Book Me
You've probably seen this one going around: a set of questions for booklovers. To my shame, I'm just now getting around to it. It's been so long that I no longer remember who tagged me for it, but somehow I think it was Dave S. of the Glittering Eye blog, but that could be wrong.
You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book would you want to be?
Hah! I'd be "Fahrenheit 451." That way I'd know what was going to happen to everyone. And even the authorities would respect me.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Oh, gods, yes. Back in my teen-age years. Rebecca from "Ivanhoe" and Holly Golightly from "Breakfast at Tiffanys" come to mind. And a little later, I've been drawn to Cathy from "Wuthering Heights" -- yes, I did like 'em certifiably crazy, passionate, sadistic, and sensual. I liked a challenge, I guess. I had a couple of years with a real-life Cathy, and it was a good wild ride but it mostly cured me of that fantasy.
What was the last book you bought?
I recently ordered, but have not yet received A Constitutional History of Secession by John Remington Graham, so I guess that counts as "bought." It's been on my wish-list for a while, but I have no pressing need for it right now. I haven't stumbled into the "Secession was Constitutional" argument in a long time. But I added the book to an Amazon order to ramp up the price enough to get free shipping.
The thing I really was ordering was a CD of recordings by John McCormick, the great Irish tenor of the 1920s and '30s. My grandfather had a whole stack of his 78s. He really had a fine voice, superb vocal control, if you aren't put off by the old-fashioned sentimentality of the songs. I inherited my grandpop's records, but it's been years since I had a 78 player to listen to them. Then the other day I heard some of McCormick on NPR (Amy's car radio; it's not one of my usual stops), and it reminded me all over again of the old records, and my grandfather, and things he taught me, like, "don't ever get in a pissing contest with a skunk." So I figured someone would have put McCormick on CD by now, if NPR was playing him, and sure enough, someone had.
What was the last book you read?
"Liberty & Freedom," by David Hackett Fischer.
What are you currently reading?
I'm one of those who generally has three or more going at once. Right now it's exactly three. One is "The Goddess and the Bull," a new book about an important Neolithic archaeological dig in Turkey -- partly about the dig and the personalities doing it, partly about the fascinating questions surrounding the "Neolithic revolution," such as why did people suddenly stop living as nomads and settle down in communities (and they were living in communities hundreds of years before agriculture, it turns out), or why did they bury their dead under the floors of their houses and mount horned bull skulls on the walls?
Working on the answers to these questions, it turns out, are a set of men and women armed with fascinating scientific micro-gagetry and sandblind academic attitudes. Someone who's devoted his or her entire adult life to pursuing doctoral degrees and writing grant proposals might not even have much luck deciphering the kitchen of a modern truck driver's family in Wisconsin, much less the 9,000-year-old ruined houses of people who hunted gazelles on foot with blades they chipped from volcanic obsidian.
Further, and this is no surprise, there's a great deal of furious ego warfare and poisonous ideology in the field. It is a gross error to presume the patterns of the present when trying to decipher the past. Archaeologists historically have been drawn into misinterpretations by starting with the assumption that, say, all communities were built around nuclear families.
But here's a feminist Marxist archaeologist (quoted in the book I've got) writing about carved female figurines dug up at Neolithic sites and often described as "goddesses:" "[I]t is equally feasible that they were concerned with sex-based gender roles and the consequent social conflict this doubtless created." In contrast to the "acceptable view" that "women tamely embraced a life of endless child-bearing, the figurines may also be demonstrating their challenge to fulfill other roles in society -- perhaps in debate over lineage, access to power, etc."
I'm glad she couches her speculations in properly speculative language. But I think an attempt to escape phallo-centric assumptions in academic models of pre-history isn't really a step forward when it presumes to rebuild an ancient community in Anatolia as though it were a womyn's studies department at a San Francisco university.
The second book is "Mind and the American Civil War," a short set of lectures by Louis P. Simpson full of juicy insights into Jefferson, Emerson, Nietzsche, and Faulkner; why the champion of American liberty kept slaves, what the Sage of Concord thought about race, why both New England and South Carolina lost the Civil War, and why Quentin Compson went to Harvard to kill himself.
The third is "Transmission Impossible," which is subtitled "American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany 1945-1955." The subject is the Neue Zeitung, a newspaper put out in Munich after the war for the German people, published under the auspices of the U.S. Army but run day to day by Germans and German-speaking émigrés, mostly of Jewish descent.
The value of reading three books at once is that the other two are fresh in your mind when you open the third, and they can inform and enlighten your understanding of it. All three of these books shine odd lights into one another for me, and they also inform, without the authors' intentions, the current events that occupy my mind, like the way to get Iraq up and running as a free nation in the heart of the Islamic Middle East.
The Germany book is especially interesting in that regard, of course, because the rebirth of Germany after WWII often is held up as a positive example of what ought to be happening in Iraq. But along the way we seem to have acquired the notion that the German reconstruction was a deliberate process with a defined set of goals and a coherent strategy by the American government. This business is said to make our efforts in Iraq look confused, venal, and impractical.
But the closer you get to the German picture, as this book makes clear, the less it looks like a grand design. From the introduction:
The Army and the State Department disagreed bitterly on the basic purposes of the occupation, the big names at the top of the food chain were preoccupied with their careers (usually intent on getting out of Germany a.s.a.p.), and it fell to mid-level bureaucrats, U.S. soldiers, and German civilians to work out the shape, process, and even direction of what was to be done.
And among the forces feeding into that mix was Gen. Lucius D. Clay, U.S. military governor in Germany in the late '40s, a son of Marietta, Georgia, who had inherited the American Southerners' contempt for "carpetbaggers" past and present and who staunchly defended the principle that moral and political reform would have to come from the Germans themselves, with the U.S. present to protect the process, but not directly involved in it.
What five books would you take to a desert island?
I'll eschew the arch answer, which would be, "The Idiot's Guide to Getting Your Ass off a Desert Island."
The "Odyssey," in one of those editions in Greek with a facing-page English translation. Not only would it be an opportunity to draw strength and wisdom from the tales of brave Ulysses, it would be a great chance to really nail down ancient Greek, something that's been on my to-do list but will never get done for want of time.
Other than that, Pound's complete poems (including the "Cantos"), a collected Anglo-Saxon verse (I can't imagine being marooned without "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer"), a complete Shakespeare, and the Norse sagas and eddas. Yeah, dead white European straight males. So shoot me.
Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
Um, I'm not even sure who's had this one and who hasn't, and it's perilously close to a chain letter. So I'll just issue an OPEN TAG to anyone who's been dying to answer these questions, but has been overlooked by friends and family when it came time to add more links to the chain. Equality of opportunity!
You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book would you want to be?
Hah! I'd be "Fahrenheit 451." That way I'd know what was going to happen to everyone. And even the authorities would respect me.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Oh, gods, yes. Back in my teen-age years. Rebecca from "Ivanhoe" and Holly Golightly from "Breakfast at Tiffanys" come to mind. And a little later, I've been drawn to Cathy from "Wuthering Heights" -- yes, I did like 'em certifiably crazy, passionate, sadistic, and sensual. I liked a challenge, I guess. I had a couple of years with a real-life Cathy, and it was a good wild ride but it mostly cured me of that fantasy.
What was the last book you bought?
I recently ordered, but have not yet received A Constitutional History of Secession by John Remington Graham, so I guess that counts as "bought." It's been on my wish-list for a while, but I have no pressing need for it right now. I haven't stumbled into the "Secession was Constitutional" argument in a long time. But I added the book to an Amazon order to ramp up the price enough to get free shipping.
The thing I really was ordering was a CD of recordings by John McCormick, the great Irish tenor of the 1920s and '30s. My grandfather had a whole stack of his 78s. He really had a fine voice, superb vocal control, if you aren't put off by the old-fashioned sentimentality of the songs. I inherited my grandpop's records, but it's been years since I had a 78 player to listen to them. Then the other day I heard some of McCormick on NPR (Amy's car radio; it's not one of my usual stops), and it reminded me all over again of the old records, and my grandfather, and things he taught me, like, "don't ever get in a pissing contest with a skunk." So I figured someone would have put McCormick on CD by now, if NPR was playing him, and sure enough, someone had.
What was the last book you read?
"Liberty & Freedom," by David Hackett Fischer.
What are you currently reading?
I'm one of those who generally has three or more going at once. Right now it's exactly three. One is "The Goddess and the Bull," a new book about an important Neolithic archaeological dig in Turkey -- partly about the dig and the personalities doing it, partly about the fascinating questions surrounding the "Neolithic revolution," such as why did people suddenly stop living as nomads and settle down in communities (and they were living in communities hundreds of years before agriculture, it turns out), or why did they bury their dead under the floors of their houses and mount horned bull skulls on the walls?
Working on the answers to these questions, it turns out, are a set of men and women armed with fascinating scientific micro-gagetry and sandblind academic attitudes. Someone who's devoted his or her entire adult life to pursuing doctoral degrees and writing grant proposals might not even have much luck deciphering the kitchen of a modern truck driver's family in Wisconsin, much less the 9,000-year-old ruined houses of people who hunted gazelles on foot with blades they chipped from volcanic obsidian.
Further, and this is no surprise, there's a great deal of furious ego warfare and poisonous ideology in the field. It is a gross error to presume the patterns of the present when trying to decipher the past. Archaeologists historically have been drawn into misinterpretations by starting with the assumption that, say, all communities were built around nuclear families.
But here's a feminist Marxist archaeologist (quoted in the book I've got) writing about carved female figurines dug up at Neolithic sites and often described as "goddesses:" "[I]t is equally feasible that they were concerned with sex-based gender roles and the consequent social conflict this doubtless created." In contrast to the "acceptable view" that "women tamely embraced a life of endless child-bearing, the figurines may also be demonstrating their challenge to fulfill other roles in society -- perhaps in debate over lineage, access to power, etc."
I'm glad she couches her speculations in properly speculative language. But I think an attempt to escape phallo-centric assumptions in academic models of pre-history isn't really a step forward when it presumes to rebuild an ancient community in Anatolia as though it were a womyn's studies department at a San Francisco university.
The second book is "Mind and the American Civil War," a short set of lectures by Louis P. Simpson full of juicy insights into Jefferson, Emerson, Nietzsche, and Faulkner; why the champion of American liberty kept slaves, what the Sage of Concord thought about race, why both New England and South Carolina lost the Civil War, and why Quentin Compson went to Harvard to kill himself.
The third is "Transmission Impossible," which is subtitled "American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany 1945-1955." The subject is the Neue Zeitung, a newspaper put out in Munich after the war for the German people, published under the auspices of the U.S. Army but run day to day by Germans and German-speaking émigrés, mostly of Jewish descent.
The value of reading three books at once is that the other two are fresh in your mind when you open the third, and they can inform and enlighten your understanding of it. All three of these books shine odd lights into one another for me, and they also inform, without the authors' intentions, the current events that occupy my mind, like the way to get Iraq up and running as a free nation in the heart of the Islamic Middle East.
The Germany book is especially interesting in that regard, of course, because the rebirth of Germany after WWII often is held up as a positive example of what ought to be happening in Iraq. But along the way we seem to have acquired the notion that the German reconstruction was a deliberate process with a defined set of goals and a coherent strategy by the American government. This business is said to make our efforts in Iraq look confused, venal, and impractical.
But the closer you get to the German picture, as this book makes clear, the less it looks like a grand design. From the introduction:
Throughout the occupation period, U.S. planners at home and abroad never completely agreed on the issue of cultural foreign policy. They could not decide whether the forceful promotion of American values abroad was appropriate at all. Even though they may have intended to spread American ideas, culture, and ways of life in Germany, they were uncertain about how to do it. Furthermore, although individual policymakers aspired to indoctrinate the Germans, the political and military infrastructure never gave them the opportunity to fully realize such ambitions. No matter what cultural vision top officials in the State Department may have had, precious little of it trickled down to the level of those on the scene. Moreover, OMGUS officials paid scant attention to Washington concerns. For the most part, the editors of the Neue Zeitung developed and realized their own policy. Directives from Washington were usually discarded and sometimes ridiculed. Even at the height of the Berlin blockade, there was no coherent policy for the newspaper.
The Army and the State Department disagreed bitterly on the basic purposes of the occupation, the big names at the top of the food chain were preoccupied with their careers (usually intent on getting out of Germany a.s.a.p.), and it fell to mid-level bureaucrats, U.S. soldiers, and German civilians to work out the shape, process, and even direction of what was to be done.
And among the forces feeding into that mix was Gen. Lucius D. Clay, U.S. military governor in Germany in the late '40s, a son of Marietta, Georgia, who had inherited the American Southerners' contempt for "carpetbaggers" past and present and who staunchly defended the principle that moral and political reform would have to come from the Germans themselves, with the U.S. present to protect the process, but not directly involved in it.
What five books would you take to a desert island?
I'll eschew the arch answer, which would be, "The Idiot's Guide to Getting Your Ass off a Desert Island."
The "Odyssey," in one of those editions in Greek with a facing-page English translation. Not only would it be an opportunity to draw strength and wisdom from the tales of brave Ulysses, it would be a great chance to really nail down ancient Greek, something that's been on my to-do list but will never get done for want of time.
Other than that, Pound's complete poems (including the "Cantos"), a collected Anglo-Saxon verse (I can't imagine being marooned without "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer"), a complete Shakespeare, and the Norse sagas and eddas. Yeah, dead white European straight males. So shoot me.
Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
Um, I'm not even sure who's had this one and who hasn't, and it's perilously close to a chain letter. So I'll just issue an OPEN TAG to anyone who's been dying to answer these questions, but has been overlooked by friends and family when it came time to add more links to the chain. Equality of opportunity!
