WHILE THEY SLEPT
An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family.
By Kathryn Harrison.
290 pp. Random House. $25.
September 29, 2008
September 24, 2008
September 20, 2008
August 13, 2008
Discovered Today! 08/14/2008
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
- Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
By
Theroux, Paul
Thirty years after his classic "The Great Railway Bazaar," Theroux revisits Eastern Europe, Central Asia, India, China, Japan, and Siberia. Wherever he goes, his omnivorous curiosity and unerring eye for detail never fail to inspire, enlighten, inform, and entertain.
Publisher Comments
Thirty years after his classic The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux revisits Eastern Europe, Central Asia, India, China, Japan, and Siberia.
Half a lifetime ago, Paul Theroux virtually invented the modern travel narrative by recounting his grand tour by train through Asia. In the three decades since, the world he recorded in that book has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed and China has risen; India booms while Burma smothers under dictatorship; Vietnam flourishes in the aftermath of the havoc America unleashed on it the last time Theroux passed through. And no one is better able to capture the texture, sights, smells, and sounds of that changing landscape than Paul Theroux.
Theroux's odyssey takes him from Eastern Europe, still hung over from communism, through tense but thriving Turkey into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbor Azerbaijan revels in oil-fueled capitalism. Theroux is firsthand witness to it all, traveling as the locals do--by stifling train, rattletrap bus, illicit taxi, and mud-caked foot--encountering adventures only he could have: from the literary (sparring with the incisive Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk) to the dissolute (surviving a week-long bender on the Trans-Siberian Railroad). And wherever he goes, from the European Union to the Pacific Rim and back, his omnivorous curiosity and unerring eye for detail never fail to inspire, enlighten, inform, and entertain.
August 11, 2008
August 3, 2008
June 24, 2008
Discovered Today! 06/25/2008
Design For the Other 90% | Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
- “The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”
June 22, 2008
Discovered Today! 06/23/2008
Objectivism on One Foot — Ayn Rand Lexicon
Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of
man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by
man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of
knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others.
He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor
sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest
and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a
system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as
masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual
benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by
resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force
against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s
rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who
initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full
capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete
separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as
the separation of state and church.
My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:
June 11, 2008
Discovered Today! 06/12/2008
Tear down your walls » Yanko Design
Anyone who has spent a significant period of time either living in a small windowless apartment or tripping through the galaxy on a mind bender may have at one point felt the urge to tear a hole in the wall to let some light in. Judging by this concept, designer Billy May almost surely has. His Torn Lighting is perfectly disguised on your wall while hiding it’s LED secrets from view. The result is the rather impressive illusion sure to leave your guests bemused, provided you paint it to match your walls of course.
- Anyone who has spent a significant period of time either living in a small windowless apartment or tripping through the galaxy on a mind bender may have at one point felt the urge to tear a hole in the wall to let some light in. Judging by this concept, designer Billy May almost surely has. His Torn Lighting is perfectly disguised on your wall while hiding it’s LED secrets from view. The result is the rather impressive illusion sure to leave your guests bemused, provided you paint it to match your walls of course.
June 8, 2008
Discovered Today! 06/09/2008
Book Review - 'While They Slept,' by Kathryn Harrison - Review - NYTimes.com
The violations that destroy human lives, or maim them, seem to demand telling. Possibly we seek such stories as ways to understand our smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs. Mythology and literature (and their descendant, the Freudian talking cure) manifest a profound hunger for narrating what is called, paradoxically, the unspeakable. Raped, her tongue torn out, Philomela becomes the nightingale, singing the perpetrator’s guilt. When Oedipus appears with bleeding eye-sockets, the tragic chorus simultaneously narrates and says it cannot speak; it looks while saying it must look away:
Skip to next paragraph
Mail Tribune, 1984
Billy Gilley in 1984, when he was convicted of murdering his parents and sister.
What madness came upon you, what daemon
Leaped on your life with heavier
Punishment than a mortal man can bear?
No: I cannot even
Look at you, poor ruined one.
And I would speak, question, ponder,
If I were able. No.
You make me shudder.In the “Inferno” of Dante, Count Ugolino, forced to cannibalize his children’s corpses, is led to narrate the horror by Dante’s offer to retell the story up in the world above. Genesis 19 not only tells the story of incest between Lot and his daughters, but proceeds to name their offspring: Moab and Ben-ammi, and the Moabites and Ammonites descended from them. Abel’s blood “cries out” with its story, and the fratricide Cain is marked.
June 7, 2008
Discovered Today! 06/08/2008
Adobe’s popular AIR runtime is gaining more and more fans, and with that, far more applications than ever that cover a broad spectrum of tools. From fun applications that let you order pizza from your desktop to applications that let you track your investments online and off , the entire spectrum is out there, and this guide should help you find at least one or two that fit your life.
June 4, 2008
Discovered Today! 06/05/2008
Complex Circular Design Techniques | BittBox
Creating intricate circular designs and patterns may look difficult because the shapes can be very complicated, but you will be surprised at just how easy making these shapes can be. I will go over some neat tricks, tools, techniques, and settings that will have you pumping out perfect circular designs in no time using Illustrator.
This tutorial is split into 2 sections: The Rotate Tool, and a Custom Pattern Brush. The Rotate tool is faster and easier, but less accurate. So lets try it first, then move on to the brush techniques. Note: These techniques are intended for use with circles. Results will vary with other shapes.
Download the shapes I used for this tutorial so you can follow along:
June 3, 2008
Discovered Today! 06/04/2008
Solution Watch - Your descriptive source of solutions - Annotated
Solution Watch surveys the new generation of the web, reviewing and providing in-depth walkthroughs of today’s best products and services.
June 1, 2008
Discovered Today! 06/02/2008
40+ Extremely Beautiful Icon Sets Hand-picked from deviantART
How to Unleash Your Creativity: Scientific American
Discussion by several people including Julia Cameron of "The Artist's Way" about creativity and how to get around creative blocks.
May 24, 2008
May 22, 2008
Discovered Today! 05/23/2008
The Paris Intifada - Granta 101
- bougnole, a racist French term to describe Arabs that dates back to the Algerian War of Independence, 1954–1962, when the French military used torture and terror against Algerian insurgents. The term bavure also comes from the same period. (The most infamous bavure was the so-called Battle of Paris, in October 1961, when a skirmish on the Pont de Neuilly between demonstrating Algerians and police led to a riot that ended with more than a hundred dead North Africans. Their bodies were thrown into the Seine by the police, under the orders of police chief Maurice Papon. Papon had previously been involved in the deportation of Jews during the German occupation of the early 1940s but was not accused of his crimes until the 1990s.)
May 20, 2008
Discovered Today! 05/21/2008
Thomas Pynchon Wiki: Gravity's Rainbow
- Besides the normal meanings, including "theater of war", 'theatre'
is the name that fireworks' organizers call a sky display. - 3.07 crystal palace
See Alpha entry, especially this re cultural meaning:
The Crystal Palace made a strong impression on visitors coming from
all over Europe, including a number of writers. It soon became a
symbol of modernity and civilization, hailed by some and decried by
others. The narrator thinks that human nature will
prefer destruction and chaos to the harmony symbolized by the
Crystal Palace.When the first major international exhibition of arts and
industries was held in London in 1851, the London Crystal Palace
epitomized the achievements of the entire world at a time when
progress was racing forward at a speed never before known to
mankind. The Great Exhibition marked the beginning of a tradition
of world's fairs, which would be held in major cities all across
the globe. Following the success of the London fair, it was
inevitable that other nations would soon try their hand at
organizing their own exhibitions. In fact, the next international
fair was held only two years later, in 1853, in New York City. This
fair would have its own Crystal Palace to symbolize not only the
achievements of the world, but also the nationalistic pride of a
relatively young nation and all that she stood for. Walt Whitman,
the great American poet, wrote in "The Song of the
Exposition":
May 18, 2008
April 11, 2008
Discovered Today! 04/12/2008
War blogger from Russia, American Ex-Pat.
Tons of Book Blogs...great aggregator
April 9, 2008
April 6, 2008
Discovered Today! 04/07/2008
Salman Rushdie talks to Andrew Anthony | By genre | guardian.co.uk Books Annotated
tags: no_tag
The Bookers' favourite
Acclaimed novels, a knighthood and, most tellingingly, the fatwa which forced him into hiding have made him one of the most celebrated, and controversial, authors of our age. His latest book returns to the tortured relationship between East and West; its other obsession is with the power of female beauty. Here he reveals how writing it helped him escape the painful break-up of his marriage to Padma Lakshmi. By Andrew Anthony
Sunday April 6, 2008
The Observer
Among other things, Salman Rushdie's latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, is a hymn to the creative and destructive power of female beauty. The heroine is a young woman of such transporting physical allure that on seeing her men fall instantly and insanely in love, heedless to the ensuing dangers. Wherever could he have come by the idea?
'Ridiculously beautiful, comically beautiful' was how he once described Padma Lakshmi, the woman who became his fourth wife. But in fact, Rushdie insists, he had the concept of the novel before he met the Indian-American model, actress and cookbook author. Still, that piece of chronology won't prevent many readers from glimpsing the shade of Lakshmi in the 'slender' and ravishing 'banquet for the senses' that is Qara Koz, a woman 'meant for palaces, and kings'.
April 5, 2008
March 29, 2008
Discovered Today! 03/30/2008
Smithsonian Magazine | Life Lists | The Smithsonian Life List Annotated
tags: no_tag
"We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to," novelist Graham Greene once wrote. A growing number of Americans of all ages are embracing that idea by renewing a resolve to live life to its fullest.
March 28, 2008
Discovered Today! 03/29/2008
tags: documentaries, television
The Writing Man's Burden | The New York Sun Annotated
tags: islam, literary, politics, quotes
fiercely attacked Mr. Amis for comments he had made to an interviewer on the subject of Islam. Musing on how to combat Islamic terrorism in Britain, Mr. Amis had said: “What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms.”
March 24, 2008
March 18, 2008
March 4, 2008
February 28, 2008
February 25, 2008
February 23, 2008
Discovered Today! 02/24/2008
ManagedQ: The Search Application
tags: search
Mont Blanc Poem by Robert Kelly
tags: poem
HicokOnMorphing.html Annotated
tags: prose
Sydney Lea : Tiny Man
for CSB and JWL
i. Homing to Vermont: Lines Written in Early Spring
The world stays scared to death even here in Zurich,
where I wait for hours to clear security,
and note in a parallel line the tiny man,
scale model, as it were: suspicious tan
and business suit and requisite attaché.
He worries his watch, then furtively adjusts—
as if no one might notice—his male equipment.
The child is father of the man. Our mighty
giant baby son is twenty-two.
Once that baby and one of his cousins walked
our woods-road with us and sang a strange nonce ditty:
Trees have eyes. What did they mean? They grew,
the kids. Grew up. Back then as they chanted their chant,
we all tramped on to the measure of its strains.
The speed of the decades puts my plane’s to shame.
Skunk cabbages shocked that spring along a freshet,
the sighted trees’ pent leaves would burst wide open
within the week. I imagine some crazy person
who dreams just now of my jet burst into flames.
I try to imagine that for the tiny man
all time stopped dead. Ideal—or rather illusion,
frail as warblers among that old spring’s limbs.
What is it, life? For me. For him. For them.
ii. Late Summer, Cedar Waxwings, Northern New Hampshire
I slither the kayak gingerly into the eddy,
snub it against the cutbank, drop an anchor.
Rocking under cottonwood, I spy
on waxwings among high limbs, all nervous, slight,
who flick to the surface for insects, then flick back.
The water drop that’s sliding down my paddle
catches these glimmers of bird, of tree, of clouds
that course overhead. And now it’s as if it holds
in its gleam far more of the world as I have known it
than I’d have dreamed. I want its progress halted.
Only the last of our children is still at home.
That small Swiss passes obliquely through the bubble,
along with weddings, five births, contentments—and heartbreaks:
my father, uncles, one of my brothers. Gone.
The droplet has plashed on the stream, a breeze has come
to shake the foliage. I whisper, Get up and go.
The eddy’s aswirl with foam beneath the trees,
which will watch me, tiny me, as I’m borne downriver.
I wish for no more than surrender to all that is,
having really no choice. How happy I’d feel to banish
my preoccupations, useless as balls on a heifer.
Who used to say that? Uncle? Father? Brother?
iii. Blue Heron, Ozark Autumn
The other brother and I and our old pal Landy
have traveled here for one of our fishing escapes,
where right to the bottom the river is clear as white
grain liquor, the wild trout willing, the countryside
a splendor but for the out-of-scale new houses
crowding the banks, blaspheming. Melancholy
gets to be part of you if you get to be old.
Enough of that, I think, though it still seems true
that everything lovely passes. Or else is ruined.
The others keeps casting while I philosophize,
though I know my use of the term is more than loose.
Maybe true too that “Life’s a bitch and then
you die.” But the notion feels too tawdry, facile.
I ought to be feeling gratitude and grace
and comradeship as I’ve done for a seeming age.
As though to remind me, from a withered riverside maple,
root-killed by excavation, drops the heron,
the tree regarding its languid flap and soar
cross-water, and I the sheer coordination
of its landing there, the shoulders lifting aft
exactly as the great legs swing before
and splayed claws find the gravel-brightened shore.
February 22, 2008
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January 15, 2008
January 9, 2008
January 7, 2008
January 6, 2008
January 4, 2008
January 3, 2008
January 2, 2008
Discovered Today! 01/03/2008
Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs - The New York Review of Books Annotated
Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs
In House to House: An Epic Memoir of War, Staff Sergeant David Bellavia—a gung-ho supporter of the Iraq war—casually recounts how in 2004, while his platoon was on just its second patrol in Iraq,
a civilian candy truck tried to merge with a column of our armored vehicles, only to get run over and squashed. The occupants were smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars. The entire platoon hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours. We stopped, and as we stood guard around the wreckage, we grew increasingly hungry. Finally, I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner candy bars. Others wiped away the gore and fuel from the wrappers and joined me.
This incident is notable mainly for the fact that the platoon stopped; from the many accounts I have read of the Iraq war, when a US convoy runs over a car, it usually just keeps going.
In Chasing Ghosts, Paul Rieckhoff, a graduate of Amherst who led a platoon of Army National Guardsmen in Iraq, describes going out on routine house raids in the summer of 2003 during which his men broke down doors, zipcuffed all the men in sight, and turned rooms upside down in the search for weapons, few of which they ever found. These raids, Rieckhoff writes, "were nasty business. Anybody who enjoyed them was sick. Sometimes I felt like I was a member of the Brown shirts in Nazi Germany." As Rieckhoff later discovered, some of his men were stealing cash found on these raids—a practice that, as other accounts suggest, is not at all uncommon.
As probing and aggressive as the reporting from Iraq has been, it is subject to many filters. There are, for example, "family viewing" standards that make it difficult for journalists to write frankly about such sensitive aspects of military life as the profane language soldiers often use. It's also hard for journalists to get an accurate sense of what soldiers really think. Through embedding, reporters have enjoyed remarkable physical access to the troops, but learning about their true feelings is far more difficult, all the more so since soldiers who speak out too freely can be prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Finally, there are limitations imposed by the political climate in which the press works. Images that seem too graphic or unsettling can cause an uproar. When, for instance, The New York Times in January 2007 ran a photo of a US soldier lying mortally wounded on the ground, the paper was angrily accused of showing disrespect for the troops. More generally, the conduct of US soldiers in the field remains a highly sensitive subject. News organizations that show soldiers in a bad light run the risk of being labeled anti-American, unpatriotic, or—worst of all—"against the troops." In July, for instance, when The New Republic ran a column by a private that recounted several instances of bad behavior by US soldiers, he and the magazine were viciously attacked by conservative bloggers. Most Americans simply do not want to know too much about the acts being carried out in their name, and this serves as a powerful deterrent to editors and producers.
Wright is no less unsparing in describing the backgrounds of the Marines. This is a sensitive topic, with few journalists willing to look too deeply into the composition of the all-volunteer army. Wright has no such qualms. "Culturally," he writes, "these Marines would be virtually unrecognizable to their forebears in the 'Greatest Generation.' They are kids raised on hip-hop, Marilyn Manson and Jerry Springer." There are "former gangbangers, a sprinkling of born-again Christians and quite a few guys who before entering the Corps were daily dope smokers." While some joined the Marines out of prep school or turned down scholarships at universities, more than half "come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents." Together, he writes, these Marines "represent what is more or less America's first generation of disposable children."
Like Fick with his visions of ancient Greece, many of these men arrived in Kuwait full of romantic notions about honor, valor, and sacrifice. From the very start, however, those ideas would be put to the test. Both Fick and Wright express dismay at the layers of incompetence among superior officers with which the men in First Recon must contend. The company's operations chief, while failing to bring along enough batteries for the Marines' critical night-fighting equipment, had the presence of mind to bring a personal video camera, which he plans to use to make a war documentary that he hopes to sell after the invasion. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Ferrando, seems more interested in the Marines' personal appearance than in their preparedness for battle. Addressing them in the Kuwaiti desert on the eve of war, he tells them that when they cross the Euphrates, all mustaches must come off. "We're getting ready to invade a country, and this is what our commander talks to us about?" one soldier says. "Mustaches?"
They are soon approached by five Iraqis dragging two bundles. Inside are two teenaged boys. Both have been wounded—one gravely. Examining him, Doc Bryan, a medic, can see that he's been shot with 5.56mm rounds, a caliber used by the Americans. "Marines shot this boy!" he roars. It's now clear that the distant figures who'd been shot at were not fighters with rifles but shepherds with canes.
Fick runs to company headquarters and explains what has happened. He wants the boys evacuated to a field hospital. The major on duty informs him that Lieutenant Colonel Ferrando is sleeping and can't be disturbed. Fick is livid:
I wanted to tell the major that we were Americans, that Americans don't shoot kids and let them die, that the men in my platoon had to be able to look themselves in the mirror for the rest of their lives.
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