so no novels for me, but of late my family has taken to declaiming modern Urdu poetry at the dinner table. to keep up i've been going through Faiz Ahmad Faiz's complete works, nuskha-hâ-i-wafâ (Manuscripts of Faithfulness); Ahmad Farâz's nâ yâft ("Missing"), jânâñ jânâñ (My Love, My Love" and khwâb-i-gul pareshâñ hai (The Flower's Dream is Distracted, and Nûn Mîm Râshid's complete works.

i've been wondering whether a certain murgh-i-siyâh moderator might be interested in a bait bâzî thread...if we posted with translations it would keep our skills sharp as well. not really a big time investment either, as long as we kept it single baits or bands. farmâiye.

[ 16 March 2003: Message edited by: Mohamad Khan ]

Henri Bergson's Laughter is within reach.

Augustine's Confessions and Desiderius Erasmus' The Praise of Folly are my bed-table books of late.

Bartek the Conqueror by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Selections from the Pali Canon: Khuddaka Nikaya; Theragatha, Therigatha.

But the immortal Don Quixote feels it is almost time for yet another campaign.

No Logo focuses on sweatshops, large multinational companies that emply sweatshop labour, and the growing trend opposing these actions.

Fences and Windows is a collection of short essays, newspaper articles and speeches from Naomi. I think I enjoyed these more than No Logo, because although they were disconected, they covered a wider range of topics and gave first hand experiences of activism in places like Seatle, Quebec City, Mexico, and Italy.

Right now, I'm reading "The Hydrogen Economy" by Jeremy Rifkin. His writing doesn't flow as much as Naomi's. The book seems to be full of figures and short on ideas (at least so far, I'm only about 100 pages in). I was really hoping to read about the promise of hydrogen energy and the technology around it, but the first 100 pages have been mainly about our current fossil fuel economy and the myriad of opinions on when fossil fuels will run out (pretty dry stuff).

- "the bang bang club", by greg marinovich and joao silva, is incredible. it's about news photographers in south africa's township war in the early 90's. on the same topic, i also saw a great documentary: "war photographer" on the cbc's "the passionate eye" a few weeks ago.

- "ranters and crowd pleasers -- punk in pop music, 1977-92", picked this up 2nd hand a few days before new years. it's a collection of essays by greil marcus, author of "lipstick traces". punk was a story that was

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played out, lived out, more times than anyone knows in the years after the Sex Pistols vanished -- in a village in Andalusia, after class at the University of Leeds, in a warehouse in Prague. The story was always the same: the music made a promise that things did not have to be as they seemed, and some brave people set out to keep that promise for themselves. The story was always different: each version left behind its own local legends, heroes, casualties, a few precious documents, a tale to tell.

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There is this other book I have, called The Security of Freedom. It's about the implications of Bill C-36 and related legislation on civil rights in Canada.

Also, there's War and Anti-War, by Alvin and Heidi Toffler. It applies the Tofflerian model (such a big word, but it just means the Three Waves of Change model) of economic and social change to changes in warfare as well. It's about 10 years old, but some of their predictions have come in pretty much as expected.

Right now for research purposes I'm reading The Alexiad of Anna Comnena (primary source from around the time of the crusades) and a book called Mythic Ireland by Michael Dames. I'm quite enjoying that one.

I have just started "The Big Nowhere" by James Ellroy, "Carlo Scarpa and the Castelvecchio" by Richard Murphy (about the Italian architect) and "Henry Ford and the Jews", by Neil Baldwin. All seem to be pretty interesting so far.

[ 17 March 2003: Message edited by: Tommy Shanks ]

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I have just started "The Big Nowhere" by James Ellroy

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This is an amazing book. Better if you read the whole LA Quartet in order - Black Dahlia, Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and fianlly White Jazz. I consider this series to be the best North American fiction to come out of the 20th C.

[ 18 March 2003: Message edited by: kingblake ]

http://loveandrage.pitas.com

[ 19 March 2003: Message edited by: cosmiccommunist ]

I'm positively loving Anne Carson's "Eros the Bittersweet" in my eternal quest to figure out what love is.

And, because i think french intellectual thought stretches the brain i'm also loving Helen Cixous's "Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing"

And on this eve of war i am reading TErry Eagleton's "Sweet Violence: the idea of the tragic"; while to stay sane i read regularly from Andrew Boyd's "Daily Afflictions: the agony of being connected to everything in the universe" which includes my favourite quote of the year (by Oscar Wilde): If you are going to tell people the truth you had better make them laugh or they will kill you.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson is also excellent. It's his best. It's a departure from the more technical elements of his cyberpunk stories. but the aesthetics are still there.
Gibson has been unfairly marginalised as a sci-fi author, when he is really more of a surrealist.

since thursday i've wolfed down Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which i bought used at Vic College's sale, and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, which i got from Michelle (thanks Michelle! )

I agree wholeheartedly that babble is great for getting ideas for future readings. Keep up the good work, you wonderful, intelligent folks!

On the Hitchhiker's Guide, the signature on one of my many emails is:

"What so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"You ask a glass of water."

The atrocities of the Red Guard and others are seen in the context of the atrocities of the warlords Mao fought against. I wasn't satisfied with the book largely because it played down his role in the carnage. I wasn't convinced that his dotage and his distance from the day to day affairs of state exempted him as much as the author tried to suggest.

There is a great sadness in China it seems and a frustration that human society cannot seem to escape its worst tendancies. Government gone mad is one of the greatest tragedies of human society. Thinking that people are fodder for social order is another atrocity of political thinking.

Naiomi Klein's book takes me back to my years of working in retail sales while pursuing my career as a cartoonist (of which I am still wildly unsuccessful and proud of it). It was painful analysis but her solutions seem ineffective, sophomoric, rather than fully revolutionary.

I suppose if you compare the two, Naiomi Klein and Mao, you see one as a failed revolutionary because of its terrible outcome and the other as a successful rebel because of the lack of impact on Global culture.

In Naiomi Klein's book there can be no counter culture no alternative aesthetic because it has all been co-opted. How do you escape such a bind?
Perhaps this will be revealed later on.

Suzuki's book is pleasant reading but it puts me to sleep as often as not. It's not that it is boring but it has an almost narcotic effect since after awhile you start to get this sense of planetary conciousness and environmental morality and inevitably fall asleep.

I am also reading an old book called Water in England by the somewhat eccentric writer Dorothy Hartley. It just predates the big environmental school but has an otherworldly charm, discussing the ways people in antiquity managed their water resources in England. It is full of lovely little drawings but much of text is begnignly opaque to the reader (which calls for re-reading at some point).

There is a good issue on water this month in the New Internationalist. It even suggests that much of the Israeli Palestinian conflict may be water related in years to come.

here

Chomsky's 9/11 interviews were enlightening and an easy and enjoyable read...

I think I would like to read more novels for a while though... as a kind of break from reality and just to get a sense of meaningfulness renewed in this crazy world.

[ 07 April 2003: Message edited by: Boinker ]

[ 08 April 2003: Message edited by: Boinker ]

[ 08 April 2003: Message edited by: wei-chi ]

You might also try one of Cornwell's more recent books, called "Gallow's Thief". The period history is well researched, from the fact checking I've done, and Cornwell has as good a story telling sense as Frasier.

Hmm. In fact, I'd say run, don't walk, and get a copy of "Gallow's Thief."

I'm still plodding along reading the Victoria Glendinning biography of Rebecca West. I say plodding only because I don't have the time to sit down and read as much as I'd like to at one sitting.

Rebecca West was a very fascinating woman, who knew some very fascinating people.

Amazing.

I'm also almost finished Fashionable Nonsense, a seminal work in the "Science versus intellectuals of dubious credentials " wars.

I've also completed Jeffery Simpson's The Friendly Dictatorship, which is essentially a thumbnail sketch of Canada's political system and current political climate. It would be too elementary for many Babblers, but I think it would make a great core text for a high-school Social Studies class. It's a quick read and surprisingly balanced. I hope Jack L. ignores Simpson's prescriptions for a "new, improved" NDP .

Freud is a very easy read, conversational, weirdly funny...and yet i feel now and again that he's not convincing me, somehow. if i could give his arguments a different philosophical context it would be different, but he seems to want it to be a "science," and as soon as i hear that, i think of and in a very narrow sort of positivistic rationalism, though i know that "science" is more than that. so i want it to be very, very logically tight...and i don't see that it is that. anyone care to offer their own readings?

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Originally posted by Mohamad Khan:
reading some books for an upcoming summer course. got through Oliver Twist and Mary Bolton, but now i'm stuck in the middle of Vanity Fair. it's gotten interesting, but did it have to be so long? Vanity, Vanity, Vanity Fair.

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I've never heard of "Mary Bolton," but I based much of my master's thesis on Mrs. Gaskell's "Mary Barton."

I also covered as many non-fictional works as I could, including articles in the journals (Fraser's and the Edinburgh Journal); things like Engels' "Condition of the Working Class" and Carlyle's "Chartism," and many other monographs describing "The Condition of England."

I made a comparative study to show both how all these middle class writers described the working class, and how fiction can be used as a source for reconstructing social history.

Heavier reading: Some papers from Linguistic Form and its Computation. In particular, the one on "Semantic vs. Syntactic Reconstruction", about where to draw the line between syntax and semantics in various reconstruction effects in sentence processing. Attempts to prove that the difference is minimal. Also some journal articles on the web on the processing load of split scrambling in Russian.

[ 13 May 2003: Message edited by: Mandos ]

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H.P. Lovecraft - the ultimate escape He was the master of old English hyper-description.

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I made a comparative study to show both how all these middle class writers described the working class, and how fiction can be used as a source for reconstructing social history.

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...but when i read the novel, it seemed as though she was walking a tightrope between sympathising with the workers and maintaining solidarity with her own class.

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I agree, and agree as well with your saying that Mrs. Gaskell condemned Chartism and Communism as wicked influences on the cotton operatives. The middle class bias in "North and South" is worse. I found a similar attitude among just about every middle class writer (the great Carlyle, with Engels, the exceptions) on the "Condition of England Question."

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Even those who were sympathetic to "the poor," nevertheless viewed them as a separate species (I used the term "caste" in my essay).

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i found that to be very true of all of the novels that i've read for Vic Lit so far. Oliver Twist really takes the cake. no doubt his attack upon workhouse conditions is very important, but on the other hand, there's hardly ever any doubt that the supposed lower-class "Other," Oliver, is actually middle-class all along. jeez.

i wrote an awful essay on Oliver Twist, on a topic that didn't really interest me. but i'm very interested in Jane Eyre's and Vanity Fair's references to colonial India and black people; how colonialism, Orientalism and anti-black racism come together in these two novels.

anyhow, since my last post, i've read a couple of things: for my course, Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights, and for my own interest, Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics, and Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. i want to comment on that last one...but i don't have the time right now.

i am now planning to do a close reading of Ibn al-`Arabi's Bezels of Wisdom (fuSuuS al-Hikaam), and wondering why i ever wanted to dive into Western philosophy in the first place, when everything that i understand is here.

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For those who [truly] know the divine Realities, the doctrine of transcendence imposes a restriction and a limitation [on the Reality], for he who asserts that God is [purely] transcendent is either a fool or a rogue, even if he be a professed believer. For, if he maintains that God is [purely] transcendent and excludes all other considerations, he acts mischievously and misrepresents the Reality and all the apostles, albeit unwittingly. He imagines that he has hit on the truth, while he has [completely] missed the mark, being like those who believe in part and deny in part [cf. Qur'an 4.150].

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[ 19 June 2003: Message edited by: Mohamad Khan ]

I wrote essays on both Jane Eyre (Vic. Lit.) and Birth of Tragedy (Philosophy of Religion) as an undergrad. My hook on Brontë was to look at Jane through the prism of Kant's Categorical Imperative.

I ate, slept and breathed Nietzsche for a few weeks. I read more and more of his writings, and I struggled with a way to approach the task, until I decided to BE Nietzsche and write my essay as a series of tragic poems.

G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. Somebody called this "the most convincing fusion of Eastern and Western philosophy ever written" or something to that effect. I can't tell if that statement is true, but it's a devil of a ride. This book remains on perpetual rotation. It's that kind of book, you need to keep reading and digging, then go away and live a little, and then read and dig and then go away live a little, anon...

Coleman Barkes, The Essential Rumi. Persian Sufi poetry in a new English translation.

I also keep an ever-changing stack of books beside my bed - and on the desk, and on the nightstand, and on the extra book shelf, and in the living room, and... - which I read sporadically as a mood or thought strikes me. I often read books - or at least sections - a number of times over the course of years - trying to connect the dots within and between texts.

[ 20 June 2003: Message edited by: Courage ]

[ 20 June 2003: Message edited by: Courage ]

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Originally posted by al-Qa'bong:

I ate, slept and breathed Nietzsche for a few weeks. I read more and more of his writings, and I struggled with a way to approach the task, until I decided to BE Nietzsche and write my essay as a series of tragic poems.

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I ate, slept and breathed Nietzsche for a few weeks. I read more and more of his writings, and I struggled with a way to approach the task, until I decided to BE Nietzsche and write my essay as a series of tragic poems.

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that's interesting. in April i finished up a 70-page paper on South Asian fiction and Andalusia. throughout most of the year i didn't have a clear thesis, but from January to April i worked on it non-stop. around the time that the war on Iraq was happening, i was hammering away at it (taking time off for regular protests, of course), and at the same time i had all these ideas for a work of fiction in my head that i wanted to get down onto paper. it was odd because i haven't had the urge to write fiction for several years. i was on a strict literary diet -- i promised myself that i wouldn't read or write anything not pertaining to the paper, so as to stay focused. but as i wrote my conclusion, i realised that in a very real sense, my paper had become a work of fiction itself. i was writing about three novels by South Asian authors about (among other things) the end of Muslim rule in India and the exile of the Moors. my first chapter, "Miscegenation," described pre-exile Andalusia and Andalusianness; the second, "Dismemberment," analysed the way in which the Moor is torn away from that Andalusian miscegenation; and the third, "Masks and the Masked," described the exiled Moor's authenticist quest for a new Andalusia, and shows how he fails. these three chapters tell a "new" story of the Moor, constructed out of the novels, with the aid of Cervantes, Manto, Darwish, Gibran, etc. the final chapter, "Book-Burning," deals with memory and the act of writing, and it shows how the tragedy of the Moor's exile and inability to come home can be a way of talking about the writing of the novels; the Moor is the author...and finally, in the conclusion, i realise that i am the Moor myself, and contained within my paper is a history of my writing of my paper. in other words, my paper wrote its own autobiography. and given that the story of the Moor is tragic, ending in failure, i discovered that my paper was tragic in very much the same way. so, welcome to the tragic essay-writers club.

(Luce Irigaray: "Of course there is fiction. This one, for example.")

as for Birth of Tragedy, it was a fascinating read. it would be pointless to go through all the things that i agreed with. but i also had some rather deep misgivings about it. i'd already encountered some of the ideas in Hindu writings, and at times he explicitly acknowledges their Indian origin. but his project of positing a Western origin for these things in Ancient Greece seems problematic to me somehow. i also think that his opposition to what he sees as the Socratic is a bit heavy-handed, and i'm not sure that tracing logic to Socrates is really valid. it's useful, i suppose, for his project. the Apollo-Dionysos/Socrates opposition is interesting, though.

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Coleman Barkes, The Essential Rumi. Persian Sufi poetry in a new English translation.

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the picture in my profile bears a striking resemblance to said poet.

there's a thread on Rumi here, where we talk about Barks' translation. as rasmus and i suggested to meades, Barks is very far from the original, but i don't think that should deter you from reading him. if Barks' renditions pique your interest, and you want a serious look at Rumi's thought, definitely pick up Nicholson's translation of the Masnavi; it's dry, but very literal.

i spent a large part of today reciting the proem to the Masnavi over and over again, trying to get it memorised. i found that concentrating on learning a poem by heart while walking around is a good way to get oneself lost.

anyhow, no translation could ever approach the Persian; you cannot duplicate Rumi's puns, for instance:

nai hariif-i har ke az yaare buriid
parda-haa-yash parda-haa-yi maa dariid

Nicholson says, "The reed is the comrade of every one who has been parted from a friend: its strains pierced our hearts." and then he adds in a footnote, "Literally, 'rent our veils.'" first of all, it's not clear to me why he uses "pierced our hearts" instead of rent our veils, and secondly there's a pun here: "parda" means both a musical "note" issuing from the flute, and a "veil." never mind the fact that "hariif" can mean "enemy" as well as "comrade."