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 Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 10:25 am Post subject: |
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Postwar
A History of Europe Since 1945
Hardcover
By Tony Judt
| Quote: | ... if east Europeans paid less attention in retrospect to the plight of the Jews, it was not just because they were indifferent at the time or preoccupied with their own survival. It is because the Communists imposed enough suffering and injustice of their own to forge a whole new layer of resentments and memories.
Between 1945 and 1989 the accumulation of deportations, imprisonments, show trials and 'normalizations' made almost everyone in the Soviet Union either a loser or else complicit in someone else's loss. Apartments, shops and other property that had been appropriated from dead Jews or expelled Germans were all too often re-expropriated a few years later in the name of Socialism - with the result that after 1989 the question of compensation for past losses became hopelessly tangled in dates. Should people be recompensed for what they lost when the Communists seized power? And if such restitution were made, to whom should it go? To those who had come into possession of it after the war, in 1945, only to lose it a few years later? Or should restitution be made to their heirs of those from whom businesses and apartments had been seized or stolen at some point between 1938 and 1945? Which point? 1938? 1939? 1941? On each date there hung politically sensitive definitions of national or ethnic legitimacy as well as moral precedence. (Footnote: When the Czechoslovak parliament voted in 1991 to restitute property seized after the war it explicityly limited the benefits to those expropriated after 1948 - so as to exclude Sudeten Germans expelled in 1945-46, before the Communists seized power). (From Epilogue, p. 823) |
For all its tireless research, an immensely readable text - enjoyably so - though it suffers from the same myopia the author criticizes in European nations still struggling with their complicity with the Nazi regime - that is, an offensive, wilfully blind view that Jews were they ONLY ethnic group Nazis targeted. And we also look forward to subsequent chapters on Israel and its treatment of aboriginal Palestinians since Shoah. Painful lessons from the Nazis on isolating and containing certain others behind a wall were well learned, it seems.
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| Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 11:08 am Post subject: |
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flirt, punk & loo
my dogs and I
Written and Illustrated by Emily Carr
Hardcover
| Quote: | January
Our studio reopens after Xmas vacation - All feel after-Xmassy and rotton, - Missus and I headaches, the fool parrot girls colds, and the pupils party - bedraggled and peevish.
Dont think much of Xmas:
Dont think much of anybody:
Dont think any of us will live long anyway: whats the good of anything: men are brutes, leastways C.P.R. men: putting dogs down on cold rhumatic wind-swept lower decks when they travel with their missus: holidaying - bit the post-man and feel better now.
(Opening pages of this tiny book, a chronicle of nasty Bobtail dogs and sundry pet-slaves which reveals one of Canada's greatest painters in a light not nearly as complimentary as one might have expected from the book's icky title) |
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| Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 12:07 pm Post subject: |
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Travel & Leisure
Magazine Subscription
Boomtown Beijing
Gearing up for next summer's Olympics,
Beijing is a city in transformation, remaking itself f
or the 21st century at full tilt. Yet even as entire
neighborhoods are dismantled and futuristic sky-
scrapers rise, Michael Z. Wise finds a growing
awareness of the value of historical preservation..
November, 2007
| Quote: | The highlight of a visit to the new Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall is the extraordinarily detailed scale model of the city that projects what China's capital will look like in the year 2020. English-speaking guides dressed in scarlet-and-black silk tunics offer assistance to foreign visitors as pulsating lights flash over the exuberant mock skyline. The government-operated urban planning museum is housed in a four-storey building the size of a major U.S. department store, and the model - a testament to the city's current explosive growth - covers some 3,200 square feet.
Just outside the museum, which is located in the heart of the capital near Tiananment Square, construction proceeds at breakneck speed. Beijing's latest transformation, driven by the turbocharged expansion of the Chinese economy and the city's intense desire to present a new face for the 2008 Olympics, is producing a resounding clash between the past and future. Although wall text in the museum proclaims a "perfect fusion" of the two, the rampant destruction of narrow lanes lined with courtyard houses dating back six centuries alarms many Beijingers who fear their heritage is on the auction block.
Yet amid the wide-scale demolition and new construction, some of the city's most prominent historic landmarks - the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and the Temple of Heaven - are undergoing their most comprehensive restorations ever. These, too, have sparked controversy, with ciriticism coming from the UN agency that oversees world cultural heritage, concerned the makeovers will leave these centuries-old structures looking freshly minted. (-- p. 260) |
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| Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:41 pm Post subject: |
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Travel & Leisure
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The Melting Point
A vast expanse of ice fringed with settlements, Greenland is a lure for adventure travelers - and at the heart of our global warming fears. Jeff Wise reports on this chilly siren of the north..
November, 2007
| Quote: | I wandered down, and asked a pair of Inuit fisherman if they had noticed a change in the weather. "We used to be able to dogsled to Disko Island, across 30 miles of sea ice," 56-year-old Daniel Jorgensen said. He spoke through a translator, in Greenlandic, an Inuit tongue. "We haven't been able to do that since 1990." Nearby, hunters loaded plastic tubs with raw whale meat cut into cubes a foot across. Jorgensen agreed with all the other fishermen I talked to: Greenland has become indisputably warmer over the last decade or so. This has made it difficult to reach traditional ice-fishing sites by dogsled. On the other hand, it's now possible to take boats out fishing year-round, and the reindeer herds, more more to feed on, are growing.
So it has always been in the Arctic. One resource vanishes; another reveals itself. In nature, such change is constant. Only this time, the circumstances of this change are deeply unnatural. (-- p. 164) |
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| Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 12:10 pm Post subject: |
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New York Times Magazine
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The 7th Annual Year in Ideas
Hope can be worse than hopelessness
By Marina Krakovsky
Dec. 9/07
| Quote: | People often display a remarkable ability to adapt to adversity, bouncing back to their usual levels of happiness despite extreme hardships. But people don't always rebound, and scientists have long wondered what factors might account for the difference. In a talk at Harvard in September, a team of researchers suggested that one obstacle to emotional recovery, oddly enough, is hope - the belief that your current harship is temporary.
From the beginning, the investigators suspected that hope might sometimes be counterproductive: prisoners with life sentences but with the possibility of parole adapt less well to prison life, for example, than prisoners with life sentences without the possibility of parole. But the researchers sought another empirical test. Their choice: Colostomy patients. The research team, led by Peter Ubel, a physician at the University of Michigan, tracked people who had portions of their colons removed or bypassed, such that the patients couldn't defecate normally. The condition is extremely unpleasant and leads many people to say they'd rather be dead, Ubel reports. But a colostomy isn't always permanent. Some patients are likely to heal and have their bowels reconnected. Whether your colostomy is permanent depends on your condition, but were it up to the patient to choose, "almost anybody would choose temporary over permanent," Ubel says.
So it's surprising that the permanent-colostomy patients ended up happier six months after the operation than the temporary group, whose members were still holding out hope. Patients with a temporary colostomy experienced a significant drop in life satisfaction versus patients in the permanent group.
It might seem strange that patients who are better off objectively were less satisfied with their lives, yet the finding makes sense: "If your condition is temporary," Ubel explains, "you're thinking, I can't wait until I get rid of this." Ubel says thoughts like these keep you from moving on with your life and focusing on the many good things that remain. (-- p. 76) |
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 7:52 am Post subject: |
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From Omens and Lucky Charms:
COUNTRY LIFE
Weekly Magazine Subscription
Spectator
The origin of the furies
By Carla Carlisle
Feb. 15/07
| Quote: | On Monday, the 'long-awaited' United Nations report on global warming was published. The result of 2,500 scientists pooling their data, it concluded what everybody but George Bush and Exxon Mobil already knew: that man has truly botched up the planet. Unless we come up with a unity of purpose greater than we've ever achieved, our children are going to pay a terrible price. ...
The UN report was released on the day the first turkeys died in Suffolk. Not that we knew. Nearly a week went by before we heard the news. But by sunset on Saturday, as I shut up my birds, I knew the worst. But it wasn't the 800 dead birds and the prospect of gassing the 160,000 remaining turkeys that caused me to tremble. It was the sight of 27 long sheds stretched across the landscape, and broadcasters calling it a 'farm' in Suffolk. This is no farm, Bernard Matthews is no farmer, and the sheds housing thousands of turkeys are not 'bio-secure' units, but havens for the development of new pandemic viruses.
...
Silent Spring
Paperback
Environmental Classic
By ecology icon Rachel Carson,
the visionary behind the DDT ban
For 30 years, I've carried around my grandfather's copy of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. A cotton farmer impoverished by the boll weevil, he still stood by Carson: put poison on the fields and you poison the rivers; poison the rivers and you poison the oceans. Carson dedicated her book 'to Albert Schweitzer who said: "Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.'"
... I latch onto a few lines in the book's introduction, from a speech by the Duke of Edinburgh in the early 1960s: 'Miners use canaries to warn them of deadly gases. It might not be a bad idea if we took the same warning from the dead birds in our countryside.' (-- p. 100) |
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| Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2008 1:22 pm Post subject: |
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Organic Gardening
Magazine Subscription
The Bee Crisis
A dramatic demise of honeybees was widely,
and often inaccurately, reported last spring.
Here are the undisputed facts and what you
can do to help the problem.
Winter, 2007
| Quote: | America's Top Pollinators Are in Crisis
FACT: Scientists estimate that more than 30 per cent the nation's 2.4 million honeybee colonies died out over the fall and winter of 2006-2007.
... forget those rampant Internet rumors that cellphone radiation and/or genetically modified crops are to blame. "There's no evidence to support those at all," states (Pennsylvania State University honeybee expert Maryann) Frazier.
Native Pollinators Are Already Picking Up the Slack
FACT: Native bees are - and always have been - important pollinators of many favorite garden vegetables and fruits. In a lot of cases, they're doing 100 per cent of the work.
... The flowers of tomatoes, eggplant, blueberries, and some other crops keep their pollen encased in tiny tubes. Bumblees and a few other natives hold on and vibrate their flight muscles until the pollen erupts through tiny holes in the tube. "Honeybees can't do this," (James H.)Crane (an entomologist with USDA's Bee Biology and Systematics Lab in Logan, Utah) says. "But it's the only way to pollinate some crops. It's the reason tomato growers bring bumblebees into greenhouses."
... Matthew Shepher, senior conservation associate for the Xerces Society, a Portland, Ore.-based group... "Squash bees get up earlier in the morning than honeybees," he notes. "And orchard mason bees will work in colder, wetter weather."
Organic Gardeners Can Save Native Pollinators
FACT: Suburban backyards and city garden plots support as many native bees as farm fields and forests do, if not more.
"There's a huge opportunity for organic gardeners to make a big difference for bees," Winfree says. "It's a win-win situation."
Chances are you've already got dozens of species whizzing around your flowers and vegetable plot from spring until fall. Natives love backyards. ...
What do bees need from you? A lush flower garden that blooms in three seasons. Some bare ground and/or suitable wood for nesting. Water. And protection from chemical attacks, even organic ones. (-- pgs. 52-55) |
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| Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 1:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | The New York Times Magazine
Enlightened Weekly Insert of Unreadable Coporate Daily
Waving Goodbye to Hegemony
Just a few years ago, America's hold on global
power seemed unshakable. But a lot has changed while
we've been in Iraq - and the next president is going to
be dealing with not only a triumphant China and a re-
tooled Europe but also the quiet rise of the second world.
By Parag Khanna, a senior research fellow in the American Strategy Program of the
New America Foundation.
Jan. 27/08
Essay is adapted from his book,
The Second World:
Empires and Influence in the New Global Order
Hardcover
| Quote: | ... Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialsim; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened America's armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and "asymmetric" weapons like suicide bombers. America's unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial counter-movements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, ...
... So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing - and losing - in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world's other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules - their own rules - without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.
The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will set the planetary stakes of the new global game. ... What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.
... While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe's, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn't educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want - like the International Monetary Fund - while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings - consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas - let alone when it's not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the region's answer to America's Apec.
The East Asian Community is but one example of how China is also too busy restoring its place as the world's "Middle Kingdom" to be distracted by the Middle Eastern disturbances that so preoccupy the United States. In America's own hemisphere, from Canada to Cuba to Chavez's Venezuela, China is cutting massive resource and investment deals. Across the globe, it is deploying tens of thousands of its own engineers, aid workers, dam builders and covert military personnel. In Africa, China is not only securing energy supplies; it is also making major strategic investments in the financial sector. The whole world is abetting China's spectacular rise as evidenced by the ballooning share of trade in its gross domestic product - and China is exporting weapons at a rate reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the cold war, pinning america down while filling whatever power vacuums it can find. Every country in the world currently considered a rogue state by the U.S. now enjoys a diplomatic, economic or strategic lifeline from China, Iran being the most prominent example. ...
The Big Three are the ultimate "Frenemies." Twenty-first-century geopolitics will resemble nothing more than Orwell's 1984, but instead of three world powers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), we have three hemispheric pan-regions, longitudinal zones dominated by America, Europe and China. As the early 20th-century European scholars of geopolitics realized, because a vertically organized region contains all climatic zones year-round, each pan-region can be self-sufficient and build a power base from which to intrude in others' terrain. But in a globalized and shrinking world, no geography is sacrosanct. So in various ways, both overtly and under the radar, China and Europe will meddle in America's backyard, America and China will compete for African resources in Europe's southern periphery and America and Europe will seek to profit from the rapid economic growth of countries within China's growing sphere of influence. Globalization is the weapon of choice. The main battlefield is what I call "the second world." ...
The key second-world countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia are mor ethan just "emerging markets." If you include China, they hold a majority of the world's foreign-exchange reserves and savings, and their spending power is making them the global economy's most important new consumer markets and thus gengines of global growth - not replacing the United States but not dependent on it either. I.P.O.s from the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) alone accounted for 39 per cent of the voume raised globally in 2007, just one indicator of second-world countries' rising importance in corporate finance - even after you subtract China. ...
Second-world countries are distinguished from the third world by their potential: the likelihood that they will capitalize on a valuable commodity, a charismatic leader or a generous patron. Each and every second-world country matters in its own right, for its economic, strategic or diplomatic weight, and its decision to tilt toward the United States, the EU or China has a strong influence on what others in its region decide to do. Will an American nuclear deal with India push Pakistan even deeper into military dependence on China? Will the next set of Arab monarchs lean East or West? The second world will shape the world's balance of power as much as the superpowers themselves will. ... (emphasis added)
What is more, many second-world countries are confident enough to form anti-imperial belts of their own, building trade, technology and diplomatic axes across the (second) world from Brazil to Libya to Iran to Russia. Indeed, Russia has stealthily moved into position to construct Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor, putting it firmly in the Chinese camp on the Iran issue, while also offering nuclear reactors to Libya and arms to Venezuela and Indonesia. Second-world countries also increasingly use sovereign-wealth funds (often financed by oil) worth trillions of dollars to throw their weight around, even bullying first-world corporations and markets. ... The second world's first priority is not to become America but to succeed by any means necessary. ...
We have learned the hard way that what others want for themselves trumps what we want for them - always. (-- pgs. 36-65) |
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| Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 9:53 am Post subject: |
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Harper's Bazaar
British Edition
Alive and flipping
When you volunteer to help on a research project,
you'll get closer than ever to some of the world's most
endangered species - as Stanley Johnson discovered,
walking Costa Rica's beaches to help protect a new
generation of leatherback turtles
April, 2007
| Quote: | The harsh truth is that, in the Pacific Ocean at least, the leatherback turtle is critically endangered. Its nesting beaches, all around the Pacific Rim, have been turned into seaside resorts. If a female leatherback does manage to reach the shore to lay her eggs, she may be hacked to pieces by waiting gangs, or her eggs, once laid, may be ruthlessly plundered. Industrial fishing, particularly long-lining, has further contributed to the tragic decline in leatherback numbers.
Playa Grande offers the last best hope of saving the species from extinction in the Pacific. Miraculously, the big-time developers have not yet got their claws into this part of the Costa Rican coastline. The bright lights from hotels and housing developments, so off-putting to the nesting turtle, do not shine here. Not yet, anyway. The local authorities have now declared Playa Grande and two neighboring beaches a marine National Park, called Las Baulas.
The Earthwatch team at Playa Grande research station doesn't just protect the turtles and their nests; it runs a hatchery, too. If, during the course of their beach patrols, the volunteers find a leatherback laying eggs below the high-tide mark, they will carefully collect them and move them to the hatchery for safety. A leatherback at Las Baulas lays 65 eggs per clutch and seven clutches a season, and nests every three to four years. Every egg protected, every hatchling saved, increases the chances of a turtle surviving to maturity,' project leader Bibi Santidrian tells me.
A quarter of a century ago, there were around 90,000 mating female leatherbacks to be found in the Pacific. Today, there are fewer than 5,000. ... (-- p. 265) |
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| Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 2:18 pm Post subject: |
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Memoirs of a Geisha
DVD
Eye candy through a glass darkly
Based on the novel by Arthur Golden
In English but you'll still need the yellow subtitles
| Quote: | Auntie (reading a letter to Chiyo, who has been sold along with her sister to slave for a supposedly high-class brothel until/unless selected to become a high-priced mistress to Japanese moguls seeking amusement beyond the confines of arranged marriages): Dear Satsu and Little Chiyo, As one who was once an orphan child myself, this humble person is sorry to inform you that six weeks after you left for your new life in Miyako the suffering of your honored mother came to its end. And only a few weeks afterward your honored father departed this world as well. This humble person feels confident both your honored parents have found their place in Paradise. But happily at the temple there is a poem called Loss carved into the stone. It has three words. But the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read Loss. Only feel it.
Little Chiyo (to herself): My mother and father had left this life. My sister, I never heard of again. I had dishonored the okiya, so Mother (madam) had other plans for me. I would pay back my debt ... year after year. Not as a geisha. As her slave. |
Memoirs of a Geisha
Papberback
By Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
Stunning soundtrack composed by John Williams
Audio CD
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| Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 12:02 pm Post subject: |
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COUNTRY LIFE
Magazine Subscription
Let it snow
Global warming could send some alpine ski resorts
into meltdown. Arabella Youens considers how old
favorite Val d'Isere measures up to up and coming
Sankt Anton
Country Life International
Autumn /Winter
2007
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| Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 12:04 pm Post subject: |
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COUNTRY LIFE
Magazine Subscription
Treasure islands
Azure seas lapping pure white sand mean
the Maldives are synonymous with indulgence.
But as Nick Smith discovers, there's a lot more
to do than just sit back and admire their beauty
Country Life International
Autumn /Winter
2007
| Quote: | ... Whatever activity you choose to take part in, however, you will be reminded to make sure you don't come into contact with the coral. This isn't simply because you could come to grief on the coral's razor edges, but because by merely touching it you can do it untold damage. Maintaining the coral reef is the Maldivian equivalent of painting the Forth Bridge, and it seems that almost every island has a small resident team of ecologists, marine scientists and oceanographers monitoring its progress.
Recent years have been very hard on the coral in the maldives, first with the 1998 El Nino event, which wiped out 16 per cent of the world's coral, then with the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which wreaked yet more destruction. Rising sea levels due to climate change are a constant threat, and living on such an environmental knife-edge means that money is always needed to fund scientific research, education and repair programmes. (emphasis added)
... Many eco-resorts in the Maldives encourage their guests to help their community-based and marine projects, promising to match their contribution dollar-for-dollar.
... I found the most interesting activity by far was spending time with the marine biologists, helping to clean the turtles or feed the sharks. ... (-- pgs. 106-107) |
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| Posted: Tue May 13, 2008 8:54 am Post subject: |
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Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
The $3 Trillion War
After wildly lowballing the cost of the Iraq conflict at a mere $50 to $60 billion,
the Bush administration has been concealing the full economic toll. The spending
on military operations is merely the tip of a vast fiscal iceberg. In an excerpt from
their new book, the authors calculate the grim bottom line.
By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
April, 2008
| Quote: | To understand why the true costs of the war are so much higher than the official estimates, we can start by looking at America’s veterans. No one has suffered more from the administration’s blindness and stinginess. To date, more than 1.6 million American troops have been deployed in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations. More than 4,000 have been killed. More than 65,000 have been wounded or injured, or have contracted a disease. Of the 750,000 troops who have been discharged so far, some 260,000 have been treated at veterans’ medical facilities. Nearly 100,000 have been diagnosed as having mental-health conditions. Another 200,000 have sought counseling and re-adjustment services at walk-in vet centers.
No adequate preparation was made for casualties on this scale. The Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.) and other agencies have been overwhelmed—both by the need for immediate medical care and by the demand for disability benefits. Already, a quarter of a million returning veterans have applied for disability benefits. Not surprisingly, many disability claims are complex: the average veteran cites five separate disabling medical conditions. The least fortunate among the veterans have suffered unimaginable horrors: brain trauma, amputations, burns, blindness, and spinal damage. Because a greater number of the injured are surviving today, the relative costs of long-term care will be greater than for any previous war. This is the surge the administration doesn’t talk about.
In 2000, the V.A. had a backlog of 228,000 pending compensation claims. Today, owing in part to a rising tide of claims from newly injured military personnel, the number has mounted to more than 400,000. It is now taking the V.A. an average of six months to process an initial claim. About 14 percent of veterans appeal the initial decision, and it then takes the V.A. nearly two years to process the appeal. In the interim, many veterans are left in limbo.
As for medical care, the V.A. is stretched beyond capacity. It has run out of money, and in cities around the country V.A. hospitals are having trouble hiring enough doctors and nurses. In many areas, seriously wounded veterans are being forced to wait more than 30 days just to see a doctor. A study by the Government Accountability Office put its finger on one reason: the V.A. based its forecasts for health-care needs as late as 2005–6 on data for 2002, before the Iraq war began.
The administration’s dishonesty when it comes to casualties and health care has been twofold. First, by failing to take into account the long-term burden of caring for veterans, it has vastly understated the true cost of the Iraq war—by hundreds of billions of dollars, as we’ll see. Second, from the outset the administration has reported casualties in a way intended to downplay the human consequences of the war.
The Pentagon is highly secretive about the total number of casualties. While it reports deaths of service personnel from both combat and noncombat operations, the official tallies list only those wounded in combat. The military has considerable discretion in deciding how a particular case is classified. If the second vehicle in a convoy crashes into the first, which has been blown up by an I.E.D., is it an accident? Or should any killed and wounded be counted as combat casualties? If a helicopter crashes in a night flight because it is too dangerous to fly during the day, should we think of this, too, as just an accident? (-- pgs. 148-150) |
| Quote: | The Three
Trillion Dollar War
Hardcover
By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
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| Posted: Thu Jun 05, 2008 6:54 pm Post subject: |
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The New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription
The Green Issue
Sporting Efficiency
By Robert Weintraub
April 20/08
| Quote: | | You might be surprised to know that the National Football League has had an environmental director for 15 years: Jack Groh. He has been with the league since Brett Favre's second season in Green Bay, so he has credibility when he says the league's efforts are "not done as a PR stunt." Rather, the attitude is that, as Groh says, "the league would be better off in its botttom line" using green principles. Groh oversees Super Bowl projects - like a reforestation program in Arizona - but he hasn't persuaded the NFL to establish green practices for its teams. Major League Baseball, however, has just done so, a fact that irks Groh: "After 15 years, that should have been us." MLOB collarborated with the Natural Resources Defense Council to draw up a comprehensive program for its franchises. Reducing the environmental impact of its travel and reducing the use of unrecycled paper are primary elements; how they will be enforced is unclear. In the National Hockey League, the Players' Association has teamed up with the David Suzuki Foundation, which created a carbon-offset program for skaters. In the land of the Kyoto Protocol, Japanese professional baseball has enacted rules to speed up the games, shortening the time between innings, half innings and each pitch. The goal is to lop 12 minutes from each game, saving harmful emissions produced as a result of powering the stadiums. If only Groh could persuade the NFL to eliminate a TV timeout or two. (-- p. 66) |
If only.
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 2:12 pm Post subject: |
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Nativity Poems
Hardcover
By Joseph Brodsky
Translated by Various Artists
| Quote: | CHRISTMAS BALLAD
For Evgeny Rein, with love
There floats in an abiding gloom,
among immensities of brick,
a little boat of night: it seems
to sail through Alexander Park.
It's just a lonely streetlamp, though,
a yellow rose against the night,
for lovers strolling down below
the busy street.
There floats in an abiding gloom
a drone of bees: men drunk, asleep.
In the dark capital a lone
tourist takes another snap.
Now out onto Ordynka turns
a taxicab, with sickly faces;
dead men lean into the arms
of the low houses.
The floats in the abiding gloom
a poet in sorrow; over here
a round-faced man sells kerosene,
the sad custodian of his store.
Along a dull deserted street
an old Lothario hurries. Soon
the midnight-riding newlyweds
sail through the gloom.
There floats in outer Moscow one
who swims at random to his loss,
and Jewish accents wander down
a dismal yellow flight of stairs.
From love toward unhappiness,
to New Year's Eve, to Sunday, floats
a good-time girl: she can't express
what's lost inside.
Cold evening floats within your eyes
and snow is fluttering on the panes
of carriages; the wind is ice
and pale, it seals your reddened palms.
Evening lights like honey seep;
the scent of halvah's everywhere,
as Christmas Eve lifts up its sweet-
meats in the air.
Now drifting on a dark-blue wave
across the city's gloomy sea,
there floating by, your New Year's Eve --
as if life could restart, could be
a thing of light with each day lived
successfully, and food to eat,
-- as if, life having rolled to left,
it could roll right.
1962
Translated by Glyn Maxwell
(-- pgs. 5-6) |
| Quote: | ... ''Nativity Poems'' collects the poems Joseph Brodsky produced most winter seasons starting in 1962, when he was a ratty 22-year-old dissident haunting the St. Petersburg cafes until the K.G.B. hauled him off to a labor camp. The last was written in 1995, a few months before his death, after a quarter-century of flaming and desolate exile in the United States. Here he became poet laureate. Universities competed to hire him. The Nobel Prize duly arrived. His fellow Nobel poets loved him, translated him, drank with him, stayed up late with him and eulogized him when his heart failed; not broken, perhaps, but certainly overcompressed.
The first Christmases in this collection find Brodsky in his early mode of dark rebellion. It was a difficult condition in many ways, among them of course the labor camp years. Yet to a writer it offered a kind of bulwark. The Soviet Union was granite oppression and provided an unbudging gritty mass to strike a poetic match against.
''You get a sense of superiority rather easily,'' Brodsky recalled years later in the United States. ''You are working against such obvious notions of vulgarity; and the state is there in a kind of obvious grandeur. You identify yourself as the good, and you may be the worst possible.''
Several of the early poems here tend to reflect this odd mixture of pain and an arrogance that could almost be called satiric complacency. The poetry sometimes breaches it, as in ''Christmas Ballad'' (1962), whose mordant portrait of a joyless St. Petersburg winter lifts with images that fly above it. Of a streetlight: ''There floats in an abiding gloom/ among immensities of brick,/ a little boat of night.'' (From BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Christmas Verses Begin In Early, Dark Rebellion by Richard Eder in The New York Times Dec. 19/01) |
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