Berkeley has an interesting online program called Conversations with History, where you can watch interviews with top historians, like this one with Oliver Roy.

Matt Simmons is one of the most respected among the "peak oil" theorists. You can see a presentation he made at Harvard in early 2006 here.

War Corporatism: The New Fascism (video). Worth checking out.

My favorite latest reads are the Dalkey Archive by Flann O'Brien, an Irish writer who I honestly hadn't heard much about until I got to Dublin, where he was apparently a local here, perhaps more so even than Joyce.

Another great read is Kevin Phillips' masterful American Theocracy.

Cosmoetica is a compendium of essays. Some good book reviews including this one on Dhalgren.

Do you like literary feuds, salacious gossip about plagiarism, and seeing those bogus poetry contests attacked? Then you might like FOETRY.

Latest read is Kevin Phillips American Theocracy.

I just returned from a great trip to Dublin for Bloomsday. I went with family, which worked out great, esp. as a close friend of the family has ties (family and friends) in Ireland that opened many doors. E.g. he arranged a dinner at the University Kildare club (where he also arranged for us to stay) with Senator David Norris, who is an expert on Joyce. (Wrote introduction to Joyce). I asked him how many people in the world have read the Wake with full understanding, and he said, "none...Joyce himself probably forgot all that he put in there."

We visited Sandy Cove (the "omphalos" -- i.e. circular castle that appears in opening scenes of Ulysses, peering over the "snotgreen sea"), the James Joyce museum, and Howth Castle, among other places. Also got a tour of the Dail ("doyle") -- the equiv. to our House of Representatives.

Also saw a good recitation/explanation of Flann O'Brien's famous work, At Swim--Two Birds.
And visited most of the major bookstores in Dublin proper.

Also read ReJoyce by Anthony Burgess, one of the best explorations of the man and his work that you can find.

After I got home I started reading Finnegan's Wake. It occurs to me that I could begin adding to my Joycean poem, "The Ill Id" (El Noise) -- using his technique (w/o as much brilliant layering and use of polyglottamy -- of dreamlanguage. Which is where the poem left off. With me asleep in a hammock slung under the el. Pot to Potawattomee? Yes, I say Yes.

The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
by George Packer (FSG, 2005)

I have to admit, I started reading this book with a great deal of skepticism, given the effusive praise from Christopher Hitchens in a plug on the back. Others also told me that Packer is a "liberal hawk" who originally supported the war. But if so, he's come a long way.

Packer's views on the war are not Hitchens'. Moreover, he takes on the ideological hybris of the neocons in a manner that is quite nuanced, fair, and critical. For that reason, it is more than a deep, first-hand account of the on-the-ground reality gleaned from numerous visits to Iraq (where he describes an increasingly dangerous atmosphere), but more interesting as a sweeping analysis laden with probing encounters with key neocon thinkers, including Perle, Paul Berman, Robert Kagan, and various Iraqi exiles.

The result is a solid description of how delusionary the leading advocates of the war are.

While comparisons with the Vietnam War are fraught with obstacles, if I were to suggest a book to compare this one to, it might be The Best and the Brightest, except that Packer lacks Halberstam's probing descriptions of the inner workings of key players -- e.g. the Office of Special Plans and Cheney's cabal. Nevertheless, he makes up for that with searing and deeply probing examinations of key ideologues, young CPA bureaucrats detached from the reality outside the Green Zone and occupation authories and soldiers who can't afford the luxury of that distance.

A friend of mine suggested he didn't see much point in the description Packer includes of his visit to the father of a dead soldier, out in Iowa, but I think it works well against the abstractions of the neocons, which he puts at the center of a searching examination of the big question: WHY? It is therefore easy to understand how the father would not arrive at the same criticism of the war that we are left with, since that would mean his son's death was meaningless.

And yet, the sad thing is that very well may be the case.

Packer is also simply a damned fine writer, which makes even those parts that you don't seem to learn much that is new (esp. after reading a few other books on Iraq) still rewarding.

So, if you want to read just one book, consider this one. (Esp. since it's not quite as dated as Christian Parenti's The Freedom, which was a solid piece of reportage on the early occupation.) I haven't yet read Anthony Shadid's book (which is supposed to be a good explanation of the war from the perspective of the Iraqi people), Baghdad Burning, or David Enders' book, Baghdad Bulletin. But if they are all good, I think it would be for different reasons.

This UK site has some interesting documentaries and other things worth checking out.

The Long Emergency
by William Howard Kunstler

You've heard of peak oil, right? But what does it mean for the U.S., and western civilization? Potentially a lot. And if you think technology will save us, you like many another person have something coming.

Problem is, we all do. And if you want a skeptical explanation of why hybrids and hydrogen-fueled vehicles and natural gas and nukes and coal are not going to bail us out because of our short-sighted addiction to suburban sprawl and SUVs, this is the book for you.

It's actually an entertaining (hey, I'm a masochist for these kind of books, and this is pretty well written and imaginative), forward-looking assessment of the coming oil crisis. And it basically confirms what I mostly already knew about oil wars, climate change and the other consequeces.

Turning our energy policies around would be like turning the Valdez around in 2 miles before the inevitable crash -- ain't likely to happen, esp. under Bush. So what do we do? Join the evangelicals in waiting for the Rapture? Stick hour head in the sand (if we were in Saudi Arabia that might not be a bad idea), learn how to garden? Yes, the latter, probably, would help.

There are some problems with this book. Some excessive (at times whacked) use of the entropy metaphor to describe sprawl and other things undercuts his argument a lot.

But hey, whaddya expect from a former editor of Rolling Stone? I definitely recommend this one.

Before the Iraq war, it was easy to attribute the opposition among establishment figures (like Bush Sr.'s national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft) to Colin Powell's own "Pottery Barn rule." Far from it for me to explain Henry Kissinger's opposition to this rule, but a quote by Kissinger on the Vietnam War suggests he knew exactly what the risk of an invasion and prolonged occupation would be: "We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought by physical attribution; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla warfare: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win."

The U.S. has lost Iraq. The only ones unwilling to admit it, of course, are Bush and his loyalists. And although the schadenfreude of knowing that this has become apparent while the "war president" is in office, becoming his second-term ball-and-chain. Thus, the boy emperor's stubborness is beginning to look like an achilles heel that was first revealed by Paul O'Neill in his book with Ron Susking (where O'Neill described Bush as a "Blind man in a room full of deaf people") is being revealed in spades through his ham-handed reaction to vet mother Cyndi Sheehan's vigil outside the ranch in Crawford (where Bush is spending five weeks of vacation -- working out twice a day; yes, he's in good shape, Maureen Dowd notices -- but Iraq is not).

During my "vacation" I read two books on the Iraq war that take us through the first two years of the occupation and reveal how Bush, Bremer and co. lost:

The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq by Christian Parenti and
How America Lost Iraq by Aaron Glantz.

A few observations about these books: Glantz' book starts slow and almost even apologetic for the war, and gets better as it goes along. He repeatedly takes issue with his Pacifica editors and their leftist audience for having such a black-and-white perspective on the U.S. and ergo, failing to understand how Iraqis really wanted to oust Saddam, a criticism that is only fair if Glantz' experiences with his editors (who tell him they only want stories critical of the U.S. military in the first year, when according to his telling it was not yet a certainty that they'd lost Iraqi hearts and minds).

The good thing about Glantz is that he never shuts out his own or others' emotions to portray himself as a kind of macho freelancer in the war zone -- a common characteristic of so many American writers who seem to want to walk in Michael Herr's shoes. He discusses how frightening it is to go to Fallujah and Najaf after they are under seige by the U.S. The rewards are the personal stories he relates from those who fall victim to the U.S. military's indiscriminate violence.

Parenti comes off as a bit more adventuristic. And he is a bit more adventuristic, seeking for instance to interview a member of the resistance. While both writers eschew the regular Green Zone briefings that the mainstream broadcast correspondents use to report on the war, traveling to different parts of the country to get the story, Parenti's book has a little more muscle, Glantz' a little more heart. Both give you a sense of why so few reporters have the guts to go into Iraq, or report outside the Green Zone.

While it is now clear to most Americans (according to the polls) that the war in Iraq was based on a false premise and has only made us more hated around the world and vulnerable to terrorist attacks, most of that sentiment is based on the senseless loss of American lives, rather than the damage to Iraq itself and the virtual slaughter of so many innocent people. Both of these books provide an inside explanation of the latter that is heartbreaking and maddening. They both make it clear how the U.S. won the invasion but lost the war, from the battle of Fallujah, the seige of Najaf, the hypocrisy of shutting down the Shiite papers as part of a process to "bring Democracy" to Iraq (freedom of speech?), Abu Ghraib, etc. There isn't much treatment of the war profiteers and contractors, but the rest is there.

One of the more interesting moments in Parenti's book is the point where he reminds us of Scott Ritter's observations as a UN weapons inspector looking for WMDs. Instead of finding any, he describes how Saddam's M-14 -- the Iraqi Special Operations and Antiterrorism Branch -- undertook extensive planning for the use of IED's before the war:

"While I found no evidence of WMDs, I did find an organization that specialized in the construction and employment of improvised explosive devices -- the same IEDs that are now killing Americans daily in Iraq. When we entered the compound, three Iraqis tried to escape over a wall with documents, but they were caught and surrendered the papers. Like reams of other documents stacked inside the buildings, these papers dealt with IEDs. I held in my hands a photocopied primer on how to conduct a roadside ambush using IEDs, and others on how to construct IEDs from conventional high explosives and military munitions. The sophisticated plans -- albeit with crude drawings -- showed how to take out a convoy by disguising an IED and when and where to detonate it for maximum damage. ... I saw classrooms for training all Iraqi covert agents in the black art of making an using IEDs. My notes recall tables piled with mockups of mines and grenades disguised in dolls, stuffed animals, and food containers -- and classrooms for training in making car bombs and recruiting proxy agents for using explosives."

In other words, before the war, it was pretty well known what kind of war Saddam was preparing for.

And the fact that the U.S. military took so long to provide armored plating and reinforced vehicles shows just how either incompetent or criminally neglectful of their own troops they were.

And that neglect in turn is reflected in the lack of training to deal with Iraqis. How many, for example, do you think have been killed because U.S. soldiers have not been taught a minimum vocabular of words like "stop" so that they can direct traffic and not resort to shooting carsful of women and children who don't understand English and sign language?

Anyone who has ever read Gravity's Rainbow will appreciate this.

The war between open knowledge systems and the privatization of knowledge extends far beyond the patent system, software copyright battles and the university-industrial complex described by Jennifer Washburn in University, Inc. Now every community faces the push towards privatization -- of the library system.

Like the privatization of other public services (esp. education) the far-right's push for budget deficits (via tax cuts for the rich, as well as war) has put the squeeze on government services. The intention is to benefit the market economy (i.e. expand the corporate sector).

In the case of libraries, what that means is cutting off services to poorer communities, destroying one of the last public institutions that people can use to pull themselves up in society. (So much for meritocracy. Do the right-wing libertarians ever notice the connections? Note: a friend who works with librarians has said that the market-based system of weeding books off the shelves, a kind of dumbing down system where only popular literature that gets checked out on a regular basis is guaranteed retention, resulted in the discarding of Darwin's Origin of Species. So Darwin's own work is now the victim of the misapplication of the "survival of the fittest" to that market.)

The business culture has infiltrated libraries in subtle, pervasive ways. Library trustees are increasingly being drawn from the business community (think of experts in real estate development who have no interest in beefing up service branches that might support community-based literacy programs), while the language of library management is subtly bent towards the market system: as a library user, you are now a "customer" (whose late fees are a revenue stream) rather than a "patron."

"A library is a temple to the anti-elitist notion that knowledge should be cheap if not free," Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in the Library wrote. But now it's more like those who can afford it will have access to knowledge.

Read Chris Dodge's excellent article, "Knowledge for Sale" in the Utne Reader (6/05) to learn more. And check out the DC Library Renaissance Project.

Nicholas Basbanes, author of A Gentle Madness (National Book Award-winner about crazy bibliophiles -- much worse than me), published a short, entertaining book that beginning book collectors will find useful: Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the Twenty-First Century. The book talks about how to go about collecting in a common-sense manner (e.g. collect the books you want to own, not ones that might be a good investment). Here are Internet sites sprinkled throughtout the book:

Firsts (the book collectors' magazine).
Advanced Book Exchange (ABE, one of my favorites for searching used books)
BiblioFind (absorbed by Amazon)
A libris (searching through an intermediary)
Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (lists individual sellers)
International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (links to dealers outsidet the U.S.)
Bookhunter Press
Rare Book School website
Book Sale Finder

Been a while since I've posted. Here's another part of my summer reading:

A bit of Gramsci for my book group we used the NYU edition.

I also read a book about Gramsci by Carl Boggs -- who I've written about before -- because I trust him to provide a direct uncluttered opinion of this political philosopher. And Boggs delivers.

Gramsci was a radical Italian union activist -- and ergo of course a Marxist -- but one who did not believe in direct economic determinism. (Hence the lineage to Stuart Hall of the UK, whose writings are mimicked in Tom Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?, though I've heard Frank never read Hall or Gramsci before, thank God). Gramsci spent his final years in prison (with no reference books to draw from, and a censor to pass things through), so his Prison Notebooks were quite impressive. Apparently, he also was able to think and write more deeply, with a level of detachment from immediate events. But still, those conditions are one reason to read derivative writings along with the original. His essays are short, which means they rarely draw things together in the grand thesis. Nevertheless, there is obvious ideological power in his writing, due to its ability to join theory with action -- i.e. praxis.

"When I was visiting the monastic republic of Mount Athos on the Chalkidiki Peninsula of northern Greece in 1998 to learn what I could about the manuscript collections that have been maintained there for a thousand years, I ran across a lovely word, idiorhythmic, which describes a kind of relaxed monasticism no longer in favor in which adherents could more or less follow their own rules, not those of an inflexible abbot. Translated from the Greek, idiorhythmic means "living by one's own life patterns," and it suggests for me a way to go about the business of scouting out books."

-- Nicholas A. Basbanes, Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the Twenty-First Century.

Such is the philosophy of a good book browser, literary flaneur, the one more disciplined people would call peripathetic?

Often when I begin to read the work of a writer I find difficult I pause and go to something that will introduce me to his or her life and work, usually a biography or collection of essays about them. This is how I started with Joyce, Auden and other poets.

Recently, I decided to go back to Borges, who I haven't read in 25 years. Instead of plunging into the two collected volumes of his ficciones and non-fiction essays, both labyrinths of learning and satire, I started with Edwin Williamson's new biography, Borges: A Life. That was a mistake. Biographies are only as interesting as the lives of the person they are about, and a librarian who was a life-long momma's boy with a confused political world-view (anti-Peron, but pro-Pinochet) is not exactly an example I would select of someone whose development is worth learning from. So skip it and instead go to Richard Burgin's Conversations with Borges (first person to ask gets my copy) and the work itself, starting with the slim volume, a Universal History of Infamy.

I hear that Hollywood is continuing to mine Philip K. Dick for movie plots. Next year, they are expected to come out with another based on the ultraparanoid cop-narc, A Scanner Darkly.
Anyone who has "been experienced" will appreciate antihero Bob Arctor's struggle with a double life in which his warring double personalities include narcotics agent "Fred," whose job is to spy on and entrap suspected drug dealer Bob Arctor. The man's mental disintegration under the influence of the insidious Substance D is genuine tragicomedy. It's gonna be interesting to see how they pull this off in film.

On the topic of Empire, I just finished Gabriel Kolko's breezy book, Another Century of War.
Kolko is touted as our "leading historian of war" by some Guardian reviewer on the cover, a dubious claim given how saturated the field is, but it is the case that he is a wise and superbly accessible writer. An easy, vigorous read.

If you want something even more morally challenging, I recommend Revolutionary Nonviolenceby Dave Dellinger who, you recall, was one of the Chicago 8, along with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Dellinger was arguably more mature and wise in his behaviors, without being judgmental: he had a good appreciation for the Yippies' antics while keeping his eye on the big picture. These essays really stand the test of time, for their clarity and vision. E.g. in his essays on the assassination of King and RFK, he manages to link them seamlessly to the ongoing war in Vietnam and the broader system of corporate capitalism without appearing to rant. A Yale grad turned community organizer, he writes with a confident voice less imbued with self-serving ambition than many who today seek the mantle of progressive punditry. Is that what corporate control of the media and blogging have done to us?

(btw, blogging creates the same kind of short-sightedness in public figures pressured to respond to just about any news event that "the number" and Wall Street pressure and stock options create for corporate executives to manage their companies for short-term gain at the expense of long-term planning. that's why I don't feel the need to get online and update this site on a regular basis.)

Oil, War and U.S. Standards of Living

Michael Klare has a new article about the coming war in Iran and how it's about long-term battle for controlling the world's energy resources.

Also, be sure to check out James Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency" , a Rolling Stone article apparently based on his new book.

I'm not very well read in the area of cultural studies, but a book group I'm in just read Stewart Hall's The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (out of print, sorry)-- which is an a collection of very insightful essays that I found as relevant and insightful to today's America as they must have been to Thatcher's England.

Comparisons with Thomas Frank immediately come to mind, except Frank (who writes similarly about authoritarian populism, but decades later) is sometimes less precise in his analysis, actually (although I find him to be a much better writer). Look for an upcoming comparative essay by Michael Berube, who has many insights on Hall and teaches cultural studies.

Spent the weekend reading Charles McCarry's re-released spy novel, Tears of Autumn. A kind of Jason Bourne-type character investigation of who's behind the Kennedy assassination. The writing was good, the plot has twists, but ultimately unconvincing: drug-dealing Vietnamese did it as vengeance for assassination of Ngo. I made the mistake of following the recommendation of the Post's Jonathan Yardley and actually finished this one. If you've got better things to read, forget it.

The Bloviator: Speaking of put-downs, Matt Taibbi does a great job skewering Thomas Friedman's latest book. Read the review and you'll be fine with your choice of not reading that one.
I'm also reading some P.K.Dick. The Penultimate Truth was the latest.

Also, Tom Frank's latest essay in the NYRB is okay, but a broken-record criticism of liberal Dems (i.e. they don't have their act together). That's not what the Post says today, but generally I'm with Frank. Problem is, he rarely crosses over from entertaining criticism to specifics about what to do. That's the hard part, eh?

From dept. of no surprises: TV may cause ADD, especially in kids, according a study published by Pediatrics magazine. Does that turn you off?