22 Wednesday Oct 2014
Arrived! David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire and Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? — I may be absent for a while . . . .http://books.simonandschuster.com/Putins-Kleptocracy/Karen-Dawisha/9781476795195
Fatigue sets in.
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16 Monday Sep 2013
In Washington, D.C. — WASHINGTON: As many as 3 gunmen attack Navy Yard, 6 dead – Politics Wires – MiamiHerald.com
From Cairo — Tarek and John are on hunger strike | Justin Podur — Two Canadians detained by Egypt’s interim government (ever the optimist, I am putting off the day when I may be forced by time to call it a “ruling junta”) have gone on a hunger strike.
Rather than cover the second-hand news for the rest of the afternoon (unless someone really wants me chatyping and doing the social network pass-along furiously (and offers sponsorship to do it), I’m inclined to continue reading Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin: Ben Judah: 9780300181210: Amazon.com: Books. As the numbers on this blog climb, I feel it incumbent upon myself to read as if in the ivory tower — with concentration and patience enough to better see what I feel I have been seeing.
Related: Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin by Ben Judah – review | Books | The Guardian 6/27/2013. The author, Luke Harding, has had a young career as a Kremlinologist and has gotten a couple of books out of it: Expelled: A Journalist’s Descent into the Russian Mafia State, which is due here quite soon, and Mafia State: How one reporter became the enemy of the brutal new Russia.
Never mind autocrats: any conflict involving integrity and power also involves a lot of thinking about the management of surface, sub-surface, and compartmented information. Neither countries nor persons may wish to “let it all hang out” (God forbid) but the development beyond copyright, patent, and basic proprietary business concerns of extended secrets-keeping societies bodes ill for humanity. The dignity of man, if there is to be any, demands to know the substance of true states of affairs.
The cuckoo and two peacocks, one in the brig, another in Ecuador, the last in Russia may have been a bit screwed up about the relationship between their empowerment, their observation, and their views, but taken together and with a continuously emerging global intelligentsia, the idea that mankind will live like a happy idiot in a cave managed and fought over by supertechnologists has a particularly enslaved and hideous aspect to it.
Related and also cued around this place: Brazil and 12 Monkeys.
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11 Wednesday Sep 2013
Weather: mid-Atlantic, late summer, sunny and hot.
Seen on Facebook Before 8:30 a.m.
http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/i-believe-a-911-tribute 9/11/2013
9/11: America’s Unfinished Business – Michelle Malkin – Page 1 9/11/2013
2 Millions Bikers to DC (Facebook Page)
Around the Web
CNN.com – September 11 Memorial
Opinion: Jihadist terrorism in America since 9/11 – CNN.com
12 years later, horrors of 9/11 shaping American opinion on Syria, Middle East – Indian Express 9/11/2013
Honor September 11th: National Day of Service and Remembrance | The White House 9/11/2013
Column: 10 changes since 9/11 : Opinion 9/11/2013
______
You can surf the web too?
How about that!
And that’s good reason for me to take it easy on the chatyping all around — blogs, correspondence, Facebook — and immerse in a good book.
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22 Wednesday May 2013
Zaidi, Abbas. Two And A Half Words And Other Stories. Gowanus Books, 2012.
What might it like to live in an atmosphere rife with bigotry, fear, and hypocrisy accompanied by the author’s and reader’s own cackling laughter?
Slip your mind into Abbas Zaidi’s slim and thoroughly delightful, also wondrously transgressive, first volume of short stories inspired by the south Asian Muslim experience and find out.
Truly, Zaidi’s Two And A Half Words And Other Stories comes off a wickedly good trip from the first mention of “Blessed Companions of the Prophet Street” (“The Shadows”) to the pitch perfect near ending wrap-up, “On that rainy evening, the four minarets of the Shahi Mosque were standing tall in the distance surrounded by the dimly-lit alleys where the ladies of the night, their pimps, and customers were getting ready for business. I lit a cigarette . . . .” (“Passions of Khalifa Hakeem”).
From the title story of the collection:
What I remember them saying was that the jhalli kuri in Number 3 had lost her mind after remaining silent and refusing to eat for days. These words had no meaning for me. But one night I woke up screaming. I dreamed that the jhalli kuri was standing over me.
A “mad girl”, a troubled apartment, mysteries . . . .
As this blog swims around in the area of language and politics, I may mention that the volume is not bereft of the latter but for western readers may be uncomfortably startling in its depictions. At one point, for example, a general notes, “if the Americans want to isolate Iran, courting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda is not a bad idea” and a reporter similarly struck with grand conspiracy theorizing chimes back, “Don’t be surprised if one day a Taliban squad is found blowing up bridges in Beijing in the name of Islam but actually serving American . . . .”
Wealth may be needed to preserve the conditions in which the literary experience of the 19th Century thrived, either that or equal tolerance for impoverishment, for even reading through the dozen expertly crafted short stories contained in Zaidi’s first collection requires time away from the web and time unencumbered by other concerns — call the proper condition “leisured time”: the experience of such work becomes that of a thin but notable and latent powerful new intelligentsia. For that set — and if you’re here, I hope you’re a part of it — such stories provide both a critique of and a map to the spirit of the world in which the author has lived.
We may never have a perfect world — God forbid it — but in Abbas Zaidi, a part of it may have given the gift of a perfect and perfectly scathing reflector and entertainer.
29 Tuesday Jan 2013
Reference: BackChannels Library Page
My library contains about 2,000 volumes.
Should I ever get it into a house (life’s not looking so good for that at the moment), I should like to have it in one room or continuously spanning one serious load bearing wall. Here in the apartment they’re arrayed over the studs one to three bookcases along sections of wall.
So far, so good.
I’ve gone to Kindle, which is not bad for curiosity but awfully bad for the disposition of even a small (the smallest) estate in books, and I may revert to collecting hardcovers.
While I mull that, I thought I would share here with readers a portion of what’s been imported in areas relevant to light commentary on politics. Were the funds available, say through a big fat fairy tale of a grant (but maybe there are angels), I would have an assistant work up cards and key them for a while. As it is, if I add a few volumes a week, just a couple at a time, that might do as well.
While items listed are here, not everything listed has been read (the infamous “RAT” is still sitting stealthily on a speaker cabinet beside the television), and not everything read has been remembered; however, I have out of necessity become more careful about quality time with books, the distractions posed by the Internet, especially Facebook, having become so fragmenting and time consuming.
In fact, I have here the habits of a way of life, but it’s a scrambling and scrapping information-bound way of life, shifting gears always between the academic and the personal, the chatyping session on the social network and the research-and-typing session that turns out a post, and the concerns of an author (would-be, wannabe, maybe is) and those of the guy who lives in “real space” after all. Apart from the nifty act of hauling a cogent quote onto a blog or into online chat, I’ve always found reading among the most calming and focusing of activities.
With a library in the home — not a lonesome bookcase in the squire’s office but rather 20 bookcases packed and packed along from grade school to graduate school (and sprinkled with inheritance: my father’s Durant and Le Carre collections are here, for example) and assembled for a dime on the dollar from thrift shops — it’s good not to always have too much burden in the way of other distractions and indulgences.
There’s not too much on the page as I type here this Tuesday afternoon in late January, only mention of five volumes, but there’s more where they came from.
Servadio, Gaia. Mafioso.New York: Stein and Day, 1976.
Fromm, Erich. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973.
Cohen, Stephen Philip. The Idea of Pakistan. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004.
12 Friday Oct 2012
17 Friday Aug 2012
Tags
book review, books, civilizational narcissism, history, Islam, Mobarak Haider, narcissism, political psychology, politics, religion, Taliban
Civilizational NarcissismEverything you wanted to know about why what is wrong with Islam — that abysmal present soaked in blood, dependence, hate, ignorance, and failed or failing or drifted states from Asia to Africa to the Middle East — may be covered in Mobarak Haider’s 2008 (Urdu version; English version, 2010) Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg.
“Narcissism is a psychic state of extreme subjectivity. The civilizational narcissists have mostly two alternating mental states: either they are perfectly unaware of the role of the world around them or if they are aware, they are sure that it admires or envies them. This infatuation with their own charm renders them totally impervious to the beauty and merit of others. Civilizational narcissism is therefore collective to the extent that all the admirers of their own civilization admire only abstract concepts; no living human or the existing pattern of civilization impresses them.”
With Pakistani street cred and cosmopolitan ivory tower brights and insight, Haider walks the reader through each dimension of cultural, geopolitical, linguistic, psychological, and social history and thought in laying out the case for an unbridled narcissism as the core component promoting the misery the Muslim Ummah continues to deal to itself and to others in the name of Allah.
In addition to the psychology, which I regard as rich and spot-on, Haider’s honesty and integrity in scholarship in and of itself stands signal to the kind of change the whole world wants as regards Islam’s ability to accept criticism, to develop by first developing itself (through other than alms and arms) and to enjoy — now these are my words — the world’s present and most assuredly future “cultural polyphony”.
I have found an implacability in conservative Muslim and American circles in which one party or the other is not only being victimized by the other, but reverting, or stuck, in the mechanics of the most woeful prejudice, which may be reduced to the statement, “they are all like that.” For some, every Muslim is a Jihadi-head (and it may be tragic for Muslims that whatever potential lay in the term “Jihad”, it really has become synonymous with “bombs on two legs” and the like); and for some opposite, every “right-winger” is Pamela Geller or Robert Spencer (I like them both): my way out of that debacle has been through the window of a term I refer to as “shimmer” — i.e., for what’s coming over the berm, uncertainty as to who, in impassioned numbers, really wants what.
Not to be the “useful idiot” in this crowd, I have at this point engaged many Muslim friends (around the world too), most of whom I genuinely enjoy in an atmosphere as generous in mutual regard as I have ever experienced in conversation.
Nonetheless, in the hands of clerics, the Taliban, and the Arabs who profit mightily on religion — the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, may be valued at $30 billion annually according to a Gulf News report — the culture produced within the vaunted “religion of peace” has serious social issues with the rest of the world.
And it can’t stand to hear about them.
After so much delving into contributing cultures and history, Haider makes this general observation, which I feel should be taken to heart:
“In all these forms of contact — individual, tribal, and civilizational — supremacy of one over the other, i.e., ascendancy of one sex over the other, of one tribe over the other, or of one civilization over the other, is a bad arrangement. It is less productive and cannot hold forever. It has been observed that if clash is less frequent than kindness, in these forms of relationships, the resulting posterity is healthier and happier. The concept of dominance seems to be the less developed form of behavior in human history. That is perhaps why all doctrines and philosophies of wisdom preached against it.” (p. 174).
I would suggest our species more gregarious than not and altogether more inclined toward real goodness and good relationships than not.
However, be that as it may, a little farther on in a chapter titled, “Hate the Jew: And Do Not Ask”, Haider notes, “The tragedy does not lie in the inability of Muslims to learn or think” — here I interrupt to note my friends do learn and do think, wonderfully, but they may be neither representative of all nor few, a subject to be taken up at another time . . . but back to Haider’s telling sentence — “it lies in the absolute dominance of Islamic dogma that has been carefully defended, so that no critical approach could ever raise a finger . . . . In Saudi Arabia, even now geocentric astronomy is taught as syllabus; Abdul Rahman bin Baaz, the head of Medina University received award of merit for his thesis that the Earth is static while the Sun and the Moon move.”
I believe the veracity of Haider’s anecdotal evidence.
Those who believe Abdul Rahman bin Baaz’s theory would seem capable of believing anything, not that anyone dare tell them that.
American Psychiatric Association. Personality disorders. In: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc; 2000:717-731.
Ali, Jasim. “Sweeping economic impact of the Haj.” Gulf News, November 7, 2011.
Altaf, Waseem. “We need multiple measures to start a return: Mobarak Haider.” Viewpoint, n.d.
Ambardar, Sheenie and David Bienenfeld. “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” Medscape Reference, updated May 24, 2011. (References 2000 DSM-IV-TR).
Kreger, Randi. “Don’t Diss the Narcissists!” Psychology Today, May 24, 2010.
15 Wednesday Aug 2012
Tags
Islam, Mobarak Haider, Muslim, narcissism, political, politics, psychology, religion
Haider, Mobarak. Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg. Pakistan: Saanjh, 2008 (Urdu), 2010 (English).
An experience embraced over time becomes an education, and so in this my fifth year of the most obscure blogging, I may graduate (by my own authority, naturally) from generalist to specialist, from being many things to many people (three dimensional fellow: writer, photographer, musician) to settling down between the desktop, library, and Skype, and forging ahead not only with what has been incubated on Facebook — every you-know-what has an opinion, of course — but narrowing even those lively rounds down to a more in-depth and perceptive tracking and analysis of the conflicts blazing away beneath an umbrella I call the “Islamic Small Wars”, that band of civil conflict and terror that has established a cold or hot presence in every Muslim-majority state and produced misery along the interface with western and other cultures.
I may not confine myself to that interest, dictators and junta and crooked oligarchs serving equally well for mindful entertainment and colorful data on which to mull the human condition and the autocrat’s propensity for mad self-adoration and aggrandizement.
We’ll see how this goes, and if it goes well, I suppose I shall have to archive and close the high school version of my foray into foreign affairs: Oppenheim Arts & Letters.
I’ll put up an “About” page soon, but, right now, I’m reading the above noted book by Mobarak Haider, and it is answering questions, filling in gaps, making sense of many things having to do with the architecture and character of the Islamic Small Wars,
I don’t want to review Haider’s book in this post — I’m still reading it, for one thing — but have wanted to play with this blog concept for a while.
The industry that has taken on the name “anti-Jihad” has grown extensively around the art of righteous complaint, and for that there has been no lack of material for squawking. What perhaps has been lacking would seem a less aligned perspective in a mind moving off the field and down into the engine room of the soul, which, incidentally, Haider does quite well, and searching out and perhaps arguing for answers.
