Bolivia and Venezuela cut ties with the Israelis

For the past 21 days, Israel has been attacking the Gaza strip, ostensibly targeting the Islamist group HAMAS, but in actuality mainly killing shitloads of civilians. 30% of the Palestinian dead are women and children. According to figures cited by Reuters around 20 minutes ago, 13 Israelis had been killed (10 of them soldiers) and over 1,055 Palestinians were killed, 670 of whom were civilians. (I hope you've heard about this conflict by now...)

Given the current set up of the world, there's not much that's going to be done about Israel's current attack on Gaza. Israel is just being Israel, and with the exception of the US, they're not going to be influenced by anybody to stop what they're doing. But nonetheless, it's refreshing to see some kind of concrete action by the governments of Bolivia and Venezuela against Israel. Both governments cut all diplomatic ties with the Israelis, with the Venezuelans expelling the Israeli ambassador and embassy staff, and the Bolivians calling on the International Criminal Court to bring human rights abuse charges against Israel.

Paul Auster

I was in my friend's apartment in Syria the other day, browsing through his bookshelves, and I was delighted to find a copy of a book by Paul Auster, which I borrowed and read from cover to cover that very night (finally going to sleep at 0730). The book was Oracle Night. It's about a writer who has just recovered from a serious accident, about his relationship with his wife and about some of his writing. But like other Auster books, it's really about ideas.

One of the main themes of the book is about starting a new life. The main character, inspired by an anecdote in a Raymond Chandler novel*, tries to write a story about a man who is nearly killed in a freak accident, and who then spontaneously abandons his family life in New York in order to start from scratch in a new city. Leaving the house to post some letters, the main character of this story within a story ends up taking a plane to Kansas City to embark on a new and bizarre existence, working in an underground room filled with telephone directories.

Like other Auster books, Oracle Night zips along and is very easy to read, and raises plenty of existential philosophical questions in the reader's mind without ever really pinning anything down. For me, Auster's trademark is the juxtaposition of a set of complex themes about what it means to be human with a straightforwardly written narrative about the day to day activities of a central character. On one hand, his books are very entertaining and earthy, and on the other, it's never quite clear what exactly he is getting at. In the case of Oracle Night, Auster refers to "the power of the random, purely accidental forces that mold our destinies", and the motif of abandoning your life and starting again afresh is an attempt to embrace the randomness of life.

Paul Auster

Auster also writes about writing. Many or most of his protagonists are writers, and I noted one very nice passage in Oracle Night about the process of writing which may evoke feelings familiar to anyone who has searched in vain for inspiration:

"I put down the book and started pacing around the apartment, walking in and out of rooms, scanning the titles of the books on the shelves, parting the curtains and looking through the window at the wet street below, accomplishing nothing for several hours.

Now I'm off to do some reading about Auster online...

* PS: I just learned it's actually Dashiel Hammet rather than Chandler...

Orwellian reading

I recently finished George Orwell's Coming Up For Air, which I bought on the street in Syria for about €0.70. Good to get back to some Orwell. He's one of my favourite writers, to the extent that I can say that he has had a formative effect on my thinking. I would recommend anyone to check out some of his essays, such as 'Politics and the English Language', which are available online. I love his simple, clear writing style. He seems to really hold to the belief that you shouldn't use a big word where a smaller word will do, and that sentences should be short. A big problem with a lot of writing - and particularly academic writing, I'd hazard - is that people like to use very complicated sentence structures. Clarity suffers as a result.

Eric Blair aka George McOrwell

Coming Up For Air is the story of 45-year-old George Bowling, a man who is pissed off with his lot. It is set in the run-up to World War II. Bowling has a wife and family and a job that is unexciting, and he goes back to his village of origin to try to capture something about himself. However, the trip is entirely disillusioning and deflating because his village has been swallowed up by the march of the urban.

The book has been referenced as a forerunner to 1984, and I can see the similarity, although the society depicted in Coming Up For Air is less extreme and the story less intense. Politics are to the forefront however, and the novel deals with a newly emerged middle class of sorts in inter-war England, evoking the misery and defeat of the capitulation to wage slavery. This is my take on it, at least. There isn't really much hopeful coming out of the narrative that I can recall. But maybe there's some hope in the protagonist's vague realisation (which is far from epiphany) that the human experience contains the potential for a more meaningful existence. So there is hope but not redemption methinks.

World War II looms large over the plot, and Bowling's memories of his service in World War I colour his pessimism and apathy.


Listening to Charles Mingus Fables of Faubus in my favourite cafe... Beautiful.

Books I read in 2006

And now I present the long-awaited follow-up to 'Books I read in 2005'. Since 2005, I've been keeping a record of the books I've read each year. Unfortunately this habit kind of fell apart around the end of 2007, but I'm going to try to resurrect it as it's always good to catalogue these things, I find...

Introducing Critical Theory - Stuart Sims & Boris Van Loon

Generation of Swine - Hunter S Thompson
(The great Gonzo journalist's take on the 80s. Lots of stuff about Iran-Contra as I recall.)

Hunter S Thompson

The Plague - Albert Camus
(Supposedly a metaphor for the French resistance to the Nazi occupation, but for me it's more effective as a straight up story about the human condition. It's quite a straightforward narrative about a town that is hit by the plague. First the disease emerges, and then the town is quarantined, and we are treated to an account of life under quarantine and the constant threat of infection. I had high hopes for this book, as The Outsider is one of my favourite books of all time. I'm glad to say that Mr. Camus did not disappoint.)

Tar Baby - Toni Morrison (an audio book)
(This was an amazing book - one of the best I've come across. I've read a couple of Morrison's other books since then and they had nothing on this. But I wonder if that was because it was an audio book? Lynne Thigpen read the text and did a great job of it. But the content of the book was really great. It's centred around the interactions between six characters living in close proximity, along with flashes back and forward from this core setting. There's an elderly white rich guy; his seemingly shallow former beauty queen wife; two of his black servants, themselves a married couple; their niece, a fashion model; and an additional stowaway. The action is primarily set on an island where the elderly rich guy lives in colonial-style luxury. Each of these six characters is drawn in exquisite and believable detail, with all their motivations and inclinations immediately accessible to the reader (or listener). The story basically illustrates how the different filters through which our identity is formed - such as race, gender, age, and social class - shape our interactions with each other. The dynamic between all the characters and the little conflicts between them portray these tensions beautifully.)

Toni Morrison

Reading Lolita in Tehran
(Excellent, but hard not to notice that it's very one-sided politically.)

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
(This was a great account of a society's colonial transition.)

The Cherry Orchard - Anton Chekhov adapted by Tom Murphy
(I went to see this in The Gate. Irish playwright Tom Murphy had adapted this classic to bring in some Irish lingo, most memorably when one of the characters exclaims "Merciful Hour!!")

Roadkill - Kinky Friedman
(Didn't like this at all.)

Beloved - Toni Morrison

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress - Ross O'Carroll Kelly

Inside Track - John Francome

The Namesake

The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri
(This is an absolutely beautiful book about an Indian couple who emigrate to the USA, and about their son's travails as a man who is neither Indian nor North American. Really captures the immigrant experience (not that I've first hand experience of this, of course).)

Firestarter - Stephen King

The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
(Another very worthwhile read.)

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - John McGregor
(A promising book throughout absolutely ruined by a crappy, saccharine, cop-out of an ending. Total rubbish.)

Dancer - Column McCann
(A novelisation of the life of Rudolf Nureyev. McCann is one of the best writers around, and one of the few novelists all of whose books I've read. This was very interesting but I prefer his other books. However, my Russio-Lithuanian friend Sasha assures me that he really captures what Russia is like.)

Nureyev

The LBJ Brigade - William Wilson
(An engaging account of the Vietnam conflict.)

Last Exit To Brooklyn
(Bleak and brilliant - touches what it means to be human.)

Ghostwritten - David Mitchell

Clockers - Richard Price
(A great book made into an even better film by the maestro, Spike Lee.)

Woody Allen - Interviews

From Hell - Alan Moore (a graphic novel)
(This is about Jack the Ripper and was made into a film I really like, directed by the Hughes Brothers, who made a pretty impressive transition from portraying the African American urban ghetto of the US in 'Menace II Society', to the Whitechapel district of 19th century London.)

V for Vendetta - Alan Moore

The Dublin Korean society

To my eternal pride, I am now featured pictorially on the website of the Dublin Korean society, courtesy of my friend Donghyeok. The pictures look a lot better on the society's homepage if you really want to peer closely at pictures of me.



This privilege has inspired me to resurrect my long-defunct blog, which I hope will now blossom again to share my brain activity with the world. But we'll see...

Allen Iverson Highlight vs Kobe Bryant LA Lakers 04/05

Iverson with three or four fantastic alley-oops and a great dunk. 15 assists for AI but 2 for 20 in the first 3 quarters, then 13 points (of 20) in the fourth. Great highlights.

Iverson vs Kobe (2001)

This is a great video of the 2001 NBA Finals. Two of the best shooting guards in the game going up against each other. Iverson the MVP, versus Kobe Bryant who is just a little younger than me. Excellent footage of the battle.

Living a productive life & Capote's In Cold Blood

What a day! It's around 6 in the afternoon, and I've been lounging in bed all day. I've done absolutely nothing since waking up except lie in my cot fooling around on the internet. I joined up to Bebo, and made up a 'how well do you know me' style quiz. I've been looking at various stuff on YouTube as well, such as clips from Apocalypse Now and some basketball. The only drawback is that I've had nothing to eat except a couple of yoghurts and a lump of bread. I'm just after getting dressed this minute, and now I think I'll go across to the shop and buy some ice-cream. I know, I know, I'm an inspiration to you all...

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote

Yesterday I added a book to my 2007 list of books: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Earlier this summer I blogged up a list of all the books I read in 2005, with the 2006 list to follow at some point. I'll publish the 2007 list at some stage next year. It's one of those books I've been meaning to read for a long time. I wanted to read it before I saw that film about Capote that came out recently, so I must rent that out one of these days now that I'm finished. Anyway, the book is a novelised account of a real-life multiple murder that happened in 1959. The novel begins shortly before the murder and ends with the evetual death of the two perpetrators, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. It reminded me of Steinbeck a little, although I'm not sure if that was due to the setting or the writing. Probably a little of both.

Apparently Capote was fascinated by the crime, and he certainly brings the events he's relating to vivid life. He paints an evocative picture of US society and does a great job of getting right inside the skins of each of the characters, even those who are only present for a handful of pages of the book. He also manages to successfully tread a fine line between having some empathy with the killers (particularly Perry Smith), and also emphasising the sheer nastiness and pointlessness of the crime. He manages to draw the events in a way that draws attention to all the contradictions and contingencies of the human experience, so that, for example, it's possible to see Smith as representing all points along a spectrum from cold-hearted, brutal psychopathy to likeable, sympathetic vulnerability.

Killers Perry Smith (top) and Richard Hickock

I believe that Mr. Capote was gay. One thing that I wondered as I read the book was whether Smith and Hickock themselves had some manner of homosexual relationship. They seem to behave like a couple quite a bit, and Hickock has a tendency to call Smith 'honey' when he talks to him. But maybe that was just his way of talking. The book contained a reference to Smith being hassled by 'queers' in the armed forces, all right, but I don't think there were any other overt references to homosexuality. But I wondered if there was a latent current going on there. I'm not for a second suggesting that just because Capote was gay himself, this was all he was able to write about (or think about), or that he was projecting his own sexual identity onto these real-life characters. I just thought that this might have been an undercurrent in the book. I'll probably look into it myself on the interweb at some point.

You wouldn't think I've a thesis to write with all this blogging, novel-reading, internet-browsing, in bed-lying and quiz-making-upping, but I actually have to write 15-20,000 coherent words about International Relations by 6th September. It's a serious struggle. I do put a lot of time into it, and I've a reasonable amount of work done, but I've been finding it extremely slow going. I haven't yet been able to get into any kind of flow with my writing as yet. So far, I've only come up with around 2,000 usable words, and it was an ordeal to squeeze every single one of those out onto the page.

Nonetheless, I actually feel reasonably good about the whole thing. I have a couple of essays that I wrote during the year that I intend to plunder for more wordage, and I'm sticking with my mantra: there's plenty of time... Even though it's almost time to start counting down to the deadline in days instead of weeks... Aaaarghhh...

Plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time plenty of time...