So, What Are You Freakin' Well Reading Now? part (ii)

Columbine by Dave Cullen. Compelling, yet requires frequent breaks in reading.

Sinclair Lewis, in his 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, eerily presages the teabaggers of today.

Right after a description of a street fight between "Minute Men" (Seems the" Spirit of '76" is fertile ground for modern propagandists, whenever they are) and various commies and other degenerates, Lewis describes a gathering of supporters of a populist demagogue at Madison Square Garden:

Quote:

These past weeks hungry miners, dispossessed farmers, Carolina mill hands had greeted Senator Windrip with a flutter of worn hands beneath gasoline torches. Now he was to face, not the unemployed, for they could not afford fifty-cent tickets, but the small, scared side-street traders of New York, who considered themselves altogether superior to clodhoppers and mine-creepers, yet were as desperate as they. The swelling mass that Doremus saw, proud in seats or standing chin-to-nape in the aisles, in a reek of dampened clothes, was not romantic; they were people concerned with the tailor's goose, the tray of potato salad, the card of hooks-and-eyes, the leech-like mortgage on the owner-driven taxi, with, at home, the baby's diapers, the dull safety-razor blade, the awful rise in the cost of rump steak and kosher chicken. And a few, and very proud, civil-service clerks and letter carriers and superintendents of small apartment houses, curiously fashionable in seventeen-dollar ready-made suits and feebly stitched foulard ties, who boasted, "I don't know why all these bums go on relief. I may not be such a wiz, but let me tell you, even since 1929, I've never made less than two thousand dollars a year!"

Manhattan peasants. Kind people, industrious people, generous to their aged, eager to find any desperate cure for the sickness of worry over losing the job.

 I'm re-reading "How Israel Lost It's Soul". by Maxim Ghilan, printed in 1974 by Pelican. He was quite a courageous journalist who exposed the assassination of the Moroccan nationalist Mehdi Ben-Barka by the Israeli Mossad and was jailed for that and 3 times for his various journalistic endeavors. It's content which includes many of the original documents of the Zionist leaders is enthralling. He died a few years ago.

 My next rereading is another Pellican book titled "The Arabs" by Edward Atiya, a remarkable book on the Arab world first published in !955. A Lebanese-Christian academic active in the Arab east who at one point organized the Arab Office in London. Obviously not one of the Mullahs.

 Just to refresh my memory of the background to the present catastrophic and dreadful events in the theocratic-Israel/Palastinian tragedy.

Hmm, this is either really eerie, or really mundane.  I read On the Road at around the same time I read just about the complete works of Hermann Hesse.

Please tell me you don't listen to The Doors these days too.

al-Qa'bong wrote:

Hmm, this is either really eerie, or really mundane.  I read On the Road at around the same time I read just about the complete works of Hermann Hesse.

Please tell me you don't listen to The Doors these days too.

Lots of Sun-Ra and jazz? I'm not sure if that is a step better or worse.

How did you know I have a cup of, erm, steaming....early grey?

Is The Simpsons on in your timezone, too?

I wonder if there will be a review of it on Not My Typewriter!

When Atheism Becomes Religion: America's New Fundamentalists [Paperback]

 by Chris Hedges

Just finished Thomas Geoghegan's excellent travelogue/rant/politico-economic thesis "Were You Born On The Wrong Continent?" (NY: New Press, 2010) It is a meditation on what life might be like for the average member of the hard-pressed, now vanishing American middle class if they were to live in a European social democracy. Geoghegan is a Chicago labour lawyer who has become familiar with Europe, especially Germany, over the years. While his book rambles and contains a bit of Michael Moore-type faux-naivete, it's superb at uncovering all the hidden injuries inflicted by the brutal Anglo-American variant of capitalism. While we in Canada haven't succumbed (yet) to its worst excesses, it's still a bit of a shock to see the petty slights and impositions we unquestioningly accept laid bare.

Geoghegan's no cheerleader. He acknowledges the manifest problems in the German model. But he also points out its amazing resilience and success. As of 2009, Germany, with its 80 million citizens, rigid labour markets, and millstone Eastern sector, exported more goods by value than any other nation on Earth, including those let-'er-rip capitalist paragons America (pop. 300 million odd) and China (1 billion plus). The reason? In large part, social democracy. As he notes, "German worker control contributes to a group interaction that over time not only builds up but protects a certain amount of human capital, especially in engineering and quality control. It's the kind of group knowledge that our efficient ‘flexible' labour markets so readily break up and disperse. We spend vastly more on basic research than the Germans do...We spend more on higher education. But with our flexible labour markets, we're unable to capitalize on this research and education...What's distinctive about Germany is the privileged position the worker has within the firm. And it's that privileged position that explains how our own middle-class way of life can survive....With our flexible labour markets we cannot develop the human capital or knowledge needed to wean ourselves away from turning out crap. In global competition the U.S. has almost every comparative advantage over Germany, but the one great advantage Germany still has over us is that it is a social democracy."

What makes it galling for an American is that Rhineland capitalism was an invention of the United States, or more particularly the US Army of occupation after the war. Distrusting German big business, but fearful of the Reds, the Americans evolved a system of worker consultation and control that checked and balanced corporate and union demands. This cleverness reflected the fact that the US Army was in 1945 a citizen army and had many New Dealers in its upper echelons. So the irony today of being able to walk into a local of IG Metall and find that (!) Dwight D Eisenhower is considered not so much a foreign general as a founder of the post-war labour renascence. And much of Geoghegan's research was funded by the German Marshall Fund, an offshoot of the original fund proposed by General George Marshall. Hard to imagine such a pair at the Pentagon these days.

One quibble. The book has a good index, but no bibliography. You'll have to run down sources yourself. But I'd recommend this book to anyone, most of all to those pur-et-dur leftists who think that social democracy is some plot to co-opt working-class energy. Read these pages to realize what an immense, yes, life-changing difference an efficient social democracy can make to the live of the vast majority of citizens.

I read 84, Charing Cross Road last night. I'm dying to see the film.

I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on the full summer issue of Monthly Review. This year, it focuses on Education Under Fire: The U.S. Corporate Assault on Students, Teachers and Schools.

Something positive to lift my spirits would be good, too.

"A History of Iran" by Micheal Axworthy. Excellent book.

Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968).

Had to go interlibrary for this one. Another sad case of a library system NOT retaining the classics so that following generations can better appreciate the lives of their forbears - in this case the 1960s, brilliantly set out for viewing by a magazine writer who has since become known for her novels.

Her style is brief, descriptive of her feelings, with acute perception of her surroundings - some might say influenced by Hemingway, but far more intelligent and understanding of her readers' concerns. Political. Her husband had just written a book, Delano, on the California grapeworkers' strike.

I can't explain why it took this long to get at it. It has shown up often, over the years, as a must read for anyone wanting to better understand life in 1960s, urban California when the sky was the limit. In a foreword, her inspiration for the book's title, the poem by W.B.Yeats, is presented along with a one-liner from the singer, "Miss Peggy Lee: I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein and Cary Grant."

I wonder if her marvelous journalism in the days of magazines is there in her fiction, or if, as Peggy Lee asked in her senior years, "Is that all there is, My Friend?" Must find out.

reading David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster.

amazing read! enjoying it thoroughly and absolutely completely.

Just about to dive into the Babble Book Club selection of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle! Excited!

I'm trying to think of something witty or literary I've read in the past while, and I have a list of great authors and books, but I have to (shoulders down, scuffing a foot) admit to a guilty pleasure - crime/mystery/suspense novels.  They are to me what TV is to others.  Currently reading an American guy named Michael Koryta.

That should be required reading for babble, kn. The "outdated" part is the history of the growth of the problem for social democracy, eh? In a way, it explains why social democrats in Quebec came over to the NDP - with lots of convincing by Jack and Tom Mulcair - in the age of Globalization. Damned hard to sell social democracy at the national level, let alone provincial, these days. The book could use more political economy, I believe. The Chicago School influence on corporate decision-making? How the worker was co-opted, etc.

for a light read, I tried David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty Some Day, and the short pieces in there are  mixed but some are funny;

notable is the huge huge split among reviewers and critics, some saying Sedaris a hilarious wry observer of small American vignettes, others saying whaaa??, not funny at all ....

DaveW wrote:

for a light read, I tried David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty Some Day, and the short pieces in there are  mixed but some are funny;

notable is the huge huge split among reviewers and critics, some saying Sedaris a hilarious wry observer of small American vignettes, others saying whaaa??, not funny at all ....

I am on the 'Sedaris loving' side and particularly love this book.

I like the divide he creates in his stories in (1) learning to become a writer and (2) the process of being a writer

I love reading Orwell. I wrote a report on one of his books in around 1968 and won a book prize from Richard J. Needham of the Mope and Wail; and Needham treated me to High Tea at the old King Eddy.

Boom Boom wrote:

I love reading Orwell. I wrote a report on one of his books in around 1968 and won a book prize from Richard J. Needham of the Mope and Wail; and Needham treated me to High Tea at the old King Eddy.

Did you and Needham get into the subject of the futility - uselessness, harmful effect - of schooling. Boomer? :) I envy you the contact.

And Greg Clark had retired to the King Eddy a couple of years before that. Met him there in the winter of 1969. Sometime after he had led his platoon up the ridge at Vimy.

Currently reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami for the Babble Book Club. Also enjoying a re-read of Orwell's Animal Farm and about to dive into The Night Circus by erin Morgenstern for my local book club.

Harperland - Lawrence Martin

People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn

[finishing up Beauty Plus Pity because again I leave everything to the last minute]

moving on to Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner, which a friend lent me in a drunken stupor wherein she usually gives her books away.

Here's a bit more info, but it sounds right up my alley as she was an accomplished short fiction writer -- a balance between Lorrie Moore and McSweeny's articles -- and has now produced this collection of short stories. 

Canadian fiction short story collections are my jam.