I like the juxtaposition in this more than usually ludicrous Guardian article – the immigrants who are simultaneously “undocumented” and “law-abiding”. A conundrum for the weekend, sir?
And I wonder how many people will point out that Obama is granting this mass amnesty mostly to help with voting numbers?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/15/obama-stop-deportation-undocumented-immigrants
Derek Turner, 15th June 2012
In a new seasonal feature, QR writers and readers tell us what’s on their reading lists for the summer. This time – DAVID ASHTON
Non-fiction – currently reflects writing projects (e.g. ancient dragon-slayer & returning-hero narratives) rather than my usual interests. Only just finished Trevor Bryce’s Life and Society in the Hittite World (2004), a good example of concise, readable scholarship. Only just started George Cox’s erudite 2-vol Mythology of the Aryan Nations (1870) and Arthurian Legends of the Middle Ages (1871). Researching subjects from various angles to minimise error leads irresistibly to sidetracks. Such tempting tangents will include Ronald Fritze’s Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions (2011), John Day’s Indo-European Origins: The Anthropological Evidence (2001) and James Holding’s Shattering the Christ Myth (2008).
Among modern historians I particularly admire Richard Overy (e.g. The Dictators & The Morbid Age), despite disagreement over occasional details, and look forward to 1939: Countdown to War (2009) if we get a sunny afternoon on the beach. I also bought John Mosier’s Deathride (2010) “debunking” Soviet WW2 propaganda, and Frank Dikotter’s Mao’s Great Famine (2011), which require careful study.
Fiction: So far into six chapters of Haruki Murakami’s weird 1Q84 (2011), a present from my son-in-law; apart from names it could be set in America as easily as Japan. This month in paperback, Peter James’ atypical thriller Perfect People would make an exciting film with a sad ending. I hope soon to recover from its anti-eugenic stance by reading Robert Heinlein’s Friday (1982) and then Ernst Jünger’s prophetic Glass Bees (1957). Little time for lighter stuff, except for Private Eye magazine (especially Craig Brown’s brilliant parodies), though dipping now and again into Robert Benchley’s My Ten Years in a Quandary, which kept me amused as a boy sailing back from Australia.
I sometimes use TV for effortless intake of its rare quality drama or movies, plus programmes like Have I Got News for You, Dad’s Army or Poirot.
DAVID ASHTON writes from Norfolk
What We’re ReadingIn a new seasonal feature, QR writers tell us what’s on their reading lists for the summer. This time – KIRBY OLSON
I have a few books in mind. One is Teach Yourself Finnish. I’m a bit stuck, but intend to “finish”. Also, Finland’s War of Choice: the Troubled German-Finnish Coalition in World War II, by Henrik Lunde. I also have a book on Finnish grammar. (My wife is a Finn.)
Also, Tales of the Rose Tree, Ravishing Rhododendrons and their Travels Around the World, by Jane Brown. L’Etat et Ses Limites, by Edouard Laboulaye (French guy who was a scholar of the American Constitution and had the idea for the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor). I’m about half way through these books. I should also read Adam Smith, and some composition text books, but probably won’t.
The Human Image: Avant-Garde and Christian, by Richard E. Sherrell. It’s subtitled New Perspectives on the Theatre of the Absurd. I’m trying to resurrect a liaison between Christianity and the avant-garde art world, esp. via my blog, Lutheran Surrealism.
I also want to read a few contemporary poets such as Catherine Savage Brosman and Jill Essbaum (a naughty Lutheran), and other Christian poets who are also steeped in the avant-garde. Know any? The last really important one was Marianne Moore.
KIRBY OLSON is an academic and a poet, and blogs at Lutheran Surrealism
In a new seasonal feature, QR writers tell us what’s on their reading lists for the summer. This time – MARK G. BRENNAN
Ah yes, the summer reading list. When the only hobby one has is reading, it makes little difference what season of the year approaches. But if nothing else, the change of seasons marks the turning of a calendar page. So what better time to pause for an inventory of the unread books accumulating around my apartment? An annotated list of “books in need of my consumption” will, if nothing else, spur me to finish a pleasant task. And while pleasant tasks are usually their own reward, the distractions of the Internet, sunny weather, and Obama’s looming defeat, have all diverted me from my typical 250 pages of reading each day. So check back with me on Labor Day to see how many of these books I have actually read.
First off, Derek Turner has asked me to review Barry Bracewell-Milnes’ two-volume Wealth Without Cost for the Quarterly Review. I would give you a snippet or two if I knew anything about these books. But since my editor made the selection for me, I have nothing intelligent to say about them right now. Make sure your QR subscription is current if you really want to know what I think about them. My review should appear in the coming fall issue.
Now for the books I can’t blame on Derek.
I have been carrying around Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations for months now. This well-traveled copy has seen much of Europe and the eastern half of the continental United States. My incorrigible indolence in refusing to put eyeball to paper and just reading the darn thing has nothing to do with the book’s merit. Unfortunately, travel distracts me too much to allow for the concentration required for such an important book. Plus, the summer solstice isn’t until late June. So this one technically doesn’t count as summer reading.
So let’s move to the post-solstice season of haze, heat, and humidity – or what New Yorkers affectionately refer to as “f—–g summer”. John Lewis Gaddis’ biography of a great U.S. diplomat, George Kennan: An American Life, hasn’t moved off my nightstand since the author autographed it for me at a recent talk he gave. I also plan to read another of his works, The Cold War: A New History. As a diplomatic historian myself, I hate to admit that I have not yet read it. But admitting you have a problem is the first step in recovery, or so sayeth the zombies emerging from their “Cult of the Twelve Steps” programs.
Unfortunately, my embarrassment does not end there. I also plan to plow through John Mearsheimer’s seminal work, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. As the only American figure willing to speak honestly about the United States’ relationship with Israel, Mearsheimer deserves every honest thinker’s respect. I hope his royalty rate is high on sales of this book. How else to reward his bravery?
My political science kick will end with Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order. I finally got around to reading Fukuyama’s groundbreaking bestseller The End of History and the Last Man. Just because I hadn’t read it didn’t stop me from opining on it for the last 20 years. But now that I understand his argument, I encourage all those who laugh at his main proposition (“The end of history? Or “History”? How silly!”) to follow suit.
On the fiction side, a learned man told me no series of novels depicts what America was, or the model of society to which traditionalists should aspire to return, than Booth Tarkington’s Growth trilogy. These three will be my one sop to fiction for the next quarter.
Finally, several books that I was supposed to read in preparation for my doctoral exams remain, shall we say, “unread”. Don’t get me wrong; I passed my exams (barely). With the help of JSTOR and book reviews, PhD candidates can learn all they need to know about a book without sitting down and, ahem, reading it. These three books did not appear on my exam preparation list by mere serendipity. So now is the time to log off JSTOR, toss out the frayed book reviews, and plow through the actual texts. In no particular order, I plan to “re-read” The Contours of American History by William Appleman Williams, D. K. Fieldhouse’s Economics and Empire, 1830-1914, and The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1907-1991 by arguably the best historian on the topic, Martin Malia.
Of course, the foregoing assumes that I am in the mood for reading anything after spending the entirety of my working day writing about American Protestant missionaries in Cuba during the first quarter of the 20th Century.
But hope springs (or shall we say “summers”?) eternal!
MARK G. BRENNAN is the Quarterly Review’s American Editor
In a new seasonal feature, QR writers tell us what’s on their reading lists for the summer. This time – TITO PERDUE
1) Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism. I know just enough about this writer to know that he predicts a very interesting future. And as I don’t much care what happens to the world just so long as it’s interesting, I have to read this.
2) Graded German Reader
3) Julius Evola – Revolt Against the Modern World. This author is reported to be strong where Nietzsche is weak, which is to say the pursuit of supernal values. I need that.
TITO PERDUE is an Alabama-based novelist, whose many novels include Lee, The New Austerities and The Node
In a new seasonal feature, QR writers tell us what’s on their reading lists for the summer. This time – PETER GEMMA
I’ve been asked to write a bit about what I am reading and plan to take up. Perhaps first I should say something about me and what I have read in the past.
I work primarily as a freelance writer now, but spent 30 years in politics – running campaigns, raising money for candidates and causes, and training candidates and campaign personnel. My reading reflects my professional life: history, politics, and biographies. I read only four or five fiction books a year and those are while on vacation (I don’t like to take books out of my library of approximately 2.000 volumes in fear of losing them.) I’ve been a bookworm from childhood. The author who impressed me most then was Harold Lamb, who wrote historically accurate novels. The dramatic covers of fighting Crusaders and exotic places captured my attention. He wrote exciting stories about Hannibal, Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Cyrus the Great.
It drives my wife crazy that I read two or three books at a time—she thinks it’s like switching TV channels to watch different shows simultaneously. But I can read a chapter or two of a biography and easily go to a history of the Dixiecrat Party for a day or two.
I’m writing a book on Southern politics covering the period of 1956-1976, the era ending segregation by federal law and judicial edicts. My focus is on the politicians who served then: some retired from the battlefield, some changed sides, and some went down fighting. My reading list for the past year has been mainly for research purposes.
I do take breaks to rest my mind: recently I read Malcom X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable—controversial because it delves into the subject’s past not seen before: womanizing, possible homosexual relationships, etc. I also read Kate Larson’s The Assassin’s Accomplice, an unconvincing attempt to tie Mary Surratt with the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln. She owned the boarding house that John Wilkes Booth frequented.
Currently, I’m reading a biography, Harry Byrd of Virginia by Ronald L. Heinemann. The late Virginia Governor and Senator Harry Byrd and his “Byrd organization” are legendary in Virginia political history, spanning 50 years. He was a true Southern gentleman just like ones portrayed in novels: white suits, deferential to women, still holding a bit of a grudge against the Yankee invasion of the South. He opposed desegregation, particularly of the public school system, going so far as closing schools and making them private so they were not subject to federal government mandates, a tactic illegal today.
I am also reading Clive Webb’s Massive Resistance, a movement in which Harry Byrd was a leader. Southern legislatures and political leaders placed roadblocks to the various federal and judicial desegregation statutes. Some tactics were very creative: South Carolina threatened to go out of the education business altogether, selling schools to private concerns, and giving vouchers to parents on an equal basis so they could send their children to the school of their choice. That sent Justice Department lawyers scrambling for ways to intervene.
Next on my list to read are three books, the first two for research purposes. J. Harvie Wilkinson’s Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics (on the list for the same reasons cited above), and Stand Up for Alabama by Jeff Frederick, a chronicle of George Wallace’s four terms as Governor. It’s 500 pages of fine print – ugh. I also have a copy of Ian Smith’s Bitter Harvest on my desk – given to me by a Rhodesian friend. I visited Rhodesia as a young man, met Ian Smith (a treasured photo of us is on my office wall), and went back 10 years later when it was Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. I probably have 100 books on Rhodesia and South African politics and history in my library. The issues and personalities in Southern Africa have always been of great interest.
If Derek Turner would send me a copy of his new novel, I may make an exception to my fiction reading routine.
PETER B. GEMMA, an award-winning freelance writer, has penned more than 100 commentaries for USA Today and written for such publications as The DailyCaller.com and Military History magazine
My latest article for Taki’s Magazine, about the Jubilee media coverage – some of the best bits sadly lost in redaction!
http://takimag.com/article/royal_pains_derek_turner#axzz1x9DkOFLr
Derek Turner, 8th June 2012
An excellent idea from the eminent University Bookman – they have asked regular writers to tell readers what they will be reading over the summer. Here is my two cents’ worth –
http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman/article/summer-2012-reading/
Derek Turner, 3rd June 2012
The Lexicon of Love, part 2
Herewith, by popular demand, some further football expressions and other miscellaneous items from the “beautiful” game:
“Good engine”, denotes an exceptionally fit and energetic player, capable of “putting in a good shift”.
“Flying machine”, self-explanatory.
“Made himself large”, as in “the goalkeeper made himself…”.
“The toys came out of the pram”, refers to a fit of petulance. “Handbags at dawn” has a similar meaning.
“Kept the ball for fun”, a way of describing an exceptionally skilful player.
“Reactionary goal”, incorrect usage of terminology, should probably be “reactional”.
“Their season was decimated”, equally infelicitous.
“He needs to man up” or “big up”, i.e. he needs to acquire a more impressive physique. “A powder puff [i.e. ineffectual/effeminate] challenge” might engender such observations.
“Large unit”, self-explanatory.
“Nutmeg”, when the ball is deliberately passed between a player’s legs.
“Fergie time”, the amount of extra time in a game that is allegedly awarded to Manchester United’s manager Sir Alex Ferguson.
“Poznan wave” a bizarre crowd celebration recently adopted by Manchester City fans. The supporters link arms and jump up and down with their backs to the pitch.
“Do I not like that”, stock phrase employed by former England coach Graham Taylor, ditto “Get Wrighty ready”.
“Yes, he’s still dead”, Paul Gascoigne, on the late George Best.
“Park the bus”, adopt a highly defensive formation.
“Positivity”, rebarbative phrase that translates as being positive.
“You make your own luck”, a spurious theory uncritically endorsed by many football commentators.
“Kamikaze defending”, self-explanatory.
“Have a pop”, either have a shot on goal or assault another player.
“Already on the beach”, phrase used towards the end of the season when a player’s mind may be on other matters. “Didn’t turn up” or “hasn’t started” have a similar connotation.
“The wheels came off”, i.e. the game plan went awry.
“Route one”, a hopeful long ball punted up the pitch. The term “kick and rush” is sometimes used in the same context.
Some memorable nicknames, “the Goat” (Sean or Shaun Goater), hence also “feed the goat”, “Psycho” (Stewart Pearce), “the Wardrobe” (Pape “Papa” Boupa Diop), “the Verminator” (Thomas Vermaelen).
More in due course from this mother lode of fatuous phraseology.
LJ
It is always salutary to remember that behind the most apparently rational human activities there is always Man, the demi-rational demiurge whose essential nature has scarcely changed in millennia. It is therefore only to be expected that even the most advanced technology is sometimes harnessed to ancient ends. A 31st May BBC article describes the upsurge of interest in “lucid dreaming”– smartphone apps and face-masks which supposedly allow their users to understand and influence their dreams. This is Intel coming to the aid of intuition, neurologists and entrepreneurs alike becoming interested in The_Science_of_Sleep, designing satnavs for the Land of Nod.
Dreams are an intrinsic part of what it means to be human – confusing, intoxicating visions we chase or run from at night, and remember with pleasure, pain or puzzlement when daylight shoves things back into shape. We have probably always sought out shamans to explain why at nights we drift between dimensions, why sometimes we float or fall in fantastical countries – and we have probably always made border-raids along these unmapped frontiers, trying to recapture the sleep-state through frenetic ritual, made-up mysteries, esoteric religions, self-mortification and narcotic narcolepsy. There is a semi-conscious thread that ties together the stag-headed dancers of pre-prehistoric Europe, classical augurs, subcontinental sadhus, whirling dervishes, Antipodean dreamtimes, Napoleon’s dream oraculum, Thomas de Quincey, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and successful but discontented Londoners like the dentist cited by the BBC, who yearns for existence in a space where he doesn’t need to gaze down halitosis-haunted gullets for a living, and
“You’re only bound by gravity if you believe in it”.
Some of the new apps actually seem rather old-fashioned, like the one which wafts you off on a wave of birdsong so you (hopefully) dream of walking in green fields. Yet it has surely always been obvious that what happens immediately before sleeping can colour your dreams – thinking hard of someone, reading an exciting book, or simply dining well if not wisely. There is also a distinctly retro flavour – a scent of Fifties sci-fi – to the masks that play light on your eyelids to induce particular reveries, as if Dr. Morbius will at any moment materialize to magic us away to his personal planet.
If there is a new aspect to these apps (apart from purely technical considerations like better design) it may lie in their world-rejecting ethos – their phraseology about ‘achieving lucidity’, asking ‘very profound questions’, ‘understanding fears’ and ‘challenging everything’. These desiderata are always of course achieved through becoming an ‘initiate’ through discipline and effort, existing (at least during the hours of darkness) on some ‘higher plane’ – a conceit highly gratifying to the egos of the participants. As Allan Hobson, the Harvard neuroscientist quoted in the BBC article, notes, only half-sorrowfully:
“Lucid dreaming is very hard work and won’t happen for everyone.”
But even these nostrums have puppyish precedents in Romantic self-realization, transcendental meditation, pop psychology, designer Buddhism and progressive politics, and all are informed by insecurity as much as arrogance.
Some lucid dreamers may simply wish to blot out particularly atrocious nightmares, and we should wish them luck if they really desire such self-abnegation. But most sound superficial – not so very different from Second Lifers, the easily-amused inhabitants of Farmville or wargames’ world-straddling Alexanders – searching for status as SIMs that they will probably never attain in those retrograde real places where imperfection and gravity still rule.
Lucid dreamers are looking for control – control over their imaginations, many out of regrettably superficial motives. Here is Harvard’s Hobson again, on Tiggerish form:
“I can tell you that it has huge entertainment value.
It’s like going to the movies and not paying for your ticket.”
Less selfishly, they may also want to exert control over themselves in order to compensate for the ugliness and anarchy of the world. Just as householders build walls to shield themselves from passers-by, lucid dreamers want virtual Leylandii to hedge out the hateful. Yet this is of course impossible, because dreams will never be controllable – and the only people really likely to sleep better as a result of lucid dreaming technology will be the enterprising salesmen presently profiting so satisfactorily from our perennial curiosity about where we go to when we sleep.
Finally, even if dreams could be controlled, should we really want to control them? Isn’t life partly about unpredictability – and don’t even the most disturbing dreams tell us things we might not otherwise never have known? “To sleep, perchance to dream”. Wouldn’t a lifelong night-time of predictably pleasant dreams quickly pall, like easy listening music or a diet of desserts? And in any case why should we wish to censor or suburbanize our imaginations in advance? The lucid dreamers’ über-organized universe would be as intolerable as it is mercifully unattainable. They should dispense with the dubious gadgetry, and take the nightscape as it has always been and will always remain – a debatable, delectable region of gaping gulfs and vast vistas, swirling shadows and half-seen shapes, serendipity and sorcery.
Derek Turner, 1st June 2012
