05w46:1 Modern Times Posted November 15th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 46 number 1 (modern times) ——————————————————————— We Now Live in a Fascist State | Lewis H. Lapham http://organicconsumers.org/Politics/harpers101205.cfm “We’re Americans; we have the money and the know-how to succeed where Hitler failed, and history has favored us with advantages not given to the early pioneers. We don’t have to burn any books. The Nazis in the 1930s were forced to waste precious time and money on the inoculation of the German citizenry, too well-educated for its own good, against the infections of impermissible thought. We can count it as a blessing that we don’t bear the burden of an educated citizenry. The systematic destruction of the public-school and library systems over the last thirty years, a program wisely carried out under administrations both Republican and Democratic, protects the market for the sale and distribution of the government’s propaganda posters. The publishing companies can print as many books as will guarantee their profit (books on any and all subjects, some of them even truthful), but to people who don’t know how to read or think, they do as little harm as snowflakes falling on a frozen pond. “ Writers and the Golden Age | Allan Massie http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/pulpit_nov_05.html “Of course, the idea that art necessarily finds expression in protest, or is essentially a means of protesting, whether from the Right or the Left, is itself, comparatively speaking, modern. It dates from the Romantic movement. Before then, much art was a celebration of the established order, and inasmuch as it was critical, the criticism was directed at those who would disturb that order. Satire, for instance, was generally conservative. Its anger and contempt were aroused by folly and the vanity and vices of the present day; the satirist harked back to a (doubtless imaginary) Golden Age. […] The Left, ever since Rousseau, has seen man as essentially good, in chains only on account of the institutions of a cruel and corrupt society. Loosen his chains, strike off his fetters, and the natural benevolence of his nature will be free to flourish. For the Left the Golden Age is still to come. The Right, however, sees our nature as essentially flawed. […]Left-wing artists, however angry, are optimists; right-wing ones, however serene or witty, are pessimists. Yet the same man may be of the Left in his politics, opinions, and daily life, but of the Right in his Art. Graham Greene is a good example: politically on the Left, nevertheless on the Right in the view of man’s nature which informs his novels.” What’s a Modern Girl to Do? | Maureen Dowd http://tinyurl.com/aany5 “‘What I find most disturbing about the 1950’s-ification and retrogression of women’s lives is that it has seeped into the corporate and social culture, where it can do real damage,’ she complains. ‘Otherwise intelligent men, who know women still earn less than men as a rule, say things like: ‘I’ll get the check. You only have girl money.” Throughout the long, dark ages of undisputed patriarchy, women connived to trade beauty and sex for affluence and status. In the first flush of feminism, women offered to pay half the check with ‘woman money’ as a way to show that these crass calculations – that a woman’s worth in society was determined by her looks, that she was an ornament up for sale to the highest bidder – no longer applied. Now dating etiquette has reverted. Young women no longer care about using the check to assert their equality. They care about using it to assess their sexuality. Going Dutch is an archaic feminist relic. Young women talk about it with disbelief and disdain. ‘It’s a scuzzy 70’s thing, like platform shoes on men,’ one told me.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 15 November 2005 @ 11:17 PM
05w02:2 Good Reading Posted January 13th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 2 number 2 (good reading) Today is Goodreads 1st birthday, and to celebrate, here is an article on autodidacticism. But before that, I feel I should acknowledge the following people who have in some way helped Goodreads over the past 12 months: Instant Coffee, Sarah Hollenberg, Izida Zorde, Chris Hand, Andrew Kear, Sally McKay, and Jennifer McMackon, thank you. As well, I should thank the following who have allowed Goodreads to host their content free of charge: AA Bronson, Andy Paterson, Greg Bear, Mark Kingwell, and Reid Cooper, it is much appreciated.Also, last weekend in the National Post, RM Vaughan wrote an article about artists using the internet, and included Goodreads. With his permission, the article can be seen here. – Timothy ——————————————————————— The Classics in the Slums | Jonathan Rose http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_4_urbanities-classics.html “…like so many postmodern critics, Professor Smith could be naively confident that she was in full possession of the facts, even without the benefit of research. But her theory had no visible means of support. Whenever it was tested, the results were diametrically opposed to what she predicted: in fact ‘the canon’ enabled ‘the masses’ to become thinking individuals. Until fairly recently, Britain had an amazingly vital autodidact culture, where a large minority of the working classes passionately pursued classic literature, philosophy, and music. They were denied the educational privileges that Professor Smith enjoyed, but they knew that the ‘great books’ that she derided would emancipate the workers. […] Kurt Wootton taught English at a Providence high school where the students were almost all black and half of them dropped out before graduation. He assigned them Richard Wright’s Black Boy and jazz by John Coltrane, which they found hopelessly irrelevant. Then he organized ArtsLit, a summer program that brings students from Rhode Island’s worst high schools to the Brown University campus to study and perform Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, GarcÃa Lorca’s Blood Wedding, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And these long-dead authors clearly sent the kids a message, as high school teacher Richard Kinslow found when he had his ESL class prepare a production of Macbeth. One of his students was the type who got suspended about once a week, but he would sneak into school for the daily rehearsals. His motivation was precisely the same as Edith Hall’s. ‘These kids had never been actively involved in any part of school except gym and art,’ explained Kinslow. ‘Doing Shakespeare honored them. If you want to talk about self-respect and pride, it made a big difference.'” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Thursday 13 January 2005 @ 2:23 PM
04w40:1 Good Writing Posted September 27th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 40 number 1 (good writing) Of course, the answer to the question, ‘what makes a good read?’ is good writing. And I’ve been told that I’m a good writer, perhaps because somewhere along the way, after reading so much, I picked up a certain confidence through imitation. But I’m also quite conscious of the lessons imparted by Orwell in his 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’. Reading it within the context of today’s politics makes it seem ahead of its time, surrounded as we are by the flaccid rhetoric of the Bush Administration who tend to oversimplify and obfuscate the complicated truths they so effortlessly deny. At the time that it was written, for anything to make it into print or radio it had to survive the whims of editors, or in the case of political speeches like those of Churchill, still fresh, the taste of voters. It seems important then to revisit this classic essay because while most of us aren’t published in the ‘legacy media’ (as the triumvirate of print, radio, and television are becoming known) we are writing all the time. Email especially is a form of instantaneous publishing (this itself being a great example) most of us deal with everyday, after which comes the blog, that ‘revolution’ people have been freaking out about all year. And as Orwell wrote, better writing means clearer thinking, “and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration”. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Politics and the English Language | George Orwell http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/orwell.htm “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” Writing Classic Prose | Denis Dutton http://www.denisdutton.com/clear_and_simple_review.htm “As they explain it, the classic style involves an attitude on the part of the writer toward three key elements: reader, presentation, and truth. First the reader: in the classic style the reader is an equal in a conversation. As a competent, intelligent person, it’s assumed that the reader could take up the other side of the exchange at any moment. While the writer may have access to information the reader does not possess -— indeed, that probably occasions the writing–there is no special authority the classic writer has over the reader. The reader and the classic writer are intellectually symmetrical, with equal competence to assess the relevant understandings of the world presupposed or discussed in classic prose.” The Age of the Essay | Paul Graham http://paulgraham.com/essay.html “The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn’t take a position and then defend it. […] Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing. [ …] To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called ‘essais.’ He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning ‘to try’ and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Monday 27 September 2004 @ 4:42 PM
04w29:1 June 16th Posted July 11th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 29 number 1 (June 16th) ——————————————————————— Super Theory Woman | Jerry Saltz http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/jsaltz/saltz7-8-04.asp ” On the night of June 16, 2004, I was a guest on the MSNBC talk show featuring the strangely likable, peculiarly white-under-the-eyes Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida and rabid right-winger […] The first ten-minute segment is a blur to me and seemed to last two seconds. All I remember is Scarborough coming on and asking, “Where’s the outrage?†Then I think he talked about Fraser being a prostitute and breaking the law and asked me, “If I snuck up from behind you and smashed you over the head with a brick and then poured salt in the open wound, would you call that art?†All I could think to answer was “That would be bad art, Joe.†I did pointedly ask if either of them had actually seen Fraser’s videotape. Unsurprisingly, neither had, to which I said something like, “Oh, so you’re like those people who ban books without reading them.†[…] whether you like it or not, Fraser should be commended for doing something brave, and in the middle of a minefield. Outside the art world she will be labeled a slut and a nut. The art world will likely call her a narcissistic showoff. But the art world is a place that says that you should be free.” Joyce’s long-lost, lustful letter smashes auction record | CBC http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2004/07/09/Arts/sexyjoyce040709.html “The famously erotic missive, initiated by an equally explicit first letter from Barnacle, includes Joyce’s recollection of past sexual encounters with Barnacle describing the time she had opened his trousers and ‘made a man of him’ – and shares his ‘ungovernable lust’ for her. Calling Barnacle ‘my darling little blackguard’ and ‘my strange-eyed whore,’ the letter is signed ‘heaven forgive my madness, Jim.’ Joyce and Barnacle met in Dublin on June 16, 1904 – the day he later immortalized in his masterwork Ulysses. Later that year, they left Dublin and never returned together to Ireland. They married in 1931, about a decade before the author’s death. “ Abracadabra , The Magic of Theory | Timothy Comeau http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/commentary/2004/06/abracadabra-magic-of-theory.html “Here’s the thing. I’m an artist, so I think I can say I know how the creative process works. I think I’ve had enough dealings with other artists to know that this is usually how it works for most of us. And my feeling is that she thought this guy was hot and wanted to do him; further, she had the wherewithal to frame it within the context of her practice and using a magic spell of theory was able to get her sextape on the wall. She didn’t even give it a title, which is really revealing. Unlike Paris Hilton, who was famous for her green-light blowjobs before her ignorance of Wal-Mart, this from the get-go was meant to be shown off, but it was also an excuse for Fraser to get laid. All well and good and I congratulate her on her cleverness and the originality of her seduction. But the work does not ‘raise ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships’. It’s a simple porn. It might raise these issues if you were an alien. Let’s ignore for a second how typically pathetic that press release is and just assume that all art galleries are currently engaged in the same bullshit, thinking this is what we – an audience of intelligent people – want and expect. And that I think that’s what I finally understand – the art-world orients itself to non-humans. The texts that accompany art works are meant to explain them to dolphins, squid, elephants and ravens, or whatever intelligent non-human life is in outer space. To entertain the ‘questions raised’ is to enter a state where we deny our common humanity for the cheap thrill of speaking of a sex video in terms of the sociological, something most likely done with others in a social situation to begin with, and something that has been done to death already to no apparent end.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Sunday 11 July 2004 @ 6:30 PM
04w15:2 Pico Iyer Posted April 6th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 15 number 2 (Pico Iyer) “I saw Pico Iyer in Pages today, ” I said. “So?” she said. “I thought you’d find that interesting,” I said. “I don’t see why I would,” she said. “I honestly don’t care.” “I think you’re just saying that,” I said. “My god, no! What is the big deal? It’s like at the Rodney Graham opening, everyone was oooing and aweing, ‘look, it’s Margaret Atwood…” “Margaret Atwood was at the Rodney Graham opening?” “Yeahss….” ——————————————————————— Leonard Cohen Unplugged | Pico Iyer http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/buzz.html “And so, as time passes, I really do begin to feel I am watching a complex man trying to come clear, a still jangled, sometimes angry soul making a heroic attempt to reduce itself to calm. As day passes into night and day again, he comes into focus, and out again, like the sun behind clouds, now blazing with a lucent high intensity, now more like the difficult brooder you might imagine from the records. ‘He’s a tiger,’ I remember a women in New York telling me, ‘a very complicated man. Complicated in a very grown-up way. I mean, he makes Dylan seem childish.’ The first time she met him, he congratulated her on a book she’d written. As their meal went on, he added, ‘Your writing is a lot more interesting than you are.’ ” The last refuge: on the promise of the New Canadian fiction | Pico Iyer http://tinyurl.com/38sy9 “The English Patient captured me, as it did many others, with a language at once precise and ornamental, and with love scenes that throw open the windows of the stuffy house of English letters to let in a new, exotic light. But what made the novel most resonant, as well as popular, was its meticulous and highly self-conscious attempt to chart a new kind of identity outside the categories of the Old World’s order. ‘We were German, English, Hungarian, African–all of us insignificant to them,’ says the title character, as he thinks back to an ‘oasis society’ before the war in which people from everywhere assembled to map the North African desert. ‘Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations.’ His closest associate among the explorers died, he recalls, because of nations. And as he reminisces about the tribal flow of post-national souls coming together in the desert, he–and we–cannot fail to notice that the people around him in the villa, too, are ‘international bastards,’ in his phrase, moving around one another, as the novel repeatedly puts it, like separate planets, ‘planetary strangers.’ ” | A response Pico Iyer’s Mongrel Soul | Dave Weich http://www.powells.com/authors/iyer.html “Dave: You do like Toronto a lot, though. It’s not perfect, but Toronto seems to represent the hope you have for how cities might develop.” Iyer: Yes, partly because the government is very self-consciously and earnestly trying to draft what is essentially a multicultural bill of rights. Canada, in general, and Toronto, in particular, is small enough and malleable enough to be shaped into a workable international community. The other reason why I was drawn to Toronto initially was that every few months I’d get a book through the mail, and it would be the most exciting and unprecedented book I’d run into. When I looked at the back, it seemed the author was always from Toronto. Michael Ondaatje is the obvious example. But Anne Michaels and so many others who are making this new Canadian literature – and Canadian literature is as resurgent as any, though it’s being made largely by people from Tanzania and India, Sri Lanka, The West Indies, and other places – many of these authors are imaginatively trying to construct new notions of a community beyond nations, as in The English Patient […] Toronto seems in certain small, practical ways, to be trying to fashion a new sense of order, how to make a peace between cultures, and its writers seem to sense that they’re living in the midst of something very exciting. Also, of course, Toronto is the birthplace of the Global Village – that’s where McLuhan wrote about it. […] Toronto provides a counterpoint, in my prejudiced opinion, to Los Angeles, for example, or Atlanta. ” Flying to the Global Village | What is The Message? – The McLuhan Program http://tinyurl.com/2l3g7 “But instead Toronto exemplifies that, of any physical space, airports represent a lack of placeness (and occasionally time) quite analogous to the electronically-induced global village conditions that we all now experience. The fusion of global cultures demonstrated in this collection of artists’ work from Spain, Germany, the U.S. and Canada exemplifies that, ‘the artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present,’ as McLuhan said. The future is the creation of a new global culture that is not necessarily tied specifically to geographical location, but rather linked to creating trans-cultural shared immediate experience. This is what the GTAA has accomplished. From the Times article, we learn that the customary ‘Welcome to Canada’ sign was removed from the arrivals gates so as not to interfere with the art. ” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 06 April 2004 @ 10:38 PM
04w13:1 Dirapideerap Posted March 22nd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 13 number 1 (dirapideerap) ——————————————————————— Rap’s last tape | Nick Crowe http://tinyurl.com/3727b “[…] even farmers in Devon have swapped their overalls for Adidas trainers and puffa jackets […] For a genre that is 25 years old this year, hip hop has little to show for its maturity. While its influence has stretched into the shires and beyond, walk down any megastore hip hop aisle and scowling back at you is a line-up of the same kind of hardmen as a decade ago. […] Repetitive images of material excess and recidivism continue to dominate the commercial rap market, and while production techniques have evolved to become the most sophisticated in pop music, rapping itself – the essence of hip hop culture – has not developed in at least a decade. […] In an essay last year in the Hudson Review, the poet (and head of America’s National Endowment for the Arts) Dana Gioia deconstructed rap’s prosody, holding up its rhythmic vitality as a contrast to the weakness of free verse. Gioia argued that rap represents a reconnection with fundamental principles of rhythm that literary poets – in their effete self-consciousness – have long since abandoned: ‘Rap characteristically uses the four-stress, accentual line that has been the most common meter for spoken popular poetry in English from Anglo-Saxon verse… to Rudyard Kipling.'” Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture | Dana Gioia http://www.hudsonreview.com/gioiaSp03.html “The end of print culture raises many troubling questions about the position of poetry amid these immense cultural and technological changes. What will be the poet’s place in a society that has increasingly little use for books, little time for serious culture, little knowledge of the past, little consensus on literary value, and—even among intellectuals—little faith in poetry itself? […] No driver can negotiate a sudden turn in the road by looking backward, and neither can a critic accurately see what is most innovative in contemporary poetry through the now-antiquarian assumptions of Modernism and the avant-garde. Those powerful ideas once produced great art, but now nearly a century old, they reflect a culture without radio, talking-films, television, videocassettes, computers, cellphones, satellite dishes, and the Internet.[…]Roland Barthes, a creature of print culture, saw the world as a text and announced ‘the death of the author.’ Anyone attentive to the new popular poetry sees the antithesis—the death of the text. American culture conditioned by electronic media and a celebrity culture based on personalities has given birth to a new kind of author, the amplified bard ” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Monday 22 March 2004 @ 1:54 PM
04w10:1 Posted March 1st, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 10 number 1 I now find myself trying to please an audience; even though I know some of you personally, I also know I have never met some of you lucky enough to be part of this club. I say this because today’s selections border on being boring, but are paired as examples of the evolution of our language. Article One discuses the new standards imposed by the infamous American SAT test (and this dear folks I thought would only be interesting to one person I know, but I had to tell myself, ‘if it’s good enough for her it’s good enough for the rest’). Because the SAT’s aren’t an issue in Canada I found it a bit of a yawner, with its tone is somewhat haughty and mocking. However, the impression it left on me is how it illustrates what we consider good writing to be (and thus, what constitutes a good read) has, along with the lexicon and pronunciation, changed over the centuries. I was also left with the impression that such changes are marked by certain individual styles, whose novelty becomes influential. The second article is etymological: the question of why The Passion of the Christ is called such. There are a lot of articles out there on the film The Passion of The Christ and its supposed controversy, but I’ve been sparing you them since I find many of them slanted and unfair. But I am no censor: if you’re really interested contact me and I’ll send you some links. (Hint: there’s a lot on Slate.com, including a great critique by Christopher Hitchens posted this past weekend. The best thing I’ve read about the film is a partial translation from a French newspaper available here). Another note: due to server issues I have been unable to update my website (including the goodreads archive index) for the past month, but hopefully things will be back up and running in the next week or so. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Would Shakespeare Get Into Swarthmore? | by John Katzman, Andy Lutz and Erik Olson http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/03/katzman.htm “How several well-known writers (and the Unabomber) would fare on the new SAT […] Reader’s evaluation: This essay is poorly organized, with only one paragraph (though, to Mr. Shakespeare’s credit, the topic sentence does speak to what the rest of the sentences in his one paragraph are about). It is riddled with errors in syntax, incomplete sentences being the most noticeable problem. Although his supporting sentences are vivid in their description, they are vague and general, not true examples. And he unfortunately spells ‘honor’ with the extraneous ‘u.’ Grade: 2 out of 6” Why Is It Called The Passion? | Sam Schechner http://slate.msn.com/id/2096041 “The simple answer is that the English word passion referred to Jesus’ suffering long before it evolved other, more sultry meanings. Today, the word still refers to Jesus’ torments, as well as to retellings of the crucifixion in the Gospels and elsewhere, even in pieces of music. (Before Gibson’s Passion, for instance, there were Bach’s Passions.) But the Christian meaning and its modern, carnal cousins are not entirely unrelated. In fact, the more common meanings of the word passion—strong emotion, zeal, and sexual desire—grew organically from the Christian sense over the course of several centuries. ” —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Monday 01 March 2004 @ 3:03 PM
