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 Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2008 1:09 pm Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
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The Headstrong Historian
Fiction
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
June 23/08
| Quote: | Nwamgba was alarmed by how indiscriminately the missionaries flogged students: for being late, for being lazy, for being slow, for being idle, and, once, as Anikwenwa told her, Father Lutz put metal cuffs around a girl’s hands to teach her a lesson about lying, all the time saying in Igbo—for Father Lutz spoke a broken brand of Igbo—that native parents pampered their children too much, that teaching the Gospel also meant teaching proper discipline. The first weekend Anikwenwa came home, Nwamgba saw welts on his back, and she tightened her wrapper around her waist and went to the school and told the teacher that she would gouge out the eyes of everyone at the mission if they ever did that to him again. She knew that Anikwenwa did not want to go to school and she told him that it was only for a year or two, so that he could learn English, and although the mission people told her not to come so often, she insistently came every weekend to take him home. Anikwenwa always took off his clothes even before they had left the mission compound. He disliked the shorts and shirt that made him sweat, the fabric that was itchy around his armpits. He disliked, too, being in the same class as old men, missing out on wrestling contests.
But Anikwenwa’s attitude toward school slowly changed. Nwamgba first noticed this when some of the other boys with whom he swept the village square complained that he no longer did his share because he was at school, and Anikwenwa said something in English, something sharp-sounding, which shut them up and filled Nwamgba with an indulgent pride. Her pride turned to vague worry when she noticed that the curiosity in his eyes had diminished. There was a new ponderousness in him, as if he had suddenly found himself bearing the weight of a heavy world. He stared at things for too long. He stopped eating her food, because, he said, it was sacrificed to idols. He told her to tie her wrapper around her chest instead of her waist, because her nakedness was sinful. She looked at him, amused by his earnestness, but worried nonetheless, and asked why he had only just begun to notice her nakedness.
When it was time for his initiation ceremony, he said he would not participate, because it was a heathen custom to be initiated into the world of spirits, a custom that Father Shanahan had said would have to stop. Nwamgba roughly yanked his ear and told him that a foreign albino could not determine when their customs would change, and that he would participate or else he would tell her whether he was her son or the white man’s son. Anikwenwa reluctantly agreed, but as he was taken away with a group of other boys she noticed that he lacked their excitement. His sadness saddened her. She felt her son slipping away from her, and yet she was proud that he was learning so much, that he could be a court interpreter or a letter writer, that with Father Lutz’s help he had brought home some papers that showed that their land belonged to them. Her proudest moment was when he went to his father’s cousins Okafo and Okoye and asked for his father’s ivory tusk back. And they gave it to him. (-- p. 72) |
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| Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 9:49 am Post subject: |
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Good Poems
Selected by Garrison Keillor
Hardcover
| Quote: | Cathedral Builders
John Ormond
They climbed on sketchy ladders towards God,
With winch and pulley hoisted hewn rock into heaven,
Inhabited sky with hammers, defied gravity,
Deified stone, took up God's house to meet Him,
And came down to their suppers and small beer,
Every night slept, lay with their smelly wives,
Quarrelled and cuffed the children, lied,
Spat, sang, were happy or unhbappy,
And every day took to the ladders again,
Impeded the rights of way of another summer's
Swallows, grew greyer, shakier, became less inclined
To fix a neighbour's roof of a fine evening,
Saw naves sprout arches, clerestories soar,
Cursed the loud fancy glaziers for their luck,
Somehow escaped the plague, got rheumatism,
Decided it was time to give it up,
To leave the spire to others, stood in the crowd
Well back from the vestments at the consecration,
Envied the fat bishop his warm boots,
Cocked up a squint eye and said, "I bloody did that."
(-- p. 356) |
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| Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 10:17 am Post subject: |
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Harper's
Magazine Subscription
God Does Play Dice
[Indulgence]
September, 2008
| Quote: | From cards used in the board game Vatican: Unlock the Secrets of How Men Become Pope, created by Stephen Haliczer, a professor at Northern Illinois University. The game, which purports to make “the electoral process clear,” retails for $39.95.
| Quote: | While rushing to board a train in order to substitute for the Pope at an important meeting, you lose your right hand in an accident. Your selfless devotion earns you great praise. Earn fifteen influence points.
Your auxiliary bishop is rumored to be having an affair with the wife of a wealthy industrialist. Lose five influence points.
After a sick cardinal passes out, you are able to carry him, despite his size and weight. This noted favorably. Earn twenty influence points.
You are shot by the mother of a girl who accused you of ignoring her claim that she was sexually harassed by a priest in the diocese. Lose twenty influence points.
You are shot by a Muslim extremist but seize him in spite of your wound. You make a full recovery. Earn ten influence points.
Your chain-smoking causes comment among many cardinals. Lose ten influence points.
You are kidnapped by a left-wing paramilitary group. You are released, but you contract a fungal infectin that causes you to lose an ear. Earn fifteen influence points.
You call on self-proclaimed visionaries to stop asserting that the Virgin Mary has been visiting them. Your stand alienates many devout people in your diocese and reduces pilgrimages and the number of visitors, thereby harming local businesses. Lose twenty influence points.
Other cardinals notice your left hand trembling and suspect you might have Parkinson's disease. Lose twenty influence points.
The Pope dies after contracting the Ebola virus during a trip to Africa. Your suggestion thast he not a stew of monkey brains and cassava root is now seen as well founded. Earn twenty influence points. ...(-- p. 26) |
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| Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 9:03 am Post subject: |
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God Is Not Great
How Religion Poisons Everything
Hardcover
By Christoper Hitchens
| Quote: | ... Steven Hawking is not a believer, and when invited to Rome to meet the late Pope John Paul II asked to be shown the records of the trial of Galileo. But he does speak without embarrassment of the chance of physics "knowing the mind of God," and this now seems quite harmless as a metaphor, as for example when the Beach Boys sing, or I say, "God only knows ..."
Before Charles Darwin revolutionized our entire concept of our origins, and Albert Einstein did the same for the beginnings of our cosmos, many scientists and philosophers and mathematicians took what might be called the default position and professed one or another version of "deism," which held that the order and predictability of the universe seemed indeed to imply a designer, if not necessarily a designer who took any active part in human affairs. This compromise was a logical and rational one for its time and was especially influential among the Philadelphia and Virginia intellectuals, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who managed to seize a moment of crisis and use it to enshrine Englightenment values in the founding documents of the United States of America.
... It is not quite possible to locate the exact moment when men of learning stopped spinning the coin as between a creator and a long complex process, or ceased trying to split the "deistic" difference, but humanity began to grow up a little in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the opening decades of the nineteenth. ... If one had to ... come up with the exact date on which the conceptual coin came down solidly on one side, it would be the moment when Pierrre-Simon de Laplace was invited to meet Napoleon Bonaparte.
Laplace (1749-1827) was the brilliant French scientist who took the work of Newton a stage further and showed by means of mathematical calculus how the operations of the solar system were those of bodies revolving in a vacuum. ...
... in his childish and demanding and imperious fashion, he (Napoleon) wanted to know why the figure of god did not appear in Laplace's mind-expanding calculations. And there came the cool, lofty and considered response. "Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse." Laplace was to become a marquis and could perhaps more modestly have said, "It works well enough without that idea, Your Majesty." But he simply sated that he didn't need it.
And neither do we. ... (From The Metaphysical Claims of Religion, pgs. 65-67) |
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| Posted: Tue Nov 04, 2008 12:38 pm Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
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The Forbidden World
Did a sixteenth-century heretic grasp the nature of the cosmos?
By Joan Accocella
Aug. 25/08
| Quote: | ... Eventually, a copy of Erasmus’s proscribed “Commentaries,” with notes by Bruno in its margins, was found in the latrine that he used. Even at the height of the Counter-Reformation, which this was, such offenses, distributed over ten years in the monastery, seem trifling. They sound like notations from the F.B.I. file of some poor professor who dared to teach Gorky in the fifties. Nevertheless, Bruno, at around the age of twenty-seven, was informed that he was being investigated by the Inquisition. Was someone trying to get rid of him? (Why the latrine search, an unpleasant task in the sixteenth century?) Was he trying to get out of the priesthood? (Why annotate the Erasmus? Why not just read it?) Whatever the real story, Bruno, hearing of the proceedings, discarded his priest’s garments and headed north, eventually crossing the border into Switzerland. To the Church authorities, that was as good as a confession; they defrocked and excommunicated him in absentia. To Bruno, apparently, it was a liberation, and he became the man we know, or think we know: the freethinker, the heretic, the man who would be burned.
For fifteen years, he travelled—to Geneva, Toulouse, Lyon, Paris, London, Oxford, Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt, Frankfurt, Zurich, Padua, Venice—never staying more than two or three years in any city. Wherever he went, he looked for a job teaching philosophy, and in some places he got one. In Paris, he gave a series of thirty lectures on logic and metaphysics. Elsewhere, he had less luck. At Oxford, when he gave a tryout presentation, the audience laughed at his accent and his Neapolitan way of talking with his hands. (He hated the English ever after. They “look down their noses,” he said, “laugh at you . . . fart at you with their lips.”) Sometimes he damaged his own cause. During his stay in Geneva, he published a broadsheet listing twenty mistakes that a highly placed professor had made in a single lecture. He was sued for slander and had to leave town in a hurry. ...
Another idea of his, which has not attracted as much attention, because it is not a heresy, had to do with “artificial memory,” the science of improving recall. This was not a side project. It was the subject of many of his Latin writings, and often the source of his income during his wandering years—he tutored people in memory skills. Ancient orators had used artificial memory systems, mentally attaching their ideas onto statues, or objects in the rooms of a building, so that later, in their minds, they could revisit those statues and rooms, retrieve their ideas, and thus give seven-hour speeches without note cards. Closer to Bruno’s time, a Catalan mystic named Ramon Llull had refined the method, imagining memory as a system of concentric wheels. Bruno adopted Llull’s schema and enlarged it. ...
How marvellous, and how utterly incomprehensible! And this was only one of his systems. But Bruno may have used such methods—he was known for his prodigious memory—and with their endless numbers of combinations, as in a giant slot machine, they obviously contributed to his vision of an infinite cosmos.
Inconveniently, that vision was heresy from end to end. If there were countless worlds besides ours, this sidelined the Christian story. Creation, expulsion, salvation: such things might have happened, but somewhere off in a corner, while other things were happening on other planets. Also eliminated was God’s difference from humanity. If, as Bruno saw it, God was present in every atom of the universe, then transubstantiation became a silly idea. (God was already in the wine.) Ditto incarnation. Bruno later said that he started having doubts about Jesus at the age of eighteen; in his mature philosophy, the Messiah has no place. Nor does original sin, or pretty much any sin. God “makes his sun rise over good and bad,” Bruno wrote. Even devils were going to be pardoned. To lead a virtuous life, you had only to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As the reader may have noticed by now, much of this constitutes liberal Christian thought in our time. (What Bruno discarded was the Church’s literalism—exactly what many of today’s believers have done.) Likewise, Bruno’s cosmology anticipated modern physics and astronomy. But it did not accord with the views of the sixteenth-century Church. It sounded like Protestantism, or worse. ... (-- pgs. 77-78) |
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| Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2008 1:33 pm Post subject: |
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Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Hardcover
By Julian Barnes
| Quote: | | ... (British poet Philip) Larkin, visiting an empty church, wonders what will happen when 'churches fall completely out of use'. Shall we 'keep / A few cathedrals chronically on show' (that 'chronically' always produces a burn of envy in this writer), or 'Shall I avoid them as unlucky places'? Larkin concludes that we shall still - always - be drawn towards such abandoned sites, because 'someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.' (-- p. 57) |
Even better:
| Quote: | One possibility we didn't consider was that God is the ultimate ironist. Just as scientists set up laboratory experiments with rats, mazes and pieces of cheese placed behind the correct door, so God might have set up His own experiment, with us playing rat. Our task is to locate the door behind which eternal life is hidden. Near one possible exit we hear distant ethereal music, near another smell a whiff of incense; golden light gleams around a third. We press against all these doors, yet none of them yields. With increasing urgency - for we know that the cunning box we find ourselves in is called mortality - we try to escape. But what we don't understand is that our non-escaping is the whole point of the experiment. There are many fake doors, but no real one, because there is no eternal life. The game thought up by God the ironist is this: to plant immortal longings in an undeserving creature and then observe the consequences. To watch these humans, freighted with consciousness and intelligence, rushing around like frantic rats. To see how one group of them instructs everyone else that their door (which even they can't open) is the only correct one, and then perhaps starts killing anyone who puts money on a different door. Wouldn't that be fun?
The experimenting, ironic, games-playing God. Why not? If God made man, or man made God, in His or his own image, then homo sapiens implies Deus ludens. And the other favourite game He gets us to play is called Does God Exist? He gives various clues and arguments, drops hints, appoints agents provocateurs on both sides (didn't that Voltaire do a good job?), then sits back with a beatific smile on His face and watches us try to work it out. And don't think that a quick and craven acceptance - Yes, God, we always knew you were there from the start, before anyone else said so, You're the man! - will cut any ice with this fellow. ... (-- pgs. 191-192) |
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| Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2009 2:14 pm Post subject: |
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National Geographic Adventure
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Everyday SURVIVAL
Most survival guides fail to consider some very useful tools: an individual's character, wits, and worldview. The tips assembled here will change the way you approach each and every day - and help you survive a particularly bad one.
By Laurence Gonzales
August, 2008
| Quote: | ... Although I still believe that equipment and training are good to have, most survival writing leaves out the essential human element in the equation. That’s why I’ve concentrated my efforts on learning about the hearts and minds of survivors. You can start developing these tools of survival now. It takes time and deliberate practice to change. But new research shows that if we adjust our everyday routines even slightly, we do indeed change. The chemical makeup of the brain even shifts. To make these lessons useful, you have to engage in learning long before you need it—it’s too late when you’re in the middle of a crisis. Presented here are 14 concepts that have proved helpful to survivors in extreme situations, as well as to people trying to meet the challenges of daily life. ...
Control Your Destiny
Julian Rotter, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, developed the concept of what he calls "locus of control." Some people, he says, view themselves as essentially in control of the good and bad things they experience—i.e., they have an internal locus of control. Others believe that things are done to them by outside forces or happen by chance: an external locus. These worldviews are not absolutes. Most people combine the two. But research shows that those with a strong internal locus are better off. In general, they’re less likely to find everyday activities distressing. They don’t often complain, whine, or blame. And they take compliments and criticism in stride. The importance of this mentality is evidenced by tornado statistics. In the past two decades Illinois has had about 50 percent more twisters than Alabama but far fewer fatalities. The discrepancy can be explained, in part, by a study in the journal Science, which found that Alabama residents believed their fate was controlled by God, not by them. The people of Illinois, meanwhile, were more inclined to have confidence in their own abilities and to take action. This doesn’t mean we should be overconfident. Rather, we should balance confidence with reasonable doubt, self-esteem with self-criticism. And we should do this each day. As Al Siebert put it in his book The Survivor Personality, "Your habitual way of reacting to everyday events influences your chances of being a survivor in a crisis."... (-- pgs. 66-74) |
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| Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2009 3:18 pm Post subject: |
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A Long Stone's Throw
Hardcover
By Alphie McCourt
| Quote: | Soon we put the Griffin house behind us and move closer to the center of the city, to the lane behind Saint Joseph's Church. Our lane, Little Barrington Street, runs parallel to its parent, the real Barrington Street, which is a grand and proper thoroughfare up the hill and in front of us. Barrington Street is home to the shepherds of our souls, the secular priests and well do they abide in their priests' house.
Before too long, from the steps of that same priests' house, a priest will "read" my mother. He will publicly rebuke her for her sins. She had gone to the priests to ask for help for us, her children. Don't come here looking for charity, missus, he would have said. You are not a fit person to be standing here and you in your sinful state. Everyone knows that you don't go to Mass on Sunday and that's a mortal sin. His purpose was clear, for if everyone didn't know my mother's sins before, then they would certainly know them now.
"The poor are always with us," we are told by way of consolation.
"We are, Father," we remind ourselves and the priest. "For aren't we always with us and shur who else would want to be with us?"
And "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven." They tell us that as well, as a reassurance, I suppose. We should rejoice in our own poverty and not envy the rich man. We, at least, have some chance of getting into heaven. The rich man has none, stuck, as he is, between the camel and the eye of a needle.
To us, a camel passing through the eye of a needle is an exciting image, but it doesn't put any bread on the table. For a loaf of bread and a quarter pound of salt butter we would take our chances with the eye of a needle. (-- pgs. 69-70) |
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| Posted: Sun Jun 28, 2009 1:50 pm Post subject: |
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To Kill a Mockingbird
Hardcover
By Truman Capote's pal, Harper Lee
| Quote: | | First Purchase African M.E. Church was in the Quarters outside the southern town limits, across the old sawmill tracks. It was an ancient paint-peeled frame building, the only church in Maycomb with a steeple and bell, called First Purchase because it was paid for from the first earnings of freed slaves. Negroes worshiped in it on Sundays and white men gambled in it on weekdays. (-- p. 134) |
Listen:
| Quote: | To Kill a Mockingbird
Audio CD
Narrated by U.S. actor Sissy Spacek, a Southerner herself
There are others but this would be our version of choice. |
View:
| Quote: | To Kill a Mockingbird
DVD
Featuring Robert Duvall in his break-out role and Gregory Peck, reminding us of a time when Hollywood still had leading men - so long.
ESL students need have no fear of the mild southern colloquy in this film classic. It was made at a time when elocution was still an important asset in the acting trade. As Robert Graves so neatly put it, goodbye to all that. |
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