Feliz Navidad - More Than Offering Another Hallmark Remark

Maybe a multicultural, multilingual celebration of Christmas has become harder to organize and pull off well, or is less meaningful, the more urgently 'we' all need to pull together collectively to solve global problems.

My personal cultural background as a north american white, anglo-saxon protestant away from home at Christmastime has exposed me to a lifetime of phony commercial attempts to link Christmas with excessive spending (for gifts, foods and entertainment). Expressions of fellow-feeling with Other Cultures, Other Peoples over the Holiday Season were once-upon-a-time framed as paternalistic gestures in the mould of extending kindness to those less fortunate than 'we' are.

Yesterday Dulio, an Argentinean, and I hefted a donated television set from the car trunk of a Jewish woman who dropped it off at COCLA for the Latino community charity drive. She helped in the effort (for awhile), but you could tell that all she wanted to do was to 'dump' the thing and get back to her own affairs as quickly as possible. (I cannot blame her a bit.)

After wrestling that huge, boxy behemoth T.V., all any person could possibly feel is how much we'd rather have a flat-screen LCD model that is so light and thin it could simply be hung on a wall, plugged in, and forgotten.

Gift-giving, unlike sharing baked bread or a homemade casserole, has started to be chosing the "latest model" hi-tech gadget for those in your immediate family and a rush to the mall for low-tech surrogates for gift-giving outside the family circle. 'Things' are either 'the latest model' or they are garbage, a mere hand-me-down or stocking stuffer.

Where I missed the boat in giving gifts to my friends, once again this year in 2006, was in not making the effort to procure color prints from my digital images (the snapshots I've taken over the entire year). Receiving a candid portrait tucked inside a nice card with a personal note (in the recipient's own Spanish, English or French language - whatever) would please each person I know well enough to give a gift to . . But it's not too late with New Year's Day coming!

I cannot get away with just putting these digital images up on the web and giving a copy of the URL address to the recipients of my holiday greeting cards -- simply because the adults I know do not browse the web and (except for email) are intimidated by what they see via the Internet. Yet everybody I know loves to receive a bunch of color prints they can hold in their paws.

For expressing my holiday cheer to Spanish speakers, this year I am discovering that the best I can do is to take the time to attempt to communicate with them by trying to talk about their original home town, about family members still in the home country and ones living here in Montreal while attempting to tell them about my own family back home and my own daughters who have grown up in Quebec. I find myself carrying more and more wallet-sized photos of family. Nothing works better when trying to converse than to ask about a person's family, about where they came from geographically (and in detail), while trying to give similar accounts of my own origins and my own family.

It is an irony; in our own culture depictions of family conversation tend to accentuate the two extremes: saccharine images of 'Father Knows Best' bonhommie and bitter feuding and strife between generations forced to pretend they can celebrate anything together. The irony comes from how satisfying it can feel to get away from the immediate family and try to communicate with a person who does not even speak your own language and who does not even celebrate the holidays like all the Masses of shoppers in our Canada-American culture.

You can consider yourself a member of a privileged caste if, somehow, you can find the time and energy over the holiday break to get away from Family and make the time to talk face-to-face with a nearby 'stranger' away from all the hustle and bustle. These stolen moments give meaning to that otherwise Hallmark cliche 'It was a privilege to make your acquaintance.'

Novelist E. L. Doctorow. Quotes about Writing from a Writer

From 'Think exist (dot) com'. "Finding quotations was never this easy."


Writers quotes. E. L. Doctorow, American Author and Editor, b.1931

“I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.”
E. L. Doctorow quote


“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”
E. L. Doctorow quote


“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
E. L. Doctorow quote


“Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.”
E. L. Doctorow quote


“It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
E. L. Doctorow quote

“There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.”
E. L. Doctorow quote


“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
vanturpais E. L. Doctorow quote


“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people ---- what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”
E. L. Doctorow quote

The Dragon's Almanac - 22 December

from Justin Wintle

"One step too few is enough
to miss the ferry."
. . . (1423)

Chinese

What Would You Experience by Trying to Collect All that Alan Sillitoe Ever Published ???

ANSWER: THE LONELINESS OF (A) LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER

from -- Books and Writers

SILLITOE -- AN 'Angry Young Men' BRITISH AUTHOR

"Alan Sillitoe is generally grouped among the "angry young men" of the 1950s, with John Osborne, John Braine, John Wain, Arnold Wesker, and Kingsley Amis. He introduced in the post-World War II British fiction realistically portrayed working-class heroes, but his range as a writer has since widened. Sillitoe has published more than fifty books over the last forty years, as well as more than four hundred essays."

Stars, seen through midnight windows
Of earth-grained eyes
Are fullstops ending invisible sentences,
Aphorisms, quips, mottoes of the gods
Indicate what might have been made clear
Had words stayed plain before them.
(from 'Stars' in A Falling Out of Love, 1964)

Note (NBDR - Blogaulaire) Would the US's Beats, the prose and poetry writers who were most prolific in the 1950s on this side of 'the Pond', also qualify as members of "the angry young men" generation? In the 1960s, after the anti-nuclear mobilizations and the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, the label used for both women and men who went counter to the Establishment culture was Beatniks (derived from Sput-nik).

But what about the evident class consciousness of this grouping of British writers? Was a more vague sobriquette invented to underplay the conflictual class issues that were raised within their published narrative? Or did the 'anger' that showed up in their fictional characters deviate so greatly from what proletarian writers had produced in the 1930s and '40s that this literary tendency deserved a new name-label with a less politically charged connotation?

It is interesting to note the link to science fiction writing and the 'angry young man' trend in the British and US novel of the 1950s. In the US, Kurt Vonnegut inherited the connection throughout the 1960s, yet very few other US writers carried both banners beside him, i.e., anger and fantasy.

QUOTE

The various protagonists of Sillitoe's early fiction are generally restless young men from the slum world, who oppose the established order of things, but who are at the same time affected by consumerism and hedonism. Sillitoe rejected artistic elitism and instead of satirizing cosy middle-class British life, he focused on rebellious individuals and poor people, who have vile lives. "If I lost all I have in the world I wouldn't worry much," Sillitoe wrote in THE RAGMAN'S DAUGHTER (1963).

"If I was to go across the road for a packet of fags one morning and come back to see the house clapping its hands in flames with everything I owned burning inside I'd turn my back without any thought or regret and walk away, even if my jacket and last ten-bob note were in the flames as well."

The collection of short fiction was praised for its vitality. "Every story (and there is not one dud) has the exhilaration of revolutionary writing," stated Julian Jebb in The Sunday Times. THE DEATH OF WILLIAM POSTERS (1965), A TREE ON FIRE (1967), and A START IN LIFE (1970) formed a trilogy about a Nottingham factory worker. In the 1970s he produced another trilogy, consisting of THE FLOWER OF LIFE (1974), THE WIDOWER'S SON (1976) and STORYTELLER (1979). A selection of his short stories, mostly written beween 1959-1981, Sillitoe collected in NEW AND COLLECTED SHORT STORIES (2003).

Sillitoe has moved in his later works beyond this lower-class milieu towards analysis of the psychological states of his characters. In the autobiographical RAW MATERIAL (1972) he portrayed his grandparents, A Start in Life leaves the protagonist peacefully cultivating his garden, bemused by a prophecy that he will go wild again at thirty-five.

In 1959 Sillitoe married Ruth Fainlight; they had a son and adopted a daughter. THE RATS AND OTHER POEMS (1960) was Sillitoe's first published book of verse. "I have always regarded myself as a poet before novelist," Sillotoe once said, but he has met with little critical success for his poetry. In 1963 Sillitoe spent a month in the Soviet Union, recording his impressions in ROAD TO VOLGOGRAD (1964). Sillitoe has lived with his family mostly in London, but has also spent time in Tangier, Spain, and Israel. During the last years they have divided their time between London and France. best known for his novels, Sillitoe has also published children's books (starring a cat called Marmelade Jim), poetry, and plays. LIFE WITHOUT ARMOUR (1995) was an autobiography.

/END QUOTE

For further reading:

Alan Sillitoe by A.R. Penner (1972); Commitment As Art by Ronald Dee Vaverka (1978 - Dissertation--Uppsala Univ); Alan Sillitoe: A Critical Assessment by S.S. Atherton (1979); The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, ed. by J. Hawthorn (1984); Alan Sillitoe by David Gerard (1988); Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Action: A Reading of Alan Sillitoe by P. Hitchcock (1989); Understanding Alan Sillitoe, ed. by Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (1999); The Long Apprenticeship: Alienation in the Early Work of Alan Sillitoe by John Sawkins (2001)

Selected works:

WITHOUT BEER OR BREAD, 1957
THE LONELINESS OF LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER, 1958 - (film 1962, directed by Tony Richardson, starring Michael Redgrave, Tom Courtenay, Avis Bunnage, Peter Madden, Julia Foster)
SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING, 1958 - (film 1960, directed by Karel Reisz, starring Albert Finney, Shirley Anne Field, Rachel Roberts) - Lauantai-illasta sunnuntai aamuun (suom. Erkki Haglund)
THE RATS, AND OTHER POEMS, 1960
THE GENERAL, 1960
KEY TO THE DOOR, 1961
THE RAGMAN'S DAUGHTER, 1963 - (film 1963, dir. by Harold Becker, starring Simon Rouse, Victoria Tennant, Ptrick O'Connell, Leslie Sands)
A FALLING OUT OF LOVE, AND OTHER POEMS, 1964
ROAD TO VOLGOGRAD, 1965
THE DEATH OF WILLIAN POSTER, 1965
A TREE ON FIRE, 1967
THE CITY ADVENTURES OF MARMALADE JIM, 1967
LOVE IN THE ENVIROS OF VORONEZH, 1968
GUZMAN, GO HOME, 1968
SHAMAN AND OTHER POEMS, 1968
ALAN SILLITOE SELECTION, 1968
Lope de Vega: All Citizens are Soldiers, 1969 (translation)
A START IN LIFE, 1970 (Bogaulaire is reading this novel . . . )
THIS FOREIGN FIELD, 1970
TRAVELS IN NIHILON, 1971
POEMS, 1971
THE RAGMAN'S DAUGHTER, 1972 (play from his story)
RAW MATERIAL, 1972
SHAMAN AND OTHER POEMS, 1973
MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN, 1973
BARBARIANS, 1974
STORM, 1974
THE FLAME OF LIFE, 1974
RAW MATERIAL, 1974
MOUNTAINS AND CAVERNS, 1975 (essays, among others of D.H.Lawrence)
THE SAXON SHORE WAY, 1975 (with F. Godwin)
THE WIDOWER'S SON, 1976
PIT STRIKE, 1977
BIG JOHN AND THE STARS, 1977
3 PLAYS, 1978
THE INCREDIBLE FENCING FLEAS, 1978
THE STORYTELLER, 1979
SNOW ON THE NORTH SIDE OF LUCIFER, 1979
MARMALADE JIM AT THE FARM, 1980
THE SECOND CHANCE AND OTHER STORIES, 1981
HER VICTORY, 1982
SUN BEFORE DEPARTURE, 1982
THE LOST FLYING BOAT, 1983
DOWN FROM THE HILL, 1984
MARMALADE JIM AND THE FOX, 1984
LIFE GOES ON, 1985
TIDES AND STONE WALLS, 1986
EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK, 1987
THREE POEMS, 1988
OUT OF THE WHIRLPOOL, 198
THE OPEN DOOR, 1989
LOST LOVES, 1990
LEONARD'S WAR, 1991
COLLECTED POEMS, 1993
SNOWSTOP, 1993
COLLECTED STORIES, 1995
LEADING THE BLIND, 1995
LIFE WITHOUT ARMOUR, 1995
ALLIGATOR PLAYGROUND, 1997
THE BROKEN CHARIOT, 1998
LEADING THE BLIND: A CENTURY OF GUIDE BOOK TRAVEL 1815-1914, 1999
BIRTHDAY, 2002
NEW AND COLLECTED STORIES, 2003

The Dragon's Almanac - 21 December

from Justin Wintle

"One man cannot breathe through another man's nose."

. . . (1421) Thai

The Dragon's Almanac - 20 December

from Justin Wintle

"Twelve armed men cannot control the
strife created by one elegant woman."

. . (1417) Chinese

Creationists by E.L. Doctorow - Summary

Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Blogaulaire has not read Creationists, E. L. Doctorow's recent book of essays reviewed below. I am still in the middle of his early 1970s novel, "The Book of Daniel" and thoroughly enjoying it. (By the way, in his own writing, E.L.D. portrays the black janitor who lives in the basement of the family's apartment building in a stereotypical vein, very close to what he deplores in Mark Twain's early work. Just between you and me . . . )

QUOTE
By CHARLES MATTHEWS

"From Welcome to Hard Times to The March, and especially in such novels as The Book of Daniel, Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, Doctorow's own creativity has been fired by American history, by the West, the Civil War, the Cold War, by gangsters and rebels and immigrants. So some of the most provocative things he has to say are about the writer's relationship to America — or in the case of Franz Kafka, to Amerika, a novel that foundered because the immensity of the country stymied Kafka's claustrophobic Old World imagination. As Doctorow says, Kafka 'held his book together as long as he'd ignored the true scale of the American continent,' but 'the minute he tried to fold our vast openness into his conceit he was finished.'

But even American writers come to grief. Harriet Beecher Stowe may have touched the American conscience with Uncle Tom's Cabin, but Doctorow faults the book for 'the implicit racism of Stowe's stereotypes' of black people. 'It is an indication of how tortuous is the moral progress of a culture where even the religiously driven protest, the aesthetically organized act of moral intellect, assumes the biases of the system it would overthrow.'
And Stowe is not the only transgressor when it comes to racial stereotyping that ironically works against the author's message. Doctorow faults Mark Twain for letting Tom Sawyer take over the latter part of Huckleberry Finn — this is 'terrible for American literature,' he says, not only because it turns a grown-up book into juvenile fiction but also because it weakens the rapport between Huck and Jim.

And the portrayal of Jim troubles him as much as Stowe's stereotyping. Huck, Doctorow notes, 'struggles against the white mores of his time to help the black man, Jim, escape from slavery, but it is Huck's progenitor" — Twain himself — "who portrays Jim, in minstrelese, as a gullible black child-man led by white children."

Doctorow rejects Hemingway's famous assertion that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Instead, he says, "It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole."

Blogaulaire agrees with the Doctorow deconstruction the Houston reviewer described in the quote. In poetry, nearly every poet who went to Mayan Mexico and 'wrote back' displays the shallow cultural imperialism Kafka stumbled through. Even Lorca waxes racists in his notes and poems from New York City as he trembles before Black Harlem.

For many years Charles Matthews was books editor for the San Jose Mercury-News. He lives in Mountain View, Calif.

Paul Neilan : Apathy and Other Small Victories

book reviews : spike magazine:

"I remember with nostalgia digesting the contents of Chuck Palahniuk's stomach in his debut novel Fight Club, and wondering why the hell he even bothered to rise in the morning. It was visceral and exciting to see the stirrings, of my own apathetic generation. They say it's always easy to recognize one of your own, and it was, in the end.

Misguided beacons of hope, in oceans of relentless despair and revelation. Second-by-second bytes of surrealism, drip-fed to you through a plasma-coloured tube. Navel-gazing, in a nutshell. So now, we bomb the shit out of each other, devise ingenious ways of blowing up aircraft, with liquid explosives, paperclips and an iPod, or otherwise inhabit 'hi-density Jpod clusters,' at the end of the world.

Three cheers for nihilism, and for making a profession out of not giving a fuck, when underneath we do, more than most. For desiring a cloak of pathos and invisibility and yet being cursed with the contradiction, of needing a public stage upon which to vent it all. I'm human, so shoot me. Riotously funny sometimes, it hurts.

Apathy And Other Small Victories, by Paul Neilan. Angst plus equal parts sublimated anger, life seen through the grime of a Greyhound bus window, disposable culture and disposable life...

'If Tolstoy were alive today and working as a temp at Panoptican Insurance, he'd say that all insurance companies are the same, then throw himself through an eighteenth story window and plunge to his death in a hail of glass and shattered dignity. I worked on the eighteenth floor, but the windows were too thick...' "

Citation from online seller:

Apathy and Other Small Victories

by: Paul Neilan
publisher: St. Martin's Press, released: 02 May, 2006
price: £8.48 (new), £4.77 (used)

The Silmarillion: edited by Christopher Tolkien

On - rare, limited and signed editions - J. R. R. Tolkien


From an online article about collecting all editions of The Silmarillion.

Development of the text

The earliest drafts of The Silmarillion stories date back to as early as 1917, when Tolkien, a British officer stationed in France during World War I was laid up in a military field hospital with trench fever. At the time, he called his collection of nascent stories The Book of Lost Tales. After the war, he tried to publish some of his stories, however many editors rejected him, regarding his work as 'fairy tale' unsuitable for adult readership. He tried once more, having already published The Hobbit in 1937; however that time too, The Silmarillion was deemed too complicated. Tolkien was asked to write a sequel to The Hobbit which would become his significant novel The Lord of the Rings.

But Tolkien never abandoned his book. He regarded The Silmarillion as the most important of his work, seeing in its tales not only the genesis of Middle-earth and later events as told in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but the entire core of his legendarium. He continued to work on them over the next several decades, revising and reworking his ideas, right up until his death in 1973.

After Tolkien's death

For several years after his father's death, Christopher Tolkien worked through the mass of papers written by his father creating a coherent, consistent and chronologically accurate whole. On some of the later parts of the 'Quenta Silmarillion' which were in the roughest state, he worked with fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay to construct a narrative practically from nothing. The final result, which included genealogies, maps, an index and the first-ever published Elvish word list was published in 1977.

Inside the book

The Silmarillion combines five parts:

1. The Ainulindalë - the creation of Eä, Tolkien's universe.
2. The Valaquenta - a description of the Valar and Maiar
3. The Quenta Silmarillion - the history of the events before and during the First Age
   
4. The Akallabêth - the history of the Second Age
   
5. Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age
   
   These five parts, in origin separate works, were (combined in one volume) as J. R. R. Tolkien (intended) . . .
   
   Click on the title of this post to read more about collecting Tolkien books.

The Dragon's Almanac - 19 December

from Justin Wintle

"When Heaven veils the sun wise men extinguish their lamps ."

. . . (1413) Chinese

The Dragon's Almanac - 18 December

from Justin Wintle

"The false prophet who foretells calamity and the true prophet who predicts health should both be cherished ."

. . . (1409) Chinese

USA Undergrads - Early Start as Rare Book Collectors & Bookdealers

Rare books find a home with youths :
By Carol Huang | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
(Post titles are links - click to see the source.)

"Bill Miglore, who graduated from Amherst College last spring, held up a dusty 1940 copy of Scholastic Magazine. But this copy contains Truman Capote's first-ever published work: a few lines about what he liked girls to wear on dates. The work had gone undiscovered for so long that Capote specialists stopped looking for it 20 years ago.

Fellow panelist Anne Harley, who records, performs, teaches, and researches Russian Gypsy and chamber music from the 1780s to 1850s, collects books of, well, Russian Gypsy and chamber music from the 1780s to 1850s. Her collection illuminating the 'cultural milieu' of the music won her Boston University's book-collecting prize last spring.

Ms. Harley reads aloud an excerpt that 'made her eyes light up' the first time she saw it, inviting the audience to experience the moment the words captured."

This feature story is not a humble one from 'The Music Man' about the farm boy who keeps a dime novel hidden in the corn crib. Huang continues:

Miglore snatched up the long-lost Capote paragraph by running a variety of specialized online searches for the right Scholastic Magazine, which someone had decided to sell on Abebooks.com, a leading online marketplace.

"It is a time-consuming and devoted process," Harley says by phone prior to the panel. Her hunt for books is even more exhausting: She travels to Russia at least once a year and wades through an aggravating bureaucracy. Harley has undergone interviews just to look at a book catalog; she's waited days to ask permission to photocopy, only to be denied. A week's work might yield just eight lines of music.

Finding valuable books on a student budget increases the challenge - and heightens the thrill. Miglore found T.S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party" inscribed by the author to his cousin Martha Eliot in a Boston bookstore - for $4. Fellow panelists gasp with empathetic delight at the story.

Literature Buggers Reality: My Part-time Bookselling as Reflected in a 1972 E. L. Doctorow Novel – his Book of Daniel

The following text strikes me as a reminder that my friend’s bookstore exists as just one more example of a genre of radical-marginal-countercultural cliché which is continually being ‘thrown up’ and perpetuated by pseudo-prophets who start businesses that are doomed to fail financially because they are mere excuses for anti-social, isolated existence without a commitment to make them work as sources of income and as viable services to one’s community.

From a scan of: E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel. New York, New American Library, 1972; p 49 --

-- where Daniel describes his biological father’s storefront radio repair shop:

On the bed of the window, resting on old curled crepe paper, bleached grey, are two display radios—a table model and a console with cloth-covered doors and a combination automatic record changer. When you go inside you see that the two window display radios have nothing inside them. They are empty cabinets. Not many people buy radios here. Mostly they have their old ones fixed. There is no irony in Paul Isaacson’s owning his own business, because he makes no profit. He employs no one and, therefore, exploits no one. Isaacson Radio, Sales and Repair, is not a good business. There were lots of poor or lower middle class people in that neighborhood. They all knew someone who could sell cheaper. And they did not support big repair bills. He was honest and he never overcharged. Rochelle, who kept the books at home, was supposed to figure out how to pay the rent each month.

(Sandra, a single mother of grown boys, has to figure that one out herself!)

Is my friend ‘Sandra’, the owner of the bookstore where I so recently worked (the place I have often described on this blog), setting herself up as a martyr? If so, could it be in close parallel to the scenario described in Doctorow's “Book of Daniel”? Is membership in a 'decade of revolt and reinventing values' sometimes not a stepping stone to selling out as a radical-chic or YUPPIE parvenu but (sometimes) more closely related to being a card-carrying commie? This has me wondering about the counter-cultural types versus the Marxist types in new ways.

I want to doubt it, disbelieve the remarkable similarities. Something makes me want to chalk it up to neurosis - as I think E. L. Doctorow was attempting . . at times . . in his fiction.

Maybe the phenomenon goes deeper than the parallel with radical history/biography (Sandra's as well as my own); maybe it is a similarity more related to persons who actively choose to remain marginal to the world of business and commerce, serving a ‘higher goal’, one that requires a personal sacrifice (effacement, in French) of ones personal identity behind piles of books, radios, or the paraphernalia of any trade -- a trade/profession that serves more as an excuse to avoid more than a supplement for engaging with real people in personally fulfilling relationships.

Do ideologues use their business and the objects of their failing professions as armor behind which they can hide their own real face, their intimate personality?

Background (from a student essay) displayed online HERE

QUOTE/

Daniel and his sister Susan are the fictional children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In Doctorow’s novel they are called the Isaacsons. Like the real people they were modeled on, The Rosenberg’s were members of the Communist Party of the United States. They were charged with passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. How lower middle-class people from the Bronx got possession of atomic secrets to pass to the Russians was never explained by the American government of the day. In the novel Daniel’s father owns a small radio repair business and Daniel’s mother, Rochelle, is a housewife.

/END QUOTE

WARNING: This is a sample of an essay by a student who "just didn't know where to start. " You may copy the essay if you wish but please use it only as a guide to good writing. Turning it as your work would be plagiarism and could get you kicked out of school.

And for a bit of enthusiastic endorsement for E. L. Doctorow’s novel Book of Daniel with which I am in agreement, we might as well read the entry on ABE for a bookseller’s unusually long offer to sell the novel for $1.50:

Book of Daniel[Buy it!]
Doctorow, E L 1.50 Abebooks Daniel's Books

Bantam Doubleday Dell Softcover. Bantam Doubleday Dell 1983 Fine/ Unread, faintest wear, In plastic.

Description: The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life-marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career (as a) scholar. It is a life that enrages him.

In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different. .It is a confession of his most intimate relation-with his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him. It is a of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents" innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House.

It (the novel) is a(bout an) investigation: transcribing Daniel’s interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks. It is a (story) of judgments of everyone involved in the case-lawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself. It is a (book) rich in characters, from elderly grandmothers of immigrant culture to covert radicals of the McCarthy era to hippie marchers on the Pentagon. It is a (book) that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II.

It is a (book) about the nature of Left politics in this country - its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations. It is The (Book) of Daniel.

1A-R2-C2 Daniel’s Books [Enumclaw, WA, U.S.A.]

A Young Toronto Woman Relates Her Discovery of Kenya and a Shantytown World

Blogaulaire commented this morning on the post linked to the title above (just click on it).

Here is a snippet from what 'Mambo!' blogged on her new site from her 'new site':

It's quite a dangerous place...not like downtown toronto scary, but like seeing machetes in the head scary....one volunteer found a dude like that two weeks ago and he and 2 guys put him in a shopping cart to the hospital. All day yesterday we heard stories from the past two weeks of volunteers getting robbed and attacked in the night when camping or hiking by bandits! Oh god!! I don't think i would deal well with bandits! Anyway, I live in a nice house comparitively speaking with 2 other boys (i think aussie) and two girls who are leaving tomorrow. Haven't met anyone yet but heard they are cool. Oh, and if you want to see what Kibera looks like rent the move The Constant Gardener...it's fantastic and that's where it is filmed. It's weird because when nora and i saw it in the summer on video I could picture myself there....and low and behold when I stood on the roof of my temporary host mother's last night I noticed it the the left of me....and the train tracks where they filmed were right behind her house.....crazy...seriously, crazy!

The Dragon's Almanac - 17 December

from Justin Wintle

"Teaching that enters the ears but not the heart is like dinner eaten in a dream."

. . . (1402) Chinese