. I think it will be a joyful journey, but along the way, I am running into contradictions.

I am reading hard books and struggling with what they tell me.

I am loving my job. Loving it. It has me rethinking my career goals, that's how much it's shaken me up this week. Mostly, I do research. I know that as soon as I know my territory there I'll want more responsibility. I'll want to be the one who jets off to conferences in Atlanta, Chicago and Vancouver, to listen and learn and share. This week, I am in love. I am paid to care about something WORTH caring about. What more could I ask for, really?

Is this the sort of society we want?

Tony Judt, one of my favorite historians and liberal thinkers, passed away. I posted one of my favorite recent quotes from him on my Facebook, but it's worth reposting here:

When I write that we are trapped in “an economic language,” I mean that we have become accustomed to answering (and asking) only economic questions, and only in economic terms. The great economists of the past, from Adam Smith to Keynes, would have thought this bizarre. For them (as for me), a well-ordered society needs to address ethical questions, questions of justice and fairness and goodness and morality and right and wrong. We can’t live just by asking, “Is this efficient?”, “Is this good for GDP?”, and so on. We have to relearn to ask, “Is this the sort of society we want?”, a question to which there will be economic answers but there cannot be only economic answers.

Lazy day.

No babysitting today. One of the kids caught some nasty bug, and Mom wanted to stay home with her, so I wound up with oodles of free time on one of the most perfect summer days Wisconsin can produce. I visited the library to pick up an armload of books about, you know, genocide, war, human rights violations, man’s inhumanity to man; and dropped by the grocery for plums at 99 cents a pound. So far, I’ve spent the day bicycling, gardening (mostly watering our poor parched plants), harvesting raspberries (some were so dangerously overripe that they never would have survived the arduous journey back to the house…), gorging myself on raspberries (hello, Tummyache), sunbathing, listening to NPR and Franz Ferdinand, catching up on correspondence, and reading Niall Ferguson's The War of the World. I am not crazy about Ferguson. He writes about history engagingly enough, but his penchant for speculation. He's much too fond of asking, "What if this had not happened, and this had happened, and this had happened differently, and Chamberlain had grown a pair, and Hitler's Sudeten gambit had folded... then what?" for my tastes. I'll take Mazower over Ferguson any day, but I've already re-read everything of his twice, and Dark Continent and Hitler's Empire at least five times each. Mazower needs to publish a new book! I do admire/appreciate Ferguson's attention to the economic causes (especially the severely limited war-making resources of the Japanese Home Islands and Germany, within its 1919 borders) of World Wars I and II.

Of course, it is not a matter of saving one ant out of a colony of ants!

After two ten-hour days at work, running non-stop in heels, I came home today in considerable pain. Bernd checked in from the San Jose airport and when his flight boarded, I crawled into bed with a heating pad and a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s A Sense of Life, dozing on and off with the book digging uncomfortably into my side.

When I woke up, the apartment was flooded with strange light that somehow streamed through every window. I ran outside and gasped. That impossible sky. The rainbow imprinted faintly over the rooftops, adjacent to pitch-black clouds. I've never seen anything like it. Neighbors I've never seen even coming and going in the morning leaned out their windows and stared.

The sky looked like this fifteen minutes ago—no edits or enhancements!

Each individual is an empire.

Men have lost respect for each other. They have become soulless bailiffs who stride into the house and scatter a family’s possessions to the four winds with no sense whatsoever that they have destroyed a kingdom… It makes me think of the anthills I used to disembowel in Paraguay; one blow of the pickax laid bare their innermost secrets. I suspect that the stalwarts who gutted this little shrine thought of it as a kind of anthill. … I have seen a young girl stripped of her gown of light. Am I to believe that reprisals are justified? … I simply cannot grasp it. I have seen housewives disemboweled, children mutilated; I have seen the old itinerant market crone sponge from her treasures the brains with which they were splattered. I have seen a janitor’s wife come out of her cellar and douse the sullied pavement with a bucket of water, and I am still unable to understand what part these humble slaughterhouse accidents play in warfare.

[ . . . ]

Here I touch the inescapable contradiction I shall never be able to resolve. For man’s greatness does not reside merely in the destiny of the species: each individual is an empire. When a mine caves in and closes over the head of a single miner, the life of the community is suspended. His comrades, their women, their children, gather in anguish at the entrance to the mine, while below them the rescue party scratch with their picks at the bowels of the earth. What are they after? Are they consciously saving one unit of society? Are they freeing a human being as one might free a horse, after computing the work he is still capable of doing? Ten other miners may be killed in the attempted rescue: what inept cost accounting! Of course, it is not a matter of saving one ant out of a colony of ants. They are rescuing a consciousness, an empire whose significance is incommensurable with anything else.

Inside the narrow skull of the miner pinned beneath the fallen timber, there lives a world. Parents, friends, a home, the hot soup of evening, songs sung on festival days, loving kindness and anger, perhaps even a social consciousness and a great universal love inhabit that skull. By what are we to measure the value of a man? His ancestor once drew a reindeer on the wall of a cave; and two hundred thousand years later that gesture still radiates. It stirs us, prolongs itself in us. Man’s gestures are an eternal spring. Though we die for it, we shall bring up that miner from his shaft.

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY. A SENSE OF LIFE.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Yesterday, Adam and I went to see Andrew Bacevich and today Lindsey and I are seeing Wendell Berry at the Overture Center! I love book week in Madison. Even if it were book week every week, it wouldn't ever lose its charm.


Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.



We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us.

Love should be allowed.

Took a brief break from all my history and foreign policy books to read a collection of short stories by Truman Capote, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s. His writing is everything writing should be—baldly honest, utterly unpretentious, sparkling with quiet humor.

“I think you could get in a lot of trouble,” I said, and switched off a lamp; there was no need of it now, morning was in the room and pigeons were gargling on the fire escape.

Morning was in the room.

I love that.

And this—

He’d been put together with care, his brown head and bullfighter’s figure had an exactness, a perfection, like an apple, an orange, something nature has made just right.

And this—

“No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is. Because I DO love Jose—I’d stop smoking if he asked me to. He’s friendly, he can laugh me out of the mean reds.”

And—

She scooped up the cat and swung him onto her shoulder. He perched there with the balance of a bird, his paws tangled in her hair as if it were knitting yarn; and yet, despite these amiable antics, it was a grim cat with a pirate’s cutthroat face; one eye was gluey-blind, the other sparkled with dark deeds.

And—

I went out into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without being seen. She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks… There was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so… She was not alone. There was a man following behind her. The way his plump hand clutched at her hip seemed somehow improper; not morally, aesthetically.

Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is it livable?

The regime had understood that one person leaving her house while asking herself: ‘Are my trousers long enough? Is my veil in place? Can my makeup be seen? Are they going to whip me?’ no longer asks herself: ‘Where is my freedom of thought? Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is it livable? What’s going on the political prisons?’

MARJANE SATRAPI. THE COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS.

We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars or ropes of diamonds.

"Did you see all the diamonds those ladies wore?" sighed Jane. "They were simply dazzling. Wouldn't you just love to be rich?"

"We are rich," said Anne stanchly. "Why, we have sixteen years to our credit, and we're happy as queens, and we've all got imaginations. Look at that sea--all silver and shadow and visions of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars or ropes of diamonds. You wouldn't change into any of those women if you could. Would you want to be that white lace girl and wear a sour look all your life, as if you'd been born turning up your nose at the world..."

"I don't know, exactly," said Jane unconvinced. "I think diamonds would comfort a person a good deal."

"Well, I don't want to be any one but myself, even if I go uncomforted by diamonds all my life," declared Anne.

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES.

But no religion is inherently violent or peaceful; people are violent or peaceful.

Excerpts from How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization and the End of the War on Terror by the brilliant, articulate, and really quite good-looking Reza Aslan.

To the extent that the War on Terror has, from the start, been posited as a war of ideology—a clash of civilizations—it is a rhetorical war indeed, one fought more constructively with words and ideas than with guns and bombs. The problem with the ideological War on Terror is that ‘terrorist’ is a wastebasket term that often conveys as much about the person using it as it does about the person being described….


It is easy to blame religion for acts of violence carried out in religion’s name, easier still to comb through scripture for bits of savagery and assume a simple causality between the text and the deed. But no religion is inherently violent or peaceful; people are violent or peaceful.



This book is, above all else, a proclamation: the War on Terror, conceived by the previous American administration as a cosmic contest between the forces of good and evil for the future of civilization, is over. It is time to strip this ideological conflict of its religious connotations, to reject the religiously polarizing rhetoric of our leaders and theirs, to focus on the material matters at stake, and to address the earthly issues that always lie behind the cosmic impulse. For although the grievances of the hijackers may have been symbolic, though they may have been merely causes to rally around, to the hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world who watched the towers fall—who were, in fact, the intended audience of that theatrical display of violence—they are nonetheless legitimate grievances and must be addressed as such. The Palestinians really are suffering under Israeli occupation. Arab dictators are in fact being propped up by US policies. The Muslim world truly does have a reason to feel under attack by a ‘crusading’ West. Addressing these grievances may not satisfy Osama bin Ladin and his fellow cosmic warriors, who sights are set beyond this world. But it will bring their cosmic war back down to earth, where it can be confronted more constructively. It will take away the appeal of the Global Jihadist movement and loosen the ties that have bound so many young, disaffected Muslims together under a master narrative of oppression and injustice. Most of all, it will deny Jihadist ideologues their principal argument that the War on Terror is, in fact, a war against Islam. Because in the end, there is only one way to win a cosmic war: refuse to fight in it.

I do not ask him to dance but to sit down.

I—who like all others want to be recognized—feel pure in you and am drawn toward you. I am drawn to where I feel pure. It was not my formulas nor my reasoning that taught you what I am. It was the acceptance of what I am that made you indulgent toward my formulas and my reasoning. I am grateful to you for accepting me at my face value. Of what use is a friend who sits in judgment of me? If I invite a friend to join me for a meal and he’s limping, I do not ask him to dance but to sit down.

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY.