Books: June 2007 - December 2007

AMERICAN PASTORAL
Philip Roth

What he has instead of a being, I thought, is blandness—the guy’s radiant with it. He has devised for himself an incognito, and the incognito has become him. (pg. 23)

But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man’s tragedy. (pg. 86)

“…eyes bearing that look both long accustomed to living with pain and startled to have been in so much pain so long.” (pg. 295)

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NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU
Stories by Miranda July

Something that needs nothing

Now that we had paid the rent, we felt entitled to mention the cockroach situation to the landlord. He said he would send someone over but that we shouldn’t get our hopes up.
Why not?
Well, it’s not just your apartment; the whole building’s infested.
Maybe you should have them do the whole building, then.
It wouldn’t do any good; they’d just come over from other buildings.
It’s the whole block?
It’s the whole world.

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THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
W.E.B. Du Bois

Years have passed away since then,--ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet…

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. (pg.8)

In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life.(pg. 42)

It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil-doing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to do so. (pg 57)

Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature. And yet they must not be encouraged by being let alone. They must be recognized as facts, but unpleasant facts, things that stand in the way of civilization and religion and common decency. (pg. 91)

“…just as certainly no adequate common-school system, just as certainly no adequate common schools could be founded until there were teachers to teach them. Southern whites would not teach them; Northern whites in sufficient numbers could not be had. If the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself, and the most effective help that could be given him was the establishment of schools to train Negro teachers. This conclusion was slowly but surely reached by every student of the situation until simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without consultation or systematic plan, there arose a series of institutions designed to furnish teachers for the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the obvious defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land, and they made Tuskegee possible.” (pg. 98)

“…there were, in the years from 1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates from Northern colleges; from 1885 to 1890 there were 43, and from 1895 to 1900, nearly 100 graduates. From Southern Negro colleges there were, in the same three periods, 143, 413, and over 500 graduates.” (pg. 106)

“—as, for instance, the Sam Hose affair. As a result of such a situation, there arose, first, the Black Belt; and, second, the Migration to Town. The Black Belt was not, as many assumed, a movement toward fields of labor under more genial climatic conditions; it was primarily a huddling for self-protection,--a massing of the black population for mutual defence in order to secure the peace and tranquility necessary to economic advance. This movement took place between Emancipation and 1880, and only partially accomplished the desired results. The rush to town since 1880 is the counter-movement of men disappointed in the economic opportunities of the Black Belt.” (pg. 154)

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities. A Negro slum may be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is quite common to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable Negro district. One thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like close proximity. It thus happens that in nearly every Southern town and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of each other. (pg. 167)

I have seen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest Negro buy and pay for a farm in installments three separate times, and then in the face of law and decency the enterprising American who sold it to him pocketed the money and deed and left the black man landless, to labor on his own land at thirty cents a day. (pg. 171)

That to leave the Negro helpless and without a ballot today is to leave him, not to the guidance of the best, but rather to the exploitation and debauchment of the worst; that this is no truer of the South than of the North,--of the North than of Europe: in any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand. (pg. 178)

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PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT
Philip Roth

Argentine Diary by William L. Shirer
The Memoirs of Casanova
W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk
An American Tragedy

At long last, not a cored apple, not an empty milk bottle greased with vaseline, but a girl in a slip, with two tits and a cunt—and a mustache, but who am I to be picky?
(pg. 179)

“Oh my God! Jack!” she calls into the bathroom. “Jack, Alex is home with a dog—he’s gone blind!” “Him, blind?” my father replies. “How could he be blind, he doesn’t even know what it means to turn off a light.” (pg. 182)

THE MOST PREVALENT FORM OF DEGRADATION IN EROTIC LIFE

I don’t think I’ve spoken of the disproportionate effect The Monkey’s handwriting used to have upon my psychic equilibrium. What hopeless calligraphy! It looked like the work of an eight-year-old—it nearly drove me crazy! Nothing capitalized, nothing punctuated—only those over-sized irregular letters of hers slanting downward along the page, then dribbling off. And printed, as on the drawings the rest of us used to carry home in our little hands from first grade! And that spelling. A little word like “clean” comes out three different ways on the same sheet of paper. You know, as in “Mr. Clean”?—two out of three times it begins with the letter k. K! As in “Joseph K.” Not to mention”dear” as in the salutation of a letter: d-e-r-e. Or d-e-i-r. And that very first time (this I love) d-i-r. On the evening we are scheduled for dinner at Gracie Mansion—D! I! R! I mean, I just have to ask myself—what am I doing having an affair with a woman nearly thirty years of age who thinks you spell “dear” with three letters!
(p. 184)

AFTERWORD
When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do.
(p. 285)

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STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS
Daniel Gilbert

This finding brings to mind that wonderful scene in the 1967 film Bedazzled in which the devil spends his days in bookstores, ripping the final pages out of the mystery novels. This may not strike you as an act so utterly evil that it would warrant Lucifer’s personal attention, but when you arrive at the end of a good whodunit only to find the whodunit part missing, you understand why people might willingly trade their immortal souls for the denouement. (p. 116)

Moreese Bickham, a former inmate, made his remark upon being released from the Louisiana State Penitentiary where he’d served thirty-seven years for defending himself against the Ku Klux Klansmen who’d shot him. (It was a glorious experience).

Filmmakers and novelists often capitalize on this fact by fitting their narratives with mysterious endings, and research shows that people are, in fact, more likely to keep thinking about a movie when they can’t explain what happened to the main character. And if they liked the movie, this morsel of mystery causes them to remain happy longer.
Explanation robs events of their emotional impact because it makes them seem likely and allows us to stop thinking about them.

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THREE CUPS OF TEA
Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

“But I’ve learned through the years, as long as you don’t believe all that rubbish about yourself, you can’t come to too much harm.” --Sir Hillary Edmund

“Everest is a harsh and hostile immensity. Whoever challenges it declares war. He must mount his assault with the skill and ruthlessness of a military operation. And when the battle ends, the mountain remains unvanquished. There are no true victors, only survivors.”

“He soon saw the region for what it was—bands of tribal powers, shunted into states created arbitrarily by Europeans, states that took little account of each tribe’s primal alliance to its own people.”

“I’d known that the Saudi Wahhbai sect was building mosques along the Afghan border for years,” Mortenson says. “But that spring, the spring of 2001, I was amazed by all their new construction right here in the heart of Shiite Baltistan. For the first time I understood the scale of what they were trying to do and it scared me.”
Wahhabism is a conservative, fundamentalist offshoot of Sunni Islam and the official state religion of Saudi Arabia’s rulers. Many Saudi followers of the sect consider the term offensive and prefer to call themselves al-Muwahhiddun, “the monotheists.” In Pakistan, and other impoverished countries most affected by Wahhabi proselytizing, though, the name has stuck.

In December 2000, the Saudi publication Ain-Al-Yaqeen reported that one of the four major Wahhabi proselytizing organizations, the Al Haramain Foundation, had built “1,100 mosques, schools, and Islamic centers,” in Pakistan and other Muslim countries, and employed three thousand paid proselytizers in the previous year.
The most active of the four groups, Ain-Al-Yaqeen reported, the International Islamic Relief Organization, which the 9/11 Commission would later accuse of directly supporting the Taliban and Al Qaeda, completed the construction of thirty-eight hundred mosques, spent $45 million on “Islamic Education,” and employed six thousand teachers, many of them in Pakistan, throughout the same period.
The madrassa system targeted the impoverished students the public system failed. By offering free room and board and building schools in areas where none existed, madrassas provided millions of Pakistan’s parents with their only opportunity to educate their children. “I don’t want to give the impression that all Wahhabi are bad,” Mortenson says. “Many of their schools and mosques are doing good work to help Pakistan’s poor. But some of them seem to exist only to teach militant jihad.”
By 2001, a World Bank study estimated that at least twenty thousand madrassas were teaching as many as 2 million of Pakistan’s students an Islamic-based curriculum. Lahore-based journalist Ahmed Rashid, perhaps the world’s leading authority on the link between madrassa education and the rise of extremist Islam, estimates that more than eighty thousand of these young madrassa students became Taliban recruits. Not every madrassa was a hotbed of extremism. But the World Bank concluded that 15 to 20 percent of madrassa students were receiving military training, along with a curriculum that emphasized jihad and hatred of the West at the expense of subjects like math, science, and literature.

One of the most encouraging notes came from an elderly philanthropist in Seattle named Patsy Collins, who had become a regular donor to CAI. “I’m old enough to remember this nonsense from World War II, when we turned on all the Japanese and interned them without good cause,” she wrote.”

For all their flaws, the Taliban had harshly suppressed the production of opium. And with them gone, especially in northern Afghanistan, poppy planting had resumed with a vengeance.
According to a study by Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan’s opium harvest had spiked from nearly nonexistent under the Taliban to almost four thousand tons by the end of 2003. Afghanistan by then produced two-thirds of the world’s raw material for heroin.

As the sun slipped behind the western ridges, Khan placed one hand on Mortenson’s back as he pointed with the other. “We fought with Americans, here in these mountains, against the Russians. And though we heard many promises, they never returned to help us when the dying was done.”