Book Reviews
Darin
1Q84, Haruki Murakami, Alfred A Knopf, NY,
2011.
The December 2011 Playboy gave this book a decent review;
granted it is a decent book, it is a book that I believe that should bear a
disclaimer. If you read Murakami’s The
Wind Up Bird Chronicles, you would know that he graphically uses torture
and violence in horrific ways albeit briefly, due to his describing WW2
activities in the orient. Cultism and rape play a role in the “edgy,” novel 1Q84. The cultism is at least related to
his previous non-fiction account of Tokyo saran gas victim interviews in Underground, (1997-98,) which is a very
fascinatingly depressing tirade and his only book that I might not ever finish.
The rape in 1Q84 is child molestation
and it clearly is linked to a cult depicted in the book. He does do a “good
cult,” “bad cult,” routine, and highlights the bad cult specifically, the
better one being a separatist sub-group from the bad cult one. I guess aging
hippies had enough of the cult leader’s blatant religious voo-doo bullshit and
moved away in order to protect people’s children. 1Q84 is also a gritty mafia tale; there are at least two murders.
Thankfully it’s not Tom Clancy, but it was a drag sometimes waiting for revenge
and redemption. (925 pages.) The ending was okay, just not great, and I have
more than one opinion to back that up. It took too long, revenge is not good
for business, it is after all a dish best served cold. But if you have Playboy willing to give you a great
review, I guess it doesn’t matter what your accountant or publisher warns you
about. It’s a great example of Murphy’s Law for diehard Murakami fans who have
probably wished for a better lengthy novel, kind of a nasty twist of fate.
Somehow he still keeps us guessing. Brilliant novel, not his best. If you are
new to Murakami read Kafka On The Shore,
or Dance, Dance, Dance, if you like
Kathy Acker, you might try, his The Hard
Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which is often thought to be
surreal, although I might be the only one who would think to make the
correlation. [I’m not, it was my former professor.]
A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary
Communities That Arise In Disaster. Rebecca Solnit, 2009, Viking. 369
Pages.
PUNK AS FUCK! Solnit’s prose or
style is somewhat feminine or “dreamy,” to the uninitiated, compared to most
political science/urban analysts that I have read. She nails her topics and
kicks ass like any other author in her field. Solnit however, offers a more
orchestrated analysis, often poetic [at least compared to some, imagine it is a
dry science,] rendition of truth. She is usually at least somewhat gentle with
statistics, compared to other authors, and to her earlier work and
collaborations, she isn’t smashing facts and figures over your head for shock
value. Solnit also points out that Shock
Doctrine, by Naomi Klein is more sensationalist, and not necessarily
pointing out solutions. Solnit does.
During the drama of the 1909 San
Francisco earthquake, the US Army actually prevented help from occurring [like
during Katrina,] and caused more damage! She recalls the Army using dynamite to
destroy wooden buildings in the fire’s path, except they hadn’t planned on
exploding a warehouse full of spirits and turpentine, which further engulfed
that part of San Francisco. Like in
Katrina residents and citizens already of 1909 S.F. citizens had organized and
planned to save the city from disaster, of course they were impeded. Solnit
recalls volunteer fire persons, tent cities and sidewalk kitchens that united
all walks of life to the new realities of life in and after disaster.
In 1917 at Halifax, Nova Scotia a
terrible naval munitions explosion took the entirety of the busy dock
community, and took the city with it. This one is somewhat obscure to folks in
the United States, however most people did what they could to save lives, and
they were for the most part unimpeded by red tape or bureaucracy, there
couldn’t have been any time for that kind of
bullshit then. Many very brave people did amazing things to save others,
sometimes at the price of their own lives.
The 1985 Mexico City earthquake is
one of the most revolutionary examples. David McNally’s book on anti-capitalism
[also highly recommended,] had previously painted most of the picture about
this topic for me. Solnit drives it home really painting it black for city
planners, contractors, and government corruption that was responsible for so
much death and destruction. In most
cases factory owners would save their machinery from destroyed buildings, and
completely ignore the screams from people buried underneath in the rubble! The
grass roots people power that arose from the 1985 earthquake became a much
larger political force that forced change in Mexico and gained national support
with the help of the Chiapas Zapatistas, a completely amazing story of
community radicalism that arose from disaster.
I bought this for my dad’s birthday
last year to try to explain to him what it is I’m studying, he knew, he at
least said that he had not known that ten thousand anarchists from the Americas
and elsewhere had swamped the New Orleans area after Katrina to try to offer
help there, I had forgotten also.
“Anarchists are funny, they can slip
through into restricted areas, tell folks on the inside what’s up elsewhere and
vice versa. Sneaky bastards skilled in urbanism can weave their way around and
fix stuff that would seem otherwise restricted to effort. Certainly for the
sake of survival, anarchists were not the only ones doing this. I keep flashing
on the riverboat people trying to transport people to the city/county to the east;
every time they got turned around by secularists they would push out and try to
dock elsewhere. The only bridge to the eastern river community was block by
their police and sheriff; it’s basically a grotesque lesson in racism and
economic inequality. Many deaths didn’t have to occur, my theory is that Bush
committed genocide, because he is a complete fucking asshole…[My review of Impeach The President is coming up
next!] …This isn’t gentrification anymore, and even the word gentrification is
simply a trumped up way of expressing genocide related to economic inequality. Urban
analysts can shuffle around nicer terminology all they want, while people are
starving to death and their academic research makes the Harvard Review, I don’t need anyone to pardon my scoffing or
disbelief.” [Paraphrasing Solnit.]
The Katrina section takes up a larger
section of the book, sometimes enraging, sometimes depressing or sad, like most
of the sections; she explains the disaster in Louisiana from first-hand
accounts in her interviewing / research process.
Rebecca Solnit is PUNK AS FUCK! Look
up Infinite City if you love
subculture or the San Francisco bay area, and look up River of Shadows, if you love either SF, or black and white photography,
or history. You are also welcome to try her year 2000 SF gentrification
collaboration with Susan Schwartzenberg, which actually unfortunately pre-dates
the silicon bust which happened the year of press. So far that is all I have
read from her, except articles. She has at least two awesome articles on Occupy
out there somewhere, and via [I know, I know…] facebook I learned that she is
currently researching Occupy anywhere other than SF [dated information: Fall
2012,] she might be interested in your Occupy stories, I know here at Slingshot we are; so for you die hard
Solnit fans that is as much scoop as I have!
Impeach The President: The Case Against Bush And
Cheney,
Dennis Loo and Peter Phillip, Seven Stories Press, NY, 2006, 308 pages.
I
read this because I figured out I wanted to read the sequel. Sometimes during a
presidential administration it’s a good idea to review the previous one. There
are at least a dozen short essays in this book whose primary topic is political
impeachment due to extremely grotesque / unheard of neglect and incompetence.
Most of these authors are professors, Dennis Bernstein (Pacfica Radio’s Flashpoints,) and Dahr Jamail (BBC, KPFA, and various other English /Scottish
media,) obviously are primarily public media moguls. There are at least two
articles whose primary argument for impeachment involves very specific points
against the oil sucking capitalist/neo-liberal vampires who have seized control
of the world, the corporate oligarchy. The
Downing Street Memos, 9-11, Iraq, hurricane Katrina, climate change, Haiti
(the CIA coup d’état against Aristide and his country,) global dominance, detention,
and torture are all prominent arguments by various authors in the quest for
impeachment last decade. I cannot approve of this book well enough. The best
way to understand the evils of today is to understand the evils of the past. In
other words two wrongs don’t make a right. I read Chapter 13: The Other Regime Change: Overthrowing
Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrande Aristide, by Lyn Duf and Dennis Bernstein
on the train to visit my folks for Christmas in 2011, that turned out not to be
the most emotionally appropriate time to read that particular chapter. You will
need to take breaks between chapters as it gets pretty distressing sometimes.
Spending time reading this watching the tentacles of the IMF and World Bank extend
for their nefarious purposes is an eye opener.
“[OBAMA’s-my emphasis,] Bush-Cheney’s
greed is staggering, and yet such vast self-dealing is, in fact, the least
remarkable of this regime’s high crimes and misdemeanors. Far more dangerous
than all its merely larcenous activity is its imperial crusade for total power.
In this regard as well it has attained new heights. Mainly through the PATRIOT
Act, but also through such steps as the establishment of “First Amendment
Zones” [NDAA, CISPA, indefinite detention, rendition, extension
of warfare and amending efforts for oil company profiteering, and corporate
privateering, ecocide, genocide, economic inequality…my emphasis,] and
other wholly arbitrary measures, this regime has outdone every prior
presidential stroke of war time tyranny, from John Adams’ Alien and Sedition
Act to all of the repressive legislation of the Cold War’s first ten years.
Such dictatorial strokes, however dangerous, were meant to stay in force no
longer than the conflicts that had spawned them, and in every case the enemy
was largely massed somewhere, or thought to be, on Planet Earth. (Even the Cold
War, however daunting its projection, could be seen as someday ceasing through
the Kremlin’s victory of surrender.)”
“This war is something else entirely. Since
“terror” is only what [OBAMA,] Bush-Cheney
say it is, their war against it is no likelier to conclude than, say, a “War on
Darkness,” or a “War on Smoke.” This war,
in other words, is no mere terminable clash, like all the prior wars in human
history, but an unprecedented national crusade to wipe out all the evil in the
world-total struggle that can only end when all the world, and human history
itself, have ended too. Since this war must be final, then it has necessarily entailed a program of repression far
more comprehensive than the mere draconian decrees of 1798 or 1917. Whereas
such prior measures were meant just to silence the dissenters of the moment, [OBAMA]Bush-Cheney’s ongoing crackdown
is intended to stamp out all opposition or divergence absolutely-not just the
dissent we hear (or not) today, but any dissidence that could break out, should
there be any place where it might be permitted to arise, or any medium through
which it might find marginal expression.”
Chapter 10, Bush-Cheney’s War On The Enlightenment,
Mark Crispin Miller. In many ways Impeach
The President… already is the
sequel. My final analysis is that Socialism seems to work very well for the
Icelanders…Anarchism is becoming more of an honorable consideration / solution as
time goes on. Read this book!
Klingon Bird of Prey: IKS Rotarran,
(B’Rel-class,)Rick Sternback, and Ben Robinson, Haynes Publishing, November 2012
Their Enterprise manual came out in 2010,
and makes the wait for the next Abrams film even more excruciating. The Klingon Dictionary came out in 1985,
I was twelve and did not get a copy until I was 26. That was a painful wait for
me personally. Luckily there was also Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, Rick Sternbach &
Michael Okuda, Pocket Books, 1991, 184 pages, which you should read if you
intend to serve aboard The Enterprise.
Rather than glorify Haynes for doing a smash job I will share a quote from the
second URL link.
“We Klingons are
a proud and honourable race and it was an affront to our people that Haynes had
not produced a manual for our warship. Following a meeting of the High Council
we have decided to spare your lives for now.” –Klingon High Chancellor Martok
That obviously
was too long a wait.
Without the Haynes Bird Of Prey [B’Rel] Operations Manual,
we cannot know the following: In case of a ship board operations emergency, due
to combat, or what have you, use the quantum dampener co-axel to regulate the
energy flow and adjust this to use to re-power your engine batteries, phaser
banks,[typical engineering techniques obviously,] or to use for a short-term
long distance hyper-drive [the etymology of this engineering discovery is
classified.] You can also re-route the quantum co-axel to your shield
generators and create a photonic pulse wave that will prevent being boarded by
your enemies [based on study of Romulan technology.] Your Occupation Fleet
Captains and Generals will begin training their fleet crews on these techniques
immediately if they had not already done so. All augmentations and related
useful techniques to incorporate Borg technology to the Occupation Fleet are
likewise classified. Qa-Pla! The end note here is that the Haynes Bird of Prey was inspirational enough for me to do a sci-fi
comparative analysis. http://darinorsteven.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-occupy-translates-into-klingon.html
No comments:
Post a Comment