Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

A couple of weeks ago I read Murakami's ' Norwegian wood '  which centers around a young student Toru Watanabe dealing with social isolation in Tokyo, the loss of a close fiend and his connections with two young women.  It's a very beautiful novel. I especially enjoyed all the little humorous, emotional or salacious side stories told by Midori and Reiko that pepper the novel alongside the main plot line. It's easy to see how this novel, which is supposedly unlike his others, captured the imagination of Japanese youth in the 'lost decade'.  Anyways, I found this BBC documentary about the author and I thought I would share it here. 

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.” ― Jorge Luis Borges.

An engaging documentary on the life and work of Vladimir Nabokov . It contains a lot of archival footage of interviews with the man himself and covers topics from lepidoptery to Lolita.   The narrator Stephen Smith interviews Martin Amis and contemporary literary critics to identify the character of the man and the underlying moral message of his Magnum opus .  Though I enjoyed it, I'm not quite sure if Nabokov would have approved : there is a heavy strain of criticism as psychoanalysis, art as didacticism throughout the film.

'There is no wealth but life'   -  John Ruskin.

Henry Miller, author of The Tropic Of Cancer , at dinner with Brenda Venus in 1979 discussing literature, life and food. -----Also on A Night OF Dostoevskian Smiles and Sadean Excesses : - Henry Miller Asleep and Awake . - Nabokov on "Lolita" . - The Logic of Existential Meaning .

Towards the end of high-school, a close friend of the family suffered from a stroke that left him without the ability to read with any sustained proficiency. As such, M---- D---- gave me his collection of books that he had acquired over the years. He had majored in literature and the collection contained a good cross-section of the Western cannon – great books – from the inception of the Spanish novel through Dickens and Dostoevsky to the authors of the Latin American boom. There was much poetry, 18 th century English and French verse and anthologies of Bronze Age Greeks. I can remember sitting with M---- D---- in hospital and talking of Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus and his smile of recognition and happiness that I was taking pleasure in reading and literature. That the books were going to good use. Whilst perpetually curious and striving for understanding, up to this point I had allowed my schooling to get in the way of my education. The collection was fuel to the fire. Among...

Tom Schiller's documentary on Henry Miller, the author of The Tropic of Cancer , and the intricacies of his bathroom walls.

From Hemingway's ' Death in the Afternoon ': "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured, or well-bred, is merely a popinjay. And this too, remember: a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl."

The first time I tried to read Hemingway I ended by throwing the book across the room. It wasn’t until I read ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ that I started to appreciate Hemingway’s work. ‘A Movable Feast’, unlike ‘A Farewell to Arms’, didn’t end up in the far corner of the room. There is a certain emotional authenticity in his sketches of Paris between the wars. I particularly enjoyed the anecdotes and observations made of Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, which are the most developed characterizations of the memoir. The notion of “the lost generation” and Hemingway’s meditation upon Stein's point was enjoyable and Fitzgerald’s problems with measurement left me in stitches. This new edition contains a lot more than earlier editions, but is not without controversy as to certain editorial alteration. Supposedly, some remarks that are uncomplimentary to Hemingway’s first wife Hadley have been removed. Nevertheless, this is still a great and evocative read.

This is a very timely book and Bacevich manages to pack it with a substantial amount of well organized information. His main themes, as evidenced by the title, are the limitations of power projection through military force and the ideology of American Imperium. He traces the history of the National Security State, its organizational apparatus and the friction between various departments and the ideology of National Security which provide the rationale for the projects of political elites. His analysis situates the Bush administration within a tradition of ideology that spans back to the early days of the Cold war. Whilst also demonstrating its discontinuities; above all, the Bush doctrine’s concept of “preemptive war”. For Bacevich, this policy is both morally indefensible and pragmatically inept. He attempts to give both a description of the current crises (the crisis of profligacy, the political crisis and the military crisis) and prescriptive advice on how to readdress past mist...