Sunday Reading

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"The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still." --Jean Rhys
Remember: Gerry Canavan has links too! So many links! Now oh my gosh get this guy out of here, all he does is post things on Facebook now (it's wonderful; what would I do otherwise?!?!) Tea Party Jokes about Slaveholders beating Up Obama in Heaven or some racist shit Seeking Answers: Some Thoughts on the Milwaukee Gurdwara Shooting. Empathy for the Devil Richie Havens Deconstructs Superman: Thoughts on Comic Book Blockbusters Get Tested or Get Out: School Forces Pregnancy Tests on Girls, Kicks out Students Who Refuse or Are Pregnant Robert Hughes, 1938-2012 Understanding Turbans 2.0 Journalism, Framing and Value A Case of the Creepy Dude The Child, Our Most Convincing Essentialism Ignoring David Foster Wallace's religion Cops Shooting People In the Shadow of Paraguay's Coup How to Have All Your Information Destroyed Forever Top Ten differences between White Terrorists and Others Obama… Read More...

"It has been fully contained, but it is not yet extinguished"

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Do not politicize a tragedy.
"Residents in Richmond. North Richmond and San Pablo. Are advised to shelter in place. Go inside. Close All windows and doors. Turn off all heaters. Air conditioners and fans. If not using the fireplace. Close fireplace dampers and vents. And cover cracks around doors and windows with tape or damped towels. Media news networks will continue to carry updated emergency information. Stay Off the telephone unless you have a life threatening emergency." Remember. Remain indoors. Take shelter in your home. Keep duct tape on hand. In case a refinery explodes. Have a home. The homeless have only themselves to blame. Take shelter in a Community. Without refineries. Stay off the Phone. Do not go out in public. Close your windows and await instructions. The people of Richmond. Have only themselves to Blame. Trust. It is Important that you do not politicize… Read More...

Sunday Reading

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Sunday Reading by the band "Jane Hu And The Aggregators" (Frank Pasquale, Gerry Canavan, and Zunguzungu on drums)
Frank Pasquale:   Explaining hypergreed; Titanic lifeboats as a positional good; Compulsion Furniture. Lobbying brings 100-fold returnfor private prison barons; financial gusher. In casino banks, the house always wins. Wealth worship encourages credulity. Welcome to the virtual workplace matrix; 85 cents for 16 tasks. Food pushers. OIRA as the "sphincter" of the administrative state. Versailles as tragedy, then farce: “maids and nannies and an indeterminate number of fluffy white dogs.” New Yorker fallen wunderkinder edition: Lehrer’s weighty confusions; rejiggering reality. Three takes on Gladwell: satirical, snarky, and devastating. Jane Hu: Hitchcock’s girl * How Cosmo Conquered the World * Olympics sentiments as "collective joy" * Postcards from France: Paul Fussell and the Field Service “Form-letter” * Why We Hate-Search * Don’t Feed the Psychotic Narcissists * DeAndre McCullough (1977-2012) * The Mystery of Charles Dickens * Gore Vidal's Detective Novels * Justin Bieber ini­tials on all my winter clothes * Becoming Stephen King * The Andy Warhol New York City Diet * How to Ditch Happily-Ever-After and Build Your Own Romantic… Read More...

Flag-waving And Drowning: On The New Branding Policy Of UKaid

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"Why is this man touching me?"
(A guest post from Meera Sabaratnam, from the excellent blog The Disorder of Things, who disorder things oh so nicely) They say that discretion is the better part of valour. But the Deparatment for International Development, or at least its boss, has decided otherwise. It was announced last month that “Aid from Britain will now be badged with a Union Flag when it is sent overseas, as a clear symbol that it comes from the United Kingdom.” In these times of urgently, relentlessly celebrating Britishness in all possible ways, this little ‘tweak’ to development policy may have slipped under the radar. The ministerial statement in the press release is worth quoting in full, because it is both strange and revealing of a particular – and, I think, regressive – political turn in international development policy: (more…) Read More...

Sunday Reading

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"If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world." -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Bint Battuta: Mozambique's 'People From Germany' Wait Decades for Salaries A Traditional City in Transition > Riyadh in 1972 Ignorant, assassin, paranoïaque, cupide, lâche, cruel: le vrai Vasco de Gama The politics of jute vs plastic in packing rice The Literary Map of Africa, a bio-bibliographical database Konkani, recognised as a major Indian regional language only in 1992, is written in five scripts Tourists Flock to South Korea's 'German Village' A Taste of Algerian Music Out of the Hadhramaut - on the Arab diaspora in South-East Asia Of liberals, secularists, Islamists and other labels Picture Masr: Egypt (mostly Cairo) beyond your Google image search results On the Mombasa Republican Council and the legacy of British/French/German/Omani territorial claims in East Africa Is Kosher Meat ?al?l? A Comparison of the Halakhic and Shar?? Requirements for Animal Slaughter The Cube, a place where… Read More...

Do Not Go Gentle Into that Dark Knight: Occupy Batman

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it fills the screen and narrative arc with all sorts of bells and whistles, bloating its running time way beyond necessity, and generally wearing you down with all sorts of things that are not Occupy Wall Street until you don’t notice anymore that it’s all the fuck about Occupy Wall Street.
[Before I go on blog-hiatus for a while -- explained here -- I literally could not prevent myself from writing about this movie, as in, physically couldn't do it. Sigh... Anyway, now for realz.] The Dark Knight Rises is not about Occupy Wall Street, even though it does have a five month anarchist occupation of New York City, which lasts into the winter until a huge phalanx of NYPD officers flood into lower Manhattan and pound the crap out of them. It is a movie that works very hard at not being about Occupy Wall Street, in fact: it fills the screen and narrative arc with all sorts of bells and whistles, bloating its running time way beyond necessity, and generally wearing you down with all sorts of things that are not Occupy Wall Street until you don’t notice anymore… Read More...

Sunday Reading

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Frank Pasquale: The new anarchy: offshore tax havens; will Mitt Romney be to tax avoidance what Rick Scott was to Medicare fraud? Durable inequality. Wall Street in a sentence:…
Frank Pasquale: The new anarchy: offshore tax havens; will Mitt Romney be to tax avoidance what Rick Scott was to Medicare fraud? Durable inequality. Wall Street in a sentence: "The incentives are to cheat, and cheating is profitable because there are no consequences.” Econned; a call for civility. Glengarry Glen Ross at the hospital collections office; a failed experiment at wallet extraction surgery. The outer limits of political struggle: millionaires taming billionaires; lunch breaks; non-embarrassing statues; 1,000 outfits made at decent wages; 1 week "national conversation" on gun control before shark attacks orOlympics take center stage. Bint Battuta: Calvino and His Cities, by William Weaver European minority language literature [podcast] Chinese worker's eyewitness account of attacks on foreign-owned businesses in South Africa Thyme Travels (about za'tar) A home for Pakistani literature - in Chicago The plight of Egypt’s forgotten Shia minority Being black in Guyana On music and films that are intentionally slow and soporific… Read More...

Trailing after Tarzan

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“Not a bit afraid. Not a bit sorry.”
The image of Tarzan lifting Jane to safety is probably the most long lasting aspect of the Tarzan franchise, creating cinematic echoes everywhere from Star Wars (Luke swinging Leia across the pit in the first one, the ewoks in the last) to the Superman thing of lifting Lois Lane out of danger, or Spiderman and Mary Jane, or any other number of copycats. Of course, in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first novel, 1914’s Tarzan of the Apes, our hero doesn't swing, moves through the jungle canopy by leaping and climbing: "He could spring twenty feet across space at the dizzy heights of the forest top, and grasp with unerring precision, and without apparent jar, a limb waving wildly in the path of an approaching tornado. He could drop twenty feet at a stretch from limb to limb in rapid descent to the ground, or he could gain the… Read More...

Sunday Reading

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Where do you receive your Sunday news? Henry James: "I can hear her now—the way, one cold, black Sunday morning when, on account of an extraordinary fog, we had not gone to church, she broke it to me by the school-room fire."
Hi there!   Jane Hu here (sometimes contributor to this weekly syndication) to let you know that I'll be updating Sunday Reading for the next little while. Our beloved Aaron will still be around (see his recommendations below!), but probably not as much (there's only one of him y'know). If you start to miss his words, there are literally years and years of them to be found back at the original zunguzungu. Anyway, like I said...   Aaron Bady:   Not Fade Away: On Living, Dying, and the Digital Afterlife Varies of Lewdness, 1795 Remember the time Edith Wharton Wrote Erotica? Aaron Sorkin Bungles the Sixties Rebecca Solnit: Apologies to Mexico Confessions of a Dot Com Entrepreneur Kissinger and Allende Teaching Children to Hate 1940's Kodachrome Racism in Football Guilty as Charged: Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies Is the Media Ignoring the Uprising in… Read More...

Autumn of the Patriarch, Forgetting to Live: Gabriel García Márquez's Memory

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Dementia runs in Gabriel García Márquez's family.
When critics attempt to account for the genesis of Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude (a sort of Genesis text in its own right), there are two easy narratives we often come across. First, there is the young Gabo faithfully transcribing his grandmother’s fabulist stories, thereby producing a “magic realist” literary modernism out of the humble beginnings of Colombian folk culture. Second, there is the “Faulknerian revolution” story that people like Pascale Casanova put forward, where William Faulkner modeled a particular way of being a writer in a peripheral place, and so García Márquez learned to be Colombian by reading about Mississippi, joining "modernism" by imitating the Modernists that preceded him. To those two, we might also add García Márquez as journalist, and no doubt many others. For me, the second volume of Alexander Von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During… Read More...

Sunday Reading

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The boredom of Sunday afternoon, which drove de Quincey to drink laudanum, also gave birth to surrealism: hours propitious for making bombs.
Frank Pasquale: Pre-Lie-bor Economist cover; post Lie-bor Economist cover; litigation-palooza; when you've lost "The American Banker".... “This is the banking industry’s tobacco moment,” says the chief executive of a multinational bank. “Banks have blown so much trust that there is no point crunching the numbers on them.” Southern discomfort. Research "conducted for reasons other than the pursuit of truth." Doctor Drew promotes Glaxo. Come try Wellbutrin, "the happy, horny, skinny pill!” Big food fattens profits with sugar-addled kids and colonizes colons abroad. What's the problem? They'll be good customers for Meridia. Why can't the two-thirds of working mothers in the US who earn less than $30,000 a year have it all? George Wallace police department stigmatizing "Professional Agitators;" reputational harm without due process? or badge of honor? Gleichschaltung around “Dolchstosslegende”?  Godwin's corollary. Bug in the drug; beez in the capitation. Bint Battuta: What Dosas Tell Us About Ourselves The history of Italians in Egypt Rites of way: behind the pilgrimage revival Translating the Trinity for Muslims… Read More...

“Happy Independence Day from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation!"

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What do you see in this photo? What did the hapless social media editor who decided to put this photo on the California Corrections department's facebook page see in it? It's been shared 489 times as of this moment -- which is 489 more times than a CA Corrections facebook post is typically shared -- and if you judge from the comments, it seems fair to guess that most people are sharing it with some variation on "WTF."  It's hard to tell what CA Corrections was trying to tell us with this photo; all they say is "Happy Independence Day from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation!" and then identify the photo as Photo: A female inmate works on an American flag while working in the Prison Industries Authority Fabrics program at the Central California Women's Facility on Thursday, April 5,… Read More...

For the Win: Failure!

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"You cannot lose if you do not play."
A luminary named Bill Scher wrote a column in the New York Times yesterday arguing that democracy is dead, and we should content ourselves with occasionally letting corporations help us while helping themselves. As he puts it: Democratic presidents typically pay dearly when they choose to fight corporations instead of deal with them...The realities of corporate power cannot be wished away by any president, no matter how tough the talk, because corporations can and will spend freely during the legislative process. And when they are unified, they have the resources to dominate debate. To this, I say Bravo! We are lucky to have so courageous a man as Bill Scher to admit defeat on our behalf. The evidence is in: when corporate interests come into conflict with a democratically elected president, corporations will win, every time. After all, when Jimmy… Read More...

Sunday Reading

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Sunday is a figment of your imagination. Wake up sheeple.
Sarah Jaffe: The #studentloanshitshow: A "deal" to freeze student loan interest rates that's worse than the rate hike? Pam Brown on the interconnectedness of student debt and housing debt: Education Debt in the Ownership Society Molly Knefel on Bloomberg's latest bargaining chips: low-income kids. The Rejectionist on ambition, and leaving, and being a girl artist: What I Did the Summer After I Graduated Politico discovers populism, and that Democrats are shit at it: Dems Go AWOL In Class War Erik Loomis points out at least one of the gaping holes in Politico's story: The Class War Has a Name: Globalization Sports! And Ladies! Amanda Marcotte on What Sports and Reproductive Rights Have in Common The Strongest Woman in America Lives in Poverty is a pretty serious indictment of the "amateur" athletic culture of the Olympics. I sort of get the feeling that the writer doesn't know it. "No… Read More...

An A B C of Puerility: Anderson, Britten, Crane

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Suzy lugs a suitcase of stolen library books through the wilderness, imaginative resources for building a private universe. Her fictions are bulwarks against the flood.
A guest post by Natalia Cecire, previously published as "Commendable," "I'm a raven," and "A surplus of toys" at her blog, Works Cited. Spoilers for Moonrise Kingdom. * * * I. Boisterous Bourrée What is puerility? Clearly, it is an artificial notion overelaborated into frigidity. Writers slip into this kind of thing through a desire to be unusual, elaborate, and above all, pleasing. They run aground on tawdriness and affectation. (6) —Longinus, On Great Writing (On the Sublime) Let's abandon the pejorative dimension in the word "puerility" for a moment, the better to see what else it has to offer. In our casual usage, "puerile" means something like "sophomoric": literally not only childish, but boyish, for a particular notion of what a "boy" is. Puerility makes everything into a game, even things that are not games, even things that must… Read More...

7 Days of Queer Theory

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On Facebook last week, my friend Ramzi Fawaz posted a different Queer Studies quote each day, in honor of SF Pride. I enjoyed the quotes, so with his permission, I reprint all seven, with his (brief) introductions.
On Facebook last week, my friend Ramzi Fawaz -- a recent Ph.D. in American Studies and lecturer at George Washington University -- posted a different Queer Studies quotes each day, in honor of SF Pride. I enjoyed the quotes, so with his permission, I reprint all seven, with his (brief) introductions. This wonderful entry from Michael Warner's "The Trouble With Normal," can kick us off: "The received wisdom in straight culture, is that all of its different norms line up, that one is synonymous with the others. If you are born with male genitalia, the logic goes, you will behave in masculine ways, desire women, desire feminine women, desire them exclusively, have sex in what are thought to be normally active and insertive ways and within officially sanctioned contexts, think of yourself as heterosexual, identify with other heterosexuals no matter how tolerant you… Read More...