I just went a bit mad today and ordered about 50 books on-line, all different, all for me. Most were from Amazon, although I bought about half a dozen from small used book dealers through the wonderful ABE Books. I ordered them delivered to the UK so that I can bring them back with me in July when we move to Rio. Mostly pent-up demand from my back-list. Here's hoping my baggage allowance survives this experience. I have no real idea how heavy these 50-odd items will be.
Body and Soul calls attention to a travesty of tied American aid for AIDS - to receive the aid, it appears that impoverished African countries must relax their rules against the import of genetically modified food.
An interesting Paul Krugman article on deflation, courtesy of a link from Danny Yee's Pathologically Polymathic.
Krugman's New York Times article explains why falling prices are a bad thing:
... deflation discourages borrowing and spending, the very things a depressed economy needs to get going. And when an economy is in a liquidity trap, the authorities can't offset the depressing effects of deflation by cutting interest rates. So a vicious circle develops. Deflation leads to rising unemployment and falling capacity utilization, which puts more downward pressure on prices and wages, which accelerates deflation, which makes the economy even more depressed. The prospect of such a "deflationary spiral," rather than the mere prospect of deflation, is what scares the I.M.F. - and it should.
One thing I've never been very clear on is how much the price of oil (energy) should be taken into account in worrying about deflation. If the price falls are systemic (ie, if the entire economy receives the same benefit and costs are just removed from the equation) I don't really follow why this is bad for the economy as a whole, especially to the extent that oil is imported (the US imports about half its consumption, IIRC).
While I am crediting Danny's weblog, let me also grab his link to the papers published by Google staff. Not only some cool looking papers, but also a good link through to Cite Seer which looks like another very useful source of academic information.
The US government has left the foreign earned income exclusion in place.
The US is one of a small number of countries that taxes non-resident citizens on income earned outside the country. I fall into this category and benefit from this exemption. It's not to say (so please don't think) that I am a tax avoider. The UK progressive tax structure is steeper than the US system, and I am a happy UK taxpayer. But paying twice would have meant the end of my working in a third country (like Brazil). I am thrilled to see this technicality crawl back under the carpet where it belongs.
I've been a bit of a stranger to this weblog for the past couple of weeks. A bit all-around busier than usual, and then a househunting trip to Rio. Fingers crossed, we've got ourselves a nice little penthouse in Ipanema for the next year. And with our move to Rio, I am contemplating adding some photos to bandiera as well.
I finished reading Richard Powers' Plowing the Dark over the weekend. Compulsive reading - I was on the cusp of not being able to put it down (only the varying demands of fatherhood and husbandhood intervened). A wonderful confluence of art, technology and politics. A search for meaning in worlds of emptiness.
Here's another Powers interview from The Atlantic Unbound.
Next up is Victor Klemperer's diaries from 1933-1941, I Will Bear Witness. I've been wanting to read this for some time, and finally got around to ordering it. I should have ordered the second volume at the same time.
So, southern Brazil was supposed to be the best place in the world to watch last night's lunar eclipse. Websites and newspapers promised us a real show, with the moon turning dark red. The weather forecast was promising. We set the alarms for midnight, about 15 minutes before totality.
Not that we needed to. The baby cried out (most unusual) at about 11:50, so we got up, threw open the shutters and had a look skyward. At clouds. At least we could tell it was dim, despite the full moon. But a bit disappointing nonetheless. We went right back to sleep, even the little one.
For a retired writer, Kurt Vonnegut has a lot to say. Lovely stuff.
What are the conservatives doing with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us? They are telling us to be absolutely terrified, and to run around in circles like chickens with their heads cut off. But they will save us. They are making us take off our shoes at airports. Can anybody here think of a more hilarious practical joke than that one?
Smile, America. You�re on Candid Camera.
(via Moby Lives).
Next up, Plowing the Dark, by Richard Powers. I also bought a copy of Levantado do Chao (Raised from the Ground), by Jose Saramago. This is one of his earliest novels, and I don't see an English translation (all the more challenging, no?).
Finally, finally, I have finished reading Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet. It has taken me nearly three months to get through it, interrupted as I have been by the stream of self-inflicted new titles pouring in from Amazon and ABE Books. Durrell played second fiddle a lot during these past months, but I kept him close enough to hand to make it all the way through (unlike Hobsbawm and Pessoa, still languishing over there on the "current reading" list, where I reckon they will linger a while longer yet).
I enjoyed the experience of reading Durrell, although at times I found it a bit frustrating. In the end, he twists you and pulls you so many different and (sometimes) far-fetched ways, you cannot help but think you are on an encyclopedic tour of the forms that love can take.
Toward the end, I actually found myself echoing Durrell (one thing he does quite well is put his first-person narrator, Darley, in the shadow of a superior writer called Pursewarden). Durrell reads Pursewarden's writing, and you start to see Pursewarden's style in Darley, but Darley still leaves some of the masterstrokes, especially of the established English tradition in writing, for Pursewarden's pen. Darley fears that, having read Pursewarden, he will never turn out to be a great writer. For myself, having endured Alex, I wonder if I will ever have the patience to sit down and produce something on a scale like this.
I say that, and yet the scale is quite intimate, so there must be (and is) something of a depth to the writing. Because he approaches the same story several times over, and each time it grows more profound (and twisted). But each pass tells you more about the characters until at the end - I wouldn't say they are surreal, but they are very human.
Maybe the only character that takes full form is Alexandria, the city itself. But one will never know. I found myself looking back in my memory for any semblance to the place that I visited. But I was only there a short time (a week) and I certainly never came to know and haunt a place like Darley's ex-pats. And, of course, the Alexandria of the late 1930s and 1940s exists no longer except in places like Durrell's quartet.
If I have one complaint, it's that the last volume, Clea seemed a bit stage-managed. There's the quote from Chekhov about introducing a gun in the first act and having to see it used. This happens in Clea. All of its scenes on the sandbar beach seem a bit contrived. And to keep the twists going, things do keep getting more and more twisted and interconnected (sometimes just a bit too coincidentally). Maybe this was because Durrell was revisiting this story over a long period of time and continued to need material to keep it fresh. I wonder if he'd thought of the plot of Clea when he was writing the first volumes, or if his points continued to evolve over the years.
I find myself very curious to read Durrell's correspondence with Henry Miller, which I understand was published. I wonder a lot about the isolation he endured in Greece - how productive that must have been for him. I'd like to read more about him and may pursue some biographical material, as well as read his last work, Caesar's Vast Ghost, about Provence and, eventually, finish (i.e., re-read) Bitter Lemons, the only other book of his I currently own.
Why was I thinking of bonfires? I can't remember, but once the idea took hold, it came clear to me that I wasn't doing a very good job of putting that sense of wonder about living into my daughter's mind. Because we're not doing anything very singular in our lives. Anything that would stand out and make a strong impression in her mind (or my own). I guess a bonfire has that effect - memories from childhood. Kind of spooky. But I was thinking about dancing, maybe some madrigal music, that kind of thing.
Anyway, I came across a quote in Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet:
If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself[.]
Via Slashdot's recent Q&A with Warren Ellis, a link to this sensitive and well-done graphic novel, Nowhere Girl by Justine Shaw.
What's remarkable about this is that she is publishing it only on the web so far, and apparently without any financial gain. No, you have to look at this site to understand what a job that is!
So, what keeps work like this from being commercial? Maybe sexual politics. The subject matter (so far) is a young Asian-American lesbian coming to grips with her sexuality and her place in society. But laid out like this, it makes a brilliant point about how human this all is...how universal. Shaw says in an interview on Technodyke,
EJ: What kind of response have you gotten?
JS: Well, most of the emails I've gotten have been from young hetero males who say they relate to Jamie. They were the kids who didn' t fit in to the straight male pecking order at school, who were into computers, or Dungeons and Dragons, or what have you. A lot of them, anyway. They were picked on, singled out, physically brutalized by their peers.
Worth a look, and in consideration of what Warren Ellis says in the interview, consider the point made again about the potential for graphic novels as a medium beyond "the funnies" to at least one more potential reader (I've read the Maus books).
Randinho at Beautiful Horizons links an article in the Miami Herald reporting on the recent surge in gang-related violence in Rio de Janeiro. As we are looking to move there in a couple of months, it makes for very chilling (and, from my own understanding of the local news, very accurate) reading.
The drug gangs control (and effectively 'police') large parts of the favelas - the poorest areas of provisional shanty housing that cling to Rio's hillsides. The status quo is that they police, and the police steer clear. However, when provoked, their ferocity overwhelms the capabilites of the poorly-paid, unmotivated and sometimes corrupt police force. And now, enter the provocation.
Lately the police have been increasing their diligence (the promises of the politicians at the last election). The drug gangs have moved down from the favelas to take on the police on their own turf - the streets, highways and public places of the more established city. The police are outgunned and unable to cope with the resort to "terrorist tactics".
What to do? The police admit that they can't win the fight themselves. My own view is that the relationships on the ground are too incestuous. Breaking down the existing status quo is probably responsible for a large measure of the violent spillover, but this work, once started, needs to be carried through to a new point of stability - one where, preferably, the police will have the upper hand, and the gangs will recede further back than the previous status quo.
Brazilians are leery of the return of the military to their streets - the memory of decades of dictatorship is too fresh - but soldiers have been used in recent months to keep the peace, without any threat to the democracy of the state. I suppose that the Lula government has enough goodwill to take extraordinary measures to solve this problem. But the military alone cannot solve this problem either. The question is, what will it take
In the US, the Senate has proposed eliminating the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion which allows expatriate Americans to exempt up to $80,000 of their income from US taxation. Normally, these people pay tax to foreign governments, so it's not like tax-free income (especially in high-tax countries), but it is exempted from the total in counting US-taxed income.
Eliminating this exemption will penalise ex-pats, who tend to be working in industries like oil, finance, high technology and consulting, leading the way in the export of American services to the rest of the world. My own interests declared - I count myself in this group of people.
The intent of this legislation is to free up enough money to fund a dividend tax cut for fat cats (in the final analysis, the main beneficiaries of this cut will be those who directly hold stock in dividend-paying companies). The government's trickle-down speculation is that this money, untaxed, would finance growth in the US economy.
Two little things - if it taxes the leading edge of the US export economy (the cost per worker could be as high as $25,000, although it will be lower in high-tax countries) - it could be handing these international jobs to other nationalities. And many companies themselves finance the extra tax burden of overseas employees, which means this would effectively be a tax on companies that do business overseas - like, well, oil companies, computer firms, banks. Friends of the White House.
Anyway, I can't believe the error of the US government at present in persisting with tax cut legislation when the dollar is especially weak (good for exports) and the US deficit has once again begun to soar. It is an especially blatant demonstration of the risks of alignment between the legislative and executive branches of government.
Somewhere in the blogosphere I saw these referred to as "deficit increases rather than tax cuts." If your own house is not in order, you have precious little business making it even worse by funding a tax cut that only benefits the wealthiest and will not stimulate the economy. And if in order to give away such a break you further cripple your own economy? One commentator in the Financial Times remarked that double taxation of Americans overseas was "an economic weapon of mass destruction." Hear, hear.
Thomas Pynchon on George Orwell's 1984, courtesy of a brief link at The Sideshow.
Body and Soul reproduces in entirety a speech made by John Brady Kiesling, the former US State Department employee whose resignation letter to Colin Powell reflected the conscience of a nation divorced from its founding principles.
Kiesling makes a convincing argument. You can read in his words a regret at having to leave behind a career that was not always perfect, but on balance gave him the satisfaction of representing "good" in the world. You can read his pain at having that Manichean judgement overturned in his developing sense that the world now perceived him to be an agent of "evil."
If a gun were held to the heads of Europeans, and they were forced to declare between black and white, 80 percent of them would conclude, at least at the moment, that the United States is evil rather than good. I suspect that the percentage of Middle Easterners would be closer to 95 percent; I'm not qualified to speak for Asians or Latin Americans, but the trend seems similar.
This is a man who has been out and met the wide diversity of people that make up the world. Innocent people. Ordinary citizens who now see his country as an lying, inept terrorising state. He has come home from overseas, and now he is telling his countrymen - the counterparts of those who perceive this evil - that it is time for a change. America is being poorly served by its government.
I think it is time and past time to stand up to the schoolyard bullies in Washington, not on partisan political terms but to defend threatened national values and interests. We should demand from the American electorate, from the American business community, from the academic world, a foreign policy based on understanding that the world's interests and our interests are inseparable.
With a Scottish wife, my attention turns from time to time to things Scottish, and this year's elections to the Scottish Parliament are worthy of a moment's comment. Primarily, in light of my recent post about the American democracy (not that I added anything original to the discussion), it is life-affirming to see Scotland move so far away from its established major parties. With devolution, Scottish politics became more local. And now, at their first major waymark post-devolution, the people have shown an interest in local issues and in speaking their minds. Socialists and Greens have been elected at the Scottish constituency level, and this matters - the Scottish government controls its own budgets and has tax-varying authority over the UK norms.
The Scottish system is different to the rest of the UK, and as their decisions take hold and Scotland evolves differently to the rest of the UK, it will be valuable to see if and how this experiment in democracy bears fruit. As an aside, Scotland has one of the most open governments in the world, and the Scottish Parliament has a major role in making itself, its proceedings and its process as open to all citizens as possible - so open, I've read, that sometimes people wish it was a little less so.
Robot Wisdom links to this article by Sam Smith's Progressive Review about the failure of American democracy. I think the focal point is the paving over of the average American's political instinct by honed and cynical television campaigns. Politics is big business, with even bigger dividends. Too important to be left to the people.
Left me wondering anew how I will teach my children about their American selves.
Having just finished reading Merton, I was interested in the opportunity to attend mass and to see again the celebration(although not a Catholic, I have been to many masses), but this time in a different light - a light of deeper understanding of the mysteries. And I have to claim disappointment, try as I have to take away some positives.
Now, it may be that because this was a special celebration commemorating the 50th anniversary of the arrival of an order of nuns, the Daughters of the Cross, that liberties were taken with the ceremony. I was a bit disturbed to see nine priests more or less enthusiastically encouraging this form of worship. It struck me as beneath their dignity.
What's bothering me is this. The bible is brought to the front of the church. Five girls form the procession, four short ones holding coloured ribbons tied to the taller fifth girl's headpiece, forming a little sacred space (I guess) (maypole?). The four bear candles, the fifth the bible, opened to its text. And then the music starts. And then the girls start to dance, while carrying the bible down to the altar. And the one in the middle is turning, and waving the bible to the assembled faithful, while dancing in time to the music and smiling broadly. And when the bible reaches the altar, an enthusiastic round of applause, prompted by a strong signal from the choir.
Raised to respect the mass, if not to partake, I found this rather alarming. I am sure that admitting such variations to the mass is an acceptance of the vernacular and traditions of the local into the body of the Church, but I still found it distasteful. Maybe I'm just being fuddy-duddish, but that would not be the church for me.
My wife and I talked about it afterward. She has a term I really enjoy to classify what I would call feel-good, all-singing, all-dancing enthusiastic worship. Happy-clappy. That's what this was, without question.
The service itself was a real mix. Most of the priests officiating were not native Portuguese speakers. I was able to follow nearly all of their clear, textbook Portuguese. I am sure the locals were as well. I suppose that the study of Latin makes it easier to get Portuguese, although my own recall of four years of Latin does not help me when I look at written Latin - I have forgotten too much of the "small stuff" - the prepositions, the word order. I probably never will forget the declensions and conjugations, and I am sure Latin explains my own understanding of English grammar.
Much of the mass was sung, but again, in an evangelical bent. My guess is that the Church here feels the need to compete with evangelicals. Brazil is a Catholic country, but the evangelicals have certainly made in-roads. A church that cannot respond to the needs of its people will lose those people. But I guess I raise the question of how far the church should lean to keep such needs within the big tent. I know this is far from an original question.
I'm putting the finishing touches on reading three books. First, the previously mentioned Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton, next the brief essay by Rachel Carson, enhanced with beautiful photographs and published as The Sense of Wonder, and finally, Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac.
Separately, each is a lovely book. Merton's story of his conversion to the Catholic faith and entry into a Trappist monastery has moved me beyond mention. I probably have more questions than answers about the mysteries of Christianity, but I suppose that Merton's book is more about taking the time to ask the questions than to let them remain unanswered. And throughout it is a sense of the world innately more valuable than as a backdrop on which to play out our modern lives. The book has its flaws, most of which are cited in the introduction. I reckon it is important to realise that this was the work of a young man just entering the monastery; just taking up his vocation. From what I know of Merton, the depth of his spiritual understanding continued to increase throughout his life, and I reckon he may have wished to amend the book later in life - perhaps his later writings serve as that coda - I have not read enough of them to know.
Carson's essay is adapted and apparently fleshed out from an article she published in a magazine in the 1950s. It makes the simple point that children need to be in nature to develop the sense of wonder, and that an adult who is aware of that awakening sense should accompany the child - both to "grow" more of that sense of wonder himself and to enable the child to expand as far as possible in a safe environment. My copy has a raft of beautiful photos taken in nature in the surroundings in which Carson lived and wrote this essay. It's a fit tribute and a message to the future, and has made me think more about the role I want to have in raising my child(ren).
Finally, Leopold's book starts as a study of nature as observed in a year on his farm in a poor, sandy part of central Wisconsin in the 1940s. Leopold's eye as a conservationist has evidently developed from his life spent close to nature and to wild places. He makes the point that the more we are educated, the less we know.
In truth, all three books tend to make this point. There is much more to life than an objective, scientific viewpoint. Maybe I am reaching the point where I think I have learned this lesson in theory and now need to put it into practice. I think that is what my seeking is about. I can't claim to be deeply religious or in deep nature or deep ecology - yet. But I feel strongly that these are areas into which I need to expand my consciousness.
I am fairly well convinced that the two go hand in hand, and that making my life, and my family's lives, whole will involve completing the cycle of coming back to knowledge of nature, and back to knowledge of God, and uniting the two.
The Pope wrote in his most recent encyclical about the pilgrim church completing its journey back to God. I feel the call of the land; the call to re-unite myself with it. I feel that in that the reconciliation of myself to the land, my need for spiritual fullness will also be completed. I guess what remains is but to take the first steps.
Of course we have just moved in the opposite direction.
I had been hesitating buying the DVD of Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain as the release in Brazil does not have English subtitles. Until now. Or so I thought. I shouldn't have waited so long.
First, because although the box does say it has legendas in English, the disk itself does not. So, French or Portuguese. And second, because tanto faz - it doesn't really matter.
I first saw this film in France, in French, in a cinema in Avignon. My French was better then - fresher. I was travelling on my own, saw the reviews of the film and was captivated by Amelie's (Audrey Tautou) smile. And I was able to follow most of the film in French.
I've since seen it in English, and now with Portuguese subtitles (no problem). And no matter what language you see the film in, it's still fantastic. Really well done. There's a line in the beginning about how Amelie likes to watch films and observe the small details that no one else spots. So, it's a challenge to watch this film closely for "easter eggs" and other inside jokes.
Most of all, I love the sense in this film of a life lived on the outside of conformity. The people in this film are all misfits, living their lives in a strangely functional but solitary manner. Does it have a message? That there are more outsiders than insiders, perhaps.
Critics at the time cited the unreal portrayal of Paris; the absence of minorities, crowds, etc. "It's not real!" Spoilsports, I say. The whole film is surreal and quirky and revels in its own atmosphere. I love it so much I watched it twice this weekend.
In my 14 years of working and travelling internationally, I think yesterday was the first time I have ever had a May 1st Labour Day holiday. I had to look around on the web to explain to my colleagues why the US does not celebrate on May 1 like so many other countries.
Growing up at the end of the Cold War, I can remember how the nightly news, on that day, would show the Soviet military parades through Red Square. Who would want, it was argued then (or so it seemed) to celebrate the same holiday as people like that. Who indeed.
Labour Day (or Workers' Day, depending on where you are and how you translate) has its origins in the US, but subsequent US governments apparently found little common ground with the events in their own past that gave rise and strength to the worker's movement. To honour workers is one thing; to honour their struggle against the bosses for decent working standards is another altogether.
In my search, I learned that, contrary to my own understanding, several other countries do not celebrate 1 May as a holiday. The UK, Canada and The Netherlands all do not have a public holiday on 1st May (unless, in the UK, it coincides with the first Monday of the month). The UK has a bank holiday on the first Monday, the Netherlands have their queen's birthday on 30th April (close enough?) and Canada has gone the route of the US with a summer-ending holiday the first Monday in September.
So, with a bit of history, I enjoyed my May 1st holiday. And I spent it working, not for my company, but for myself - updating the accounts, doing some filing, getting better organised. It was a day spent labouring, but as a result I should have a weekend free for other pursuits. And although I have not "bridged" to the weekend, making a 4-day break, I have found the utilitarian joys of the midweek holiday to be a concept worthy of future consideration.