The Mental Health of George W. Bush
Check the Booker Prizes.
by Don DeLillo;
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The Mental Health of George W. Bush
Check the Booker Prizes. |
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The Body Artist
by Don DeLillo; best book of last quarter. |
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"The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year." [John Foster Dulles] |
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{ December (diciembre (see also books on Spanish)) 2004 }
(12.30.2004)
End of year book discard:
Includes poems selected from four of his books of poems, some translations, and some new poems. The newer the poems, the more Franz Wright opens into the generosity of Walking to Martha's Vineyard.
The title poem is simply:
Leaves stir overhead; I write what I'm given to write. The extension chord to the black house. |
An exploration of Japan's resurgent nationalism after World War I, through a study of representation and misrepresentation, politeness and rudeness, generosity and manipulation. Obsessed with status and hierarchy.
Using a visual artist as his protagonist, Ishiguro writes a much more coherent and interesting novel that his surreal The Unconsoled, and even than his pleasing When we were Orphans, a 2000 Booker Prize nominee.
A good day for watching videos:
After Life, the enthralling Japanese film of what happens to you when you die,
and why you need to paying attention to your happiest moment.
Eric the Viking: A Middle Ages Crisis (1989).
Tim Robbins saves the world. Written and directed by Terry (Monty) Jones who also stars,
together with John (Python) Cleese.
Suicide Kings (1998), a noir film with Christopher Walken.
Some timely lessons in poker playing and justice.
Hilarious.
| "So, Charlie, don't go dying on me. Remember I'm a lawyer. I got friends in hell." |
Truman, the HBO biography starring Gary Sinise.
Fascinating to see the life of President Harry Truman (1945-1953)
after seeing his part in
All the Shah's Men.
This long prose poem teaches about the joys and problems that face both a writer and a reader. It includes "the Taoist sense of ... spontaneous origins ... as a process in writing".
"Fu" means the form of this poem. Wen Fu was a new use of this form, which was popular in the third century for telling histories and for praising power lords. "Wen" means art, as well as writing or literature.
There are 16 sections and this example is from section III ('Choosing Words'):
He chooses from among his ideas and orders his thoughts; he considers his words with great care and fits them with a sense of defined proportions. ... The poet brings light into darkness, even if that means the simple becomes difficult or the difficult easy. ... He calms his mind's deep waters; he collects from deep thoughts the proper names for things. |
This is from section VIII ('The Key'):
What wants to continue must not end; what has been fully stated is itself a conclusion. ... When verbosity is restrained and proper order established, one is saved from the pain of further and further revision. |
And this example is from section IX ('The Five Criteria'):
1. Music. When the rhythm is slack and has no tradition, then the poem falters. ... 2. Harmony. When the phrasing is self-indulgent, the music is gaudy and no one can find beauty. ... 3. Feeling. Searching for a subject, the poet may indulge in the needlessly obscure or the trivial, forsaking common sense. ... 4. Restraint. ... Even when feeling is there, it is not enough unless there is also refinement. 5. Refinement. When the poem is free of all confusion, the passions come into perspective. ... |
It documents the USA-organized coup in Iran (1953), goaded by the saber rattling of the British and the re-elected Winston Churchill.
Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh (the victim of the coup) headed Iran's elected government. He nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which had earned immense profits for the British while paying almost nothing to Iran. Initially Prime Minister Mossadegh was praised in the USA for his stand against a colonial power, and his concise and passionate eloquence at the U.N. He was Time's "Man of 1951".
But as soon as Dwight Eisenhower was elected president of the USA in November 1952, the American CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service quickly planned and executed the coup.
One serious lack: the book needs a time line of the relationship of Iran and the USA as well as Britain and Iraq.
Mma Precious Ramotswe continues to solve personal and professional problems with her Number One Ladies' Detective Agency in Botswana in another cozy detective novel.
Her assistant, Mma Makutsi, is not only Assistant Detective, but is also the acting manager for the kind but depressed Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni (Mma Ramotswe's fiancee). The no-nonsense Mma Makutsi gets greater efforts and better results from Mr. Matekoni's lazy apprentices, partly because she can amaze them with her commonsense approach to trouble-shooting car problems. She also detects moral fiber in a single beauty contestant.
I also enjoyed Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and his Tears of the Giraffe.
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Listened to a multi-accented reading (by British actor Nigel Planer) of
Hogfather (1999)
by Terry Pratchett.
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This is the funniest book I've had read to me this year. Its humor is a little under-graduate-student, but so are the works of Douglas Adams and Monty Python, i.e., a quaint mixture of really stupid and really intelligent, interwoven with interesting satire.
There is a plot, appropriate to the Winter Solstice, or Hogwatch Night, which is the night that the plump Hogfather in his red suit and white beard climbs into his sleigh pulled by four pigs (Gouger, Tusker, Rooter, and Snouter), and delivers gifts to the cargo-cult worshipping (i.e., Capitalist consumer) boys and girls.
This year the Hogfather is missing, and his stand-in is everybody's straight man, Death.
The Assassin's Guild is responsible for the disappearance of the Hogfather, and they have been hired by the humorless Auditors of the Universe. The Auditors, being literal-minded accountants, want people to stop believing in things that aren't real and thus cause cosmic disorder.
It's up to Death's adopted granddaughter Susan (the 'gothic governess') to save chaos, and she is aided by a raven (addicted to eating eyeballs), the small-scythe carrying Death of Rats ('the Grim Squeaker'), and Bilious, the God (actually the Oh-God) of Hangovers.
Though soon we will come to Hogmanny (New Year), so it's possible that the Hogfather rides out on December 31st, not 21st nor 24th.
I look forward to listening to other books by UK writer Terry Pratchett (b. 1948).
Check your favorite search engine for the Denver Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Club, which lists Pratchett's work and comments on several books.
Also recommended: Jingo and Thief of Time.
Also see other books by Terry Pratchett. (12.20.2004)
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What is the most obvious mental health problem of G. W. Bush? [Comparison of percentages are with data reported on 10.30.2004.]
Number of votes: 797 (was 631 last check). |
At first I thought that Stan Rice's poetry would not have been published in a Knopf hardback if his wife had not been the vampire writer, Anne Rice.
Then I thought that Stan Rice's poems (which he calls Psalms) were written in the form that the priest in Monty Python and the Holy Grail reads the instructions for the Holy Hand Grenade.
And finally I decided that they had an interesting voice in their own right, as in this sample from "Psalm 187", which replicates what the book preserves: "idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation that were characteristic of the poet."
Crush time and you get a rubbery powder. The fighting cocks are all chained to their stakes. We are dealing with people's heads here. Frankly when I sat down I frightened even myself. But something is wrong with this statement. The database may itself be a hate crime. ... Something is against whitewashing beheadings. Is that taking it too far. Even tribulation is free speech. Even anti-batter makes the fried chicken crisp. No matter what your prophecy is You must swim until your skin is a robe. |
What do you do if your child drowns in a white water river and her body is trapped beneath rocks in a deep eddy. What if your twin brother was one of the rescuers and he also was caught by the river?
What if the river is a Wilderness Preserve? Who do your love more - the land, your dead, your family, your community?
Although the first half of the book is a little awkward and self-conscious, this novel is mainly a written exploration of such questions.
Ron Rash has won an NEA poetry fellowship and has published three collections of poetry and two short stories. This is his first novel.
Not only does a daily walk bring down your blood pressure. So does losing 5 pounds. Ok, ok, the diet starts tomorrow.
Insightful story of how Susanna Kaysen, as a young woman, attempted suicide and found life difficult. She committed herself to the McLean Psychiatric Hospital. The wealth of her parents paid for her 496 days of residence.
On suicide:
| "Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't." |
On insanity:
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"Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast.
... The predominant quality of the slow form is viscosity. Experience is thick. Perceptions are thickened and dulled. Time is slow. ... In contrast to viscosity's cellular coma, velocity endows every platelet and muscle fiber with a mind of its own, a means of knowing and commenting on its own behavior. There is too much perception, and beyond the plethora of perceptions, a plethora of thoughts about the perceptions and about the facts of having perceptions." |
On mind, memory, emotions:
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"Whatever we call it - mind, character, soul - we like to think we possess something
that is greater than the sum of our neurons and that 'animates' us.
A lot of mind, though, is turning out to be brain. A memory is a particular pattern of cellular changes on particular spots in our heads. A mood is a compound of neurotransmitters. ... The brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perception. ... Something is interpreting this clatter of neurological activity. ... Imagine the first interpreter as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the world. The world in this case means everything out- or inside our bodies, including serotonin levels in the brain. The second interpreter is a news analyst, who writes op-ed pieces. They read over each other's work. One needs data, the other needs an overview; they influence each other. They get dialogs going." |
On her diagnosed illness:
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"What does borderline personality mean, anyhow?
It appears to be a way station between neurosis and psychosis: a fractured but not disassembled psyche. Though to quote my ... psychiatrist: 'It's what they call people whose lifestyles bother them.'" |
So why don't you just go visit Catarina's book blog.
Hmmm. Much less interesting than his When we were Orphans, a 2000 Booker Prize nominee.
In The Unconsoled, the narrator is in a labyrinth of anxiety nightmares. Once, in a Fresh Air interview, Ishiguro mentioned (with reference to The Unconsoled) how one (i.e., himself) ends up promising things to people one does not know simply because they persist in asking you until you feel you must agree to what they ask. Small wonder that one doesn't want to remember what one promised. And the resulting Kafkaesque dreams only make me keep thinking "Kafka did it better."
A delight. Interleaved reading of the diaries of the empirical Eve (read by Betty Buckley) and the stolid Adam (read by Mandy Patikin).
A deserving nominee on the long list for the 2004 Booker Prize. This was also on the 2004 Orange Prize shortlist and was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Awards.
The Great Fire refers to many things in this book, including the fire storm of Hiroshima, the Great Fire of London, and the long-lived and consuming love of a middle-aged man for an under-aged (and eventually of-age) girl, as well as the fire of life in two terminally ill children.
An often-stated theme is the love of books shared by many of the characters.
Finished listening to the unabridged CD of
Will in the world: how Shakespeare became Shakespeare (2004)
by Stephen Greenblatt.
Of special interest are the Greenblatt's explorations of:
Yet I miss the the delights of hypothesized conversions such as Colm Toíbín peppers in his text of The Master.
Finished The Master (2004)
by Colm Toíbín.
A fictionalized study, based on biographical materials and family accounts. Externally the novel begins in 1895 in London, with Henry James' failure in the theater. Each chapter is headed by a month and year, moving forward in small jumps toward the end of the 19th century, while full of Jamesian memories of his life, family, and friends. Of special interest to writers are the observations on his process, from his acquiring of characters for his novels by listening and adapting:
And how did James think about his art?
| "He did not ever in his life actively seek the hard doom of general popularity. Nonetheless, he wanted his books to sell, he wanted to shine in the marketplace and pocket the proceeds without compromising his sacred art in any way." |
How did people think of James' use of people. One friend, Gosse:
| "insisted that writing a story using factual material and real people was dishonest and strange and somehow underhand ... a cheap raid on the real and the true." |
{ November (noviembre (see also books on Spanish)) 2004 }
A fascinating semi-autobiographical description of a brave soldier's actions, emotions, and thoughts, while trying to cope with his conflicting feelings about warfare, possibly brought on by shell shock. As he [Sherston/Sassoon] came from an upper-class family and performed many brave and daring acts, his public rebellion against fighting did not lead to his being shot but to his psychiatric care in Edinburgh with Dr. Rivers.
Eventually, he is "cured" and he returns to his unit. He is posted to Ireland (where he reports mainly on his fox hunts with the locals) and then to Palestine. Eventually he returns to France and the trench warfare of the Western Front:
| "Wonderful moments of the War, we called them, and told people at home that after all we wouldn't have missed it for worlds. But it was only one's youngness, really, and the fact of being in a foreign country with a fresh mind. Not because of the war, but in spite of it, we felt such zest and fulfilment, and remembered it later on with nostalgic regret, forgetting the miseries and grumblings, and how we longed for it to come to an end." |
Earlier he wrote Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and then the excellent Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.
Mma Precious Ramotswe, a plump, dignified, and sensible woman, continues with her Detective Agency in Botswana in this cozy detective novel. A delightful book of interleaved mysteries about love, and lies, and lost children.
It is pleasing to see Mma Makutsi promoted to Assistant Detective (though she is still to do the typing and make the tea as well as have some cases). The kind Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni (Mma Ramotswe's fiancee) copes as best he can with his inferiority complex, and provides the sweetness that in a Victorian novel was usually provided by a wife and mother.
I love the glimpses of traditional African life. As in the first book, the common sense of the heroine and her practical intuition and gentle humor are pleasant. However, the ethicist career of the author shows through a little too strongly at times. While the discussion about the morality of lying is important, it should be dealt with more concisely.
I also enjoyed Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.
I've been reading and re-reading Sending Messages Over Inconceivable Distances recently, a collection of narrative and lyrical poems about a generous life and the adoption of a Chinese baby girl. Among my favorites are Inside the Water (p.59), Beginning Mandarin (p.63), and the brilliant Economics (pp.12-13), which is also the source of the book's title:
I understand money, the trading of a symbol for energy between people, but time I don't comprehend any better than my husband's love for radio antennas or my need to study mystery... ... Each hour I spend working to make money is worth two hours, the hour I spend and the hour I lost smelling lilacs, ... Only love makes time not equal money. I quit work, go to my husband hunches over his transmitter. He shouts, "Yankee Zulu!", international phonetics, over the airwaves. "I'm a Yankee Zulu too," I say. He adjusts my buttons, begins protocol: "Let's send messages over inconceivable distances." |
Autographed copy! You can get your very own copy with the poet's autograph if you contact Karen Braucher (braucher at portlandia.com).
It includes another of my favorites, the delightful How to Stay Married (first published in "Manzanita Quarterly" (Autumn 2002)):
The perfect marriage is, they say, a blind woman married to a deaf man. Or is it a deaf woman married to a blind man? Failing to achieve these physical variations, it is helpful to think of marriage as ocean waves - ... After a while, you must be a boat, or parts of a boat - yesterday the rusty scupper, today gunwales, tomorrow ballast and bailing buckets. You must be a motor, a sail, a paddle. It's helpful to enjoy the view. It's helpful not to think about the lack of life preservers. |
Finished
The Cuckoo (2004)
by Peter Streckfus.
The Yale University Press's most recent selection, chosen by
Louise Glück.
Fascinating. Glück compares Streckfus to Bidart (assemblage; ritual). Others compare him to Ashbery and Pound. While I don't understand most of Streckfus' work, it's absorbing to read. I admire and enjoy his poems in some mysterious way. For readers who enjoy persona poems, he has several from the point-of-view of things (such as a dung heap) or animals (such as a goat).
When I opened it at "Death and a Fig", I thought it was by
For students of book organization, there are five sections, each of ten or a dozen pages. The last section is a single 10-part poem, "The Organum", 'composed wholely of language from Frances Parkman's The Oregon Trail (Boston, 1875) and ... The Journey to the West'. See how far you get without noticing a structural reason for the title.
Thirteen essays on the themes and underlying lessons of history.
The slant of the book is suggested by some of its chapter's epigraphs:
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Introduction:
"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being
governed by your inferiors." Plato.
Chapter 2. "The great majority of mankind is satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities." Machiavelli. Chapter 5. "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." Winston Churchill. Chapter 8. "Don't be humble. You're not that great." Golda Meir. Chapter 13. "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed." William Butler Yeats. Chapter 11. "Leadership is a combination of strategy and character. If you must be without one, be without the strategy." General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Chapter 13. "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed." William Butler Yeats. |
Concerning the relationship between Karl Rove and George W. Bush:
The end is obvious: Karl Rove thinks it, and George W. Bush does it... Rove's political strategies are steering administration decisions on domestic issues and foreign policy." (p.11)
Bush was livid. He arrived for a staff meeting and glowered at Rove.
'No one will promote me at the expense of my father. Karl, I expect you to write a handwritten apology.
Rove did write an apology, immediately." (p.223)
The book does not repeat the Time Magazine 2001 report that George W. Bush's pet name for Rove is 'Turd Blossom'. (as stated in http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/usa/karl-rove).
Concerning Karl Rove's methods, you need to read the book. Here are a few:
Responses to Karl Rove from those closest:
Before or after you read the book, you can VOTE on the Mental Health of George W. Bush
Having see one elephant seal chase another, I am astonished by how quickly they can propel themselves across a beach. This small book has a huge number of photos and facts per page, making it a great read about the lives and features of the ugliest of seals. The males have enormous schnozzles and fight on the beaches for ownership and mating rights with the females.
So this is the psychology and politics of elephant seals, which leads me to Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential.
As I am thinking of joining a committee, it was helpful to be reminded of the Dogbert IQ rule:
| "The intelligence quotient of any meeting can be determined by starting with 100 and subtracting 5 points for each participant." |
The advice on how to get rid of phone callers makes this a surprisingly practical book:
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"1. No matter what they ask, just give them the information you have right in front of you...
2. If the caller protests, make them restate the question in as many forms as possible... 3. Act like the caller's question makes no sense whatsoever. ('Are you talking in Pig Latin? What do all of those words mean?') 4. Pause 20 seconds and pretend you've forgotten the entire conversation. ('Hello, have you been helped?') ... 7. If the pest calls you again, slip into a foreign accent and start over at step one." |
This is a good read, a 'Peter Pan lives his extended adolescence' book, full of joy and devoid of much responsibility.
Sassoon's humor saves this romp through self-indulgence in the pleasures of fox-hunting (an excuse to buy horses, jump fences, and hang out with men) and cricket (cheaper but, while a few of the hunters were women, all the cricketers are chaps).
Laugh-out-loud warning: Part Six, The Colonel's Cup, has Sassoon nearly fall off his horse at a critical moment toward the end of a race. His struggles to recover his seat are a delight as is:
| "After that really remarkable recovery of mine, life became lyrical, beatified, ecstatic, or anything else you care to call it." |
Even joining the army for World War One is treated light heartedly. However, the final chapter is the most interesting. Sassoon works behind the lines and in them, proving himself as a brave and insightful man. His class consciousness (astounding at this remove) seems to be more an automatic description, much as we might say 'tall' or 'blonde', for he treats men from the lower classes with much interest and respect if they are interesting and competent.
He later wrote the excellent Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress. These three books are the trilogy The Memoirs of George Sherston.
I admire and refer you to www.gyford.com/phil/notes/2004/04/16/the_balkans_by_mar.php, the detailed notes on this book by Phil Gyford.
Among the many new things I learned from The Balkans: A Short History are:
As Phil Gyford highlights in his selected [and British English] quotes:
| "'Ethnic cleansing' - whether in the Balkans in 1912-13, in Anatolia in 1921-2 or in erstwhile Yugoslavia in 1991-5 - was not, then, the spontaneous eruption of primeval hatreds but the deliberate use of organised violence against civilians by paramilitary squads and army units; it represented the extreme force required by nationalists to break apart a society which was otherwise capable of ignoring the mundane fractures of class and ethnicity." |
Mark Mazower is a professor of history at Birkbeck College, London. Previously he was a professor of history at Princeton University. His specialties include modern Greece, 20th century Europe, and international history, with particular current interest in the post-Ottoman experience in the Balkans and Middle East, as well as war and population movements.. His education include classics, philosophy, International Affairs, and modern history.
By the way, the Balkans are:
Balkan Mountains.
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Balkan Peninsula.
Largest peninsula of southeast Europe.
Bounded by:
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Balkan States.
These countries are (November 2004) in the Balkan Peninsula and environs:
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A feel-good thriller. Good escapist fiction after the sad outcome of the 2004 U.S.A. presidential election.
Written almost as memoir but with an omniscient narrator, this novel takes you through the life and death of a women (Daisy) born in Manitoba in 1905. It begins (actually) before her birth (with the lives of her parents) and ends after her death (with her family and friends).
A special delight of the book is whenever a hoard of varied voices appears, each usually recognizable as one or other of Daisy's relatives or friends, and telling a lot more about the speaker than about Daisy. The book has a stronger plot, more humor, and more poetry than Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, without Woolf's self-conscious and exhausting effort.
"Nothing in his life has prepared him for the notion of love."
"The mysteries, secrets, and lies of their separate selves dance like atoms across a magnetic field so that the room, this simple low-ceilinged country kitchen, is charged with the same kind of vibrancy that precedes a cyclone."
"His smile ... hatched from ... the suspicion that love is no more than a diminutive for self-injury."
"These things at least were things she might believe in: the print of sunlight on her bare arm. The cool sweet drink sliding down her throat. The buttons on her father's shirt, glittering there like a trail of tears."
"Or is love something less, something slippery and odorless, a transparent gas riding through the world on the back of a breeze, or else ... just a word trying to remember another word."
It was a deserving nominee on the short list for the 1993 Booker Prize.
Only two books connected to books in both of the polarized groups:
These books linked directly to books on the left and through 1 jump (I think this is what Krebs means by '2 steps') to right-wing books:
And these linked directly to books on the right and through 1 jump to left-wing books:
Krebs observes "4 steps from the most central Blue book to the most central Red book ... Most social network theorists believe that any pair linked by a path of more than three degrees are very far apart." He suggests that you "focus on the edge nodes and the bridges.".
{ October (octubre (see also books on Spanish)) 2004 }
(10.31.2004)
Greene writes in such a restrained and stately way that I am repeatedly surprised that his novels are set in the present. This book of betrayal, incompetence, and tragedy is set in an Argentina of terrorism, dictatorship, idle rich, revolutionary priests, and treacherous women and men.
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What is the most obvious mental health problem of G. W. Bush? [Comparison of percentages are with data reported on 10.11.2004.]
Number of votes: 631. |
A collection of stories that each pivots around a realization or insight in a life or a soul. The terror and joy of these stories is enhanced by the expressive reading of Donal Donnelly, the Irish-born actor.
Mostly I have no clue what the surreal poems of Parts One and Two concern. [This is in line with my comments on his Walking the Black Cat.]
But I enjoy the poems in Part Three. They have a clearer narrative as counterpoint to the fancy flights. Particular pleasures are the more well know pieces, including The Pleasures of Reading and Empires, which contains:
My grandmother prophesied the end Of your empires, O fools! ... One of your heroes was giving a speech. "Monster," she called him. There were cheers and gun salutes for the monster. "I could kill him with my bare hands," She announced to me. ... "Don't go blabbering about this to anyone," She warned me. And pulled my ear to make sure I understood. |
Understand that there is a beast within you that can drink till it is sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. |
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On April 20 of this year [2004] Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts,
in tandem with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, announced
Operation Homecoming: Writing the War Experience ...
funded ($250,000 of its $300,000 cost) by the Boeing Company, ...
a major recipient of our tax dollars and a corporation that profits from war...
Will Operation Homecoming serve them [the returning troops]? Will it serve poetry? Or is it designed to serve quite another purpose? ... What is it like for a returning veteran to write under the aegis of the military, where language necessarily serves a far different purpose than it does for a poet? ... "Most alarming to many of us," writes Kevin Bowen, "Operation Homecoming threatens to move the NEA into the business of supporting the generation of propaganda, a wartime exercise that is not part of its mission, and does writers, veterans, and the public a great disservice." |
Finished High Country (2004)
by Nevada Barr.
A novel of intrigue and mystery and wry humor, set in Yosemite National Park. Barr does justice to the beauty of the high country, while she tells how a middle-aged female heroine succeeds where "elite rescue teams" failed. As always, Barr is a little heavy-handed in sprinkling clues that divide the bad guys and gals (they are bad-tempered, don't like the heroine, and deserve her outbursts of cunning, sarcasm, and surprise physical attack) from the good (who are helpful and nice). Pleasant escapism for a rainy day.
| Prior to the sole 1980 Reagan-Carter presidential debate, ABC-TV commentator George Will stole (Democrat) President Jimmy Carter's briefing book and gave it to (Republican) Ronald Reagan's handlers, for use in preparation of Reagan for responding to Carter in the debate. |
This book is a blessing of amazing poems - poems that met Emily Dickinson's test, for they take off the top of my head. Many of Franz Wright's poems begin in the physical of what is happening just here and just now, and they leap through space and time, and between the outside world and the heart's interior.
This book is the deserving winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
My favorites include "On Earth":
Resurrection of the little apple tree outside my window, leaf- light of late in the April called her eyes, ... ... The world is filled with people who have never died |
and "Walden":
Sunlight and silence stood at a bend in the path suddenly; wind moved, once, over the dark water and I was back. ... in that element half underworld, half sky. There is a power that wants me to love. |
It beat out the bookmakers favorite: by October 15, Cloud Atlas was "the hottest favourite ever to win the Prize at odds of 5/4".
| 'In lieu of flowers, Harry would prefer that you not vote for George Bush.' |
As always, you can vote on the mental health of George W. Bush
A delightful collection of haiku that "make it new", presenting the natural world with new juxtapositions, insights, and relevance. There is a recognition of ourselves as makers and destroyers and re-makers.
The book has two sections. The first ("Within the Walls") comprises haiku of the garden. One of my favorites is:
mint crushed
I wheel the barrow
into lavender
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The second part ("Without the Walls") comprises haiku of the wilderness. These, even more than the work of the first section, are amazing. A favorite is:
felled sequoia --
starlight
into every ring
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For other examples, see the notes for Christopher Herold's 2004 Pescadero Weekend Workshop.
UCSC's Craig Reinarman has published (American Journal of Public Health) his analysis of data from Amsterdam in the Netherlands and San Francisco in the USA.
"The Netherlands effectively decriminalized marijuana use in 1976, and it is available for purchase in small quantities by adults in licensed coffee shops; in the United States, marijuana use carries stiff criminal penalties, and more than 720,000 people were arrested for marijuana offenses in 2001."
UCSC's Roberto Gwiazda has published (Health Physics)
his measurements showing that exposure is found in both:
(1) soldiers with shrapnel in their bodies resulting from
"friendly fire" and
(2) "soldiers who did not have shrapnel in them but were involved in the friendly fire
incidents, either because they were in the vehicles that were hit or because they participated
in the recovery operations."
They were controlled with a reference group of soldiers who participated in the war but not in combat operations.
The protagonist is Eiji Miyake, a youth. His quest is to find his father. To make this standard plot interesting, Mitchell hurls jump-cuts at you every minute.
Mitchell lives in Hiroshima, so perhaps this approach models some of the chaos between reality and the surreal that was experienced there when the U.S.A. exploded a W.M.D. (weapon of mass destruction).
The story, set in Tokyo, starts and restarts and restarts, etc. ad nauseam. I could not grasp what was reality (if anything) and what was dream, what was surreality and what was a damaged brain in a mental institution, what was a fecund imagination and what was a brain on speed.
The book is much too big and scattered for me to pay more than passing attention to number9dream' s obsessions with the number 9, John Lennon, punk-goth, computer games, and the existential search for meaning in modern Japan.
One of the most useful reviews is by Steven Poole ("David Mitchell's second novel number9dream is flawed but stylish"), from March 10, 2001 in The Guardian
David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is on the 6-member shortlist (chosen from a longlist of 22) for the 2004 Booker Prize, BBC News reported on 26 August, 2004 that bookmakers William Hill rated it the favorite, giving it odds of 3/1 to win. By October 15, Cloud Atlas is "the hottest favourite ever to win the Prize at odds of 5/4".
More than a farce, Number 10 is an epic journey around Britain in the Tony Blair years.
Wakeup, Booker Prize, and include one of Sue Townsend's books in a list of your nominees!
The author gave us the marvelous four books on her young protagonist Adrian Mole (from The Adrian Mole Diaries : The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 to Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years).
Now her characters are grownup, though acting no more maturely. Accompanied by police officer Jack Sprat, the British P.M. (a.k.a. "that pratt Edward Clare"), disguised in his wife's clothes, and now named Edwina St. Clare, experiences the trials of the British public, including the collapsing public transportation system, elder care, and emergency care.
Number 10 is not only the location of the British Prime Minister's residence at Number 10 Downing Street. It's also the house number of Jack's Mum, who has been a conned into turning her meager home into a crack den.
One of the book's most resilient and sensible characters is the Pakistani taxi driver, whom Jack and "Edwina" hire when "Edwina" quickly gets fed up with public transportation.
During the week of this wandering, Edward's brilliant and over-achieving wife, Adele, stops taking her pills. Therefore she starts having hallucinations again.
Providing much needed romantic relief, Jack falls in love with "Edwina's" sister.
Readers outside the U.K. may miss a few of the jokes, but much of the satire is not exclusively British. The interwoven plots and adventurous characters are a joy no matter where you live.
Other books by Sue Townsend. (10.13.2004)
Despite grumbling from some Republicans, this book is supported by the George Bush Presidential Library: about half the four dozen photos are copyrighted-credited to that Library.
The Acknowledgments, completed June 8, 2004, fill 6 of the 705 pages. Kitty Kelley spoke with 937 people in preparing her book. Only one of her contacts (Sharon Bush, ex-wife of Neil Bush) now denies some of her quoted statements.
Is the book True? Yes, people's memories are imperfect and eye witnesses are notoriously inaccurate. Still, the book does seem to give enough diversity of data to document:
Is the book worth reading? It's definitely worth skimming. The large number of quotations and the sign-posting of emotions keep the material lively. And it certainly provides some answers to the puzzled question, "where did George W. Bush come from?"
Zukav believes that "The soul of an individual ... is that part of us that is immortal." And that "Your personality, your body, your intuitional structure... are all ... energy tools of the soul. Your soul existed before your personality came into being."
To him, human beings are non-physical and immortal souls first, and physical beings second. Even so, he tells us that we have "no scientific way to validate" the existence of the soul.
He proposes that significant human evolution is no longer to obtain greater physical ("external") control and power. Instead it's to obtain "authentic" power by merging our perceptions and values with the inner desires of our souls, by understanding whether our intentions serve the needs of our soul.
To present his ideas, he writes about karma (in a way familiar to students of eastern philosophy), trust, intuition, addiction, and relationships. Though he says of karma (in an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove): "Here in the west we call it the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule is not a moral dictum. It is loving guidance about how to live and how to create in a world that is governed by the universal law of cause and effect."
Some of his statements (such as his claim that animals do not have individual souls but are part of one big soul for that animal) are startling. He does not acknowledge debts to other philosophies, so I have no idea if this window opened up for Zukav spontaneously or from other thinkers.
He follows the first definition in many dictionaries, that the soul forms the "rational, emotional, and volitional faculties in man ... forming an entity distinct from the body." Zukav also says that "Psychology is the study of ... the personality even though the word means the study of the soul." But the Greek word psyche means not only the soul but also the breath of life, the life spirit. One may want the psyche to be eternal. But it may simply be the here-and-now of the breath.
Finally, poet Robert Browning wrote: "The soul doubtless is immortal where a soul can be discerned." It would be wise to live a little more consciously of what might be one's soul, even if one doesn't believe all of The Seat of the Soul.
What is the most obvious mental health problem of G. W. Bush? Dry drunk (as Alcohol-Related Disorder NOS) (DSM 291.9) (133) 26% Delusional Disorder (DSM 297.1) (111) 21% Narcissistic Personality Disorder (DSM 301.81) (93) 18% Antisocial Personality Disorder (DSM 301.7) (53) 10% Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Predom. hyperactivity (44) 8% Some other mental health diagnosis (27) 5% Politician Syndrome (proposed new DSM category 333.333) (25) 4% No problem: he is mentally healthy. (20) 3% Number of votes: 506. |
As in other issues, lots of marvelous essays, haibun, and haiku, including one of my favorites by Christopher Herold:
filing rust from the lawnmower blades first robin song |
An emotional roller coaster. Does one laugh or weep at such misfits as Barker's characters? Some of them fit with each other, though, so they are not entirely hopeless.
Because of my preference to read 20 books in parallel, its multiple threads made Wide Open a difficult book for me to read. So I read just this one - and I still kept getting mixed up on who the male characters were, despite their idiosyncrasies that should help me to keep them clear. The female characters are better differentiated.
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Related pages:
Books on Buddhism.
Books on Learning Spanish.
Poetry - Learn How to Write Your Own.
Forests of California and Trees of the World.
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