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editor
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 Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 12:05 pm Post subject: |
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Art & Love
An Illustrated Anthology
of Love Poetry
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | OUR CHILD
Oh child, do you know, do you know
where you come from?
From a lake
with white and hungry sea gulls.
Besides the wintry water
she and I built
a red bonfire
wearing away our lips
from kissing each other's souls,
throwing everything into the fire,
burning up our life.
This is the way you arrived in the world.
But in order to see me
and in order to see you one day
she crossed over the seas
and in order to embrace
her small waist
I walked the whole earth,
with wars and mountains,
with sand and spines.
This is the way you arrived in the world.
From so many places you come,
from the water and from the earth,
from the fire and from the snow,
from so far away you walk
toward the two of us,
from the terrible love
that has enchained us,
so we want to know
what you are like, what you say to us,
because you know more about the world than we gave you.
Like a great storm
the two of us shake
the tree of life
down to the most hidden
fibers of its roots
and you appear now,
singing in the leaves,
on the highest branch
we reached with.
Pablo Neruda, Chilean, 1904-1973
(-- pgs. 20-21, adjacent to Hummingbird and Passionflowers.
Martin Johnson Heade, American, 1819-1904. Oil on canvas) |
| Quote: | HEARING THAT HIS FRIEND WAS
COMING BACK FROM THE WAR
In old days those who went to fight
In three years had one year's leave.
But in this war the soldiers are never changed.
They must go on fighting til they die on the battlefield.
I thought of you, so weak and indolent,
Hopelessly trying to learn to march and drill.
That a young man should ever come home again
Seemed about as likely as that the sky should fall.
Since I got the news that you were coming back,
Twice I have mounted to the high wall of your
home.
I found your brother mending your horse's stall;
I found your mother sewing your new clothes.
I am half afraid; perhaps it is not true;
Yet I never weary of watching for you on the road.
Each day I go out to the City Gate
With a flask of wine, lest you should come thirsty.
Oh that I could shrink the surface of the World,
So that suddenly I might find you standing at my side!
Wang Chien, Chinese, 756-835
(-- p. 35, adjacent to Wang Shi-chi Watching Geese.
Ch'ien Hsuan, Chinese, ca. 1235-after 1301. Handscroll in
ink, color, and gold on paper) |
| Quote: | I WANT TO BREATHE
you in I'm not talking about
perfume or even the sweet o-
dour of your skin but of the
air itself I want to share
your air inhaling what you
exhale I'd like to be that
close two of us breathing
each other as one as that.
James Laughlin, American, b. 1914
(--p. 81, adjacent to Poplars. Claude Monet,
French, 1840-1926. Oil on canvas). |
| Quote: | Not unlike Variations on the word sleeping by - sigh... - Margaret Atwood, Canadian Keeper of the Flame
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen
I would like to watch you
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary. |
| Quote: | WEARING THE COLLAR
I live with a lady and four cats
and some days we all get
along.
some days I have trouble with
one of the
cats.
other days I have trouble with
two of the cats.
other days,
three.
some days I have trouble with
all four of the cats
and the
lady:
ten eyes looking at me
as if I was a dog.
Charles Bukowski, American, b. 1920
(-- p. 93, adjacent to Kiesler and Wife. Will Barnet, American, bl. 1911. Oil on canvas, 1963-65.) |
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| Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 11:52 am Post subject: |
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Time's River
The Voyage of Life in Art and Poetry
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Hardcover
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | Unending Love
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,
In life after life, in age after age forever.
My spell-bound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms
In life after life, in age after age forever.
Whenever I Hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together,
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
At the heart of time love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell -
Old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever:
Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
The love of all man's days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,
The memories of all loves merging with this one of ours -
And the songs of every poet both past and forever.
Rabindranath Tagore, Indian, 1861-1941
Translated by William Radice
(-- p. 50, adjacent to Titian, Venus with a Mirror, c. 1555) |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 12:10 pm Post subject: |
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Art and Nature
An Illustrated Anthology of Nature Poetry
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Hardcover
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | SAILING HOMEWARD
Cliffs that rise a thousand feet
Without a break,
Lake that stretches a hundred miles
Without a wave,
Sands that are white through all the year
Wthout a stain,
Pine-tree woods, winter and summer,
Ever-green,
Streams that for ever flow and flow
Without a pause,
Trees that for twenty thousand years
Your vows have kept,
You have suddenly healed the pain of a traveller's heart,
And moved his brush to write a new song.
Chan Fan-Sheng, Chinese, 5th century
(-- p. 18, below Peach Blossom Spring. Fan Chi, Chinese. 1616 -after 1694. Leaf from the album Landscapes. 1646; ink and color on paper.) |
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| Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 2:33 pm Post subject: |
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From the PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to Children's Literature:
The Witches
Hardcover
By Roald Dahl
Illustrations by Quentin Blake
| Quote: | A REAL WITCH spends all her time plotting to get rid of the children in her particular territory. Her passion is to do away with them, one by one. It is all she thinks about the whole day long. Even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman or driving around in a fancy car (and she could be doing any of these things), her mind will always be plotting and scheming and churning and burning and whizzing and phizzing with murderous bloodthirsty thoughts.
Which child, she says to herself all day long, exactly which child shall I choose for my next squelching?
A REAL WITCH gets the same pleasure from squelching a child as you get from eating a plateful of strawberries and thick cream.
She reckons on doing away with one child a week. Anything less than that and she becomes grumpy.
One child a week is fifty-two a year,
Squish them and squiggle them and make them
disappear.
That is the motto os all witches. (From A Note about Witches, pgs. 4-5) |
The Witches
DVD
Perfectly cast - a classic!
The Witches
Audio CD
Narrated by British actor Simon Callow
| Quote: | | Callow is pretty good, but there are more recent versions we'll have to hear. Quite often, the author gives the best reading of his own work, though these recordings are now for some reason hard to come by. Please check back soon for our full review of this wonderful book. |
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| Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 11:52 am Post subject: |
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New York Times Magazine
Literate Corporate Media Weekly that
Makes Us Long for the East
Poetry of Protest
The consequences of reading García Lorca in Tehran.
By Zarah Ghahramani as told to Robert Hillman
Dec. 2/07
| Quote: | In my native Iran, choosing the wrong heroes can have frightening consequences. I chose my first hero (not counting my adored father) a decade ago when I was a university student in Tehran, studying Spanish. My teacher put before us a book of verse by the poet Federico García Lorca, who was killed by nationalist soldiers at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Even reading his poems of dire prediction, I was thrilled by his bravery, facing life and its torments with no balm other than words. I remember the experience of reading one of his poems, "The Weeping." A sympathy for my fellow men and women, no more than a seed before I read it, grew shoots above the soil by the time I finished.
Tehran was enjoying a mild Prague Spring in the late '90s when I first read García Lorca. After 18 years of repressive rule by a government of puritanical priests, a liberal reformist, Mohammad Khatami, was elected president of Iran. Khatami's reforms were wishy-washy by the standards of Iran's serious radicals (a little more freedom of speech, nothing extravagant), but I welcomed them like the new dawn. When the reforms were swept aside by the puritans, who remained as powerful as ever, I raised my voice in the street along with thousands of other student protesters. I believed I was keeping faith with Garcia Lorca, and also with the great poets Saadi and Hafez of long-ago Persia, who honored love and liberty. My friends and I sat on the steps of the library chattering like happy children as we planned new protests. With so many joyful on our side, it was impossible to believe that those who despised happiness could ever prevail over us...
I didn't know it at the time, but I was only one of hundreds of student protesters detained that day. Our demonstrations had exhausted the patience of the hard-liners in the regime, and the police had been let off the leash. "Downtown" meant a tiny cell in Evin prison زندان اوین, in North Tehran, and "a few questions" meant protracted torture. I found it difficult to believe that my cheerful protests could have roused my interrogators to such violence. Bruised black by fists and boots, my shoulders and arms livid with lash welts, my scalp left bare and bleeding after my hair was shorn....
After 29 days of interrogation, friends on the outside were able to secure my freedom. The danger of rearrest compelled me to leave my country, and I now live far from Iran... If I'd have known what the interrogators of Evin could do to me, I'd have kept my mouth shut. García Lorca knew exactly what to expect from the people who hated him but kept speaking out. I understand that now. (-- p. 86) |
Federico García Lorca
Selected Verse
Revised Bilingual Edition
Edited lovingly by Christopher Maurer
| Quote: | CASIDA II
Del llanto
He cerradfo mi balcón
porque no quiero oir el llanto,
pero por detras de los girses muros
no se oye otra cosa que el llanto.
Hay muy pocos ángeles que canten,
hay muy pocos perros que ladren,
mil violines caben en la palma de mi mano.
Pero el llanto es un perro immenso,
el llanto es un ángel immenso,
el llanto es un violin immenso,
las lágrimas amordazan al viento,
y no se oye otra cosa que el llanto.
II Qasida of the Weeping
Translated by Catherine Brown)
I have closed off my balcony,
for I do not want to hear the weeping.
But out there, beyond gray walls,
nothing is heard but the weeping.
There are very few angels who sing.
There are very few dogs who bark.
A thousand violins fit in the palm of my hand.
But the weeping is an enormous dog,
the weeping is an enormous angel,
the weeping is an enormous violin,
tears have muzzled the wind,
and nothing is heard but the weeping.
(-- pgs. 294-295) |
A word about Lorca:
| Quote: | | Federico García Lorca is always - no matter what he is writing about - an elegiac poet. He looks beyond the "here and now" and sees what is present as a symbol of what is absent. No matter where one opens his work, its theme is the impossible: the melancholy conviction that all of us have certain indefinable longings that cannot be satisfied by anything around. Robert Bly (101) got it exactly right: Lorca is a poet of desire. He is always saying "what he wants, what he desires, what barren women desire, what water desires, what gypsies desire, what a bull desires just before he dies, what brothers and sisters desire." Lorca's powers of metaphor push desire even further, into the world of plants, insects, and inanimate things. In his poems, all of life is driven by some sort of undefined pain or longing. To him, the essence of poetry is mystery. And "mystery" means that language can only point at, and never adequately name, what is is that we want. What Lorca's poetry tells us is that none of us can say what we want, and none of us would be happy if we attained it. (From the Introduction, p. i) |
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| Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 11:32 am Post subject: |
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Eat the Rich
A Treatise on Economics
Hardcover
By P.J. O'Rourke
| Quote: | A NOTE ABOUT THE NUMBERS IN THIS BOOK
How accurate are the statistics in the following pages? How long is a piece of string? All statistics are fraught with error. And I, personally, cannot add a 15 percent tip to a ten-dollar bar tab and get the same number twice. Not that I've ever had a bar tab as small as ten dollars. And that may be part of the problem. But, even sober, I'm no mathematician. And neither, apparently, are the other people who publish statistics. For example, I refer the reader to the debates about Cuban gross domestic product in Chapter V and Tanzanian per-capita GDP in Chapter VIII. The numbers seem as random and inadequate as the change I ended up leaving that surly bartender.
Statistics, however, can have some value for comparative purposes, and this is the way I've tried to use them. Unless otherwise noted, the population, GDP, vital stats, and other principal figures in Eat the Rich come from the 1997 edition of the CIA's World Factbook and the 1997 edition of the U.S. Department of Commerce's Statistical Abstract of the United States. Yes, I know, the CIA is the espionage agency that had to read about India's nuclear tests in The Washington Post. And now Pakistan is making mushroom clouds, too. Pretty soon every cabdriver and 7-Eleven manager in the world will have the bomb. And I also know that the Department of Commerce is no Plato's Academy in Athens. But the baloney in the Factbook and the Statistical Abstract is presumably all cooked from the same ground-up scraps and innards, and comes packaged in easily compared slices.
Although even our government doesn't always agree with itself about these things. The FB says the estimated mid-1997 population of the United States is 267,954,764, while the SA says 267,645,000 - a discrepancy of almost 310,000 people. That's as if all the residents of Wichita, Kansas, had disappeared. Check the tornado reports. Call Dorothy. Anyway, when forced to choose between numbers, I've picked the CIA's for the simple reason that nobody's ever been terminated with extreme prejudice by the Department of Commerce.
There is another problem with the statistics in this book. They're outdated. All statistics are outdated. They are the record of a certain arbitrary moment, and by the time that record is processed and printed, it is, in effect, your senior-class picture in the high-school yearbook and you're very embarrassed by last fall's hairstyle. My statistics are even more outdated than usual, having been collected over a period of two and half years... (From Acknowledgments, pgs. xvi-xvii) |
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| Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 9:32 am Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
A Reporter at Large
Big Foot
In measuring carbon emissions, it's easy
to confuse morality and science.
By Michael Specter
Feb. 25/08
| Quote: | Greenhouse-gas emissions have risen rapidly in the past two centuries, and levels today are higher than at any time in at least the past 650,000 years. In 1995, each of the six billion people on earth was responsible, on average, for one ton of carbon emissions. Oceans and forests can absorb about half that amount. Although specific estimates vary, scientists and policy officials increasingly agree that allowing emissions to continue at the current rate would induce dramatic changes in the global climate system. To avoid the most catastrophic effects of those changes, we will have to hold emissions steady in the next decade, then reduce them by at least 60-80 per cent by the middle of the century. (A delay of just 10 years in stopping the increase would require double the reductions.) Yet, even if all carbon emissions stopped today, the earth would continue to warm for at least another century. ...
A person's carbon footprint is simply a measure of his contribution to global warming. (CO2 is the best known of the gases that trap heat in the atmosphere, but others - including water vapor, methane, and nitrous oxide - also play a role.) Virtually every human activity - from watching television ot buying a quart of milk - has some carbon cost associated with it. We all consume electricity generated by burning fossil fuels; most people rely on petroleum for transportation and heat. Emissions from those activities are not hard to quantify. Watching a plasma television for three hours every day contributes two hundred and fifty kilograms of carbon to the atmosphere each year; an LCD is responsible for less than half that number. Yet the calculations required to assess the full environmental impact of how we live can be dazzlingly complex. ... A few months ago, scientists at the Stockholm Environment Institute reported that the carbon footprint of Christmas - including food, travel, lighting, and gifts - was 650 kg per person. That is as much, they estimated, as the weight of "one thousand Christmas puddings" for every resident of England. ...
Many factors influence the carbon footprint of a product: water use, cultivation and harvesting methods, quantity and type of fertilizer, even the type of fuel used to make the package. Sea-freight emissions are less than a 60th of those associated with airplanes, and you don't have to build highways to berth a ship. Last year, a study of the carbon cost of the global wine trade found that is actually more "green" for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, which shipped by sea, than wine from California, sent by truck. That is largely because shipping wine is mostly shipping glass. The study found that "the efficiencies of shipping drive a 'green line' all the way to Columbus, Ohio, the point where a wine from Bordeaux and Napa has the same carbon intensity."
The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised fifty miles away. "In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the UlK, which helps productivity," (Adrian) Williams (agriculture researcher at the Natural Resources Department of Cranfield University, in England) explained. That means the yield of New Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates, so the energy required for farmers to grow the crop is correspondingly lower. It also helps that the electricity in New Zealand is mostly generated by renewable sources, none of which emit large amounts of CO2. Researchers at Loncoln University in Christchurch, found that lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to England produced 688 kg of carbon-dioxide emissions per ton, about a fourth of the amount produced by British lamb. In part, that is because pastures in New Zealand need far less fertilizer than most grazing land in Britain (or in many parts of the U.S.). Similarly, importing beans from Uganda or Kenya - where the farms are small, tractor use is limited, and the fertilizer is almost always manure - tends to be more efficient than growing beans in Europe, with its reliance on energy-dependent irrigation systems. ...
... We are going to have to reduce our carbon footprint rapidly, and we can do that only by limiting the amount of fossil fuels released into the atmosphere. ... Each time we drive a car, use electricity generated by a coal-fired plant, or heat our homes with gas or oil, carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases escape into the air. We can use longer-lasting light bulbs, lower the termostat (and the air-conditioning), drive less, and buy more fuel-efficient cars. That will help, and so will switching to cleaner sources of energy. Flying has also emerged as a major carbon don't - with some reason, since airplanes at high altitudes release at least 10 times as many greenhouse gases per mile as trains do. Yet neither transportation - which accounts for 15 per cent of greenhouse gases - nor industrial activity (another 15 per cent) presents the most efficient way to shrink the carbon footprint of the globe. ...
(John O.) Niles, the chief science and policy officer for the environmental group Carbon Conservation, argues that spending $5 billion a year to prevent deforestation in countries like Indonesia would be one of the best investments the world could ever make. "The value of that land is seen as consisting only of the value of its lumber," he said. A logging company comes along and offers to strip the forest to make some trivial wooden product, or a palm-oil plantation. The governments in these places have no cash. They are sitting on this resource that is doing nothing for their economy. So when a guy says, 'I will give you a few hundred dollars if you let me cut down these trees,' it's not easy to turn your nose up at that. Those are dollars people can spend on shcools and hospitals."
... According to the latest figures, deforestation pushes nearly six billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. That amounts to 30 million acreas - an area half the size of the UK - chopped down every year. Put another way, according to one recent calculation, during the next 24 hours the effect of losing forests in Brazil and Indonesia will be the same if 8 million people boarded airplanes at Heathrow Airport and few en masse to New York.
... From both a political and economic perspective, it would be asier and cheaper to reduce the rate of deforestation than to cut back significantly on air travel. It would also have a far greater impact on climate change and on social welfare in the developing world. Possessing rights to carbon would grant new power to farmers who, for the first time, would be paid to preserve their forests rather than destroy them. Unfortunately, such plans are seen by many people as morally unattractive. "The whole issue is tied up with the misconceived notion of 'carbon colonialism," Niles told me. "Some activists do not want the Third World to have to alter their behavior, because the problem was largely caused by us in the West." (-- pgs. 44-52) |
Others agree:
Travel & Leisure
Magazine Subscription
Traveling Light
When it comes to the things we carry with us -
and the impact we have on the places we visit -
less is more. Alex Shooumatoff makes the case.
November, 2007
| Quote: | | But traveling light doesn't mean just reducing your baggage. It means reducing your footprint or, rather, footprints: your carbon footprint, your ecological footprint, your footprint on the local culture. Most of your carbon footprint comes from the planes you take. A gallon of combusted airplane fuel produces up to 100 times more greenhouse gases than a gallon of gasoline. You can take consolation from the fact that if all of the passengers on the plane drove to the destination in their cars, their collective footprint would be greater, but still, airplanes account for something like 5 percent of the total anthropogenic (human) contribution to the rising temperatures that are wreaking havoc on the planet's ecology and weather systems. (-- p. 136) |
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| Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 3:36 pm Post subject: |
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Conde Nast Traveler
Magazine Subscription
The Power of Travel
By Dorinda Elliott
Now that the travel industry is beginning to tackle
social issues from poverty to health care, the hotel
you choose can make the difference between..
. a child going hungry or being fed
. a wildlife habitat being protected or destroyed
. a woman giving birth to a healthy child
or one infected with HIV.
May, 2007
| Quote: | In his thirteen years as general manager of the Holiday Inn along Patong Beach in Phuket, Thailand, Wolfgang Meusburger had never thought much about supporting the community. Just positioning his hotel as a luxury oasis on one of Thailand's most overbuilt honky-tonk beaches was challenge enough. On the ocean side, crowds of beer-swilling tourists, counterfeit handbag hawkers, and prostitutes compete for the walkway along a strip of noisy restaurants, bars, and T-shirt shops. Down the way, Rock Hard A Go-Go offers pole-dancing girls in bikinis, and at the Moulin Rose and other cabaret clubs, transvestites sing pop songs. To Wolfgang, keeping the riffraff out was more important than community outreach.
That all changed in December, 2004, when the tsunami that devastated the region swamped the beachfront, wiping out hawker stalls, trashing dozens of hotels and restaurants, and killing more than seven thousand people up and down the Thai coast. Meusburger was relatively luck: He lost only one guest to the waves, and no employees were killed. But the lobby was waist-deep in mud and cluttered with debris, including a motorcycle that had been swept in by the sea. ...
Apart from charitable giving and job training, some hotels are trying to find ways to channel business to local communities by hiring and buying locally. The catchphrase in the nonprofit world is "linkages and leakages," and more and more hotel managers use the term these days. Linkage is good: It means that a hotel property is connected to a community and contributing to its economy. Leakage is bad: It means that the hotel company is just sending its profits back home to heardquarters. The Caribbean has been the focus of much discussion about linkages and leakages, because it is a region where so much luxury is found in the midst of so much poverty. Jamaica is a case in point: It is still desperately poor (25 per cent of the population lives on less than $2 a day) despite enormous amounts of tourism money flowing into the country - most of it landing in the tills of all-inclusive resorts.
In its pay scale and atmosphere, the Sandals Whitehorse resort along the island (Jamaica)'s south coast is typical of other large beach properties in impoverished regions around the world: Starting wages are around $90 a week, compared to the $500 guests pay per night to stay. Inside the hotel's European Village compound, you would hardly know that Jamaica exists, except for the calypso beat provided by the Mighty Beeston Mento Band, playing by the snack bar. The resort boasts that at its seven restaurants, "you may dine in a different corner of the globe each night without leaving." I ate at Giuseppe's Italian restaurant, where I drank Californinan red wine and ordered fettucine with shrimp (imported) and scallops (imported).
At top Caribbean resorts, it's not at all unusual to sit down to a dinner that is almost entirely imported food - smoked salmon (imported from Nova Scotia), say, followed by filet mignon (imported from Australia) - bringing no benefit whatsoever to the local economy.
By reputation, all-inclusive resorts are the worst "leakers": Generally, they keep guests on their compounds, spending money at the resorts instead of in town, and they often import a large portion of what they consume. ...
While Sandals may be doing more than most hotel companies in Jamaica to help support the local community, the full picture of its impact is not entirely rosy. Built on former wetlands in the middle of what was once a sleepy bay, the Sandals Whitehorse resort project was controversial from the get-go. The hotel went over budget by more than $40 million, and a government investigation had been launched. The developers moved a population of crocodiles that lived on the property to a nearby zoo. "There used to be so many crabs and crocodiles," says a worker at a nearby inn with a sigh. "So many birds, they used to come flying by, but they just don't come anymore." ...
Two years ago, Conrad Hotels, which is owned by Hilton, signed on to manage a huge casino and resort project that environmentalists have been fighting for more than a decade. Those opposed to the 700-acre development worry that it will destroy and important nursery area and affect hundreds of miles of sea habitat. Tearing out the mangroves and dredging the harbor reportedly have already reduced the populations of lemon shark and other species. When the environmentalists protested to Hilton, the company replied with letters reiterating the legality of the project - and did nothing significant to address their concerns. Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch, found of the UK-based Shark Trust, has called the project "one of the most egregiously scandalous environmental crimes in recent years." A Hilton representative declined to comment on the issue, saying only that the company's role will be limited to managing the Conrad Hotel, "if and when it gets built."...
For all of the good that hotels are beginning to do, it's hard not to notice the damage caused by the industry in many developing destinations. "It's clear that attracting the wrong kind of visitors, promoters, and developers can launch a boom-and-bust cycle that has been repeated time and time again," says Sustainable Travel's (president, Brian) Mullis. Beach areas like Pattaya in Thailand are a case in point - so overdeveloped that both the natural beauty and the local culture have been ravaged. "Death by a thousand cuts is what tourism has represented for ecodiversity," says Jamie Sweeting, a senior director at Conservation International's Center for Environmental Leadership in Business. But it's all relative:"I'd give my druthers to get any of those five-star hotel projects to Africa," says Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, who wrote The End of Poverty and is an adviser to the United Nations Millennium Project aimed at eradicating hunger and poverty. "Tourism brings development and jobs, and that's a good thing." The challenge, he points out, is how to develop responsibly. ...
Singapore-based Raffles spent $30 million restoring the Grand Hotel d'Angor to its colonial splendor, and a room there now costs $360 a night. A short walk away, in the Angkor Hospital for Children, some patients are wasting away from malnutrition, others from tuberculosis. Just outside the town, beggar children chase tourists coming out of the temples. ...
Raffles got caught up in an ugly, complicated fight with its workers in 2003 when they went on strike, protesting the fact that the hotel - outrageously - wasn't distributing the entire service charge added to guests' bills. The hotel's hard-line position was colored by teh complexities of operating in such an impoverished country: Its employees, who earned an average of $210 a month, would have made more than the chief of police if the entire service charge had been disbursed. In a ddition, the strikers demanded two-month annual leaves and six-month paid maternity leaves. The court declared the strike illegal, and Raffles fired 300 workers. Hotels across town (Angkor Wat, Cambodia) dropped service charges entirely. ...
"We (InterContinental Hotels Group Asia)'re growing so fast out here (Asia). We're adding sixty new hotels in China, and we're trying to get it right environmentally," he (CEO Patrick Imbardelli) says. "It's not easy: The Chinese all want three-storey atriums, which from an environmental point of view are terribly inefficient." (-- pgs. 256-268) |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 3:43 pm Post subject: |
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Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
Global Citizens
Activists and scientists are propelling a cultural turnaround,
but the green revolution is also being forged by macaroni
and cheese, novels, and fashion, by venture capitalists,
rockers, and hoteliers. This is their world, on the next 26
pages, and the rest of us can just try to live up to it.
The Man of the Hour
Leonardo DiCaprio
ACTOR, ACTIVIST
2nd Annual Green Issue
May, 2007
| Quote: |
| Quote: | | If you go to leonardodicaprio.com, you will find that it is split down the middle. The left half is labeled "Leonardo," and will bring you up-to-date on his filmmaking career (doing rather nicely, with a recent Oscar nomination for his performance in Blood Diamond and, to some tastes, an even stronger performance in best-picture winner The Departed). The right half is labeled, "Eco-Site;" it offers guides to various environmental concerns, tips on differences anyone can make, and links to dozens of green organizations and information. Not many stars share their fan face time with gorillas and ferns, but this is the image DiCaprio puts forward to the world: a literal expression of twin passions. A longtime environmentalist - remember his interview in 2000 with then president Bill Clinton for an ABC Earth Day special? - DiCaprio is currently on the boards of both the Natural Resources Defense Council and Global Green USA and has been a tireless promoter of green causes and events. Later this year will see the fusion of his two passions with the release of The 11th Hour, a feature documentary on environmental ills and possible cures, a kind of state -of-the-earth address with gorgeous pictures and eloquent experts, which DiCaprio is producing, co-writing, and narrating. As he says in this remarkable film, as hopeful as it is alarming,"So we find ourselves on the brink." On the brink of what, it is made plain, is up to us. (-- p. 236) |
The 11th Hour
DVD
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 11:08 am Post subject: |
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Mad
Magazine Subscription
It's that Idiotic time of year again!
The MAD 20
The Dumbest People, Events and
Things of 2007
January, 2008
| Quote: | 2 BUSH BREAKS PRESIDENTIAL RECORD FOR TIME OFF
VACATION DAZE
George Bush is zeroing in on a long-standing record even more hallowed than Hank Aaron's 755 homers: Ronald Reagan's presidential vacation mark of 436 days. Experts said it would never be broken, yet as we go to press, Dubya is on the verge of surpassing the Gipper's remarkable relaxation achievement with a year on the job still to go. Bush has taken about 70 vacations, during a war no less! If FDR took off that much time (note: he didn't, and he served FOUR terms!) you'd be reading this introduction in German while munching on strudel. It's monumentally dumb! (-- p. 15) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 1:46 pm Post subject: |
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The Malaria Capers
More Tales of the Parasites and People, Research and Reality
By Robert S. Desowitz
| Quote: | | Kala azar, however, is different: it has not yielded its past origins and epidemiology to the modern historian's search. This is peculiar because the disease is distinct enough that had it been present it should have been descriptively remarked upon in th eearly medical writings. It is not an indolent disease that would have gone unnoticed. Kala azar frequently occurs in epidemic proportion, killing thousands during its apogee. Nor can we attribute this narrative absence to an observational gap solely on the part of India's ancient writers. Visceral leishmaniasis (kala azar) is not confined to India but is now known to occur in a vast area of China, in Russian Turkestan, in the Sudan and Ethiopia, in Mediterranean Europe (southern Spain, France, and Italy, Greece, Malta, Crete, and Yugoslavia), 2 in North Africa, and in the New World as foci of infection along the coast of Brazil. Except for Brazil and the Sudan, these are regions with a rich written record spanning at least fifteen hundred years. In that record we can see the past epidemics of plague, typhus, malaria - but nowhere do we find an account of a disease that could be interpreted as kala azar. To the best of our admittedly imperfect knowledge, kala azar seems to have made its first attack on humans in Jessore 1824. And like AIDS, its true epidemiological origins may never be satisfactorily traced. (From the chapter, How the Government Disease Came to India, pgs. 34-35) |
| Quote: | | 2. The tourist and guide books certainly do not mention the risk of contracting kala azar at these European tourist meccas. The odds are admittedly very small. Still, a tourist stands a greater chance of getting kala azar in the French Cote d'Azur than breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. And while it is hardly a tourist resort, special and timely note should be made of kala azar's entrenched endemicity in Iraq. |
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| Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 3:08 pm Post subject: |
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National Geographic Traveler
Magazine Subscription
My CHINA
Annual Photography Issue
January/February, 2008
| Quote: |
Olympic Park Tableau
Beijing
The future rises before the eyes of construction workers helping to build the new "Water Cube," the main swimming venue for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Designed by Australian and Chinese architects, the Water Cube features a facade that appears to be made of large water bubbles. In reality, they are sections of plastic film pumped full of air. London-based photographer Ian Teh was drawn to the night scene because of the "slightly surreal quality of the image - its curious mix of lighting, wacky modern architecture, and workers who look like they could be having a picnic. Many of these workers come from faraway provinces and live in the countryside. They have never seen this kind of avant-garde architecture, and it is quite likely they will never afford a ticket to see the Olympic events in these spaces. I have a huge respect for these men, for their camaraderie, their strength of character, their kindness, and their desire to improve their difficult lives." Teh says the 2008 Olumpics are important ot the Chinese, as they provide an opportunity to introduce their nation to the world. "I've traveled to this country for the past ten years and seen a great many changes, but none have been so great as those of the past few years. Japan, South Korea, and some countries in Southeast Asia have had their economic booms, but the changes in China are far-reaching in their impact on the nation's people and the world, and no one is sure what the outcome will be. When I'm in China, I feel like I'm in the eye of a storm. And being in the eye of a storm, one can sense a great excitement all around. But it is also hard to know what is really happening." (Caption with photo, p. 76) |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Mar 07, 2008 9:36 am Post subject: |
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I Heard the Owl Call My Name
Hardcover
By Margaret Craven
| Quote: | "It is an old village - nobody knows how old. According to the myth, after the great flood two brothers were the only human beings left alive in the world, and they heard a voice speak and it said, 'Come, Wolf, lend them your skin that they may go fleetly and find themselves a home.' And in the wolf's skin the brothers moved south until they came to a small and lovely valley on a river's edge, surrounded by high mountains, and here they returned the skin to their friend, the wolf, and they threw a magic stone to see which one would build his village here, and Quelele, the younger, moved on, and Khawadelugha, the elder, built his house, and in his dances he moved right as even now the dancers moved right because the wolf moved right, and on his totem he carved a wolf as one of the crests of his tribe.
"The Indian name of the village is Quee which means 'inside place,' and according to the tribal history its site was chosen wisely because the river, its access, is treacherous and easily defended. But the enemy was wise also, and in the great tribal wars it came through a mountain pass and down the river, and the spirit that lives in Whoop-Szo, the Noisy Mountain, that is across the river and towers over the village, heard the enemy coming and sent down a slide and buried it.
"Now Kingcome is known as a compact, Christian village, and this means that to run smoothly the elected chief, the vicar and the agent from the Indian Affairs Dpartment must be co-operative and wise, and though I am sure the Lord could pass a small miracle and manage this, He seldom does. Once there was a chief who agreed with anyone on anything. Once there was an agent who said there was no use educating the Indian because if you did, you'd have to find him a job, and he was bound to die off anyway. And once the church sent a man to Kingcome who had never worked out well anywhere because it was sure here he could do no harm. All were wrong, and the village survived them.
"The Indian knows his village and feels for his village as no white man for his country, his town, or even for his own bit of land. His village is not the strip of land four miles long and three miles wide that is his as long as the sun rises and the moon sets. The myths are the village and the winds and the rains. The river is the village, and the black and white killer whales that herd the fish to the end of the inlet the better to gobble them. The village is the salmon who comes up the river to spawn the seal who follows the salmon and bites off his head, the bluejay whose name is like the sound he makes - 'Kwiss-Kwiss.' The villlage is the talking bird, the owl, who calls the name of the man who is going to die, and the silver-tipped grizzly who ambles into the village, and the little white speck that is the mountain goat on Whoop-Szo.
"The fifty-foot totem by the church is the village, and the Cedar-man who stands at the bottom holding up the eagle, the wolf and the raven! And a voice said to the great cedar tree in Bond Sound, 'Come forth, Tzakamayi and be a man,' and he came forth to be the Cedar-man, the first mangod of the people and more powerful than all others."(From Chapter 1, pgs. 11-13) |
About Tsawateniuk (Kingcombe Inlet) Kwakwaka'wakw immortalized in the novel:
| Quote: | Harper, John (with Bob Sam and Chief Adam Dick) Coastal & Ocean Resources Inc., Sidney, B.C.
Clam Gardens of the Pacific Northwest: Sitka to Puget Sound
Clam gardens are areas of the intertidal zone that were cleared by aboriginal peoples for the purpose of clam harvesting and culturing. To date, several hundred of these clam gardens have been identified and mapped. The most southerly site identified to date is in Brentwood Bay near Victoria BC. The most northerly site is in Sitka Sound. Traditional knowledge indicates that construction of a clam garden entitled its creator to ownership and that such ownership would ensure sustainable harvesting at the site. (From Sharing our Knowledge: A Conference of Tsimshian, Haida and Tlingit Tribes and Clans, 2007). |
| Quote: | I Heard the Owl Call My Name
Audio CD
Narrated by popular U.S. reader, Frank Muller
Muller's reading is adequate, but we're open to new possibilities for this small, classic tale - one of few that portray First Nations as respectfully and lyrically as they richly deserve. |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 5:08 pm Post subject: |
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The Napoleon of Crime
The Life and Times of Adam Worth,
Master Thief
Hardcover
By Ben Macintyre
| Quote: | "Most of the saloons never closed. Or they did for just long enough to be cleaned out and then to begin afresh drinking, fighting, cursing, gambling and the Lord only knows what," recalled Eddie Guerin, a useless crook but a successful memoirist who would eventually become Worth's friend and colleague. The 3,000 saloons noted with distaste by Bishop Simpson and others in post-bellum New York included such euphonious establishments the Ruins, Milligan's Hell, Chain and Locker, Hell Gate, the Morgue, McGurk's Suicide Hall, Inferno, Hell Hole, Tub of Blood, Cripples' Home, and the Dump. But if the nomenclature of the dives was indicative of the immorality herein, the names of the clientele were still more telling: Boiled Oysters Malloy; Ludwig the Bloodsucker, a vampire who had hair "growing from every orifice"; Wreck Donovan; Piggy Noles; the pirate Scotchy Lavelle, who later employed Irving Berlin as a singing waiter in his bar; Eat-em-up Jack McManus; Eddie the Plague; Hungry Joe Lewis, who once diddled Oscar Wilde out of $5,000 at banco; Gyp the Blood; the psychotic Hop-Along Peter, who tended, for no reason anyone could explain, to attack policemen on sight; Dago Frank; Hell-Cat Maggie, who filed her teeth to points and had sharp brass fingernails; Pugsy Hurley and *Gallus Mag, a terrifying dame who ran the Hole-in-the-Wall saloon and periodically bit the ears off obstreperous customers and kept them in a pickling jar above the bar, "pour encourager les autres"; Big Jack Zelig, who wouldk, according to his Hoggy Walsh, Slops Connally, and Baboon Dooley of the Whyos gang; One-Lung Curran, who stole coats from policemen; Goo Goo Knox; Happy Jack Mulraney, who killed a saloonkeeper for laughing at the facial twitch which led to his sobriquet; brothelkeepers Hester Jane the Grabber Haskins and Red Light Lizzie, and the unforgettable Sadie the Goat, a river pirate and leader of the Charlton Street Gang, which occupied an empty gin mill on the East Side waterfront and terrorized farms along the Hudson River.
According to Herbert Asbury, whose 1928 Gangs of New York is probably the best book ever written on New York crime, "Sadie [the goat] acquired her sobriquet because it was her custom, upon encountering a stranger who appeared to possess money or valuables, to duck her head and butt him in the stomach, whereupon her male companion promptly slugged the surprised victim with a slung-shot and they then robbed him at their leisure." (For reasons unknown but not hard to imagine, Sadie fell afoul of the formidable *Gallus Mag of the Hole-in-the-Wall, who bit off her ear, as was her wont. But the story has a happy ending: the two women eventually became reconciled, whereupon gallant Gallus fished into her pickle jar, retrieved the missing organ, and returned it to Sadie the Goat, who wore it in a locket around her neck ever afterward.) (From Chapter Three, The Manhattan Mob, pgs. 21-22) |
Gangs of New York
Hardcover
By Herbert Asbury
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 10:12 am Post subject: |
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The Complete Illustrated Guide to
Feng Shui
How to Apply the Secrets of Chinese
Wisdom for Health, Wealth and Happiness
Paperback
By Lillian Too
| Quote: | What to Do if Things Go Wrong
The Prince and Princess of Wales, for example, are incompatible, as they belong to different groups. Princess Diana was born on July 1, 1961. Her Kua number is 3, and her best directions are south, north, souteast, and east. Prince Charles was born on November 14, 1948. His Kua number is 7, and his most auspicious directions are northwest, southwest, northeast, and west.
From the above, it is easy to see that what is good for one is bad for the other. It is, therefore not surprising that these two people cannot live together harmoniously. Further analysis of their year elements indicates that she belongs to the realm of gold or metal, while he belongs to the earth element. Under the cycle of relationships, earth produces gold - thus Prince Charles "made" Princess Diana. It was he who brought fame to her. Unfortunately, gold exhausts earth, so she caused him much exasperation and grief. Fortunately for him, he is not of the wood element, otherwise she might well destroy him and, fortunately for her, she is not of the water element, or he might destroy her. (From [bHealth, Romance, and Marriage[/b], p. 207) |
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