From the category archives:
Last post from The Army and Vietnam
It’s also interesting to note how the analogy with the Vietnam war breaks down with regards to Iraq. Iraqification is probably more difficult than Vietnamization because of the threat of ethnic civil war, and I don’t think that it’s accurate to talk about “guerilla bands that lie in wait just outside the populated areas” in Iraq. But, as always, I might be wrong.
(Comments on the last excerpt were especially good.)
Still more from The Army and Vietnam
(As always, Arms and Influence has more.)
(UPDATE: This sort of corruption, of course, is another big part of the story.)
I read Haruki Murakami’s Underground
More from The Army and Vietnam
Inspired by this post, I read The Army and Vietnam
I especially appreciated the introduction and its lucid introduction to the strategy of a successful insurgency/counterinsurgency. I liked that part so much that I’ve transcribed about four pages, in the interest of posting it in small blog-sized chunks for discussion. The book was published in 1986. It’s fascinating to see how much of it applies to the situation in Iraq, and how much is less relevant.
I hope that this inspires a few readers to buy the book
Here goes.
A few days ago Matthew Yglesias linked despairingly to a Caitlin Flanagan Atlantic book review/long article on ‘blowjob nation’ (and he wasn’t despairing because it was paywalled). Now I see (via Maud) it is available free online at Powell’s books. It seems to need a comment box; now it has one.
I myself will not comment, except to note that – in a sign of the times – TLS the Times just started a bunch of blogs. Just bought itself a typepad account, apparently. And – another sign of the times, perhaps – this venerable literary organ has allowed one of its tv critics (assigned to the Big Brother beat) to employ this image of herself (semi-worksafe). Like Flanagan, she appears to be named Caitlin. And that’s all I have to say.
When the eminent sociologist Orlando Patterson says that someone is “a sparkling new talent with all the boldness and intellectual self-assurance necessary” to pursue “critical reflections on African-American identity”, it makes sense to pay attention. This is how he describes Tommie Shelby in his review of Shelby’s new book, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. (Shelby and I went to graduate school together.)
Here’s Patterson’s description of the book:
Although black Americans have led the way in practical matters, insightful theoretical reflections on identity politics are still wanting. Shelby’s “We Who Are Dark” is respectful of such politics, but severely critical as well. His book contests the movement’s central claims at a level of sociophilosophical sophistication that one rarely encounters….
He maintains that the black power call to collective action based on exclusive black organizations is now inappropriate because of the economic and regional heterogeneity of the black population. It is also, he says, politically counterproductive since it risks alienating badly needed progressive allies among the nonblack population….
Shelby’s powerful critique of black cultural particularism incorporates and supersedes all previous discussions of the subject. He identifies eight basic tenets of this tradition: blacks have a distinctive culture; they should collectively and consciously reclaim that culture; they should take pride in conserving and reproducing it; unlike white culture, it provides a valuable foundation for their individual and communal identities; it is an emancipatory tool in resisting white hegemony, providing an alternate set of ideals to live by; it should be accorded public recognition by the state; blacks, as the main producers of this culture, should benefit from it in financial and other ways; and as “owners” of this culture, blacks should be the foremost authorities and interpreters of it.
We hear these arguments all the time, sometimes subtly, often crudely. Most non-blacks are either contemptuous of them or quietly dumbfounded. Many simply turn a blindly patronizing eye. Shelby takes the arguments seriously, and meticulously demolishes them all. He does not deny that there are distinctive forms of Afro-American culture. Far from it. His concern, rather, is with the ways black spokesmen think about this heritage and the chauvinistic claims commonly made about it, beginning with the questionable view that being black means one is, or ought to be, culturally black….
What is needed, Shelby says, is a pragmatic nationalism that encourages “individual blacks to maintain solidarity with one another regardless of the racial composition of the political organizations in which each participates.” Solidarity of this sort – identification, special concern, loyalty and trust – has to be black rather than part of a wider program of color-blind liberal or radical reform, because blacks suffered a unique history of injustice under slavery and Jim Crow, and continue to do so through patterns of institutional discrimination and more subtle forms of personal racism. But it cannot be too black, since this risks entrapment in the manifold errors of thick identity. And it has to be thin because blacks have got to come to terms with the fact that most of the socioeconomic challenges they face in modern America have little to do with their blackness. Yet it cannot be too thin, or it becomes mere shallow rhetoric.
Frankly, I wouldn’t have expected anything less from him – a thoughtful and insightful book written for grown-ups.
We’re staging a book event at the Valve. The book is Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees
In her hugely successful memoir, Olivia Saves the Circus, Olivia gives a virtuoso account to her school class of how she single-handedly rescued a circus performance (all the performers were sick with ear infections, she claims) by doing everything herself. The book is replete with astonishing but true accounts of Olivia the Lion Tamer, Olivia the Queen of the Trapeze and Olivia and her Amazing Trained Dogs. At the end, Olivia’s teacher suspects something and the following exchange takes place.
In his hugely successful memoir, A Million Little Pieces, James Frey gives a virtuoso account of his life of crime and drug abuse. The book is replete with astonishing but true accounts of Frey getting a root canal without anesthesia, Frey involved in a fatal train accident, and Frey in jail for desperate crimes. At the end, The Smoking Gun provided “detailed evidence”:http://www.thesmokinggun.com/jamesfrey/0104061jamesfrey1.html that Frey’s “memoir” is in fact a highly fictionalized — not to say falsified — version of events. The “following exchange”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/books/11memo.html?ex=1294635600&en=d54d1a2e5fa09232&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss takes place between Doubleday, Frey’s publisher, and the _New York Times_:
Two days after an investigative report published online presented strong evidence that significant portions of James Frey’s best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” were made up, the book’s publisher issued a statement saying that, in essence, it did not really matter. … “Memoir is a personal history whose aim is to illuminate, by way of example, events and issues of broader social consequence,” said a statement issued by Doubleday … “By definition, it is highly personal. In the case of Mr. Frey, we decided ‘A Million Little Pieces’ was his story, told in his own way, and he represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections.”
Olivia would be proud.
A friend just told me a story: he left a post-it in a book, returned it to a university library, was soon summoned into the presence of an enraged librarian, informed that post-it’s destroy books and the one he had returned had been sent to the lab for testing. If deemed contaminated with corrosive post-it glue, he would be charged for replacement.
I am very sorry to hear that post-its in books are like facehuggers on all the minor characters in the Alien films; because I use post-its like mad. I have a copy of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation with post-its on the post-its. (So I guess I should figure out whether post-it glue is bad for post-it paper, if I’m planning on saving those post-its for years.) I always assumed I was being kind to books, not writing on/dogearing the pages. I will change my habits if I must but I’ll miss the useful darlings.
Googling I’m getting some confirmation of the ‘post-its are bad’ thesis. But why haven’t I heard this before? Is everyone else in the know? Did the Volokhs already take sides two days ago and I missed the memo? I often walk around carrying library books that flutter like colorful tropical birds. I never noticed anyone glaring at me.
In other news, have you ever noticed how computer and software and general IT advertising often features a picture of a multiethnic, mixed gender group of co-workers, smiling faces all lit by the light of the monitor of the obviously excellently working computer they are gathered around. When in fact the only time five people are ever staring at the same lit computer screen is when one of them is saying something like ‘really? even the off button doesn’t work?’
Technorati’s “List of Popular Books”:http://www.technorati.com/pop/books/ introduces me to “There is Eternal Life for Animals”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0972030107/kieranhealysw-20, which argues that
bq. All animals go to heaven. How do we know? We look in the book that God left us, the Bible. This book takes you through the Bible and proves through the scriptures that there is life after death for all the animals. It covers: — God’s relationship with the animals; — The current life of the animal kingdom; — The future life of the animals and its restoration; — What animals are currently in heaven; — Whether animals have souls and spirits; — Praying for animals. There Is Eternal Life For Animals includes numerous Bible scriptures, opinions and commentaries from Bible Theologians, visions, stories, near-death experiences of children, and personal experiences. It also reviews many of the original Greek and Hebrew words and their translations.
I am tempted to buy the book and have it sent to “P.Z. Myers”:http://pharyngula.org/ as a gift. It’s true that if the book’s argument is right the downside for P.Z. is, of course, that there is a benevolent God filling up Heaven with our beloved cats and dogs. On the other hand, maybe the “beloved giant squid”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/squid_sighting_in_the_deep_dark/ are up there, too, in the deep-sea regions of heaven.
I’m interested to read the “What animals are currently in heaven” section. Does the author mean what _kinds_ of animals, or particular _individual_ animals? If the former, do Deer Ticks make it? Or Liver Fluke? If the latter, “Phar Lap”:http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/pharlap/ is surely there (despite also being scattered around Australia), but what about Garfield?
I’ve just finished reading Neil Gordon’s “The Company You Keep”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0142004529/junius-20 which I’ve enjoyed and been stimulated by as much as any work of fiction I’ve read in the past year (I’ve barely put it down in the last two days). I won’t post plot spoilers here, but the central drama revolves around a former member of the “Weather Underground”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weathermen whose elaborate new identity comes apart in 1996, thereby risking both prison and the loss of his seven-year-old daughter. There are plenty of implausible coincidences in the plot, but Gordon manages to make the whole believable. The central literary conceit of the book is that it is presented as a series of emails from the main protagonists to the seventeen-year-old daughter ten years later. And those emails so do not read like any email anyone has ever written! The main theme of the book is about how trust in friends is more important than abstract principle. Questionable, perhaps, but Gordon puts the case persuasively. There’s also a lot of the spy thriller about the book, and plenty of revolutionary tradecraft that took me back to reading Victor Serge’s “What Every Revolutionary Should Know About State Repression”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1926/repression/index.htm and to the whole mystique of the “professional revolutionary” as once cultivated by the groupuscules. (Though it isn’t mentioned in the book, Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” seemed to play in my head as the appropriate sountrack as I read, together with a few others from Blood on the Tracks.)
I’d love to give every Crooked Timber contributor and reader a copy of this book for Christmas, but I’m afraid you’ll have to buy your own.
Some time ago Tim Burke posted, requesting help expanding a ‘trope’ list for an ‘Images of Africa’ course. Here’s a sample, which gives you an idea what he’s looking for:
1) Hidden city/lost civilization deep in the jungle. Often civilization of whites or non-Africans.
2) Missionary/explorer in a cannibal cooking pot; general tropes of cannibalism.
3) Mysterious ritual that turns out to have been marriage to chief’s daughter
4) Superstitious bearer/guide
5) Evil witchdoctor
6) White man “gone native”/Tarzan figure
7) Kurtz-style descent into madness …
And so on. I couldn’t think of anything to add at the time, now I’ve got one. [click to continue…]
“Scott McLemee”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/12/01/mclemee wrote a little while back about reading Colin Wilson as a teenager.
bq. But I have a certain fondness for that novel [Wilson’s _The Philosopher’s Stone_], having discovered it during Christmas break while in high school. It set me off on a fascination with Wilson’s work that seems, with hindsight, perfectly understandable. Adolescence is a good time to read The Outsider. For that matter, Wilson himself was barely out of it when he wrote the book.
I too had a Colin Wilson thing when I was a teenager; something I’m a little embarrassed about today. But nowhere near as embarrassed as I am about the “Erich von Daniken”:http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/uvwxyz/vondaniken_erich.html phase I went through when I was ten or so. Which seems a nice topic for a weekend discussion thread. What is the most embarrassing book that CT readers idolized when they were teenagers or pre-teens? Painful confessions welcome.
In a sense, science fiction is all about the Industrial Revolution. The genre begins with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. Among the layers of meaning that can be read into this work the most obvious, pointed to by the subtitle, is an allegory of the Industrial Revolution, unleashing forces beyond the control of its creators. In one form or another, this has remained the central theme of the genre.
Counterposed to the Promethean theme of science fiction is the frankly reactionary medievalism of Tolkien and most of his successors (‘It is not unlikely that they [orcs] invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions have always delighted them’).
Alternate history, long the topic of five-finger exercises in which, say, Paul Revere’s horse goes lame, has provided a new approach to the problem. The great discovery of recent years, after a period when the whole genre of speculative fiction seemed in danger of exhaustion, has been the fictional potential of the 18th and 19th centuries, the time when modernity, the transformation of life by science and technology, was still new and startling.
Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell gives the alternate history wheel a new spin, by imagining a starting point at which alternate and real histories have converged. Clarke’s Georgian England is just like the real thing, but has a history in which magician-kings ruled the North until some time in the 14th century.
For reasons that are never entirely clear, magic has faded away until its study has become the domain of gentlemanly antiquarians, ‘theoretical magicians’ who never actually cast a spell. Their comfortable clubs are suddenly disrupted by the emergence of a ‘practical magician’ the enigmatic Gilbert Norrell. He is joined by a student and potential rival Jonathan Strange.
Strange is much the more attractive of the pair, but appearances may deceive. Without anything much in the way of moral qualms, he joins Wellington in wreaking magical havoc on the armies of Napoleon, often finding it difficult to put the world back together afterwards.
The re-emergence of magic in this fictional world (where industry is scarcely mentioned) parallels the emergence of technology in the Industrial Revolution. Norrell is the image of a modern researcher looking for grant funding, emphasises cautious and practical applications of magical technology in agriculture, coastal defence and so on. And he has all the vices of associated with the type, hoarding information, jealous of his intellectual property and so on. Meanwhile Strange is alive to, and welcomes, the revolutionary possibilities of magic.
But it is Norrell, and not Strange, who opens the door to chaos when he makes the classic mistake of accepting an attractive-seeming bargain from the the faery king of Lost Hope, to spare the beautiful young wife Sir Walter Pole, from death in return for ‘half her life’. Rather than taking the second half of three-score years and ten, the king calls her away every night to dance in his endless dismal balls.
Lost Hope is the link to the third main character in the book, the ‘nameless slave’ Stephen Black, a negro servant in the Pole Household. The faery takes a fancy to Stephen Black, and determines that Stephen should become King of England, a goal he pursues with amoral carelessness for the sufferings he inflicts along the way. In the end, however, it is his own kingdom of Lost Hope that Black comes to rule.
The book ends in a cloud of dimly-perceived possibilities, with Norrell and Strange vanished from England, and magic transforming the North, very much like the real situation as Britain emerged from the Napoleonic wars. A sequel (or a trilogy) seems called for, and will be awaited eagerly.
