Category Archives: BP - Reading 2006 - Page 7

14587. (S. Craig Watkins) Hip Hop Matters ― Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement

06-01-27 READ 14587. (S. Craig Watkins) Hip Hop Matters ― Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a MovementA straight­for­ward his­tory of the ear­ly days of Hip Hop, focus­ing more on the pro­duc­ers, record labels and peo­ple who ran the busi­ness end than on the per­form­ers. Hip Hop seems to have coa­lesced into exis­tence simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in sev­er­al U.S. cities in the ear­ly sev­en­ties, but a con­ven­tion­al “birth­day” is the August 11, 1973 par­ty in a base­ment apart­ment in the Bronx. Soon, people DJs like Afri­ka Bam­baataa and Kool Herc were throw­ing block par­ties fea­tur­ing break­beats and scratch­ing. Emcees, began spon­ta­neous­ly rap­ping to the beats.Through the sev­en­ties, it was a spon­ta­neous, infor­mal and bare­ly noticed seen…it was six years before the first Hip Hop album was record­ed and released. As the musi­cal fash­ion sat­u­rat­ed the world, mon­ey start­ed pil­ing up, and the inevitable strug­gle between art, social con­science, and busi­ness inter­ests. This is the part that inter­ests the author. His analy­sis is com­mon sense: mon­ey soon over­whelms art and social causes. 

An inter­est­ing quo­ta­tion: “Who would pay mon­ey for some­thing they can hear for free at par­ties? Let’s keep it under­ground. Nobody out­side of the Bronx would like this stuff any­way.” —- Joseph Sad­dler, aka Grand­mas­ter Flash, 1979, when approached with the idea of putting rap music on records.

14586. (Valerio Massimo Manfredi) The Last Legion

An inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal nov­el set in the peri­od of Romu­lus Augus­tus, the last Roman Emper­or in the West­ern Empire. The book is trans­lated from Ital­ian. It is fast-paced adven­ture fic­tion, writ­ten in the spir­it of Alexan­dre Dumas. There is a “sur­prise” end­ing, which the read­er will prob­a­bly see com­ing fair­ly ear­ly in the game. Though most of the action takes place in Italy, it is suf­fused with the “Mat­ter of Britain”. Doesn’t any­one ever write about late Roman Spain, or Nor­ica, or Africa?

14577. (John Donne) The Selected Poetry of Donne [ed. Marius Bewley]

Donne is best when he writes of love or death, dullest when build­ing “meta­phys­i­cal” struc­tures or play­ing games with theology.

Where, like a pil­low on a bed,
A preg­nant bank swell’d up, to rest
The violet’s reclin­ing head,
Sat we two, one another’s best.
Our hands were firm­ly cemented
With a fast balm, which thence did spring,
Our eye-beams twist­ed, and did thread
Our eyes, upon one double-string;
So to inter­graft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pic­tures in our eyes to get
Was all our prop­a­ga­tion.

14576. (Kurt W. Treptow) Vlad III Dracula ― The Life and Times of the Historical Dracula

Vlad the Impaler represented as Pontius Pilate judging Jesus Christ, 1463 (artist unknown)

Vlad the Impaler rep­re­sent­ed as Pon­tius Pilate judg­ing Jesus Christ, 1463 (artist unknown)

This seems to be the best book on Vlad III of Wal­lachia, the his­tor­i­cal “Drac­ula”. It at least explodes the sil­li­est inter­pre­ta­tions, put for­ward by Marx­ists under the Ceauces­cu regime, that seem to have found their way into many sec­ondary sources. Vlad seems to have been a per­fectly ordi­nary lit­tle gang­ster, com­mit­ting plen­ty of atroc­i­ties, but not much dif­fer­ent in style and moti­va­tion from those of oth­er thugs rul­ing prin­ci­pal­i­ties. Com­pared to the colos­sal out­rages of the reli­gious wars that tore Ger­many apart, soon after, it was all small potatoes.

While Vlad enjoyed tor­tur­ing peo­ple and impal­ing them, he was no more vicious than, say, the Ref­or­ma­tion the­olo­gian John Calvin, who enjoyed tor­tur­ing peo­ple by slow­ly roast­ing them on a spit while their heads were soaked with cold water to pro­long the agony .… a tor­ture that he once con­demned two chil­dren to. And he isn’t any more of a mon­ster than Guata­mala’s dic­ta­tor José Ríos Montt, whom Ronald Rea­gan admired and called “a man of great per­sonal integri­ty and commitment.”

14573. (René Descartes) Les Méditations Metaphysiques

A statue of René Descartes in Den Haag, Netherlands.  I once sat below it, eating a lunch of Patatje Joppie (fries with Joppiesaus) and pickled herring.

A stat­ue of René Descartes in Den Haag, Nether­lands. I once sat below it, eat­ing a lunch of Patat­je Jop­pie (fries with Jop­piesaus) and pick­led herring.

Descarte’s chief impor­tance to us now lies in his men­tal atti­tude, and his approach to solv­ing prob­lems. He did not always come to con­clu­sions that I can accept, and some­times did not live up to his own meth­ods, but the sig­nif­i­cant thing is that he tried to look at the world in a way that would be famil­iar to a sci­en­tist in our time, or to any schol­ar, lawyer, doc­tor, or tech­ni­cian try­ing to main­tain an objec­tive, ratio­nal discipline.

For­mally, the Med­i­ta­tions are writ­ten in the “dialec­tic” style that was the her­itage of medieval and renais­sance phi­los­o­phy. But Descartes was not inter­ested in the medieval tech­nique of com­par­ing author­i­ties and mak­ing an “argu­ment”. He was more inter­ested in the ques­tions: “What can I claim to know?” “How shall I dis­tin­guish between what I believe, and what I can claim as proven?”

Every sci­en­tist and lawyer is now famil­iar with the impor­tance of these ques­tions. I can step out­side and see a man rob­bing anoth­er man at gun­point. After the event, I can give tes­ti­mony to this, but oth­er peo­ple need not believe me if I can­not cor­rob­o­rate it. I myself might not be cer­tain, for instance, that it was not a vivid dream, which I mis­took for expe­ri­ence. A chemist might see a sig­nif­i­cant reac­tion in a test-tube. Yet, he expects oth­er sci­en­tists to sus­pend judg­ment on his report until it can be dupli­cated. The phras­ing of his report will be care­fully thought out to reflect the epis­te­mo­log­i­cal and judi­cial con­sid­er­a­tions that sci­ence depends on. There are hints and pre­mo­ni­tions of this atti­tude in ear­lier thinkers, like Aris­to­tle, Euclid, Ibn Sin­na, and Aquinas, but it is Descartes who brings them to the fore­front, and con­cen­trates on them. Read more »

14572. (D. M. LeBourdais) Canada’s Century

Nursing Sister at Fort Churchill, Manitoba, preparing to board an RCAF De Havilland Otter. (Library and Archives Canada Photo, MIKAN No. 4234435)

Nurs­ing Sis­ter at Fort Churchill, Man­i­to­ba, prepar­ing to board an RCAF De Hav­il­land Otter. Cana­di­an-made bush planes such as the Otter and Beaver were the “cov­ered wag­ons” of the Cana­di­an North (Library and Archives Cana­da Pho­to, MIKAN No. 4234435)

This book was pub­lished in 1956, and it reflects a time when Cana­di­ans had very dif­fer­ent things to think about. This was the peri­od when a num­ber of peo­ple became inspired by visions of the North­ern Fron­tier. French-speak­ing Cana­di­ans seem to have been more caught up in it than Eng­lish-speak­ing Cana­di­ans, who seem to have been more attract­ed to the mag­ic of the bloom­ing sub­urbs, but there were books like this pub­lished in both lan­guages. The North was bristling with poten­tial min­eral wealth. The 1940s had already seen a Pio­neer Move­ment, which was espe­cially encour­aged by influ­en­tial peo­ple in Que­bec, who want­ed to divert the leak­age of French Cana­di­ans migrat­ing to New Eng­land (where they would cer­tainly lose their lan­guage) into the North­ern and West­ern Cana­da, where they would be able to keep it. This meant mov­ing into the last remain­ing untouched patch­es of pos­si­ble agri­cul­tural land in North Amer­ica, and home­steading under the most extreme con­di­tions. Some set­tle­ments failed, some­times home­steads would be aban­doned in moment of despair, the cof­fee pot left boil­ing on the stove. (It’s iron­ic that my moth­er, from an ancient Que­bec fam­ily along the St. Lawrence, expe­ri­enced both. Her fam­ily moved to Mass­a­chu­setts to get work in the mills, but when she fin­ished school, she returned to Cana­da and wound up in a sub­arc­tic Ontario min­ing town.)

Read more »

14560. (Henry David Thoreau) A Yankee In Canada [ed. Maynard Gertler] (Henry David Thoreau) Thoreau: Walden and Other Writings [ed. Joseph Krutch]

06-01-18 READ 14560. (Henry David Thoreau) A Yankee In CanadaThore­au is one of those peo­ple that you might read as a teenag­er, then keep in the back of your mind for the rest of your life. But do you get around to re-read­ing him lat­er in life? One thing that strikes me now, on reread­ing him, is how much he gets dis­tort­ed by false mem­o­ry. How many peo­ple have decid­ed that the ide­al life is on a farm, and talk about Thore­au and “sim­plic­i­ty”? But for the actu­al Thore­au, farm life was the com­plex rat race he was flee­ing from! He com­plained that every­one he knew was car­ry­ing a barn on their back. One man’s sim­plic­ity is anoth­er man’s 1984, I sup­pose. The econ­o­mist John Ken­neth Gal­braith who had grown up on one of those dour Scot­tish-Cana­di­an farms in south­ern Ontario once explained that after milk­ing cows with frozen teats on sub­zero morn­ings and bail­ing hay by hand, noth­ing he ever did as an adult was clas­si­fi­able as work, and he would much rather be a pro­fes­sor than go back to that sim­plic­ity, thanky­ou very much. I did my own fair share of farm work, and even with more mod­ern machin­ery, I know exact­ly what he meant. Try stand­ing up to your knees in half frozen sheep shit while cold driz­zle soaks into you, for an entire day, while you wres­tle fierce­ly kick­ing ani­mals to the ground, one after anoth­er. Sim­plic­ity, indeed.

On reread­ing, I found Walden and Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence to be pret­ty much as I remem­bered them. Thore­au made it clear in Walden that he was mak­ing an exper­i­ment in self-dis­ci­pline, not design­ing a blue­print for every­one to live by. He had enough sense to know that if every­one tried to live off the beans in their back­yard, the result would be grind­ing medieval pover­ty, not inde­pen­dence. He was not going off to live in a cave. He walked to town every day to see his friends, and he even went off on lengthy jaunts of tourism.

His trav­el jour­nals con­tain some of his most enter­tain­ing writ­ing. His prose style is remark­ably mod­ern-sound­ing for the 1850s. His obser­va­tion of sen­sory detail was also unusu­al for the peri­od. A read­er hav­ing no appro­pri­ate clues might place the prose style at cir­ca 1910. “A Yan­kee In Cana­da” describes the Charlevoix region north of Que­bec City, a place I did a few hun­dred kliks of walk­a­bout in, with Fil­ip Marek. Thore­au spoke French rea­son­ably well (he was of Chan­nel Island ances­try), and asked ques­tions every­where. He was not only pre-occu­pied with nature, which describes with pre­ci­sion, but with eco­nomic and social facts as well. For exam­ple, he not­ed that the vot­ing fran­chise was wider in Cana­da East than in New Eng­land, that the British still treat­ed Que­bec as a gar­ri­son town (it is still 17 years before Con­fed­er­a­tion), and which vari­eties of fruits and cloth were import­ed and exported.

One thing he got iron­i­cally wrong. He noticed a large num­ber of stone Church­es, imag­in­ing them to be a lega­cy of Nor­mandy. But, in fact, most of the orig­i­nal church­es of Que­bec had been made of wood, in a sim­ple style impro­vised by the Habi­tants. Over the next two cen­turies, most of these church­es suc­cumbed to the inevitable fires, and only a hand­ful of them sur­vive today on the Ile d’Orleans. But the style sur­vived. The Eng­lish set­tlers of New Eng­land, also com­ing from a land of stone church­es, copied the Que­bec wood­en church­es, per­fect­ing them into the dis­tinc­tive white Con­gre­ga­tional jew­els that still make many New Eng­land vil­lages sub­limely beau­ti­ful. The pret­ty stone and tin-roofed church­es that Thore­au saw along the St. Lawrence were most­ly built short­ly before he saw then.. They are usu­ally paint­ed white in the trim­mings, and built of pale gray stone, so that a Que­bec vil­lage has a visu­al charm almost as strik­ing as a Ver­mont one, but the effect is dif­fer­ent. The “strip vil­lage” dom­i­nates in Que­bec, fol­low­ing river­banks, evolved from farm lots that are nar­row on the roads, but extend for miles back into the for­est. This con­fig­u­ra­tion is crit­i­cal in harsh win­ters, when the walk­ing time to the near­est neigh­bour can deter­mine life or death. By con­trast, New Eng­land vil­lages focus on a square, and are much more com­pact, but out­ly­ing farms must be ser­viced by more road mileage. He was, of course, fas­ci­nated by the Catholi­cism in Cana­da, as any New Eng­lan­der would be, but he was not hos­tile. He was equal­ly fas­ci­nated by the omnipresent kilt­ed Scots High­landers, hav­ing appar­ently nev­er seen so many bare male legs.

But Thoreau’s prose is won­der­ful, and you can just pic­ture your­self hav­ing a cheer­ful after­noon pok­ing around in the woods with him. He claimed to have been a hap­py man, and per­haps he wasn’t lying.

(Stephen Leacock) Behind the Beyond

I have not read all of Leacock’s old humour books, yet. There were quite a few of them, not to men­tion var­i­ous col­lec­tions and omnibus­es. This 1916 vol­ume, in gen­eral, is a sharp falling off in qual­ity from the genius of Sun­shine Sketch­es . But it does con­tain two fine items. One is “The Retroac­tive Exis­tence of Mr. Jug­gins” whose fate is com­pre­hen­si­ble to any­one who has set out to sharp­en a pen­cil and end­ed up spend­ing three hours at it, or start­ed to study Gravity’s Rain­bow and end­ed up read­ing Beowulf. All of Jug­gins’ exis­tence is like that, and in the end we find him pass­ing “back through child­hood into infan­cy, and present­ly, just as his annu­ity runs to a point and van­ishes, he will back up clear through the Cur­tain of Exis­tence and die, or be born, I don’t know which to call it.” Read more »

14544. (Jonny Bealby) For a Pagan Song: Travels in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan

This trav­el nar­ra­tive, focus­ing on the remote region of Afghanistan called Nuris­tan, has a won­der­ful back-sto­ry. Beal­by had been a bright, but book-hat­ing Eng­lish youth with a seri­ous read­ing dis­abil­ity. But his girl­friend was an avid read­er, and when she gave him a copy of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King , he forced him­self to read it. The sto­ry appealed to him, and even­tu­ally he became both an adven­tur­ous trav­eler and a pub­lished writer. His girl­friend came to a sud­den acci­den­tal death on one of their trips. Lat­er, still griev­ing, he found him­self watch­ing the won­der­ful John Hus­ton film of Kipling’s sto­ry. He vowed to under­take a jour­ney par­al­lel­ing that of the fic­tional Peachy Car­na­han and Dan­ny Dravot, to the remote land of “Kafiris­tan”, beyond the Hin­du Kush. This of course, is a per­fectly real place, the long, nar­row prong of Afghan ter­ri­tory that kept Pak­istan from bor­der­ing the for­mer Sovi­et Union. Bealby’s adven­ture took place in the 1990’s, the Pak­istan of the smol­der­ing bor­der war with India, and the Afghanistan of the Tal­iban. He had lit­tle appar­ent inter­est in pol­i­tics. What comes across in this book is his abil­ity to make him­self at home among strangers, and to instant­ly grasp the human ele­ment in a place that is for­eign to him. My friend Fil­ip, in Prague, is rather like him in this. I would glad­ly trav­el any­where with such a person.

14541. (Gerard Kornelis van het Reve) Parents Worry

Van het Reve is con­sid­ered one of the Netherland’s most impor­tant writ­ers, but I have to say this nov­el left a sour taste in my mouth. I just have no sym­pa­thy for writ­ers who iden­tify gay sex­u­al­ity entire­ly with sado-masochism, self-fla­gel­lat­ing guilt, and obses­sions about catholic doc­trine. No mat­ter how lit­er­ary and sophis­ti­cated it is made to sound, it is basi­cally just as sil­ly as teenagers in Okla­homa dress­ing up as goths and drink­ing cat blood, or any oth­er infan­tile behav­iour based on “blas­phemy”. I resent hav­ing gay sex­u­al­ity sta­pled to this stuff ― or any type of sex­u­al­ity, for that mat­ter. I real­ly couldn’t find any inter­est­ing ideas in this nov­el, or any pas­sages that gave me plea­sure, or images that did not seem trite. The “erot­ic” com­po­nent of the book was mere­ly depress­ing and pathet­ic. Per­haps the style has some par­tic­u­lar qual­ity in Dutch that I have no access to, which accounts for its fame. I have no idea why Van het Reve is though so high­ly of. The light­hearted, tol­er­ant and civ­i­lized atti­tude that most Dutch peo­ple have towards sex is the polar oppo­site of all this kind of stuff. Maybe they just find it so strange that they assume it must be sig­nif­i­cant. But in Eng­lish, there are acres of this kind of stuff in print, play­ing on the mor­bid and self-destruc­tive atti­tudes towards sex that pre­vail in much of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world.