books...books...books

2012-02-07T14:47:00.000-08:00

THE LADY IN THE LAKE
--Raymond Chandler

"I don't like your manner," Kingsley said in a voice you could have cracked a Brazil nut on.
"That's all right," I said. "I'm not selling it."

"Police business," he said almost gently, "is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of me. So we have to work with what we get--and we get things like this."

"One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?"
Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. '"Did he say 'whom'?"
"yeah, but don't hit him," I said. "There is such a word."
"I often wondered where they kept it. Look, buddy," he said to the clerk, "we want up to 716. Any objection?"

__________________________________

2011-11-17T15:06:00.001-08:00

Just finished JACK KEROUAC'S "Maggie Cassidy"...

2011-10-28T15:06:00.000-07:00

MADNESS VISIBLE: A Memoir of War
Janine di Giovanni

Before we left with a group, moving up the hill to the front, Jon said that he was proud of all of them when they left, but he felt bad sending some of them off. He new, maybe, that some were going to their deaths. You could always tell, he said, who was going to make it and who was not, by some strange look in their eyes.

Srebrenica massacre

This is what it feels like to watch someone else's agony: no matter how many times you listen and record someone's story, no matter how many refugees you see crossing over a mountaintop wearing plastic bags on their heads to protect themselves from the freezing rain--you do not get used to it.

He dropped me at the hotel and screeched off, as though my desire to get to Serbia or Montenegro were contagious.

You can forgive but not forget... we think that love is greater than hate... but it is a small step to go from hate to love; love to hate. It is a very thin line.
--Zeljko Kopanja, editor, in Banja Luka, August 2000

10,615 persons, out of whom 1,601 were children, were killed in Sarajevo. More than 50,000 persons were wounded, a great number of whom remain invalids. The siege of the city lasted from May 2, 1992 to February 26, 1996 or 1,395 days, which is the longest siege in the modern history of mankind.
--Suada Kapic, from a "war" map of Sarajevo, 1996

__________________

2011-10-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

Just finished THE DEMON OF DAKAR by Kjell Eriksson. Well-written.

2011-08-07T15:18:00.000-07:00

THE WAR FOR LATE NIGHT
Bill Carter

(On top of that, one Fox executive had turned up onstage so drunk that he couldn't pronounce the word "Tostitos.")

Jay wasn't displaying any overt signs of anger, but Lorne Michaels believed he was too professional to ever allow himself to let that out in public... Michaels could only guess the source of Leno's displeasure. "They made him come in, they made him do it. He had to sing for his supper, he had to audition again, and it was just all in a hostile room."

Conan was not only cagy but was totally transparent and upfront, qualities that were no advantage in a negotiation.

...but as even one senior NBC executive conceded, "You can't trust network executives; they go back on their word."

"Depend on it sir: When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." --Samuel Johnson

Knowing and recognizing television was like knowing and recognizing candy bars, Lorne Michaels reasoned. You anticipated what you would get for your dime or quarter or dollar (depending on how old you were.) Snickers? That was the one with nuts. If somehow that relationship changed, because the wrapper made it odder or more expensive looking, you might get confused and think maybe that wasn't the candy bar you wanted after all. It might still be a good one, of course, but it wasn't the one you knew. If it had the look of having gone upmarket, maybe you'd look around for a different candy bar.

The classy answer is, "'Oh, well, that's a silly question to ask, because somebody already has that job.' That's what you say if you're classy.

"What does Jay have on you?" Conan asked, his voice still low, his tone still even. "What does this guy have on you people?" What the hell is it about Jay?"

__________________

2011-07-11T21:12:00.001-07:00

DENIAL AND DECEPTION: AN INSIDER'S VIEW OF THE CIA FROM IRAN-CONTRA TO 9/11
Melissa Boyle Mahle

Christine Cabon is a French military officer best known for her part in the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior...

Speaking at a university forum in 1993, Gates stated that at the time of his confirmation, 60 percent of the CIA budget was devoted to Soviet issues. By the time he left, Russian issues accounted for only 13 percent of the budget.

...Yasir Arafat had jeopardized Gulf Arab financial backing for the Palestinian cause when he chose to tailgate Palestinian popular opinion and support the Iraqi position during the Gulf War.

In a show of Islamic solidarity Sudan changed its visa laws in 1991, allowing any Muslim into the country without a visa.

1993
On January 25th, during the morning commute, chaos broke out in front of the gates of CIA headquarters. Lansing Bennett and Frank Darling were murdered as they sat at the traffic light, waiting to turn into the restricted drive leading into the CIA compound.

Black Hawk Down - Mark Bowden

There is an old saying in the Directorate of Operations among operations officers: If you don't like a case, for whatever reason, but do not have a good reason to terminate it, polygraph the agent. The test can be engineered to ensure that the agent fails.

Named 'Project Bojinka,' the cell planned to simultaneously blow up twelve airplanes as they flew across the Atlantic.

"Against All Enemies" - Richard Clarke's memoir

"Inside The CIA" - Ronald Kessler

"See No Evil" - Baer

_____________________

2011-06-29T13:13:00.000-07:00

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
Jonathan Safran Foer

"There were parts that I did not understand, but I conjecture that this is because they were very Jewish, and only a Jewish person could understand something so Jewish. Is this why you think you are chosen by God, because only you can understand the funnies that you make about yourself?"

"I'm looking for my voice... I want to do something I'm not ashamed of."

And then, in one of his moments of mental clarity, Shalom-then-Kolker-now-Safran called to her through the wall: I'm still here, you know. You promised you'd pretend to love me until I died, and instead you're pretending I'm dead.

____________________

2011-06-15T16:10:00.000-07:00

DARKNESS VISIBLE
William Styron

Jean Seberg, ex-wife of Romain Gary.

Italian writer Cesare Pavese, who in parting wrote simply: No more words. An act. I'll never write again.

____________________

2011-05-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

STEPHEN ADLY GUIRGIS
Jesus Hopped the A Train

ROOFTOP:
I useta go home and have nightmares 'bout gettin' stuck up inside a whale--my pops useta beat my ass wit' a slipper talkin' about "Ain't no whales in Harlem, fool, go back to sleep, this is a workin' family!"
_________

ROOFTOP:
The real question here ain't "Do I think I'm more important?" The actual fuckin' question is, "Do YOU think I'm important ENOUGH?"

____________

MARY JANE:
...I sat Angel down and informed him that the D.A. had filed for first-degree felony murder and that the charge carried a mandatory sentence of "Life without the Possibility." And Angel looked at me, and said, "Without the possibility of what?"

_________

MARY JANE:
What's God's plan for you?

ANGEL:
Chicken wings and beer.
_____________________________________

2011-05-04T14:17:00.000-07:00

SAVAGES
Don Winslow

Dope is supposed to be bad, but in a bad world it's good, if you catch the reverse moral polarity of it. Chon refers to drugs as a "rational response to insanity," and his chronic use of the chronic is a chronic response to chronic insanity.
__________

Elena knows that love makes you strong
And love makes you weak.
Love makes you vulnerable.
So if you have enemies
Take what they love.
__________

Chon: "In my world, there's only he do or he don't ism because when it comes down to a man getting it done, either he do, or he don't."

___________
"I've accepted Christ as my personal savior."
"--it didn't turn out that well for the guy. You know, the crucifixion thing and stuff."

______________

"Are you going somewhere?"
"I'm thinking France."
"What's in France?"
"I dunno, French stuff. The French."
___________

An electronically altered voice says, "Let me speak with Mr. Let's Cut the Shit."
"I'm here."
"Let's cut the shit, shall we?...."
"No problem.
"Really? Because it was a problem before."
"It's not now."
"Good. Now let me speak to Mr. Fuck You."

___________________________

2011-04-20T18:22:00.000-07:00

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Zainab Salbi

Early on in Saddam Hussein's reign, a woman could occasionally express a contrary opinion as long as she joked, cried, or sounded like a bit of an airhead.

...though [Saddam Hussein] legalized honor killings in the 1990s...

I remember hearing about a businessman who had been executed for raising his prices in violation of a law no one understood. The amazing part was not his murder, but the act that the Mukhabarat had apologized to the family afterward, saying they had made a mistake because he hadn't violated the law after all.

"He charms people, he seduces them, and then he harms them."

Uday, the elder of Amo's two sons, would later become infamous worldwide for his "rape palaces" where he raped and tortured women. ... Uday invited the daughter of a friend of my mother's out on a date, and her parents were so upset they arranged overnight for her to be married to a cousin in Dubai. She left the country almost immediately.

Between the world of right-doing and the world of wrong-doing there is a meeting ground.

_______________________

2011-04-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

NAKED PICTURES OF FAMOUS PEOPLE
by Jon Stewart

As Karl Marx wrote, "Religion is the opiate of the people, and who couldn't use a little opiate now and again."

_____________________

2011-03-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

My Father's Body
by William Matthews

First they take it away,
for now the body belongs to the state.
They open it
to see what may have killed it,
and the body had arteriosclerosis
in its heart, for this was an inside job.
Now someone must identify the body
so that the sate may have a name
for what it will give away,
and the funeral people come in a stark car
shaped like a coffin with a hood
and take the body away,
for now it belongs to the funeral people
and the body's family buys it back,
though it lies in a box at the crematorium
while the mourners travel and convene.
Then they bring the body to the chapel, as they call it,
of the crematorium, and the body lies in its box
while the mourners enter and sit
and stare at the box, for the box
lies on a pedestal where the altar would be
if this were a chapel.
A rectangular frame with curtains at the sides
rises from the pedestal,
so that the box seems to fill a small stage,
and the stage gives off the familiar
illusion of being a box with one wall torn away
so that we may see into it,
but it's filled with a box we can't see into.
There's music on tape and a man in a robe
speaks for a while and I speak
for a while and then there's a prayer
and then we mourners can hear the whir
of a small motor and curtains slide
across the stage. At least for today,
I think, this is the stage that all the world is,
and another motor hums on
and we mourners realize that behind
the curtains the body is being lowered,
not like Don Giovanni to the flames
but without flourish or song
or the comforts of elaborate plot,
to the basement of the crematorium,
to the mercies of the gas jets
and the balm of the conveyor belt.
The ashes will be scattered,
says a hushed man in a mute suit,
in the Garden of Remembrance,
which is out back.
And what's left of a mild, democratic man
will sift in a heap with the residue of others,
for now they all belong to time.

______________

2011-03-21T13:36:00.001-07:00

WHITE NOISE
Don DeLillo

"I am the false character that follows the name around."
________________

"In the middle of it all is Hitler, of course."
"He was on again last night."
"He's always on. We couldn't have television without him."
"They lost the war," she said. "How great could they be?"
________________
"Am I going to die?"
"Not as such," he said.
"What do you mean?"
"Not in so many words."
"How many words does it take?"
__________________

Who in this room would believe me if I said that the suicide rate hits an all-time record among people who live near high-voltage power lines?
_________________________________

2011-03-08T16:50:00.000-08:00

THE NATURE OF YEARNING
David Huddle

American History
Young, they meet and tell each other
everything, exchanging childhoods,
as members of different tribes
present gifts at their first meeting
to signal their desire for peace.

The boy grew up with hog-killing,
had a knife-fight in high school,
jumped from airplanes in Germany,
and interrogated farmers
who denied they were Viet Cong.

The girl knew about monsoon heat.
In college she'd gone to India
for a month and stopped being the girl
who spent summers at the club, swimming
and playing tennis with her sister.

Talking this way, he sees her life
as what he was raised to want.
She sees his as the struggle
she's been denied. Her tenderness
comes freely; he wills his into shape.

Years later, when they are raising
children, the woman can't always
remember not to tease the man
with a kitchen knife in her hand,
and the man still hasn't learned

how to chat politely at parties.
But they don't mind remembering how
when they first met, he couldn't hear enough
about her birthday sleepovers,
nor she about his fucked-up army pals.

____________

Quiet Hour
Sometimes after dinner
they dawdle long after

the kids have excused
themselves. Then their

talk pleases them, what
her boss told her today,

a small thing he repaired,
something a teacher said

to their oldest. Tonight
it would be easy to ask,

When should we separate?
Who'll stay in the house?

How are we going to share
the children? She could

say, Do you know how hard
it's been living with you

all these years hating you
so much? He could tell her

he's thought of leaving
every day. From the air

they could pluck these words,
then maybe the forgiving ones

would come, too, I know
I haven't been, you did

the best you, and we tried,
we really, or maybe what came

would be the deeply bitter
you son of a, you goddamn.

So the words they choose
for these last moments

of sputtering candlelight
hold the weight of their

separate lifetimes, what
future their children may

expect, and finally whether
death will be cruel or kind

to them: I guess I'd
better do these dishes. No,

you're tired, I'll do them,
you just stay put.
_________________

2011-03-08T08:33:00.000-08:00

FAIR GAME
Valerie Plame Wilson
Fox News stayed true to form in the wake of four out of five guilty verdicts with a news crawler saying "Scooter Libby found not guilty of lying to FBI investigators."

Everyday when CIA officers got up and went to work... they asked this million-dollar question: What is the mission? What am I supposed to do today, tomorrow, for the duration of the assignment? And does anybody out there really care?"

________________

2011-03-04T15:48:00.000-08:00

BLOWING MY COVER
Lindsay Moran

______________________

2011-02-26T14:29:00.000-08:00

FREEDOM
Jonathan Franzen

...when she considers her sisters, who are now in their early forties and living alone in New York, too eccentric and/or entitled-feeling to sustain a long-term relationship, and still accepting parental subsidies while struggling to achieve an artistic success that they were made to believe was their special destiny.

Ray grinned as if she'd been amusing. Joyce unfolded her half-glasses to examine the dessert menu while Walter blushed and Abigail, with a spastic neck-twist and a sour frown, said, "'Ray'? 'Ray'? We call him 'Ray' now?"

...because, when you got right down to it, it entailed telling him she didn't want him the way he wanted her: that craving sex with her mate was one of the things (OK, the main thing) she'd given up in exchange for all the good things in their life together.

___________________________

2011-02-06T18:53:00.000-08:00

THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES
--Ben Mezrich

Behind every great fortune, there lies a great crime.

FDR had been rejected from the [Porcellian] and had called the incident "the greatest disappointment of his life."

In one class--one of his stupid Cores called Art in the Time of Augustus--he'd supposedly fallen so far behind that he'd almost forgotten about an exam that was going to be worth a large percentage of his overall grade. He'd had no time to study for the damn thing--so he'd reportedly figured out a unique way of dealing with the situation. He'd created a quick little Web site where he posted all the artwork that was going to be on the exam and invited people in the class to comment--effectively creating an online crib sheet for the test. He'd essentially gotten the rest of the class to do the work for him--and he'd aced the exam, saving his grade.

_________________________

2011-01-12T15:08:00.000-08:00

LIBRA - Don DeLillo

Introduction:
Some stories never end. Even in our time, in the sightlines of living history, in the retrieved instancy of film and videotape, there are stories waiting to be finished, open to the trust of reasoned analysis and haunted speculation.

A couple of years ago, at a Warhol show that featured silkscreens of Jacqueline Kennedy, the museum director said, "Was Warhol a great artist? Does this work belong here? It's like asking whether three shots or four were fired at Kennedy. These are great questions."

A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.

At twenty years old, all you know is that you're twenty. Everything else is a mist that swirls around this fact.

But idealists of course are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who turn bitter overnight, deceived by lies they've told themselves.

The Zapruder 8mm film, 19sec long (a witness filmed the JFK presidential parade and caught the shooting on camera): http://bit.ly/g6iRa9
_______________________

2010-11-09T18:51:00.000-08:00

THE HISTORY OF LOVE
Nicole Krauss

"To celebrate, my mother took us to a French movie with subtitles about two girls who run away from home. The theater was empty aside from three other people. One of them was the usher. Bird finished his Milk Duds during the opening credits, and tore up and down the aisles in a sugar high until he fell asleep in the front row."

"Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. And everyone who walked by was happier than I."

"It's strange what the mind can do when the heart is giving the directions."

"A HUNDRED THINGS CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE; A LETTER IS ONE."

_______________

2010-11-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

Another Bullshit Night In Suck City
Nick Flynn

Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING PLACES--modified by a vandal or a disgruntled employee to read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING DOWN. If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn't be his life raft.

Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.

We catch them on the way down, Joy says. Next stop, the morgue.

He thinks:
This will be my prison novel. My Dostoyevsky. My Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn will be green with envy when he reads this shit.

In 1878 Benjamin Disraeli said: You are not listening now, but one day you will hear me.

[on college]
The carpenter, who recently moved out on his wife and two kids so he can sit outside a tent in the state park under a kerosene lamp each night and kill a bucket of beer in peace, just looks at me and rolls his eyes when I mention that I'm thinking of not going. Don't be an asshole, he tells me, you have your whole life to work.

I swiped the tree after reading a self-help book that said not to make any life changes after a major trauma, to keep doing what you'd always done.

...I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn't a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand before your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you.

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression.

___________________

2010-10-15T19:36:00.001-07:00

DINAW MENGESTU (author)

-----------------

2010-10-14T15:28:00.000-07:00

John Le Carre's OUR KIND OF TRAITOR

2010-10-01T17:58:00.001-07:00

THE TERROR
Dan Simmons

"Except for the fact that John Irving was sick and half-starving and his gums were bleeding and he feared that two of his side teeth were loose and he was so tired that he was afraid he would collapse in his tracks at any moment, this was one of the happiest days of his life."

-----------

2010-09-01T19:36:00.000-07:00

THE FLOATING BRIDGE
Avid Shumate

MANNEQUINS
At auction I buy two dozen mannequins and set them around the
house. I give each a name and dress them in tuxedos. Gowns.
Work clothes. Pajamas. I set a few in front of the television. Two
at the kitchen table. A man on the toilet. A woman in the shower.
Four on the lawn with croquet mallets. At night vandals arrange
them in obscene positions. But I don't mind. I'm glad they're
interested. Two mannequins lie naked in the spare bedroom
staring up at the ceiling. One dangles by his neck from a rope in
the workshop. Pull him once--the garage door opens. Pull him
again--it closes. The rest are stacked in the purgatory of my
closet. My neighbors think I'm a pervert. My mother doesn't
believe in psychiatrists but makes an exception in this case. Last
week the police searched the place and left laughing. When my
lover arrives she calls them by their proper names. She brings a
new hat for one. A paisley scarf for another. Then she turns the
lights out and stands quite still among them. I know which one
she is. But I play along with her little game.

_________

THE HOUSE OF DEATH

When you arrive in the House of Death they serve you a dish of
purple fruit they chilled the night before. They give you a choice
of hats. Pointed or flat. A pair of sandals. A white robe. You get to
select five things to remember from when you were alive. The rest
you must leave behind. You have the run of the place. But candles
are forbidden. As well as talk of regret. It's a large house that takes
years to traverse. To break the monotony they hold dances out on
the lawn and tell jokes. Like the one about the priest and the
camel... Or the man who jumped from the plane... There's
only one clock in the House of Death. It's all unloaded by hand. Then
carted off to the cliffs and dumped into the sea.

________________

2010-08-28T12:04:00.000-07:00

JOSHUA FERRIS' UNNAMED
________________________________________

2010-08-27T16:27:00.001-07:00

David Niven, Memoir: Bring on the Empty Horses

_____________

2010-08-12T18:13:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE
Kim Addonizio

Death Poem
Do I have to bring it up again, isn't there another subject?
Can I forget about the scrap of flattened squirrel fur
fluttering on the road, can I forget the road
and how I can't stop driving no matter what,
not even for gas, or love, can I please not think
about my father left in some town behind me,
in his blue suit, with his folded hands,
and my grandmother moaning about her bladder
and swallowing all the pills, and the towns I'm passing now
can I try not to see them, the children squatting
by the ditches, the holes in their chests and foreheads,
the woman cradling her tumor, the dog dragging its crippled hips?
I can close my eyes and sit back if I want to,
I can lean against my friends' shoulders
and eat as they're eating, and drink from the bottle
being passed back and forth; I can lighten up, can't I,
Christ, can't I? There is another subject, in a minute
I'll think of it. I will. And if you know it, help me.
Help me. Remind me why I'm here.

Eating Together
I know my friend is going,
though she still sits there
across from me in the restaurant,
and leans over the table to dip
her bread in the oil on my plate; I know
how thick her hair used to be,
and what it takes for her to discard
her man's cap partway through our meal,
to look straight at the young waiter
and smile when he asks
how we are liking it. She eats
as though starving--chicken, dolmata,
the buttery flakes of filo--
and what's killing her
eats, too. I watch her lift
a glistening black olive and peel
the meat from the pit, watch
her fine long fingers, and her face,
puffy from medication. She lowers
her eyes to the food, pretending
not to know what I know. She's going.
And we go on eating.

Dear Sir Or Madam
This letter is the one you shouldn't open.
Or if you have, please don't read further.
It is going to give you terrible news.

Oh sir, or madam, we are strangers
but forgive me, I feel as though I love you
typing this on the forty-seventh floor

alone except for the man who cleans the carpets.
Forgive me if I grow distracted,
and think of my own burdens...

a wife's ashes, a boy who rocks back and forth
all day, and babbles nonsense. His photograph
and hers are on my desk; he doesn't smile.

The doctors test and test, then send
him to another. Maybe you, sir, or madam,
have felt a kind of helplessness at how things go?

I'm trying to finish this, to tell you
what I'm paid to tell you,
what I have stayed here late to compose

in just the right fashion, even if it takes
all night--the janitor has gone,
turning off all the lights. There's only my lamp,

and the quiet... My wife liked quiet. She liked
to hold me without either of us talking,
just breathing together. Sir,

breathe with me now. Madam, hold on to me.
There is news I must give you.
Let's not speak of it yet.
_________________________

2010-08-12T15:41:00.000-07:00

NEW FROM PENGUIN:

YOU LOST ME THERE
by Rosencrans Baldwin

_____________

And from the www.hirmes.com/ice site:

Money Changes Everything: Twenty-Two Writers Tackle the Last Taboo with Tales of Sudden Windfalls, Staggering Debts, and Other Surprising Turns of Fortune [Hardcover]
Jenny Offill (Author), Elissa Schappell (Author)

_______________

2010-08-12T15:37:00.000-07:00

LUCKY - ALICE SEBOLD
-------------

2010-07-19T19:07:00.000-07:00

THE WORLD IS FLAT

______________________

2010-07-15T19:36:00.000-07:00

Black Umbrellas

by Rick Agran

On a rainy day in Seattle stumble into any coffee shop
and look wounded by the rain.

Say Last time I was in I left my black umbrella here.
A waitress in a blue beret will pull a black umbrella

from behind the counter and surrender it to you
like a sword at your knighting.

Unlike New Englanders, she'll never ask you
to describe it, never ask what day you came in,

she's intimate with rain and its appointments.
Look positively reunited with this black umbrella

and proceed to Belltown and Pike Place.
Sip cappuccino at the Cowgirl Luncheonette on First Ave.

Visit Buster selling tin salmon silhouettes
undulant in the wind, nosing ever into the oncoming,

meandering watery worlds, like you and the black umbrella,
the one you will lose promptly at the day's end

so you can go the way you came
into the world, wet looking.

"Black Umbrellas" by Rick Agran, from Crow Milk. © Oyster River Press, 1997.

____________________________

2010-07-08T19:47:00.000-07:00

Robert Phillips

Letter to My Mother

You helped me pack for that milestone
event, first time away from home alone.
It didn't matter the summer camp was poor—
long on Jesus, short on funds—bordering

a tea-colored lake. No matter we could afford
only two weeks. To help get there I hoarded
months of allowances. I was ten, felt grown,
I finally was going somewhere on my own.

You folded the ironed tee-shirts and skivvies
—you even ironed and creased my dungarees.
In Southern drawl: "And of course you'll dress
for dinner!" you said, packing with the rest

my one blazer, dress shirts, and rep tie.
I didn't protest, I was an innocent stander-by.
(The suitcase was a new brown Samsonite.
Even empty that thing never was light.)

First exhilarating day—after softball, archery,
diving instruction (which I took to swimmingly)—
came rest hour. While others took a shower
or wrote postcards home, I dressed for dinner:

the white shirt, the pre-tied striped tie,
the navy jacket. In process I received a wry
glance from my counselor. The dinner bell tolled,
I felt every bit the gentleman as I strolled

toward the rustic dining room. I entered,
the room exploded with boyish hoots and laughter,
pointing at me, the funniest thing they'd seen.
They still had on their shorts or jeans.
The rest of the two weeks were impossible.
Not chosen for any teams, called a fool,
Mother, I was miserable through and through.
But when I came home I never told you.
_________________________

2010-07-03T16:39:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"Mr. Peanut" by Adam Ross

"Portrait of an addict as a young man" by Bill Clegg

"Globish: How the English Language became the world's language" by Robert McCrum

"Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter" by Tom Bissell

"...My Dad Says" by Justin Halpern

"Medium Raw" by Anthony Bourdain

"Hitch 22" by Christopher Hitchens

"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell

"Born To Run" by Christopher McDougall

"The Thing Around Your Neck" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Tinkers" by Paul Harding

"My Horizontal Life" by Chelsea Handler

"The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls

______________________________________

U.S AIRWAYS MAGAZINE 6/2010

"Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" - Annie Dillard

"Thus Spoke Zarathustra" - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Fear and Trembling" - Soren Kierkegaard

"The Complete Stories" - Flannery O'Connor

"The Art of the Commonplace" - Wendell Berry

(thejohnfox.com)
______________________________________

2010-06-08T12:55:00.001-07:00

The Year of Finding Memory - Judy Fong Bates

______________

2010-05-27T19:40:00.001-07:00

Poet Linda Pastan

_____________

2010-05-26T19:30:00.000-07:00

CONFESSIONS

by Lowell Jaeger

I once shoplifted
a tin of Vienna sausages.
Crouched in the aisle
as if to study the syllables
of preservatives, tore off the lid,
pulled out a wiener and sucked it down.

I've cheated on exams.
Made love to foldouts.
Walked my paper route in a snowstorm after dark,
so I could steal down a particular alley
where through her gauze curtains, a lady
lounged with her nightgown undone.

I've thrown sticks at stray dogs.
Ignored the cat scratching to come inside.
Even in the rain.
Sat for idle hours in front of the TV, and not two feet away
the philodendrons for lack of a glass of water
gasped and expired.

So many excuses I've concocted to get by.
Called in sick when I was not. Grabbed credit
for happy accidents I had no hand in.
Pointed fingers
to pin the innocent with crimes
unmistakably mine.

I have failed
to learn from grievous error.
Repeated gossip.
Invented gossip. Held hands
in a circle of friends to rejoice
over the misfortune of strangers.
Pushed over tombstones.
Danced the devil's jig.

Once, when I was barely old enough
to walk home on my own, I hid
behind an abandoned garage.
Counted sixteen windows.
Needed only four handfuls of stones
to break every one.

"Confessions" by Lowell Jaeger, from We. © Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2010. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
------------------

2010-05-25T10:15:00.000-07:00

SMALL GODS OF GRIEF
Poems by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

LETTER TO A FRIEND
A dank dawn. Sodden light
on damp brick. Lilacs rot to rust,
and the crow's nest barren in the oak.

It's you I long for most today,
to sit across this kitchen table, your
awkward legs

comfortable under it for once,
our inner clamors quiet for this while
of conversation--vague as this day.

Imagine the sound of a marble
bouncing down the stone steps of an empty
house, you said, months ago,

and I've been hearing its
resonance since, a desolate din, chilling
as this kitchen where nothing's

lit and everything seeps
with stillness. It took me
all this time to understand why

that sound haunted me so--
now I need you to take it back: it has
no place here, no reason
to bounce in me any longer.
Come soon. Bang your palm against
the door as you always do: too loud,

as if you wanted to scare silence
out of itself, out of a house in which
no one would be there to listen.

____________________

FILTHY SAVIOR

Look at this storm, the idiot:
it pours its heart out here, of all places,
an industrial suburb on a Sunday,

drenches cinder-blocks
and parking lots, wastes its gusts
on smokeless stacks,

not even a trashcan to send
rumbling through streets. And lightning--
forking itself to death to hit

nothing, what a waste. What if
I hadn't been here, lost too? Four a.m,
and I'm driving to nowhere again,

a shirt over my nightgown,
reciting Rimbaud aloud, like an insomniac
idiot--scared to death

by my longing for it, death,
so early in the morning, and driving
until the longing runs on empty.

The windshield wipers can't
keep up with this deluge, and I almost
run over a flapping white
thing in the middle of the street. I step
out, it's a gull, one leg caught in a red
plastic net snared around its neck.

I throw my shirt over the shrieking
thing, take it to the car, search my bag
for something, anything,

find a nail file to saw at the net.
The gull is huge, filthy, shits and pecks.
I slip a sleeve over its head:

you idiot, I'm trying to save you--
hold it down, cut, pull, free the leg,
neck, hold the gull against me,

fighting for its life, its crazed
heart beats against mine. I step out,
open the shirt--and there it goes--

letting the wind pluck it
away, suck it into a cloud and it's
gone--like some vague,

bleak longing--
as the rain lifts and the suburbs
emerge in dirty white light.
_______________

2010-05-11T15:38:00.001-07:00

The Caine Mutiny

______________

2010-05-10T05:36:00.000-07:00

FAILURE
Philip Schultz

MY DOG
His large black body lies on his bed across the room,
under the French doors, where he used to sleep, watching me.
The vet said to cover him with a blanket, but I can't.

Two hours ago he moaned loudly and let go of his life.
My wife dreamed of his death in Paris but didn't tell me.
I drove home from the airport imagining him at the door,

tail wagging. He introduced me to my wife in a dog run,
stood proudly beside me at our wedding, handsome
in a red bow tie. He face wherever I was, sat staring out

the window if I was away. If you haven't loved a dog
you'll find it hard to believe he knew it was time to die
but wanted to wait two weeks for me to come home.

I'll spread his ashes at the beach where we walked nearly
every day for twelve years, this gentle creature following me
the mile and a half to the breakers and then back to our car.

---------------------
HUSBAND

What could be more picturesque
than us eating lobster on the water,
the sun vanishing over the horizon,
willing, once again, to allow us almost
any satisfaction. William James said
marriage was overlapping: opinions,
histories, the truth of someone not you
sitting across the table seeing the you
you can't bear to, the face behind
the long fable in the mirror. Freud said
we're cured when we see ourselves
the way a stranger does in moments.
Am I the I she tried to save, still lopsided
with trying to be a little less or more,
escaping who I was a moment ago?
Here, now, us, sipping wine in this
candlelit pause, in the charm of the ever
casting sky, every gesture familiar,
painfully endearing, the I of me, the she
of her the us only we know, alone together
all these years. Call it what you like,
happiness or failure, the discreet curl
of her bottom lip, the hesitant green
of her eyes, still lovely with surprise.
---------------------

THE ONE TRUTH

After dreaming of radiant thrones
for sixty years, praying to a god
he never loved for strength, for mercy,
after cocking his thumbs
in the pockets of his immigrant schemes,
while he parked cars during the day
and drove a taxi all night,
after one baby was born dead
and he carved the living one's name
in windshield snow in the blizzard of 1945,
after scrubbing piss, blood,
and vomit off factory floors
from midnight to dawn,
then filling trays with peanuts,
candy, and cigarettes
in his vending machines all day,
his breath a wheezing suck
and bellowing gasp
in the fist of his chest,
after washing his face, armpits
and balls in cold back rooms,
hurrying between his hunger
for glory and his fear
of leaving nothing but debt,
after having a stroke and
falling down factory stairs,
his son screaming at him
to stop working and rest,
after being knocked down
by a blow he expected all his life,
his son begging forgiveness,
his wife crying his name,
after looking up at them
straight from hell, his soul
withering in his arms--
is this what failure is,
to end where he began,
no one but a deaf dumb God
to welcome his back,
his fists pounding at the gate--
is this the one truth,
to lie in a black pit
at the bottom of himself,
without enough breath
to say goodbye
to ask forgiveness?
---------------

2010-04-25T10:51:00.000-07:00

TALKING IN THE DARK
Wesley McNair

THE CABBIE
Up front in the dark he is nothing
but a back and the back
of a head, but then he brings
the sights of the city at night
to my window, filling the cab
with his jokes, so by the time
he takes the photograph
of his girlfriend down from its place
on the visor above him, flicking
on the dome light, I'm all
smiles too. She's the one
who keeps me in the cab every night,
especially with the marriage
coming up, he says, smiling back
in the rearview mirror with part
of his face. But now I'm not sure
the woman in the photo, which looks
shiny and has scissored edges,
is his girlfriend at all,
and leaning forward to hand it
back to him, I notice how fat
he is, his stomach pressed up
against the steering wheel,
understanding at last, the light
off again, this is his world:
two soft chairs on moaning tires,
and him, and me, the visitor
who sits with him, laughing as others
have laughed, and talking,
and watching the city shine around us
as he drives through the dark.
________________

THE WEIGHT

Of course, the ones
who came to his office
might have been turned away
by the salesman's stomach,
so heavy as he bent
to the drawer for his brochure,
he had to lean on the cabinet
with one small arm.
But when he stood up
and they saw how he had pushed
the stomach deep int his pants,
cinching the buckle high above it
as if to say, Here I am
above the belt, a normal man,
they were moved by his effort
to resemble them. The truth is,
sitting down at the table,
where the stomach disappeared,
he was like them, except
for his sorrow, which at first
they could not lift away.
Yet choosing the things they most
wanted from his brochure,
they soon brought a smile
to his face. Soon, at the door,
they were shaking his hand
like old friends, just before
they returned to their old hunger,
the anticipation of happiness
they carried like a weight.

SPEAKING OF TIME
"Give it time," we say knowingly, as if time
were the preferred brand of motor oil
or a vitamin drink that makes the children grow
up right, though considering how time
can sometimes deal us a car that blows its engine
no matter what oil we use, or a vitamin-fed child
who grows into a ghoul, we haven't said enough. Time's
not ours to give, for one things nor is it, as in "It
will happen in its own time," always good.
Taking the aging bank president, for instance,
who in just five years has become the meek one
of the two, sitting beside his wife in church
as though she were his mother, and whispering
all through the service to nobody, not even
himself. Time, of course, couldn't care less,
which is why, seeing him or the lady with the cane
and pills who spends the whole day drinking nothing
so she won't have to get up and pee, we say, "If I
ever get like that, take me out and shoot me,"
our way of holding firm against the fact
that our own days are limited and Time
has all the time in the world. There are so many
ways to resist our uncertain, short futures,
like stopping off in a favorite decade,
as the late-60s couple has done, she
with the long dress, he with the whitening
ponytail. Or, if we want to play for keeps,
we could leave this time-cursed world by going
into the arms of Christ and never coming out,
or vanishing forever into work like the happy
bureaucrat spanking his hands after each task completed
"in a timely manner." But since Time will go on
dusting our hair, and creasing our hands
whatever we may do with them, perhaps
the best way is to put aside our fear of change
and death (fear being the only death we'll ever know
in life) and forget the wishful thought
that time makes good things happen to us,
thinking instead of time as the one medium we have
to make ourselves happen. Not through some step-
by-step program that helps us free the inner child
or get irresistible breasts in just seven days,
but slower and less organized, like the process
of sorrow that might begin in the heart
of the bureaucrat at the height of his pleasure
in finishing his job, or the unexpected flicker
of relief the bank president's wife,
meek all her life, might start to feel
as she stands up beside her spent husband in church
to sing. The hymn's words are about living forever
out of Time, though suddenly all she can think about
is living in it, as she has never quite done. Never mind
the regret and guilt she'll have to endure now,
she can't live without it, any more than the bureaucrat
or you or I can live without whatever pain might come
from recognizing that time has no truer measure
than our own heartbeat. Who says, anyway,
that the span of human life amounts to nothing
but a speck of time? The truth is, it's our speck.

_______________________

THE PUPPY

From down the road, starting up
and stopping once more, the sound
of a puppy on a chain who has not yet
discovered he will spend his life there.
Foolish dog, to forget where he is
and wander until he feels the collar
close fast around his throat, then cry
all over again about the little space
in which he finds himself. Soon,
when there is no grass left in it
and he understands it is all he has,
he will snarl and bark whenever
he senses a threat to it.
Who would believe this small
sorrow could lead to such fury
no one would ever come near him?

______________________

2010-04-05T09:24:00.000-07:00

BEETHOVEN REMEMBERED
The Biographical Notes of Franz Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries

"It was also here that another Hungarian count (at my encouragement when he told me what he wished to do) once laid before Beethoven a manuscript copy of a difficult Bach composition. Beethoven played the piece at sight and, according to the owner, just as Bach himself had played it."

"In this symphony Beethoven had thought about Bonaparte during the period when he was still First Consul. At that time Beethoven held him in the highest regard and compared him to the greatest Roman consuls. I myself, as well as many of his close friends, had seen this symphony, already copied in full score, lying on his table. At the very top of the title page stood the word, 'Buonaparte' and at the very bottom 'Luigi van Beethoven,' but not a word more. Whether and with what the intervening space was to be filled I do not know. I was the first to tell him the news that Bonaparte had declared himself emperor, whereupon he flew into a rage and shouted: 'So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man. Now he also will trample all human rights underfoot, and only pander to his own ambition; he will place himself above everyone else and become a tyrant!' Beethoven went to the table, took hold of the title page at the top, ripped it all the way through, and flung it on the floor. The first page was written anew and only then did the symphony receive the title Sinfonia eroica."

A most curious utterance: "I found only one, whom I will most likely never possess." Who may this woman have been? In all likelihood it was Amalie Sebald, later Frau Justizrat Krause, with whom Beethoven had been quite taken for some yeas."

_________________________

2010-03-30T13:37:00.000-07:00

A thousand and one nights or The Arabian Nights

_______________

2010-03-29T14:36:00.000-07:00

PAULA
Isabel Allende

"...abundance is always within reach, if only one knows how to find it."

"'We forget,' he often said, 'that no matter what we do, we are on the road to death.'"

"The future does not exist, the Indians of the Altiplano say, we can only be sure of the past--from which we draw experience and knowledge--and the present--a brief spark that at the instant it is born becomes yesterday."

"Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences."

_________________

2010-03-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

POEM FROM WRITER'S ALMANAC

Breaking Silence - For My SonPatricia Fargnoli

2010-03-02T19:50:00.000-08:00

TOP BOOKS - LOS FELIZ BOOKSTORE

Elizabeth Gilbert - Committed

Colum McCann - Let the great world spin

Joshua Ferris - Then we came to the end (read Aug 27th 2010)

Stieg Larsson - The girl with the dragon tatoo

Kevin Sampsell - A Common Pornography

Don DeLillo - Point Omega

The Art of Racing In The Rain

Steve Almond - Not That You Asked

Malcolm Gladwell - Outliers
------------------------

2010-02-16T13:58:00.000-08:00

Curiosity killed the cat
Satisfaction brought it back

______

2010-02-15T10:07:00.000-08:00

PET SEMATARY - STEPHEN KING

Beginning:
Here are some people who have written books, telling what they did and why they did those things:

John Dean. Henry Kissinger. Adolph Hitler. Caryl Chessman. Jeb Magruder. Napoleon. Talleyrand. Disraeli. Robert Zimmeran, also known as Bob Dylan. Locke. Charlton Heston. Errol Flynn. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Gandhi. Charles Olson. Charles Colson. A Victorian Gentleman. Dr. X.

Most people also believe that God has written a Book, or Books, telling what He did and why--at least to a degree--He did those things, and since most of these people also believe that humans were made in the image of God, then He also may be regarded as a person... or, more properly, as a Person.

Here are some people who have not written books, telling what they did... and what they saw:

The man who buried Hitler. The man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth. The man who embalmed Elvis Presley. The man who embalmed--badly, most undertakers say--Pope John XXIII. The twoscore undertakers who cleaned up Jonestown, carryinb body bags, spearing paper cups with those spikes custodians carry in city parks, waving away the flies. The man who cremated William Holden. The man who encased the body of Alexander the Great in gold so it would not rot. The men who mummified the Pharaohs.

Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.

________________

It was around one'clock that afternoon when Church came back like the cat in the nursery rhyme.

________________

He played solitaire that night until long after midnight.
He was just dealing a fresh hand when he heard the back door open.
What you buy is what you own, and sooner or later what you own will come back to you, Louis Creed thought.
He did not turn around but only looked at his cards as the slow, gritting footsteps approached. He was the queen of spades. He put his hand on it.
The steps ended directly behind him.
Silence.
A cold hand fell on Louis's shoulder. Rachel's voice grating, full of dirt.
"Darling," it said.
_____________

2010-02-15T09:16:00.000-08:00

BOOKS

INFIDELITIES: Stories of War and Lust
--Josip Novakovich

LUNAR FOLLIES
--Gilbert Sorrentino

DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DEMIN
--David Sedaris

THE BOOKSELLER OF KABUL
--Asne Seierstad

THE LAST TRUE STORY I'LL EVER TELL
--John Crawford

WILD DUCKS FLYING BACKWARD
--Tom Robbins

----------------------------------------

2009-12-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

MY WAR GONE BY, I MISS IT SO
Anthony Loyd

It would be so trite, so inappropriate to say that the eyes lost something as they witnessed the whole madness of it all, to talk of empty stares and children with hollow gazes. But it was not what people lost in Bosnia that you noticed in their eyes, it was what some of them gained. Whether it is your own or someone else's, the taste of evil leaves an indelible mark on the iris. You can see it flickering in moments of introspection as the muscles relax.

Men and women who venture to someone else's war through choice do so in a variety of guises. UN general, BBC correspondent, aid worker, mercenary: in the final analysis they all want the same thing, a hit off the action, a walk on the dark side. It's just a question of how slick a cover you give yourself, and how far you want to go. If you find a cause later then hold on to it, but never blind yourself with your own disguise.

Dispatches - Michael Herr

John Le Carre

Primarily it was far easier to resurrect nationalist angst in people who have defined sense of nationality than those who do not... After the departure of the Turks in the nineteenth century, the Muslims lacked an 'ethnic identity' until 1974, when Tito recognized them as a separate entity in Bosnia, where they formed the majority population. They were no more than the descendants of Slavic tribes who had settled in Bosnia and converted to the religion of their rulers, the Turks. So the majority had no real sense of an historically rooted nationalism beyond being 'Bosnian.'

Walk on looking ahead. Don't look back, don't look down, don't look inwards. You will fall eventually, one way or another, but with those rules at least you will be up there for a bit longer.

All participants lie in war. It is natural. Some often, some all the time: UN spokesmen, Croats, Serbs, Muslims, the lost. Truth is a weapon more than a casualty. Used to persuade people of one thing or another, it becomes propaganda. The more authoritative a figure, the bigger the lies; the more credible his position, the better the lies.

What defined these two groups? Race? They were the same race. Culture? They were all Tito-era children. Religion? No man present had the first clue about the tenets of his own faith, be it Orthodox or Islam. They were southern Slav brothers, pitted in conflict by the rising phoenix of long-dead banners raised by men whose only wish was power, vlast, and in so doing...

Then a face detached itself from the anonymous mass, and walked purposefully...

There is a philosophical element to it all too: a bullet may or may not have your number on it, but I am sure shells are merely engraved with 'to whom it may concern.'

We had shared something together in Sarajevo so intimate and incommunicable, a humility and compassion among individuals unconnected by blood tie. which I have never found elsewhere. Some would call it the human spirit. Whatever it was, to discuss those time in London seemed an unbearable prospect: the needless wounding of a walk back into loss that I just could not face. I hope that they understand.
___________________

2009-11-22T16:00:00.000-08:00

My Judy Garland Life, A Memoir
Susie Boyt

Listen to me, Esther. A career's a curious thing. Talent isn't always enough. You need a sense of timing, an eye for seeing the turning point, recognising the big chance when it comes along and grabbing it.

If Freud had settled in America (which he loathed - he called it 'a gigantic mistake')...

----------------

2009-11-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

AMERICAN PRIMITIVE
Poems by Mary Oliver

FLYING
Sometimes,
on a plane,
you see a stranger.
He is so beautiful!
His nose
going down in the
old Greek way,
or his smile
a wild
Mexican fiesta.
You want to say:
do you know
how beautiful you are?
You leap up
into the aisle,
you can't let him go
until he has touched you
shyly, until you have rubbed him,
oh, lightly,
like a coin
you find on the earth somewhere
shining and unexpected and,
without thinking,
reach for. You stand there
shaken
by the strangeness,
the splash of his touch.
When he's gone
you stare like an animal into
the blinding clouds
with the snapped chain of your life,
the life you know:
the deeply affectionate earth,
the familiar landscapes
slowly turning
thousands of feet below.
----

AN OLD WHOREHOUSE

We climbed through a broken window,
walked through every room.

Out of business for years,
the mattresses held only

rainwater, and one
woman's black shoe. Downstairs

spiders had wrapped up
the crystal chandelier.

A cracked cup lay in the sink.
But we were fourteen,

and no way dust could hide
the expected glamour from us,

or teach us anything.
We whispered, we imagined.

It would be years before
we'd learn how effortlessly

sin blooms, then softens,
like any bed of flowers.
------

2009-11-08T18:11:00.000-08:00

A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole

When the credits had ended and Ignatius had noted that several of the actors, the composer, the director, the hair designer, and the assistant producer were all people whose efforts had offended him at various times in the past,..."

You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces.

------------

2009-10-27T13:54:00.000-07:00

Taxonomy Of Barnacles
by Galt Niederhoffer

------------------

2009-09-30T17:28:00.001-07:00

If Ignorance Is bliss, Why Aren't There More Happy People?
John Lloyd & John Mitchinson

Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.
--Steuart Henderson Britt

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labor, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
--Lewis Thomas

All anybody needs to know about prizes is that Mozart never won one.
--Henry Mitchell

Who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what did he think he was doing at the time?
--Billy Connolly

Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.
--Jean Sibelius

I don not try to dance better than anyone else. I try to dance better than myself.
--Mikhail Baryshnikov

Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.
--E.M. Forster

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.
--Dag Hammarskjold

My doctor gave me six months to live but when I couldn't pay the bill, he gave me six months more.
--Walter Matthau

About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.
--Herbert Hoover

Good people are good because they have come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.
--William Saroyan

I have done everything possible to please you. I am the most famous artist in the world. I have worked day and night and undergone hardships of every description, but I still do not know what you want of me...
--Michelangelo Buonarotti

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why God? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered: "There's just something about you that pisses me off."
--Stephen King

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
--Mark Twain

It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.
--Bill Vaughan

The phrase "working mother" is redundant.
--Jane Sellman

We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.
--Stephen Covey

How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And if I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I want to see him.
--Soren Kierkegaard

We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons.
--Alfred E. Neuman

Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes of playing a poor hand well.
--Robert Louis Stevenson

This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us; to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves; to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.
--Oswald Spengler

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
--Rebecca West

You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.
--Sam Levenson

All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
--Spike Milligan

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's cup, France is accusing the US of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named "Bush," "Dick," and "Colon." Need I say more?
--Chris Rock

William Styron:
Book - Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1989)

Next week there can't be any crisis. My schedule is already full.
--Henry Kissinger

I keep six honest serving men/They taught me all I knew/Their names are What and Why and When/And Hos and Where and Who.
--Rudyard Kipling

Muriel Rukeyser
Book: The Book of the Dead

He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.
--Groucho Marx

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.
--Pablo Picasso

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.
--James Baldwin

Ernest Becker
book: The Denial Of Death

There is a serious defect in the thinking of someone who wants more than anything else to become rich. As long as they don't have the money, it'll seem like a worthwhile goal. Once they do, they'll understand who important other things are--and have always been.
--Benjamin Jowett

To be a woman is something so strange, so confusing, and so complicated that only a woman could put up with it.
--Soren Kierkegaard

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2009-08-04T20:13:00.000-07:00

WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING
Chris Hedges

Only the dead have seen the end of war - Plato

The historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere.

The imagined heroism, the vision of a dash to rescue a wounded comrade, the clear lines we thought were drawn in battle, the images we have of our own reaction under gunfire, usually wilt in combat. This is a sober and unsettling realization. We may not be who we thought we would be. One of the most difficult realizations of war is how deeply we betray ourselves, how far we are from the image of gallantry and courage we desire, how instinctual and primordial fear is.

"I do not understand," wrote Primo Levi. "I cannot tolerate the fact that a man should be judged not for what he is but because of the group to which he happens to belong."

The first casualty when war comes is truth - Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917

Elsa Morante: History: a Novel

A legendary fighter--and Ryszard Kapuscinski correctly pointed out that girls make much better child soldiers than boys because they are less prone to hysterics--

Ivo Andric - The Bridge on the Drina

Ariel Dorfman - Widows

Anthony Loyd - My War Gone By, I Miss It So

There are few sanctuaries in war. But one is provided by couples in love. They are not able to staunch the slaughter. They are often powerless and can themselves often become victims. But it was with them, seated around a wood stove, usually over a simple meal, that I found sanity and was reminded of what it means to be human. Love kept them grounded. Love, when it is deep and sustained by two individuals, includes self-giving--often self-sacrifice--as well as desire. For the covenant of love is such that it recognizes both the fragility and the sanctity of the individual. It recognizes itself in the other. It alone can save us.

A World War II study determined that after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties. They found that a common trait among the 2 percent who were able to endure sustained combat was a predisposition toward "aggressive psychopathic personalities."

William Manchester - Goodbye Darkness

...love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has power both to resist in our nature what we know we must resist, and to affirm what we know we must affirm. And love... is eternal.

______________________

2009-07-14T12:43:00.000-07:00

What Babies Say Before They Can Talk
By Paul C. Holinger

Your child's tendency to want to be like mom and dad is one of the most powerful influences on his emerging character. In fact, your baby's tremendous conscious and unconscious urge to emulate you is one of the strongest, and perhaps most often overlooked, motivators of behavior.

__________________

2009-07-02T19:46:00.000-07:00

A RACE LIKE NO OTHER - Liz Robbins

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GENETIC ROULETTE:
The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods
Jeffrey M.Smith

Scientists have since worked on some interesting combinations. Spider genes were inserted into goat DNA, in hopes that the goat milk would contain spider web protein for use in bullet-proof vests. Cow genes turned pig skin into cowhides. Jellyfish genes lit up pigs' noses in the dark. Arctic fish genes gave tomatoes and strawberries tolerance to frost. Potatoes glowed in the dark when thirsty...

The bias of the FDA in favor of company wishes over science is not unprecedented at the agency. In July 2006, the Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility distributed a 38-question survey to nearly 6,000 FDA scientists. Nearly 1,000 scientists responded, disclosing that 61% knew of cases in which "Department of Health and Human Services or FDA political appointees have inappropriately injected themselves into FDA determinations or actions," and 60% knew of cases "where commercial interests have inappropriately induced or attempted to induce the reversal, withdrawal, or modification of FDA determinations or actions."

"What I saw generically on the pro-biotech side was the attitude that the technology [GMO] was good, and that it was almost immoral to say that it wasn't good, because it was going to solve the problems of the human race and feed the hungry and clothe the naked.... And there was a lot of money that had been invested in this, and if you're against it, you're Luddites, you're stupid. That, frankly, was the side our government was on." - Dan Glickman, US secretary of agriculture under President Clinton.

On Christmas Day 1859, the Victorian Acclimatization Society released 24 rabbits into the Australian countryside so that settlers could hunt them for sport and feel more "at home." The rabbits multiplied to well over 200 million, spreading out over 4 million square kilometers. That Christmas present now costs Australian agriculture about $600 million per year.

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2009-06-05T15:22:00.000-07:00

FEET OF CLAY
Anthony Storr

Many painters, writers, and composers are narcissistic in that they value their own creative pursuits more than human relationships, and are often predominantly solitary. But, although they may spend much of their time alone, most creative artists want to communicate with others through their work and gain self-esteem from those who appreciate it.

Manic-depressives sometimes claim that their experiences of the depths of despair and the heights of elation have so intensified their lives that, if offered the choice, they would choose to have their illness rather than suffer the tedium of conventional normality.

There is a well-known psychiatric phenomenon called "folie a deux". If two people live together and one is mad, the other may become convinced by at least some of the delusions expressed by the psychotic partner. If the psychotic partner is removed to hospital, the other partner usually recovers his or her sanity.

Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud paper: On Narcissism: An Introduction
Stanley Milgram: Obedience to Authority

If the world had possessed a detailed biographical account of Jesus, an authentic picture of what he was like as a man, it is quite possible that Christianity would not have been established as a world religion. I am not suggesting that Jesus would have been shown up as dishonest or inauthentic; but simply indicating that a person is more easily made into a mythical figure if the outlines of his personality are blurred.

If we were perfectly adapted to the environment and the environment remained constant we might live in a state of blissful ignorance, unaware of any problems, but we should not be inventive because there would be no incentive to be so.

One man's faith is another man's delusion.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh:
There are fictions when the society supports you, there are fictions when nobody supports you. That is the difference between a sane and an insane person; a sane person is one whose fiction is supported by the society. He has manipulated the society to support his fiction. An insane man is one whose fiction is supported by nobody; he is alone so you have to put him in the madhouse.

Aldous Huxley records the case of the Swiss Anabaptist Thomas Schucker, who claimed that he was divinely guided to cut off his brother's head, and did so in the sight of a large audience which included his father and mother.

________________________

2009-05-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

THE WHITE TIGER
Aravind Adiga

...my first day in school, the teacher made all the boys line up and come to his desk so he could put our names down in his register. When I told him what my name was, he gaped at me:
"Munna? That's not a real name."
He was right: it just means "boy."
"That's all I've got, sir," I said.
It was true. I'd never been given a name.
"Didn't your mother name you?"
"She's very ill, sir. She lies in bed and spews blood. She's got no time to name me."
"And your father?"
"He's a rickshaw-puller, sir. He's got no time to name me."
"Don't you have a granny? Aunts? Uncles?"
"They've got no time either."
The teacher turned aside and spat--a jet of red paan splashed the ground of the classroom. He licked his lips.
"Well, it's up to me, then, isn't it?"

"Sometimes I wonder, Balram. I wonder what's the point of living. I really wonder..."
The point of living? My heart pounded. The point of your living is that if you die, who's going to pay me three and a half thousand rupees a month?

It will be good for me to stop here.
When we meet again, at midnight, remind me to turn the chandelier up a bit. The story gets much darker from here.

__________________________

2009-02-10T19:50:00.000-08:00

Life In the Balance

"As a practicing physician, I always paid careful attention to my patients' hands, often beginning my physical exam there, for the hands often provide important diagnostic clues. Thickened tendons in the palm can indicate diabetes. Swelling of soft tissue near the fingertips combined with nailbed changes may be a sign of lung cancer or cardiovascular disease. Painful lumps in the fingertips can suggest an infection of the heart valves."
--Thomas Graboys, M.D

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2009-02-06T15:09:00.000-08:00

Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill
The Story of Mary Bell
by Gitta Sereny

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2009-01-29T22:40:00.001-08:00

Listening Is an Act of Love
(edited by Dave Isay)

________________

2008-10-10T19:34:00.000-07:00

Madame de Stael: The First Modern Woman
Francine du Plessix Gray

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2008-10-08T15:34:00.000-07:00

AMY HEMPEL
The Harvest
Reasons To Live
At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom
Tumble Home

EDITH PORTMAN
The House Of Mirth

Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Petals Of blood

ROBERT MUSIL
The Man Without Qualities

________________________________

2008-10-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

BLISS BROYARD
One Drop: A True Story of Family, Race, And Secrets

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2008-10-04T18:15:00.000-07:00

BOOKS
VALENTINE ALILY
Mark of the Cobra

KALU OKPI
On The Road

MARIAMA BA
So long a letter

CAMARA LAYE
The Radiance of the King

ELECHI AMADI
The Concubine

MONGO BETI
The Poor Christ of Bomba

_____________________________

2008-09-26T20:14:00.000-07:00

ADVERSITY QUOTIENT: Turning Obstacles into Opportunities
Paul G. Stoltz, PhD

Life is like mountain climbing. Fulfillment is achieved by relentless dedication to the ascent, sometimes slow, painful step, by slow, painful step.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
The slogan "Press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
--Calvin Coolidge

Even when the setback is life-altering, your ability to control what you can, limit the reach of the adversity to the situation at hand, and minimize how long it endures will be the definitive factor in how quickly and to what degree you will recover from these tremendous challenges.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "A person with a strong enough why can bear almost any how.

Norman Vaughan: My Life Of Adventure

Life is hard. How you handle it determines your destiny.

_____________________

2008-09-18T21:45:00.000-07:00

STET
Diana Athill

Since then I have often noticed that it is not good for people to start a venture with enough-not to mention too much-money; it is hard for them to learn to structure it properly, simply because they are never forced to.

Everything that makes life worth living is the result of humankind's impulse to fight the darkness in itself, and attempting to understand evil is part of that fight.

Book: Into that Darkness - Gitta Sereny

Author: Jean Rhys

Books:
Michael Anthony: The Year in San Fernando
John Gardner: Grendel
Michael Irwin: Working Orders and Striker
Chaman Nahal: Azadi
Merce Rodoreda: The Pigeon Girl

Morris Stock: Parents Unknown: A Ukrainian Childhood
Daphne Anderson: The Toe-Rags

No doubt all writers know in their heads that their publishers, having invested much money and work in their books, deserve to make a reasonable profit; but I am sure that nearly all of them feel in their hearts that whatever their books earn ought to belong to them alone.

Authors:
Mordechai Richler - Barney's Version
Brian Moore
Alfred Chester

...I do think it is impossible to spend the first eighteen years of your life in a given set of circumstances without being shaped by them...

It is natural that a writer who knows himself to be good and who is regularly confirmed in that opinion by critical comment should expect to become a best-seller, but every publisher knows that you don't necessarily become a best-seller by writing well. Of course you don't necessarily have to write badly to do it; it is true that some bestselling books are written astonishingly badly, and equally true that some are written very well. The quality of the writing---even the quality of the thinking--is irrelevant. It is a matter of whether or not a nerve is hit in the wider reading public as opposed to the serious one which is composed of people who are interested in writing as art.

Once, when he [V.S. Naipaul] was particularly low, we talked about surviving the horriblness of life and I said that I did it by relying on simple pleasures such as the taste of fruit, the delicious sensations of a hot bath or clean sheets, the way flowers tremble very slightly with life, the lift of a bird's flight...

Diana Athill: Make Believe

Years ago, in a pub near Baker Street, I heard a man say that humankind is seventy per cent brutish, thirty per cent intelligent, and though the thirty per cent is never going to win, it will always be able to leaven the mass just enough to keep us going.

Author: Molly Keane
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2008-09-13T00:14:00.001-07:00

FAITH OF MY FATHERS
John McCain

It's an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment. Having no one else to rely on, to share confidences with, to seek counsel from, you begin to doubt your judgment and your courage. But you eventually adjust to solitary, as you can to almost any hardship, by devising various methods to keep your mind off your troubles and greedily grasping any opportunity for human contact.

We had a saying in prison: "Steady strain." The point of the remark was to remind us to keep a close watch on our emotions, not to let them rise and fall with circumstances that were out of our control.

Ironically for someone who had so long asserted his own individuality as his first and best defense against insults of any kind, I discovered that faith in myself proved to be the least formidable strength I possessed when confronting alone organized inhumanity on a greater scale than I had conceived possible. Faith in myself was important, and remains important to my self-esteem. But I discovered in prison that faith in myself alone, separate from other, more important allegiances, was ultimately no match for the cruelty that human beings could devise when they were entirely unencumbered by respect for the God-given dignity of man. This is the lesson I learned in prison. It is, perhaps, the most important lesson I have ever learned.

It's not hard to understand now that, given the prevailing political judgments of the time, the Vietnam War was better left unfought... If the government and the nation lack the resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone. We were accountable to the country, and no one was accountable to us.

I...learned that you can fill the moment, [time], with purpose and experiences that will make your life greater than the sum of its days.

It is a surpassing irony that war, for all its horror, provides the combatant with every conceivable human experience. Experiences that usually take a lifetime to know are all felt, and felt intensely, in one brief passage of life.

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2008-08-26T19:10:00.000-07:00

LIFE IN THE BALANCE
A Physician’s Memoir of Life, Love and Loss With Parkinson’s Disease and Dementia. By Thomas Graboys, M.D., with Peter Zheutlin

_____________________

2008-08-26T12:32:00.000-07:00

CITY GATES
Elias Khoury

      He was a man and he was a stranger,
     He didn't tell his story to anyone, he didn't know he was
a story to be told. He thought, he used to think, the way we think, and he was like everyone was, but he didn't tell anyone, because he didn't know that the things that had happened could be told to anyone.
     He was a man and he was a stranger,
     He doesn't remember how his story began, because he doesn't know. He saw himself in the middle of the story and he didn't ask how it began, because he was busy with its ending. And when the ending came he found that he didn't know the ending either, and that the others didn't know the ending, because the ending can't be known, because the ending is an ending.

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2008-05-26T16:39:00.000-07:00

CARRY ME DOWN
M.J. Hyland

'No storybooks,' he says, 'means no reading stories.'
'Yes sir,' I say.
'No reading stories means no imagination. We all start life with an imagination, of course, but without stories to feed it the imagination, like a starved dog, dies.'
He stares out at the playing field. 'And when a person doesn't read and when a person has no imagination they are sure to end up with no inventiveness of mind and spend a life with nothing but hackneyed, worn-out things to say. A life of slogans, jargon and cliches.'

___________________________

2008-05-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN
M. J. Hyland

I have read somewhere that one is not permitted to think of the Torah whilst on the toilet. I have also read that when Tolstoy was a child, his older brother would torment the young writer by telling him to stand in a corner and not think of a white bear. Consequently, a white bear was all that Tolstoy could think about.

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2008-05-11T17:56:00.000-07:00

STRONG AT THE BROKEN PLACES
Richard M. Cohen

...a young man in a wheelchair had complained bitterly in a PBS documentary I helped produce that people only see the chair, not the man in it.

Intense seriousness separates him from his peers. He is on a mission to make a life.

Ben creates his own isolation, and then suffers from it.

He travels the road less taken because he must. The chair separates him from others. So does that fence he has constructed in his head.

_________________

2008-04-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

BORN STANDING UP
Steve Martin

Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.

Time has helped me achieve peace with celebrity. At first I was not famous enough, then I was too famous, now I am famous just right. Oh yes, I have heard the argument that celebrities want fame when it's useful and don't when it's not. That argument is absolutely true.

In the early 1980s, a friend whose father had been killed crossing the street and whose mother had committed suicide on Mother's Day advised me, "If you have anything to work out with your parents, do it now. One day it will be too late."

There was another lengthy silence as we looked into each other's eyes. At last he said, "You did everything I wanted to do."
"I did it for you," I said. Then we wept for the lost years. I was glad I didn't say the more complicated truth: "I did it because of you."

___________________

2008-04-09T11:20:00.000-07:00

MAN GONE DOWN
Michael Thomas

No true idealist has a solid backup plan.

It changed when I was with her. I changed--to them--seen through the lens of my wife. I was no longer frightening, perhaps intimidating but in an exotic kind of way, for the women at least. The men reacted with a timid acceptance, tolerating their wives' open curiosity when they passed on the street.

Then the children came. "They" had always considered Claire as one of their own, and perhaps, after I became a father, they considered me that, too. Somehow they let us in--they let me in. And although I don't think that I changed a bit, we became a part of the "us," that seemingly abstract and arbitrary grouping that is able to specifically manifest itself...

________________________

2008-03-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

MEMOIRS FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
Fyodor Dostoevsky

...the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction. (237)

Tyranny is a habit; it has the capacity to develop and it does develop, in the end, into a disease. I maintain that the best of men may become coarsened and degraded by force of habit, to the level of a beast. Blood and power are intoxicants; callousness and perversity develop and grow... (237)

Some people think... that if a prisoner is well fed and well cared for, and everything is done according to the law, that is the end of the matter. This is another delusion. Every man, whoever he may be, and however low he may have fallen, requires, if only instinctively and unconsciously, that respect be given to his dignity as a human being. The prisoner is aware that he is a prisoner, an outcast, and he knows his position in respect to the authorities; but no brands, no fetters, can make him forget that he is a man. (134)

The dreams of the man who is caged and deprived of freedom are quite different from those of the man who is alive in the real sense. The free man has his hopes, of course (for a change in his lot, for instance, or the successful completion of an enterprise), but he lives and acts; real life with all its chances and changes wholly engrosses him. It is different for the prisoner. He also has, let us concede, a life--prison life, convict life; but whoever he is and for whatever term he has been confined, he is definitely and instinctively unable to accept his fate as something positive and final, as a part of real life. Every convict feels that he is not in his own home, but as it were on a visit. (115)

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2008-03-09T17:54:00.000-07:00

THEN WE CAME TO THE END
Joshua Ferris

It's true that that there's a twelve-year-old mentality in America. Every six-year-old has it.

Some of us loved killing an hour of the company's time and others felt guilty for it afterward. But whatever your personal feelings on the matter, you still had to account for the hour, so you billed it to a client. By the end of the fiscal year, our clients had paid us a substantial amount of money to sit around and bullshit, expenses they then passed on to you, the consumer.

_______________

2008-03-02T01:15:00.000-08:00

OUT STEALING HORSES
Per Petterson

If I had punched the man in Karlstad, my life would have been a different life, and I a different man. And it would be foolish to maintain, as so many men do, that it would have come to the same thing. It would not. I have been lucky. I have said that before. But it's true.

__________

2008-02-25T14:30:00.001-08:00

A LONG WAY GONE: MEMOIRS OF A BOY SOLDIER
Ishmael Beah

New York City, 1998
My high school friends have begun to suspect I haven't told them the full story of my life.
"Why did you leave Sierra Leone?"
"Because there is a war."
"Did you witness some of the fighting?"
"Everyone in the country did."
"You mean you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?"
"Yes, all the time."
"Cool."
I smile a little.
"You should tell us about it sometime."
"Yes, sometime."
-------
When I was very little, my father used to say, "If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die."

Not more than a week later, I was talking at gatherings in Freetown about child soldiering and how it must be stopped. "We can be rehabilitated," I would emphasize, and point to myself as an example. I would always tell people that I believe children have the resilience to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance.
__________

2008-02-22T10:07:00.000-08:00

AN AMBASSADOR'S WIFE IN IRAN
Cynthia Helms

Under Iranian law hijacking is punishable by death. A senior Iranian police official was quoted the next day by a member of the embassy as saying, "The hijackers will receive a fair trial. They will then be shot."

...mosaics, an art form that evolved from the days when mirrors ordered [to Iran] from Venice arrived broken so often that artisans fashioned the shattered pieces into decorations called a'ineh kari.

THE INNOCENT MAN
John Grisham

On August 11, 1995, a bizarre execution took place. Robert Brecheen, a forty-year-old white male, barely made it to the death chamber. The day before, he swallowed a handful of painkillers that he had somehow smuggled in and stockpiled. His suicide was to be his final effort at telling the state to go to hell, but the state prevailed. Brecheen was found unconscious by the guards and rushed to the hospital, where his stomach was pumped and he was stabilized enough to get hauled back to H Unit for a proper killing.

Every death row has at least one boss and several who want to be. There are factions vying for control. They prey on the weak, often demanding payment for the right to "live" on The Row. When word filtered to Greg that he needed to pay rent, he laughed and sent a message back that he would never pay a dime to anyone for living in such a rat hole.

In a small room behind the gurney, three executioners are hiding. They are not to be seen. Their identities are unknown around the prison. They are not state employees, but freelancers of some variety who were secretly hired by an old warden many years ago. Their arrivals and departures to and from McAlester are mysterious. Only the warden knows who they are, where they come from, and where they get their chemicals. He pays each of them $300 in cash for an execution.
The tubes from the inmate's arms run up and through two two-inch holes in the wall and into the small room where the executioners do their work.
When the formalities are tidied up, and the warden is certain there will be no last-minute phone calls, he nods and the injections start.
First a saline solution is pumped in to open the veins. The first drug is sodium thiopental, and it quickly knocks out the inmate. Another flushing of saline solution, then the second drug, vecuronium bromide, stops the breathing. Another quick flush and the third drug, potassium chloride, stops the heart.
The doctor appears, does a quick check, pronounces death.

Robert Mayer book The Dreams of Ada
_____________________

2008-02-01T14:16:00.000-08:00

MY INVENTED COUNTRY
A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile
Isabel Allende

When I was fifteen, I left the church forever and acquired a horror of religions in general and monotheistic faiths in particular. I am not alone in this predicament; many women my age, guerrillas in the battle for women's lib, are similarly uncomfortable in patriarchal religions--can you think of one that isn't?

Churches are filled on Sundays, and the pope is venerated, although no one pays any attention to his views on contraceptives because it's thought that there's no way an aged celibate who doesn't have to work for a living can be an expert on that subject.

Chiloe's culture is different from that of the rest of the country, and their people are so proud of their isolation that they oppose the construction of a bridge that will join the large island to Puerto Montt. It is such an extraordinary place that every Chilean and every tourist must visit it at least once, even at the risk of staying forever. The Chilotes live as they did a hundred years ago, dedicated to agriculture and the fishing industry, specifically salmon. Buildings are constructed solely of wood, and in the heart of each house there is always a huge wood stove burning day and night for cooking and for providing warmth to the family, friends, and enemies gathered around it.

I did not inherit my grandmother's psychic powers, but she opened my mind to the mysteries of the world. I accept that anything is possible. She maintained that there are multiple dimensions to reality, and that it isn't prudent to trust solely in reason and in our limited senses in trying to understand life; other tools of perception exist, such as instinct, imagination, dreams, emotions, and intuition.

That good woman maintained that we all have psychic powers but since we don't use them they atrophy, like muscles, and finally disappear.

Writer: Emilio Salgari

Chile is possibly the one country in the galaxy where there is no divorce, and that's because no one dares defy the priests, even though 71 percent of the population has been demanding it for a long time. No legislator, not even those who have been separated from their wives and partnered a series of other women in quick succession, is willing to stand up to the priests, and the result is that divorce law sleeps year after year in the "pending" file, and when finally it is approved it will be with so much red tape and so many conditions that it will be easier to murder your spouse than to divorce him or her.

It has often been said that we Chileans are envious, that we are bothered by others' success. It's true, but the explanation is that what we're feeling isn't envy, it's common sense. Success isn't normal. The human being is biologically constituted for failure, the proof of which being that we have legs instead of wheels, elbows instead of wings, and metabolism instead of batteries... We detest it when a countryman rises above the rest of us, except when it happens in another country, in which case the lucky fellow (or female equivalent) becomes a kind of national hero. The person who triumphs locally, however, is less than adored; soon there is tacit accord that he should be taken down a peg or two. We call this sport chaqueteo, "jacketing": grabbing the offender by his coattails and pulling him down.

I have a woman friend who is a gynecologist and has specialized in looking after unmarried pregnant teenagers, and she assures me that unwanted pregnancies are much less common among university students. That happens more in low-income families, in which parents place more emphasis on educating and providing opportunities to their male children than to their daughters. These girls have no plans, they see a gray future, and they have limited education and little self-esteem; some become pregnant out of pure ignorance.

I had a relative who twice won the jackpot in the lottery, but he always said "So-so," in order not to offend. As an aside, it's rather interesting to learn how his good fortune came about. He was a very strong Catholic and as such never wanted to hear talk of contraceptives. After his seventh child was born, desperate, he went to the church, knelt before the altar, and had a heart-to-heart talk with his Creator. "Lord, since you sent me seven children, it would be a kindness if You helped me feed them," he argued, and immediately took a long, carefully prepared list of expenses from his pocket. God listened patiently to the arguments of his loyal servant and almost immediately revealed the winning lottery number in a dream. Those millions lasted for several years, but inflation, which was endemic in Chile during that time, reduced his capital at the same rate he enlarged his family. When the last of his children was born, number eleven, he returned to church to argue his case, and again God came to his aid by sending another revelation in a dream. The third time it was no deal.

When my grandfather grew old, he refused to wear a hearing aid because he thought that the only thing good about his years was not having to listen to the foolish things people said.

...that's how nostalgia is: a slow dance in a large circle. Memories don't organize themselves chronologically, they're like smoke, changing, ephemeral, and if they're not written down they fade into oblivion. I've tried to arrange my thoughts according to themes or periods of my life, but it's seemed artificial to me because memory twists in and out, like an endless Moebius strip.

The victors write history in their own way. Every country presents its soldiers in the most favorable light, hides their mistakes and downplays their atrocities, and after the battle is won everyone is a hero.

Novel: Mario Vargas Llosa: Feast of the Goat
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Autumn of the Patriarch

What I'd done earlier in Chile made little impression, partly because exiles tend to inflate their credentials and in the end no one believes much of anything; there were false doctors who had barely graduated from high school and real doctors who ended up driving taxis.

Maybe the place I'm homesick for never existed. Now when I visit, I must compare the real Chile to the sentimental image I've carried for twenty-five years. Since I've lived outside the country for so long, I tend to exaggerate the virtues of our national character and forget the disagreeable aspects.

_______________

2008-01-31T17:44:00.000-08:00

SNOBBERY, THE AMERICAN VERSION
Joseph Epstein

("Better to be an ancestor," said Freud, neatly covering this point, "than to have them.")

In Europe, it used to be said, people want to know who you are. In the United States, they want to know what you do. A useful distinction, this, for it implies that in Europe whom you derive from, your family line, is the crucial datum, whereas in America what you do defines you. In America, one's work marks one socially...

Shaw did teaching grave damage with his famous aphorism: "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."

Because of the cachet that culture has in contemporary America, to be even a not very good poet or a hopeless painter is still to be thought "creative," to have a higher calling. Besides, if one isn't good at one's art, one can always teach it in universities, turning out hundreds of young people quite as mediocre as oneself.

In The New Yorker, of all places, a man from Helena, Montana, in response to an article about servant problems, wrote that the article 'filled me with paroxysms of class rage. As a forty-one-year-old working-class man who grew up poor... I've grown sick of watching people with money wring their hands and worry about the morality of hiring servants, and whether their servants love them, and how much working people deserve to be paid. Just understand that we don't love you, and that your money is always gained by our poverty and hard work, and that there is nothing noble about hiring somebody for pennies to do what you as an able-bodied person should be doing yourself.'

The working class, the so-called lower orders, received a boost from Dickens, for in any Dickens novel, someone from the working class is likely to be the repository of all loyalty, kindness, goodheartedness, and no-frills wisdom. All this is very close to nonsense, of course, for creeps and saints are to be found in every social class and exist across all class lines.

"'Elitist,' a politically supercharged word, is almost invariably another sour-grapes word, at least when used to denigrate people who insist on a high standard. The distinction, I believe, is that the elitist desires the best; the snob wants other people to think he has, or is associated with, the best.

To this day the longing for aristocracy on the part of Americans crops up in odd places. Royalty in close proximity seems to make Americans lose their balance, if not get positively goofy. Princess Diana, not long before she died, visited Northwestern University, where I teach. The spectacle of the university president, a smallish man in glasses, following the Princess about the campus, yapping away, reminded one of nothing so much as that of a chihuahua attempting to mount an Afghan hound.

He judged his colleagues by their skill at their discipline, and, apart from their characters, nothing else.

After the discovery of Hitler's Final Solution, anti-Semitism began to be less easily expressed and less openly enacted in, among other places, university quota systems. (Harvard's and Yale's admission policies called for allowing roughly 13 percent of Catholics and Jews among their student bodies.)

NORMAN MAILER - ARMIES OF THE NIGHT (Vietnam protest book)

Novelist Dan Jacobson, in an essay on his boyhood as a Jew in the town of Kimberley in South Africa:
"But anyone who has been the object of racial hatred knows that it is so wounding to its victim--more wounding than personal abuse directed against him as an individual--precisely because it denies his individuality. To every member of the spurned race it says: to me you will never be a person with a life and interests of your own, but always a representative of a species. Whatever you do will reveal only your speciesdom; and if you try to escape from it, that too will reveal the species you belong to."

Much snobbery is about denying the next person his individuality, or, when allowing it, permitting it only inferior standing.

Georg Simmel, the trenchant German sociologist, has suggested that the individual who takes a stand against fashion may do so out of personal weakness, fearful that "he will be unable to maintain his individuality if he adopts the forms, the states, and the customs of the general public."

_________________________

2008-01-18T14:59:00.000-08:00

T.C. BOYLE
The Human Fly And Other Stories

The Love of My Life
Achates McNeil
Juliana Cloth

______________________

2008-01-13T02:25:00.000-08:00

BARACK OBAMA - DREAMS FROM MY FATHER

"Of course it hurt," he said, taking a sip from the jug. "Sometimes you can't worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go."

To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to hear.

"The change comes later. In about five years, although it seems like it's coming sooner all the time."
"What change is that?"
"When their eyes stop laughing. Their throats can still make the sound, but if you look at their eyes, you can see they've shut off something inside."

Literature: Tillich and Niebuhr

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.
But that's not all law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

2007-12-20T14:52:00.000-08:00

THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2007
Edited by Stephen King

T.C. BOYLE - Balto

JOSEPH EPSTEIN - My brother Eli
"Here we're happy just to make a living and get some kind of fix on reality. Our hands are full trying to cope with the world as it is. We don't waste a lot of time on the world as it ought to be."

"I'm sure there'll be a few more Mrs. Eli Blacks, all with numbers after their names, like ennobling suffixes."

STELLAR KIM - Findings & Impressions

RICHARD RUSSO - Empire Falls (won 2002 Pulitzer Prize)
__________

2007-12-14T13:40:00.000-08:00

LEAVING A DOLL'S HOUSE
Claire Bloom
In fact, my mother always saw to it that I kept a very level head, and didn't let the success I had that night, or on any subsequent occasion, affect me in any profound way. Not that we didn't both get tremendous pleasure from my early achievements; it was simply that the danger of taking oneself too seriously or expecting that life could possibly continue in this exalted sphere was not being the least realistic, and only asking for pain and disappointment later in life.

During filming he told me more than once that to wake up and find Elizabeth on his pillow was like having Christmas every morning--

__________

2007-12-08T21:15:00.000-08:00

EAT PRAY LOVE
by Elizabeth Gilbert

Some time after I'd left my husband, I was at a party and a guy I barely knew said to me, "You know, you seem like a completely different person, now that you're with this new boyfriend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David. You even dress like him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think maybe you always look like your men."

I met a young Australian girl last week who was backpacking through Europe for the first time in her life. I gave her directions to the train station. She was heading up to Slovenia, just to check it out. When I heard her plans, I was stricken with such a dumb spasm of jealousy, thinking, I want to go to Slovenia! How come I never get to travel anywhere?
Now, to the innocent eye it might appear that I already am traveling. And longing to travel while you are already traveling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness. It's kind of like fantasizing about having sex with your favorite movie star while you're having sex with your other favorite movie star.

My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. I can see her peace. She did not cop out on herself. The benefits of her choices are massive--a long, stable marriage to a man she still calls her best friend; a family that has extended now into grandchildren who adore her; a certainty in her own strength.

Her solitary nature means she needs a family to keep her from loneliness; my gregarious nature means I will never have to worry about being alone, even when I am single.

Giulio asked, "What's the word in New York City?"
I thought about this for a moment, then decided. "It's a verb, of course. I think it's ACHIEVE."
(Which is subtly but significantly different from the word in Los Angeles, I believe, which is also a verb: SUCCEED).

The thing is, you must be very careful when introducing a new chicken to the general flock. You can't just toss it in there with the old chickens, or they will see it as an invader. What you must do instead is to slip the new bird into the chicken coop in the middle of the night while the others are asleep. Place her on a roost beside the flock and tiptoe away. In the morning, when the chickens wake up, they don't notice the newcomer, thinking only, "She must have been here all the time since I didn't see her arrive." The clincher of it is, awaking within this flock, the newcomer herself doesn't even remember that she's a newcomer, thinking only, "I must have been here the whole time..."

...a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.

...Sean is one of those people like me who were born with the itch, the mad and relentless urge to understand the workings of existence. His little parish in County Cork didn't seem to have any of these answers, so he left the farm in the 1980s to go traveling through India, looking for inner peace through Yoga. A few years later, he returned home to the dairy farm in Ireland. He was sitting in the kitchen of the old stone house with his father--a lifelong farmer and a man of few words--and Sean was telling him all about his spiritual discoveries in the exotic East. Sean's father listened with mild interest, watching the fire in the hearth, smoking his pipe. He didn't speak at all until Sean said, "Da--this meditation stuff, it's crucial for teaching serenity. It can really save your life. It teaches you how to quiet your mind."
His father turned to him and said kindly, I have a quiet mind already, son," then resumed his gaze on the fire.

Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention.

I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

I've been watching the expatriate society in Ubud, and I know for a stone-cold fact this is not the life for me. Everywhere in this town you see the same kind of character--Westerners who have been so ill-treated and badly worn by life that they've dropped the whole struggle and decided to camp out here in Bali indefinitely, where they can live in a gorgeous house for $200 a month, perhaps taking a young Balinese man or woman as a companion, where they can drink before noon without getting any static about it, where they can make a bit of money exporting a bit of furniture for somebody. But generally, all they are doing here is seeing to it that nothing serious will ever be asked of them again. There are not bums, mind you. This is a very high grade of people, multinational, talented and clever. But it seems to me that everyone I meet here used to be something once (generally "married" or "employed"); now they are all united by the absence of the one thing they seem to have surrendered completely and forever: ambition. Needless to say, there's a lot of drinking.

______________

2007-12-01T13:30:00.000-08:00

THE HOAX
Clifford Irving

Soul-vomit: the uninhibited pouring forth of emotion and sentimentality, of love and hate, aspiration and frustration.

...I even enticed Edith into the water, despite her theory that man had struggled for a million years to drag himself out of the sea and evolve into a creature of the land. "To go back into the sea," she maintained, "is to throw away everything [that] humanity stands for."

"The harder you work, the luckier you get."

___________

Books: June 2007 - December 2007

2007-11-25T11:42:00.000-08:00

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.”