Communicating Arts - Main Web Site
I don't know whether I really have the luxury, but I have invested some funds and much time into producing a kind of studio within an apartment, its main features for fuel being a computing center, a modest home theater, and a pretty good library--not bad for "writer, photographer, musician--and now that weather, possibly "the markets" too, have me socked in, the one hot and languid, the other possibly thinning, I thought this a fine season to trade substantial time in cyberspace for extended reading time in realspace.
First, I may recommend the following from the stacks of books recently read.
Anatomy of a Nakbah
Efraim Karsh's Palestine Betrayed (Yales University Press, 2010) tells the what done it, who done it, where done it, and why done it of the 1948 abandonment of the disincorporated villages of the Ottoman-to-British Mandate landscape under the watch, more or less, of Jerusalem's Haj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini and the watchful gaze of competing Arab states intent on picking up land and honors attending the destruction of the new state of Israel.
Perhaps Karsh's most damning argument in passing: how the streams of refugees develop, location by location, by Arab misinstruction, out of fear of the Jews--and not much of that (but definitely, egregiously there) spread by the Jews themselves--out of inherent chauvanism and xenophobia, and how some strike deals with the Israelis and become part of Israel's Arab complement; and most of all, how the whole seems a story Palestinian scholars have not wished to cover with exhaustive documentation.
Karsh claims his as the first of such volumes to dredge up the record and tackle what has been mythologized and drilled ad infinitum into Palestinian heads under the billing of "alternative narratives," a fairly good phrase for fiction.
Phillips on Politics' Own Religiosity
In her tour de force The World Turned Upside Down (Encounter Books, 2010), British journalist Melanie Phillips synthesizes the Big Bang of all academic indictments, first wrapping her powers of observation around the global warming frenzy and the remarkably hazy, frequently invented, science that has served to justify the fervor without validating the cause, and moving to to compress with that that fashionable and trivial religiosity Islam's contribution to a full throttle attack on western civilization and its foundational and seemingly forgotten or neglected values.
To digress, Phillips' books, the above and the earlier Londistan, lay out the antecedents to "what is happening now"--i.e., the answer to how did we get to this pass and from where--and I cannot tell you how much I wish I could settle down into summarizing key points and gliding over the most entertaining of anecdotes offered, but the press to see conflict fully, to turn more pages, to move on to next books (while maintaining a pretty good roster of conversations across the web), and, the point here, of relating a library shelf to you, discourages it, would that I today possessed a far more leisured and open perception of available time, short-term and long.
If Islam seems to be squabbling over 7th Century matters, the predominantly Judeo-Christian west (Christian with a stalwart Jewish Old Testament core) has perhaps been unconsciously wrestling with the lost scholarly and bookish arts of the 20th and 19th Centuries. We are in a hurry, and I should think academics and journalists in a hurry bode ill for their societies--best to retire to the lounge and read such as Melanie Phillips (I will mention also Robin Shepherd for his A State Beyond the Pale) page by deliciously informative page.
The web, or web reading, wants a zinger of a sentence or paragraph in review--a "gotcha" of a quote--but with Phillips, the hammer comes down in several paragraphs, or, alternatively, as may be right with books, several well coordinated and incisive paragraphs form her anvil-like paragraph blocs.
Bear with me.
Not only is the West loosening its own grip on reason and modernity, but it is also failing to hold the line against those who are waging an explicit war against them from without. Instead of fighting off the encroachment of Islamic obscurantism--part of a campaign to conquer the free world for Islam--the West is embracing that oscurantism as if it had a cultural death wish. In part, this is the misguided realpolitik of appeasement; but more deeply, it is once again the result of a complete loss of moral and cultural bearings through multiculturalism and victim culture, along with the acting out of collective Western guilt as an act of expiation to bring about peace on earth--with the result that truth and justice are turned on their heads.
President Obama's speech of conciliation to the Muslim world in Cairo in June 2009 was a startling example of this genuflection to the forces of irrationality and antimodernity. Not only did he parrot Arab and Muslim claims that the Palestinians had "suffered in pursuit of a homeland," thus ignoring their six decades of aggression against Israel. Not only did he state that the Jews' aspiration for their homeland was rooted in the Holocaust--the Arab and Muslim claim that negates the Jews' historic and unique dominion over Israel and its centrality to the Jewish religion. The president also sanitized Islam and its history. He selectively and misleadingly quoted the Qur'an to present a passage that is a prescription for violence and murder against Jews and "unbelievers" as instead a precept affirming the value of perserving human life; and he also claimed that Islam played a major role in the European Enlightenment:
As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam. It was Islam--at places like Al-Azhar University--that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed . . . . (elipses mine).
But these claims were absurd, as the Islam scholar Robert Spencer noted in some detail:
The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what we know today as "Arabic numerals" did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India. Aristotle's work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world . . . . the first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683 . . . . (elipses mine). (Passage: pp. 399-400)
The scholars may have at it as regards first claims on basic gadgets, numbers, and medicine, but the strength of Phillips' arguments must not be dismissed out of hand, for they are rooted in the deepest sense of something being wrong and globally or almost so. For examining in depth what has gone wrong in so many heads, Phillips has got her thoughts fixed on defining the keys and needs next--I hope there is a next--to head for the locks to undo and unhinge so much darkness encroaching on a civilization brightened by its Renaissance, tempered also by too much bloodletting of its own in the name of God, and, at this time, found secure, democratic, and open, and despite the most vociferous proponents of the Global Jihad, coherent and cohesive as well.
Michael Gruber - Competition for Le Carre
John Le Carré stepped out of the Cold War series into the Jihad with two books--Absolute Friends (2003) and A Most Wanted Man (2010), the one dealing with the ambiguities attending participation in far left to radical social circles and deeds, some violent and the latter ambiguity in what may be observed and put together for the purposes of defending society from the next assault from militant Islam. In The Good Son, Michael Gruber's novel venturing bravely and well into the same arena, the forces of Jihad and the intelligence-driven anti-Jihad make a knot of lives twisted together by chance and the necessity of pursuing adventurous guessing games.
Gruber's novel starts with a stock mythologized matchstick: the intercept of a cell phone conversation about the theft of a substantial quantity of weapons-grade Plutonium bound for a Taliban controlled bomb making facility in Pakistan.
First question: has there been a theft or are NSA officials being duped?
Each answer has its consequences, and Gruber, through one character, Cynthia Lam, a translator deftly plays the threats posed by each answer as he develops characters closer to the true action of the novel, which, and this perhaps in the spirit of Phillip Roth, has to do with the salient features of authentic identity in two characters, a mother, Sonia Bailey, and her son, Theo, who each lead multiple double lives, first and foremost as citizens of the west with root or relationship (both, differentially, and which to whom I will not tell here) in the Pashtun culture of Pakistan's wilds, but then too, one might say second and more pervasively, as a Pakistan-oriented Pashtun family.
Featuring a kidnapping of a do-good western conferencing group by the Taliban, torture somewhere within the NSA-CIA spider's nest, not to mention a look into the deepest blacks of covert operations, and an ambiguous nuclear threat assessment, The Good Son turns out an excellent read as well as an appropriate, timely, and informative one.
Jude the Renowned -- "Hitch" Looks Back
In whatever way one "wastes" one's talent, whether piddling it away in obscurity or pickling it (judging from the results so far, quite nicely, I'd say) while in the spotlight, Christopher Hitchens in Hitch 22 (Hachette Book Group 2010) lays out the genesis of the most enviable of writerly swaths carved indelibly into 20th Century letters, starting as the son of parents who neither object nor interfere with his intuitive compass, moving on to proto socialist revolutionary activities while at Oxford (Oxford!), scribbling this and that for mainstream compensation by day, working for The People by night, gallavanting from gutter to manse, from pub pint to wine served well in more genteel surrounds, from the unwashed to the well scrubbed, weekly, and, most admirably, quite on his own, albeit with some parental financial sacrifice to secure his foothold in the right place, deliberately, and at the right time, the cusp of the 1960's cultural revolution, fortuitously.
Preferring that friends call him "Hitch"--I'm less sure about fans and reviewers, and here I am more fan than reviewer--Christopher Hitchens' memoir emphasizes the quasi-private mythology of the writer, perhaps avoiding a long dwelling on the murkier lanes in which a lively spirit might drown, but never the darker or merrier moments in career and relationships. In all--I'm still reading it, Hitch has turned out the record of a fine and most perceptive and paripatetic adventurer on his travels through the literary and political cultures of the post-WWII "Boomer" generation.
19th Century Modern
I have never liked the names "Google" and "Yahoo"--baby's noises for a brand name, an ignorant pioneer's cry for another--and yet in this late dawn of the Internet's Introduction to Humanity, both have turned out appropriate for conditions. Our latest challenge, recognized and shared, so I may hope, by a few peers has not to do with getting "hooked up" and "wired"--what a metonymic history those two similes have enjoyed--but rather with trading back time mired in the delights and hooks of cyberspace--yes, Facebook, I mean you, among others--for the better management and enjoyment of life in Realspace.
Toward that end and with much help from hot and humid weather, I've got the following stacked up on the candlestick table beside my bed -- by Christopher Hitchens: Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and Why Orwell Matters; by Raphael Patai, The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology; by William Nicholls, Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate; by Qanta A. Ahmed, MD, In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor's Journey in the Saudi Kingdom; by Elie Wiesel, Rashi.
All books mentioned in this post have been listed in reference.
Unfortunately, somewhere between guitar playing, dancing, the pursuit of photography as a business, also the Fire of 2006 (personal chapter), moving northwestward of the Washington, D.C. metropolis, wrestling with relationships (Jacob had a much easier assignment), and this year the discovery of a not too interesting but nonetheless mysterious leukemia (and high blood pressure), I've lost much of the habit of reading at length--definitely a realspace, not cyberspace, activity--along with some ambition and energy, what part influenced by lifestyle, income / financial worry, ageing, illness, and the weather, I don't know.
What I may hope, however, is to read well this summer, enjoy some short drives and long walks, dine well (if with less alcohol on account of what I've come to call my prescribed vein-relaxing, vivid dream inducing "Lisinopril thrill"), and, this inspired by the Hitchean spirit so recently encountered, become myself a better writer, photographer, musician.
Reference
Ahmed A., Qanta MD. In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor's Journey int he Saudi Kingdom. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2008.
Hitchens, Christopher. Hitch 22: A Memoir. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2010.
Hitchens, Christopher. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006.
Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Karsh, Efraim. Palestine Betrayed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010.
Le Carré, John. Absolute Friends. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003.
Le Carré, John. A Most Wanted Man. New York: Scribner, 2008.
Nicholls, William. Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate. Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1995.
Patai, Raphael. The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996.
Phillips, Melanie. Londonistan. New York: Encounter Books, 2006.
Phillips, Melanie. The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, and Power. New York and London: Encounter Books, 2010.
Wiesel, Elie. Rashi: A Portrait. Catherine Temmerson, Translator. New York: Nextbook - Shochen, 2009.
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