You read the review of a memor written by a writer whose father was a famed short story writer. You saw some similarities of the chaos and the struggles to find identity, self-respect, and solace and meaning through words. Reading the review made you more determined to be honest with yourself and more persistent in your own quest.
You held her close to you and uttered in a faint, rasping, stuttering voice: "we, we need to be, be good and true, true to each other", by which you meant to say, you need to be true to her. You couldn't bring yourself to tell her that as much you liked her and didn't mind spending time with her, love had become a stranger to you. You had lost faith and trust in the immortality of love. All you saw was a stark naked reality that people used each other in the name of love and sex was merely a way to allay the itch of loneliness. There was no longer devotion and sacrifice and forgiveness. Instead, what was plainly shining and glittering in the sunlight was selfishness masqueraded as love. How would you know it so? Love was not love if there was a preoccupation with self, and not much concern for the Other, if there was too much insistence on being right and not enough listening, if there was a constant keeping track of scores. Love was not asking what the Other was doing for you, but asking yourself of what you were doing for the Other. Love, simply put, was giving without bothering asking back for anything in return. Remember, when we were young and green, when calculation did not yet infect our souls, all we wanted to do was to please the one we loved, to make him or her feel happy. Seeing him or her happy also made us feel happy. Now we have become walking calculators. The other day your client burst into your office, crying and sobbing and wailing that her husband of 40 years was seeing another woman and initiating a divorce proceedings. You calmly told her, but without sympathy, that you had seen that brewing for years. Nobody wanted to spend time with a self-righteous, bossy, domineering woman. All men want peace and tranquility. They have no stomach for arguments and excuses and pathology.
What's going on, sweetheart? Why are you crying? I am sending you a message, preparing you for a goodbye of our own? Nah, you imagine too much. Anyway, que sera, sera, you know what I mean. What counts is the here and now. We get some good sleep, eat right, get some exercise, be nice and pleasant despite petty, even major, provocations. We live for the moment. We put up with stupidity masqueraded as wisdom, pontification presented as knowledge, and cruelty shown as love. I talk too much as usual. I've got to go to work. I really have a very tough job, as you know. Everyday I am tested to the utmost. Everyday is the fight to the finish. I don't know how long I can do what I'm doing. I'm not getting any younger. I just looked outside the window. It seems to be a beautiful day. And I am feeling good and glad to be alive. Life by itself has no meaning, as you know. It's up to us to give it meaning. I hope your meaning makes sense, if you know what I mean. I've got to go.
Roberto Wisdai
Roberto Wissai
Thursday, March 31, 2011
An account of life of father and son, both writers
Townie: A Memoir
by Andre Dubus III
Norton, 387 pp., $25.95
The first four children of the short-story writer Andre Dubus—he had two more, much later, with his third wife—were all born on Marine Corps bases beginning in 1958. Suzanne was the oldest, then Andre III, his brother Jeb, and finally Nicole. Dubus was a Marine Corps officer and rose to the rank of captain. Some of his time was served on the aircraft carrier Ranger in the Far East. After six years of service he resigned his commission in order to become what he had always wanted to be, a writer, and was accepted in the Writers’ Workshop, the celebrated program at the University of Iowa. Kurt Vonnegut was a teacher there at the time, as was Richard Yates.
Life in Iowa City was happy and stimulating. Dubus was a sociable man and so was his wife, Pat. She had been a homecoming queen in Louisiana, where they both were from, and had admired his writing in the local newspaper. After meeting him she broke her engagement to another boy and, following a brief courtship, eloped with Dubus. In Iowa they made friends easily. There was little money but there were frequent parties, drinking, laughing, talking about books and writing. It was a warm, convivial life.
After Iowa, the family moved east where Dubus had a teaching job that paid seven thousand dollars a year. They lived in rural New Hampshire and then on the New Hampshire–Massachusetts line, still giving parties at which friends from the college, poets, creative people, and students, mainly young women, were guests. The happiness began to fade, there were marital fights, and Dubus left home to live with one of the beautiful students.
He was a small man, nice looking, neat in his habits, dedicated to his work, a runner who ran every day after he’d finished writing, and who went to Mass every morning. He liked people, especially women, and made friends easily. He didn’t abandon his children. He gave money to help support them and saw them, all four together, every weekend when he usually took them someplace to eat. Pat and the children had moved to Newburyport at the mouth of the Merrimack River where, as in other towns upriver, commerce had receded, the red-brick mills were empty, stores closed, cars rusting, and life was different than it had been. There, Andre III writes in Townie: A Memoir:
Kids roamed the neighborhood like dogs. The first week I was sitting in the sun on our steps, I made the mistake of watching them go by as they walked up the middle of the street, three or four boys with no shirts, a couple of girls in shorts and halter tops. The tallest one, his short hair so blond it looked white, said, “What’re you lookin’ at, fuck face?”
“Nothing.”
Then he was on our bottom step. He pushed me hard in the chest and kicked my shin. “You want your face rearranged, faggot?”
“No.”
Maybe he walked off after that, maybe he punched me in the head, I’m not sure, but of all the places we’d lived so far it was clear this was going to be the meanest.
Later they moved to Haverhill, another boarded-up city, Irish and Italian, with barrooms, it seemed, on every block. The worst part of town was “the avenues” where the roughest elements were, layabouts in black leather jackets, rent collectors, motorcycles, guys itching for a fight. There were fights at school from which Andre III shrank. He was small, afraid, and didn’t know how to handle it. There weren’t gangs but rather feared, aggressive individuals, a big, slope-shouldered, mean kid named Clay Whelan who beat him up three or four times a week, and others, smaller but implacable with a kind of repellent glamour. Andre, his brother, and older sister smoked dope, dropped acid, grew long hair, skipped school, and except for being prey behaved like all their peers. Suzanne began dealing. Jeb practiced the guitar and before long was having sex in his room with his former teacher.
Their mother had a series of boyfriends, one as bad as the next, until she finally settled on Bruce, who was of a different mold, drove a Jaguar, dressed well, had money, and promptly bought bicycles for the four kids. He had seven of them himself and was separated from a wife in Boston. The house was uncared for, dirty dishes piled in the sink, unread books from Iowa days in the bookcase, little in the refrigerator, and children making their own, downward-trending way and their mother commuting to a low-paying job in Boston. It was a trash life. Townie has many scenes of it, the streets, convenience stores, bars, young people, no Steve Jobs among them, no Barack Obama, all of it to the driving sound of music, Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, Pink Floyd, Ten Years After. There was early sex. One of the little hoydens that Jeb was briefly involved with was the sister of Ricky J., a tough rent collector. One day on the street someone said to Andre:
“I wouldn’t want to be your brother right now.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause he’s fucking dead, that’s why.”
The brother of Ricky J., Tommy, nineteen or twenty years old, was coming home on leave from the army to deal with Jeb. He weighed almost two hundred pounds and had almost beaten a biker to death. Fear of his arrival was blowing around like gusts of wind. Then, in a scene from a western, a figure was striding up their street with half a dozen followers in leather jackets and T-shirts. It was Tommy J., a foot taller than either Dubus brother and sixty or seventy pounds heavier. “That’s him, Tommy,” someone said. Before Jeb could get in the house, he was punched hard in the face. “You like my little sister, mothafucka?” Andre tried to intercede. “Tommy, come on,” he pleaded. Another punch in the face. Their mother came running out, grabbing a fallen branch and swinging it, shouting to get out or she would call the cops. “Fuck you, you fuckin’ whore.” He would kill Jeb if he even looked at his sister again. As Tommy J. left, his eyes passed over Andre as if he didn’t exist, as if there was no one there:
I stood in front of the sink and the mirror. I was almost surprised to see someone standing there. This kid with a smooth face and not one whisker, this kid with long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, this kid with narrow shoulders and soft arm and chest muscles and no balls. This kid had no balls. I looked into his eyes: I don’t care if you get your face beat in, I don’t care if you get kicked in the head or stabbed or even shot, I will never allow you not to fight back ever again. You hear me?
Ever. Not once, ever, again.
There was no father to tell this to. Pop, as the older Dubus is called in the book, was teaching at Bradford, the respectable, green-lawned college across the river from Haverhill. He was still in touch with his ex-wife, coming back to family dinners on holidays and seeing his children regularly, but although he’d been told of their being picked on and had tried to do what he could about it, he really did not know what was going on in their lives.
To make himself strong and also strong-looking, Andre began lifting weights. He devoted himself to it fanatically, to bodybuilding and the image of a boy who would be respected and even feared. He was almost sixteen years old and in a few months was working out six days a week, two hours at a time, eating a healthy diet, and by his birthday bench-pressing his own weight. In one session he did a thousand sit-ups. At the same time his grades were improving. One night, cursed at and threatened by two men, he finally steps forward and talks back. He’s punched in the face for it, but he feels triumph. He finally did something, something changed. The fuse was burning.
It becomes like a fight movie, training endlessly, going to a storefront gym, learning to hit, pound the heavy bag with body blows, practice jabs and right crosses, but also a movie like Walking Tall or Billy Jack, getting even, a Clint Eastwood movie with clenched words and deadly action, a movie where the hero, all bloody, looking finished, says, “You better kill me because if you don’t, I’m going to kill you.”
What happened, however, was that Andre’s sister Suzanne was raped. It happened in Boston and late at night, and Andre felt shame somehow for not having been there to protect her, shame for his father, too, and a perverse pleasure that he’d been the one to call his father with the news and its implication that he’d failed his children. The rapists were never identified or found, but the day came when Andre, standing up for his brother against one of the Lynch brothers in a bar on Washington Street, suddenly hit as hard as he could and Lynch went straight down, teeth knocked out, mouth bloody. Andre had crossed the line, hit first, hit hard:
I used to think the butterflies in my stomach meant I was afraid and if I’m afraid it’s because I should be and then I’d get even more butterflies and the adrenaline would back up on me till I couldn’t even move, and I’d just stand there and do nothing….
You can’t let it back up on you. You have to move as soon as it comes. No foreplay. No shoving each other. As soon as you know you’re in a fight, you punch him hard in the face and you keep punching.
He looked in the mirror now and saw the boy who hadn’t backed down or run or pleaded. “I was smiling at him, and he was smiling back at me.”
Townie is not really about town and gown, it’s about the way of the warrior described in straightforward, driving prose that feels almost like the present tense. Dubus is a writer keenly alert to the physical world, its smells, colors, shapes, and substance, and you sense the desire to put things down clearly and exactly so that they will be remembered. Through almost unintentional repetition you come to know the names of streets, bars, the Basilere Bridge, the GAR park, the statue of Hannah Dustin, and Monument Square.
Andre becomes a fighter, not in the ring, although he trains at one time for the Golden Gloves, but a fighter on the side of honor, justice, the weak, the Billy Jack he had dreamed of. Hitting someone in the face without warning takes a certain kind of conditioning and attitude. It’s a violation of another man’s essential person. It’s different from boxing or wrestling where physical violence is condoned and is the whole point, different from violence in any sport. The violence that Andre practiced and describes is a career of slugging men and putting them in the hospital, sometimes wading into groups of them—No, Andre, don’t, the girls are saying, don’t—men in a Chrysler at a wedding reception, men making noise in an alley in Austin, men who terrified a woman in the airport in Miami, and many others made him an avenger, at least in his own eyes, but also a menace. “The retribution that must now be delivered,” he writes at one point. One night he drives his car to scrape the entire length of another car that’s carrying a bumper sticker he doesn’t like. For a time he becomes a Marxist.
After college, back in Haverhill working at a halfway house called Phoenix East, there is a spellbindingly written account of one of the inmates, Donny C., whom he finds in the kitchen one night standing shirtless in boxer shorts with a butcher knife pressed to his throat. Andre persuades him to come and talk, and he does, still holding the knife. Donny complains that he can’t breathe, the counselors won’t let him swear or fight, and if he can’t do those things and be himself he might as well be dead. Andre understands. With the glint of the knife still between them, he describes an image that comes from his own heart:
…Donny with a good job making good money, all dressed up and out on a date with a beautiful woman, walking down a city street at night when a man steps from the shadows to give them shit and Donny takes care of business before the man can even get started.
Donny begins to nod his head, yeah. The thing is, he didn’t need to change his ways but instead to hold on to the things that gave him self-identity and merely add new and presumably more socially desirable things to them. Andre had himself already gone through the process. A few years earlier he’d begun to write and to sublimate his rage into words on a page.
He had read his father’s stories when he was first in college at Bradford, and his mother had suggested to him once that he should write, but he’d dismissed the idea. He admired his father’s writing, but he felt it was also a cop-out. He listened to his girlfriend, who was a student in one of his father’s classes, repeatedly praise a writer in the class, and one day he found a copy of this writer’s story on her bed.
He read it and was deeply impressed. It appears that writing was latent in him and one day, alone in his apartment, he sat down and simply began. He was working in construction at the time and training for the Golden Gloves but something else was beginning. In time he would approach writing with the same dedication and almost religious intensity that he had devoted to making himself inviolate. He would sit down every morning without expectation or judgment, without ego or self-image involved, and wait for something true to come.
In the night of July 23, 1986, driving home from Boston where he had gone to pursue some research for something he was writing, Andre Dubus, the father, slowed down for a car that had hit a motorcycle. A young couple, stunned, their faces bloody, sat in the car. Dubus helped them out and tried to flag down an oncoming car in the darkness. At the last moment, unaccountably, it swerved toward them. Dubus pulled the woman out of the way, but he and the young man were hit at high speed, almost sixty sickening miles an hour. The young man was killed. Dubus was critically injured, both of his legs were crushed. There were ten operations on the right one. In the end it had to be amputated just below the knee, and the left one was so severely damaged that Dubus was never able to use it again.
He was fifty years old, an admired writer whose influences included Chekhov and Hemingway and whose work was somewhere between them, truthful, detailed, and with a kind of honorable sentimentality. He drank in the evenings, went to baseball games in Boston, and after his daughter’s rape began collecting usa ble guns—at the time of the accident he was carrying three of them—but at the core he was a disciplined, dedicated writer. He sometimes played opera as he wrote. He sometimes wore a Japanese kimono. Writing was the real center of his life, apart from his Catholicism. The day before his right leg was amputated, he was cheerful when visited by Andre. A devastating operation lay ahead. Dubus had been a runner all his life, and Andre had sometimes run with him. Andre bent down and kissed the bare right foot goodbye.
For the last twelve years of his life, the elder Dubus was essentially a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair. His third wife, with whom he’d had two daughters, had left him, and his two sons rebuilt his house themselves to make it more practical for him. Through the years Dubus had grown closer to them, particularly Andre, proud of his fighting—Dubus himself, though a Marine, had never been in a fight—and his writing; at times he was virtually a close pal. His many friends remained loyal to him. A group of writers, including John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, John Irving, Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, and Richard Yates, got together and organized a series of readings from their work to help pay his medical expenses. In 1988 he was awarded a MacArthur grant.
ownie is an account not only of Andre’s life, it is also a record of everything his father did not know and had missed as a result of having left the family, a final bonding with and tribute to a father who was errant but hugely influential. Autobiographies have become a very popular form. The first person has been a favored voice for as long as there have been books, and in autobiography it may hold our interest because of whose voice it is, how well known, or because of its own vitality, its a cappella power. There is something of both in Townie. Women do not figure largely in the book. It is a man’s confession, honest and somewhat disturbing, standing alongside other writers’ books about their youth and, often, absent or defective fathers: Frank Conroy’s influential Stop Time, Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, or J.R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar. In autobiography there is only one witness and one account, and it stands.
Andre Dubus III is married now with three children of his own and is a teacher as his father had been. There are inevitable connections to be drawn between father and son, emotional ones, as the book shows so clearly, but as writers they are not the same and the younger has proved more popular. He gives the impression of someone not to be crossed, someone polite enough but who would do the same thing to anyone who messed with his daughter that Tommy J. did to Jeb. Jeb attempted suicide twice, once nearly successfully. Andre never did.
When his father died of a heart attack in February 1999, Andre was in San Francisco promoting his new novel, House of Sand and Fog, which was nominated for the National Book Award and became an Oprah selection. The man at the desk in his hotel said there was a call for him. It was his wife on the phone, crying. “Honey, what?” he said. “What?” His first thought was of his children, something had happened to one of them. His wife couldn’t stop crying. Finally she was able to say, “Your dad—”
They had once sat together talking at length to an interviewer and then drinking and continuing to talk, and Andre had said to himself:
You need to tell him how it was. He still thinks this was just a sport for you. He’ll listen now. Tell him how it was.
He never managed to until now.
He and his brother, Jeb, built the coffin for their father with their own hands, taking all of one night to do it. More than eight hundred people attended the funeral:
his two older sisters from Louisiana, their grown daughters and sons, cousins of his we barely knew. There were writer friends from his time in Iowa City, ex-girlfriends and two ex-wives, Peggy singing “Summertime” up in the balcony. There were hundreds of students from over the years, drinking buddies from Ronnie D’s, retired professors from Bradford, waitresses and bartenders and former cops.
The ground was frozen too hard to bury him and they had to wait until spring. The two brothers and a friend dug the grave. Townie is the great wreath, part beautiful flowers, part still-green leaves, part thorns, bits of cloth, paper, everything Andre wanted to remember laid with toughened hands on the grave.
James Salter
New York Reviewe of Books
April 7, 2011
by Andre Dubus III
Norton, 387 pp., $25.95
The first four children of the short-story writer Andre Dubus—he had two more, much later, with his third wife—were all born on Marine Corps bases beginning in 1958. Suzanne was the oldest, then Andre III, his brother Jeb, and finally Nicole. Dubus was a Marine Corps officer and rose to the rank of captain. Some of his time was served on the aircraft carrier Ranger in the Far East. After six years of service he resigned his commission in order to become what he had always wanted to be, a writer, and was accepted in the Writers’ Workshop, the celebrated program at the University of Iowa. Kurt Vonnegut was a teacher there at the time, as was Richard Yates.
Life in Iowa City was happy and stimulating. Dubus was a sociable man and so was his wife, Pat. She had been a homecoming queen in Louisiana, where they both were from, and had admired his writing in the local newspaper. After meeting him she broke her engagement to another boy and, following a brief courtship, eloped with Dubus. In Iowa they made friends easily. There was little money but there were frequent parties, drinking, laughing, talking about books and writing. It was a warm, convivial life.
After Iowa, the family moved east where Dubus had a teaching job that paid seven thousand dollars a year. They lived in rural New Hampshire and then on the New Hampshire–Massachusetts line, still giving parties at which friends from the college, poets, creative people, and students, mainly young women, were guests. The happiness began to fade, there were marital fights, and Dubus left home to live with one of the beautiful students.
He was a small man, nice looking, neat in his habits, dedicated to his work, a runner who ran every day after he’d finished writing, and who went to Mass every morning. He liked people, especially women, and made friends easily. He didn’t abandon his children. He gave money to help support them and saw them, all four together, every weekend when he usually took them someplace to eat. Pat and the children had moved to Newburyport at the mouth of the Merrimack River where, as in other towns upriver, commerce had receded, the red-brick mills were empty, stores closed, cars rusting, and life was different than it had been. There, Andre III writes in Townie: A Memoir:
Kids roamed the neighborhood like dogs. The first week I was sitting in the sun on our steps, I made the mistake of watching them go by as they walked up the middle of the street, three or four boys with no shirts, a couple of girls in shorts and halter tops. The tallest one, his short hair so blond it looked white, said, “What’re you lookin’ at, fuck face?”
“Nothing.”
Then he was on our bottom step. He pushed me hard in the chest and kicked my shin. “You want your face rearranged, faggot?”
“No.”
Maybe he walked off after that, maybe he punched me in the head, I’m not sure, but of all the places we’d lived so far it was clear this was going to be the meanest.
Later they moved to Haverhill, another boarded-up city, Irish and Italian, with barrooms, it seemed, on every block. The worst part of town was “the avenues” where the roughest elements were, layabouts in black leather jackets, rent collectors, motorcycles, guys itching for a fight. There were fights at school from which Andre III shrank. He was small, afraid, and didn’t know how to handle it. There weren’t gangs but rather feared, aggressive individuals, a big, slope-shouldered, mean kid named Clay Whelan who beat him up three or four times a week, and others, smaller but implacable with a kind of repellent glamour. Andre, his brother, and older sister smoked dope, dropped acid, grew long hair, skipped school, and except for being prey behaved like all their peers. Suzanne began dealing. Jeb practiced the guitar and before long was having sex in his room with his former teacher.
Their mother had a series of boyfriends, one as bad as the next, until she finally settled on Bruce, who was of a different mold, drove a Jaguar, dressed well, had money, and promptly bought bicycles for the four kids. He had seven of them himself and was separated from a wife in Boston. The house was uncared for, dirty dishes piled in the sink, unread books from Iowa days in the bookcase, little in the refrigerator, and children making their own, downward-trending way and their mother commuting to a low-paying job in Boston. It was a trash life. Townie has many scenes of it, the streets, convenience stores, bars, young people, no Steve Jobs among them, no Barack Obama, all of it to the driving sound of music, Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, Pink Floyd, Ten Years After. There was early sex. One of the little hoydens that Jeb was briefly involved with was the sister of Ricky J., a tough rent collector. One day on the street someone said to Andre:
“I wouldn’t want to be your brother right now.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause he’s fucking dead, that’s why.”
The brother of Ricky J., Tommy, nineteen or twenty years old, was coming home on leave from the army to deal with Jeb. He weighed almost two hundred pounds and had almost beaten a biker to death. Fear of his arrival was blowing around like gusts of wind. Then, in a scene from a western, a figure was striding up their street with half a dozen followers in leather jackets and T-shirts. It was Tommy J., a foot taller than either Dubus brother and sixty or seventy pounds heavier. “That’s him, Tommy,” someone said. Before Jeb could get in the house, he was punched hard in the face. “You like my little sister, mothafucka?” Andre tried to intercede. “Tommy, come on,” he pleaded. Another punch in the face. Their mother came running out, grabbing a fallen branch and swinging it, shouting to get out or she would call the cops. “Fuck you, you fuckin’ whore.” He would kill Jeb if he even looked at his sister again. As Tommy J. left, his eyes passed over Andre as if he didn’t exist, as if there was no one there:
I stood in front of the sink and the mirror. I was almost surprised to see someone standing there. This kid with a smooth face and not one whisker, this kid with long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, this kid with narrow shoulders and soft arm and chest muscles and no balls. This kid had no balls. I looked into his eyes: I don’t care if you get your face beat in, I don’t care if you get kicked in the head or stabbed or even shot, I will never allow you not to fight back ever again. You hear me?
Ever. Not once, ever, again.
There was no father to tell this to. Pop, as the older Dubus is called in the book, was teaching at Bradford, the respectable, green-lawned college across the river from Haverhill. He was still in touch with his ex-wife, coming back to family dinners on holidays and seeing his children regularly, but although he’d been told of their being picked on and had tried to do what he could about it, he really did not know what was going on in their lives.
To make himself strong and also strong-looking, Andre began lifting weights. He devoted himself to it fanatically, to bodybuilding and the image of a boy who would be respected and even feared. He was almost sixteen years old and in a few months was working out six days a week, two hours at a time, eating a healthy diet, and by his birthday bench-pressing his own weight. In one session he did a thousand sit-ups. At the same time his grades were improving. One night, cursed at and threatened by two men, he finally steps forward and talks back. He’s punched in the face for it, but he feels triumph. He finally did something, something changed. The fuse was burning.
It becomes like a fight movie, training endlessly, going to a storefront gym, learning to hit, pound the heavy bag with body blows, practice jabs and right crosses, but also a movie like Walking Tall or Billy Jack, getting even, a Clint Eastwood movie with clenched words and deadly action, a movie where the hero, all bloody, looking finished, says, “You better kill me because if you don’t, I’m going to kill you.”
What happened, however, was that Andre’s sister Suzanne was raped. It happened in Boston and late at night, and Andre felt shame somehow for not having been there to protect her, shame for his father, too, and a perverse pleasure that he’d been the one to call his father with the news and its implication that he’d failed his children. The rapists were never identified or found, but the day came when Andre, standing up for his brother against one of the Lynch brothers in a bar on Washington Street, suddenly hit as hard as he could and Lynch went straight down, teeth knocked out, mouth bloody. Andre had crossed the line, hit first, hit hard:
I used to think the butterflies in my stomach meant I was afraid and if I’m afraid it’s because I should be and then I’d get even more butterflies and the adrenaline would back up on me till I couldn’t even move, and I’d just stand there and do nothing….
You can’t let it back up on you. You have to move as soon as it comes. No foreplay. No shoving each other. As soon as you know you’re in a fight, you punch him hard in the face and you keep punching.
He looked in the mirror now and saw the boy who hadn’t backed down or run or pleaded. “I was smiling at him, and he was smiling back at me.”
Townie is not really about town and gown, it’s about the way of the warrior described in straightforward, driving prose that feels almost like the present tense. Dubus is a writer keenly alert to the physical world, its smells, colors, shapes, and substance, and you sense the desire to put things down clearly and exactly so that they will be remembered. Through almost unintentional repetition you come to know the names of streets, bars, the Basilere Bridge, the GAR park, the statue of Hannah Dustin, and Monument Square.
Andre becomes a fighter, not in the ring, although he trains at one time for the Golden Gloves, but a fighter on the side of honor, justice, the weak, the Billy Jack he had dreamed of. Hitting someone in the face without warning takes a certain kind of conditioning and attitude. It’s a violation of another man’s essential person. It’s different from boxing or wrestling where physical violence is condoned and is the whole point, different from violence in any sport. The violence that Andre practiced and describes is a career of slugging men and putting them in the hospital, sometimes wading into groups of them—No, Andre, don’t, the girls are saying, don’t—men in a Chrysler at a wedding reception, men making noise in an alley in Austin, men who terrified a woman in the airport in Miami, and many others made him an avenger, at least in his own eyes, but also a menace. “The retribution that must now be delivered,” he writes at one point. One night he drives his car to scrape the entire length of another car that’s carrying a bumper sticker he doesn’t like. For a time he becomes a Marxist.
After college, back in Haverhill working at a halfway house called Phoenix East, there is a spellbindingly written account of one of the inmates, Donny C., whom he finds in the kitchen one night standing shirtless in boxer shorts with a butcher knife pressed to his throat. Andre persuades him to come and talk, and he does, still holding the knife. Donny complains that he can’t breathe, the counselors won’t let him swear or fight, and if he can’t do those things and be himself he might as well be dead. Andre understands. With the glint of the knife still between them, he describes an image that comes from his own heart:
…Donny with a good job making good money, all dressed up and out on a date with a beautiful woman, walking down a city street at night when a man steps from the shadows to give them shit and Donny takes care of business before the man can even get started.
Donny begins to nod his head, yeah. The thing is, he didn’t need to change his ways but instead to hold on to the things that gave him self-identity and merely add new and presumably more socially desirable things to them. Andre had himself already gone through the process. A few years earlier he’d begun to write and to sublimate his rage into words on a page.
He had read his father’s stories when he was first in college at Bradford, and his mother had suggested to him once that he should write, but he’d dismissed the idea. He admired his father’s writing, but he felt it was also a cop-out. He listened to his girlfriend, who was a student in one of his father’s classes, repeatedly praise a writer in the class, and one day he found a copy of this writer’s story on her bed.
He read it and was deeply impressed. It appears that writing was latent in him and one day, alone in his apartment, he sat down and simply began. He was working in construction at the time and training for the Golden Gloves but something else was beginning. In time he would approach writing with the same dedication and almost religious intensity that he had devoted to making himself inviolate. He would sit down every morning without expectation or judgment, without ego or self-image involved, and wait for something true to come.
In the night of July 23, 1986, driving home from Boston where he had gone to pursue some research for something he was writing, Andre Dubus, the father, slowed down for a car that had hit a motorcycle. A young couple, stunned, their faces bloody, sat in the car. Dubus helped them out and tried to flag down an oncoming car in the darkness. At the last moment, unaccountably, it swerved toward them. Dubus pulled the woman out of the way, but he and the young man were hit at high speed, almost sixty sickening miles an hour. The young man was killed. Dubus was critically injured, both of his legs were crushed. There were ten operations on the right one. In the end it had to be amputated just below the knee, and the left one was so severely damaged that Dubus was never able to use it again.
He was fifty years old, an admired writer whose influences included Chekhov and Hemingway and whose work was somewhere between them, truthful, detailed, and with a kind of honorable sentimentality. He drank in the evenings, went to baseball games in Boston, and after his daughter’s rape began collecting usa ble guns—at the time of the accident he was carrying three of them—but at the core he was a disciplined, dedicated writer. He sometimes played opera as he wrote. He sometimes wore a Japanese kimono. Writing was the real center of his life, apart from his Catholicism. The day before his right leg was amputated, he was cheerful when visited by Andre. A devastating operation lay ahead. Dubus had been a runner all his life, and Andre had sometimes run with him. Andre bent down and kissed the bare right foot goodbye.
For the last twelve years of his life, the elder Dubus was essentially a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair. His third wife, with whom he’d had two daughters, had left him, and his two sons rebuilt his house themselves to make it more practical for him. Through the years Dubus had grown closer to them, particularly Andre, proud of his fighting—Dubus himself, though a Marine, had never been in a fight—and his writing; at times he was virtually a close pal. His many friends remained loyal to him. A group of writers, including John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, John Irving, Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, and Richard Yates, got together and organized a series of readings from their work to help pay his medical expenses. In 1988 he was awarded a MacArthur grant.
ownie is an account not only of Andre’s life, it is also a record of everything his father did not know and had missed as a result of having left the family, a final bonding with and tribute to a father who was errant but hugely influential. Autobiographies have become a very popular form. The first person has been a favored voice for as long as there have been books, and in autobiography it may hold our interest because of whose voice it is, how well known, or because of its own vitality, its a cappella power. There is something of both in Townie. Women do not figure largely in the book. It is a man’s confession, honest and somewhat disturbing, standing alongside other writers’ books about their youth and, often, absent or defective fathers: Frank Conroy’s influential Stop Time, Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, or J.R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar. In autobiography there is only one witness and one account, and it stands.
Andre Dubus III is married now with three children of his own and is a teacher as his father had been. There are inevitable connections to be drawn between father and son, emotional ones, as the book shows so clearly, but as writers they are not the same and the younger has proved more popular. He gives the impression of someone not to be crossed, someone polite enough but who would do the same thing to anyone who messed with his daughter that Tommy J. did to Jeb. Jeb attempted suicide twice, once nearly successfully. Andre never did.
When his father died of a heart attack in February 1999, Andre was in San Francisco promoting his new novel, House of Sand and Fog, which was nominated for the National Book Award and became an Oprah selection. The man at the desk in his hotel said there was a call for him. It was his wife on the phone, crying. “Honey, what?” he said. “What?” His first thought was of his children, something had happened to one of them. His wife couldn’t stop crying. Finally she was able to say, “Your dad—”
They had once sat together talking at length to an interviewer and then drinking and continuing to talk, and Andre had said to himself:
You need to tell him how it was. He still thinks this was just a sport for you. He’ll listen now. Tell him how it was.
He never managed to until now.
He and his brother, Jeb, built the coffin for their father with their own hands, taking all of one night to do it. More than eight hundred people attended the funeral:
his two older sisters from Louisiana, their grown daughters and sons, cousins of his we barely knew. There were writer friends from his time in Iowa City, ex-girlfriends and two ex-wives, Peggy singing “Summertime” up in the balcony. There were hundreds of students from over the years, drinking buddies from Ronnie D’s, retired professors from Bradford, waitresses and bartenders and former cops.
The ground was frozen too hard to bury him and they had to wait until spring. The two brothers and a friend dug the grave. Townie is the great wreath, part beautiful flowers, part still-green leaves, part thorns, bits of cloth, paper, everything Andre wanted to remember laid with toughened hands on the grave.
James Salter
New York Reviewe of Books
April 7, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Truth about a certain so-called Zen "master"
You heard about a certain dude who professed a profound understanding of Zen Buddhism. You sought him out. You had several conversations with him. In the third and last conversation with him, you realized that he was a vain fraud. You didn't publicize your finding because you were kind and besides your discovery of the fraudulence of this self-professed Zen master only confirmed your suspicion that truly enlightened men would prefer silence and not publicity. If one feels a need to talk publicly about anything, as you yourself often do, that often means one does not really know much about the subject. Anyway, you thought only you knew the dark secret about this man until you ran into a woman who also happened to know about this Zen "master". She confirmed to you that the man was a hypocrite. You were floored by her astuteness. You thought she would not know that truth about him because publicly she had professed a respect for the man.
You are vain, pompous, arrogant, loud-mouthed, prickly, vengeful, hypersensitive, neurotic, eternally angry, indomitably restless, and violence-prone. You know all of these about yourself. You are not proud of who you are, but you never pretend to be somebody who you are not. At least you have a basic honesty about who you are. You never think you are better than you really are. And that sets you apart from many assholes and douche bags you know.
Roberto Wissai
You are vain, pompous, arrogant, loud-mouthed, prickly, vengeful, hypersensitive, neurotic, eternally angry, indomitably restless, and violence-prone. You know all of these about yourself. You are not proud of who you are, but you never pretend to be somebody who you are not. At least you have a basic honesty about who you are. You never think you are better than you really are. And that sets you apart from many assholes and douche bags you know.
Roberto Wissai
Elridge Cleaver and love letters in "Soul on Ice"
Here is a question that elicits information about the respondent: "What is the meaning of 'comparison'? More specifically, what do people mean when they say, 'compare yourself with so and so'?"
The question came up because you, once again, were exasperated beyond relief by the stupid and simplistic attitude and answer of a certain interlocutor. First, she didn't listen well. Second, she didn't take time, as usual, to formulate a measured, thoughtful answer; she just blurted out whatever came to her mind. Third, she became argumentative when you pointed out the error of her mode of thinking. Being defensive and argumentative instead of acknowledging the soundness of the arguments of her debater was by and in of itself a sign of stupidity and intellectual and emotional retardation.
To compare means to find out the similarities and differences. To use the phrase "to compare and contrast" is a sign that the speaker is stupid or insensitive to the nuances of the English language because the meaning of "to compare" already implies the component "to contrast".
To compare oneself with another person is to undertake a process to find out the similarities and differences one has vis-a-vis the other. As simple as that, it does not necessarily imply to compete.
What does this have anything to do with Elridge Cleaver and the three (two written by EC) love letters in the book "Soul on Ice"?
You have always fancied that you can write beautiful love letters in English. This aptitude has won you the affection and love of several educated women whose native tongue is English. They even expressed marvel at your ability to render your thoughts and torturous feelings in a borrowed tongue. But when you came across the two letters written by EC, a black prisoner, to his white civil rights lawyer, you were floored by EC's ability to handle English. His words are deep, lyrical, and grippingly beautiful. You admitted that the black dude was better than you. Reading those letters has always brought you peace, joy, and pleasant memories. You don't love those women anymore and they no longer love you, but the sentiments and sensations you experienced when you expressed them are always part of you and make you feel good of who you are. You also recognize, somewhat belatedly, that romantic love is truly conditional. The object must always stay worthy of the love one has for him/her, otherwise love will wither and die. This recognition of the temporality of romantic love has helped you come to terms with the issue of acceptance and rejection.
Truth can be elusive. Sometimes we must work very hard to get it. Romantic love is a very slippery truth.
Roberto Wissai
The question came up because you, once again, were exasperated beyond relief by the stupid and simplistic attitude and answer of a certain interlocutor. First, she didn't listen well. Second, she didn't take time, as usual, to formulate a measured, thoughtful answer; she just blurted out whatever came to her mind. Third, she became argumentative when you pointed out the error of her mode of thinking. Being defensive and argumentative instead of acknowledging the soundness of the arguments of her debater was by and in of itself a sign of stupidity and intellectual and emotional retardation.
To compare means to find out the similarities and differences. To use the phrase "to compare and contrast" is a sign that the speaker is stupid or insensitive to the nuances of the English language because the meaning of "to compare" already implies the component "to contrast".
To compare oneself with another person is to undertake a process to find out the similarities and differences one has vis-a-vis the other. As simple as that, it does not necessarily imply to compete.
What does this have anything to do with Elridge Cleaver and the three (two written by EC) love letters in the book "Soul on Ice"?
You have always fancied that you can write beautiful love letters in English. This aptitude has won you the affection and love of several educated women whose native tongue is English. They even expressed marvel at your ability to render your thoughts and torturous feelings in a borrowed tongue. But when you came across the two letters written by EC, a black prisoner, to his white civil rights lawyer, you were floored by EC's ability to handle English. His words are deep, lyrical, and grippingly beautiful. You admitted that the black dude was better than you. Reading those letters has always brought you peace, joy, and pleasant memories. You don't love those women anymore and they no longer love you, but the sentiments and sensations you experienced when you expressed them are always part of you and make you feel good of who you are. You also recognize, somewhat belatedly, that romantic love is truly conditional. The object must always stay worthy of the love one has for him/her, otherwise love will wither and die. This recognition of the temporality of romantic love has helped you come to terms with the issue of acceptance and rejection.
Truth can be elusive. Sometimes we must work very hard to get it. Romantic love is a very slippery truth.
Roberto Wissai
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Acceptance and Rejection
You have to be honest with yourself at all times. Denial and self-deception may be useful in the short term, but always harmful to oneself in the long run.
When you face rejection, you have to ask yourself if the rejection has any basis or simply the case of misperception. If it is from misperception, then you must proceed to an inquiry whether you contributed to the misperception. But most humans don't operate on that process of reasoning. They get bent out of shape when they are rejected. They automatically find all kinds of reasons and excuses to justify their self-worth. They are afraid to look at the possibility that they are rejected because they don't have much or even nothing to offer to the relationship, whatever the relationship may be, be it romance, friendship, commerce, or politics.
You have come to a conclusion that humans tend to think better of themselves than they deserve. On the other hand, very few humans think less of themselves than they are actually worth.
And then we have the issue of death which is the greatest equalizer. All of us have to die some day. You seriously doubt most humans take the trouble to really think what they live for. Most humans just struggle to live for no other reason that to die presents them with a finality so decisive that they don't want to think about the demise of their existence which came into being by chance anyway, a chance encounter between an egg and one sperm from one hundred million competitors. From that chance encounter came first a single human cell which kept on dividing until it became a trillion-cell apparatus that inquired, joked, lied or, in your case, wrote poems and stories and essays and speculated about philosophy, religion, and politics while having a choice to navigate in one of the four languages and having some reading comprehension of several more. When the end comes, you know all the particles that constituted you will return to randomness while folks whose minds were brainwashed by early indoctrination fancy that they will live again in heaven as they will be "saved" by some carpenter who came to earth 2,011 years ago.
Most humans neglect to strive for real, beneficial, lasting achievements. And yet in the back of their minds they are nagged by a hard question of what legacy they will leave behind. After all, they don't want to live like a dog or a hog or a log by the side of the road: here today, gone tomorrow, no memory, no impact, no meaning, completely inconsequential, utterly useless, absolutely insignificant.
You have a feeling that a certain comrade of yours will die with some satisfaction that his life was not in vain because he did live for others and that his life was not entirely consumed by self-interest and selfishness.
Roberto Wissai
When you face rejection, you have to ask yourself if the rejection has any basis or simply the case of misperception. If it is from misperception, then you must proceed to an inquiry whether you contributed to the misperception. But most humans don't operate on that process of reasoning. They get bent out of shape when they are rejected. They automatically find all kinds of reasons and excuses to justify their self-worth. They are afraid to look at the possibility that they are rejected because they don't have much or even nothing to offer to the relationship, whatever the relationship may be, be it romance, friendship, commerce, or politics.
You have come to a conclusion that humans tend to think better of themselves than they deserve. On the other hand, very few humans think less of themselves than they are actually worth.
And then we have the issue of death which is the greatest equalizer. All of us have to die some day. You seriously doubt most humans take the trouble to really think what they live for. Most humans just struggle to live for no other reason that to die presents them with a finality so decisive that they don't want to think about the demise of their existence which came into being by chance anyway, a chance encounter between an egg and one sperm from one hundred million competitors. From that chance encounter came first a single human cell which kept on dividing until it became a trillion-cell apparatus that inquired, joked, lied or, in your case, wrote poems and stories and essays and speculated about philosophy, religion, and politics while having a choice to navigate in one of the four languages and having some reading comprehension of several more. When the end comes, you know all the particles that constituted you will return to randomness while folks whose minds were brainwashed by early indoctrination fancy that they will live again in heaven as they will be "saved" by some carpenter who came to earth 2,011 years ago.
Most humans neglect to strive for real, beneficial, lasting achievements. And yet in the back of their minds they are nagged by a hard question of what legacy they will leave behind. After all, they don't want to live like a dog or a hog or a log by the side of the road: here today, gone tomorrow, no memory, no impact, no meaning, completely inconsequential, utterly useless, absolutely insignificant.
You have a feeling that a certain comrade of yours will die with some satisfaction that his life was not in vain because he did live for others and that his life was not entirely consumed by self-interest and selfishness.
Roberto Wissai
Is Loneliness a feeling or an existential fact/phenomenon?
Fools mistakenly confuse what they feel with true emotions which are essentially anger, envy, grief, and joy. Loneliness is not an emotion. It's a state of being prompted by a need to be sociable as Man is a social, not solitary, animal. No matter how much an individual meditates on the nature of loneliness, his loneliness does not go away if the need to be with other humans, preferably with those who understand and accept him, is not met, just like you don't meditate away feelings of hunger and thirst. They have to be met. Of course, one does not die from loneliness right away. One dies a slow death. Biological needs are always more urgent than social needs. One can suppress the social needs to some extent, but they don't disappear. A human is diseased if he does not feel a need to interact with his fellow humans, if he never feels lonely if being cut off from his kind.
Bread's David Gates
So on TV at ungodly hours appeared commercials for music collections of folk rock music of the 1960's through 1980's. And there they were, bits and pieces of several songs of Bread were played out. They hit you like a freight train. You felt sweet, bitter, calm, and sad all at once. You were young then and you were in love. Little did you know that love was an illusion and a wishful thinking. What we really have is a feeling of loneliness and we use others to relieve that itch of loneliness and maybe get some sexual release at the same time. As for really loving somebody else, I know what that means, but I have never been a recipient of such love. All the women I have met all talked a good game, but the bottom line was that they cared for themselves far, far more they did to me. I think they used me rather than lruly loving me.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Power, Anger, Anger Management, Solution by Undestanding?
So, you read another sad story about a returning soldier with PTSD who killed his pregnant wife, his 2-year-old daughter, and then himself. Reading the account brought back flashbacks of your own mental instability of one time and how close you were with an early death and you turned to reading psychology and then philosophy and eastern religions for help. Now you have some insights to deal with existential problems.
The key thing you are recognizing is your grappling with the issue of power and how your reactions to it. You must cope with the frustrations. You must also admit that suicide is the cowardly way out. If you must kill, you will kill the ones---the assholes and douche bags--- that caused you pain, not yourself and your loved ones. Always be rational in your thinking. Get sufficient sleep. Avoid putting yourself in situations where assholes and motherfuckers have power over you. Rise above your need of validation and affirmation. Avoid fools and stupid people because sooner or later they would say or do something stupid to make you angry. Fools and ignorant folks are better off to keep their mouths shut at all times. What they say have no value, but sadly they don't know that truth. They keep opening their mouths and spew nonsense. You hate stupidity and ignorance. You were once stupid and ignorant yourself. You couldn't keep your mouth shut. You did not know you were ignorant.
Assholes and hypocrites need to be avoided. You must be patient and smart.
The key thing you are recognizing is your grappling with the issue of power and how your reactions to it. You must cope with the frustrations. You must also admit that suicide is the cowardly way out. If you must kill, you will kill the ones---the assholes and douche bags--- that caused you pain, not yourself and your loved ones. Always be rational in your thinking. Get sufficient sleep. Avoid putting yourself in situations where assholes and motherfuckers have power over you. Rise above your need of validation and affirmation. Avoid fools and stupid people because sooner or later they would say or do something stupid to make you angry. Fools and ignorant folks are better off to keep their mouths shut at all times. What they say have no value, but sadly they don't know that truth. They keep opening their mouths and spew nonsense. You hate stupidity and ignorance. You were once stupid and ignorant yourself. You couldn't keep your mouth shut. You did not know you were ignorant.
Assholes and hypocrites need to be avoided. You must be patient and smart.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Psychological Disorders
I just read (Time Magazine, March 21. 2011, pp 38-39) that scientists have discovered that psychological disorders start early in childhood and tend to stick around for a long, long time. That piece of news struck me like a lightning bolt, freeing me of all self-doubts and reinforcing what I have thought about the human mind, and especially the behavior of so many odd and strange individuals of a certain group with which I have a tenuous relationship.
Let me start with an observation that I am myself not a stranger to oddities, but compared to those aforementioned dudes, I would have to say that I have a much closer connection with realities than they do. One is really sick and lonely, yet he ironically has taken upon himself a task of beating the drum that I need psychological consultation. Ironies are lost on him. Here we have a guy who thought it was cool to compose a "poem", modeled after the lyrics of a song written by a composer whom he worshipped, about a failed effort at masturbation. The reason I knew of the existence of such a sordid attempt of "literary" (sic! and sick!) creation was that the sick dude posted it in the cyberspace. And yet he later baldly denied that he had never, ever indulged in such onanistic behavior, literary or manually. That was not the only strange thing about him. He even posted an article written by somebody else, in which the deeply offensive word about female genitalia is spelled in Vietnamese in all of its splendor. So, the dude is also a liar, besides being sick in the head and suffering from sexual impotence. He is also infamous for dishing out insults, but extremely thin-skinned at any counter-attacks. I almost forgot to point out that he has repeatedly invited contempt and ridicule upon himself for his lame, crippled efforts to write verses instead of prose. His so-called verses lack both rhyme and rhythm, besides meaning and impact. He simply has no feel for the cadence, music, and rhythm of words, a prerequisite in any effort of expressing oneself in verse.
There is another dude who is neither brave nor patriotic, but loves power. He fancies that he has power. He once criticized and publicly corrected me for usingly the common Anglo Saxon word "fucking" once in my fictional piece about an ex-soldier in distress. And then a few weeks later, he himself recounted a very crude joke in which the port-hole of a cruise ship cabin was compared, by way of double entendre, with the human female sexual orifice! I would think there was no clearer example of hypocrisy and fraud than this dude's behavior. My respect for the dude went down the toilet after I read his joke.
And then there is a dude for whom I strangely have an affection despite his tendency to pontificate on whatever topic that is brought up, no matter if he knows about it or not. The dude also has an odd habit of looking at whatever situation from a very uncommon angle. I think he has a problem with his vision, both literally and metaphorically.
What's about me? Shoot (polite form for "shit", in case you don't know, similar to "darn" for "damn"), it would take a book to catalogue my strangeness and oddities. Everybody I meet says I am different. Every girl and woman I come across says I am interesting and funny. And most of them would fall in love with me, one way or another. I was born different and I stay different. I march to a different drummer. I hear a different music. But one thing I can assure you: I ain't no fraud nor hypocrite like other strange dudes.
Roberto
Let me start with an observation that I am myself not a stranger to oddities, but compared to those aforementioned dudes, I would have to say that I have a much closer connection with realities than they do. One is really sick and lonely, yet he ironically has taken upon himself a task of beating the drum that I need psychological consultation. Ironies are lost on him. Here we have a guy who thought it was cool to compose a "poem", modeled after the lyrics of a song written by a composer whom he worshipped, about a failed effort at masturbation. The reason I knew of the existence of such a sordid attempt of "literary" (sic! and sick!) creation was that the sick dude posted it in the cyberspace. And yet he later baldly denied that he had never, ever indulged in such onanistic behavior, literary or manually. That was not the only strange thing about him. He even posted an article written by somebody else, in which the deeply offensive word about female genitalia is spelled in Vietnamese in all of its splendor. So, the dude is also a liar, besides being sick in the head and suffering from sexual impotence. He is also infamous for dishing out insults, but extremely thin-skinned at any counter-attacks. I almost forgot to point out that he has repeatedly invited contempt and ridicule upon himself for his lame, crippled efforts to write verses instead of prose. His so-called verses lack both rhyme and rhythm, besides meaning and impact. He simply has no feel for the cadence, music, and rhythm of words, a prerequisite in any effort of expressing oneself in verse.
There is another dude who is neither brave nor patriotic, but loves power. He fancies that he has power. He once criticized and publicly corrected me for usingly the common Anglo Saxon word "fucking" once in my fictional piece about an ex-soldier in distress. And then a few weeks later, he himself recounted a very crude joke in which the port-hole of a cruise ship cabin was compared, by way of double entendre, with the human female sexual orifice! I would think there was no clearer example of hypocrisy and fraud than this dude's behavior. My respect for the dude went down the toilet after I read his joke.
And then there is a dude for whom I strangely have an affection despite his tendency to pontificate on whatever topic that is brought up, no matter if he knows about it or not. The dude also has an odd habit of looking at whatever situation from a very uncommon angle. I think he has a problem with his vision, both literally and metaphorically.
What's about me? Shoot (polite form for "shit", in case you don't know, similar to "darn" for "damn"), it would take a book to catalogue my strangeness and oddities. Everybody I meet says I am different. Every girl and woman I come across says I am interesting and funny. And most of them would fall in love with me, one way or another. I was born different and I stay different. I march to a different drummer. I hear a different music. But one thing I can assure you: I ain't no fraud nor hypocrite like other strange dudes.
Roberto
Reluctant Silence
You are a walking study in contradictions. You are being pulled apart from warring sentiments. At this moment, you are taming the peacock penchant and settling for the soothing sentimentality of nostalgia while taking stock of where you are after tumultuous decades of struggling with yourself.
Yesterday you looked at the long hair cascading over the shoulders and a flashback of distant images roared back to life. You were an awkward teenager who first awoke to feelings of love and desire. You survived the yearnings. You are now realizing you value pride and ego over conquest. You are working hard to be independent of prosaic attachments. Others should be attached to you, not the other way around. Suffering has taught you that you, not the Other, should be the object of adulation and desire, and that, in the end, you are truly the better one in values, if not mere physical attributes. Your significant other keeps yelling in frustrations: "Why you keep expressing yourself the way you do? Who do you think you are?" And you look at her squarely in the eyes and evenly and slowly say the following words every single time those rhetorical questions are thrown at you: "A wonderful, rare, beautiful human being who cannot and would not countenance fraud and hypocrisy. I have to expose them, to denounce them because I am eternally afraid of them. I don't want them to infect my soul. While denouncing them, I force myself not to be what I am denouncing. By publicly speaking against them, for the sake of my honor, I force myself not to take them in. A man's words and deeds have to be consistent otherwise he is not much of a man. I want others to love me and accept me for who I am, not what I pretend to be. I want my words to have value and meaning, and not mere noise."
Roberto Wissai
Yesterday you looked at the long hair cascading over the shoulders and a flashback of distant images roared back to life. You were an awkward teenager who first awoke to feelings of love and desire. You survived the yearnings. You are now realizing you value pride and ego over conquest. You are working hard to be independent of prosaic attachments. Others should be attached to you, not the other way around. Suffering has taught you that you, not the Other, should be the object of adulation and desire, and that, in the end, you are truly the better one in values, if not mere physical attributes. Your significant other keeps yelling in frustrations: "Why you keep expressing yourself the way you do? Who do you think you are?" And you look at her squarely in the eyes and evenly and slowly say the following words every single time those rhetorical questions are thrown at you: "A wonderful, rare, beautiful human being who cannot and would not countenance fraud and hypocrisy. I have to expose them, to denounce them because I am eternally afraid of them. I don't want them to infect my soul. While denouncing them, I force myself not to be what I am denouncing. By publicly speaking against them, for the sake of my honor, I force myself not to take them in. A man's words and deeds have to be consistent otherwise he is not much of a man. I want others to love me and accept me for who I am, not what I pretend to be. I want my words to have value and meaning, and not mere noise."
Roberto Wissai
Friday, March 25, 2011
Me, Me, Me!
The French, incongruously and incredibly as it may sound, have a saying "The self is detestable" (Le moi est haisable, with two dots over the i, something my iPhone can't deal with for the moment). The Vietnamese who were introduced to that distant offshoot of Latin came up with a close, pithy approximation of translation (cai toi dang ghet) which denounces preoccupation with oneself, a practice and phenom also known with an learned, elegant word narcissism. I find all these turning downs of narcissism a turn-off.
I like narcissism. I glorify it. I wallow in it. I strongly believe most works of art and even of science have deep roots in the celebration of the superiority of the self over the humdrum, humbug mediocrity of the masses.
Yes, sir, I know there is a short step between narcissism and megalomania. And I am not sure if megalomania is even that bad as long as the person who is afflicted with that mindset can deliver. At any rate, inferiority complex and self-hatred and self-doubt have proven to be more pernicious than narcissism and megalomania because the former block any attempts of self-expression.
What's about old-fashioned virtues like humility and modesty? Aren't they better than narcissism and megalomania? It depends. Humility and modesty are certainly more conducive to smoother social relations and definitely not jarring and offensive to tender sensibilities if they are genuine and heart-felt. The reality is that very few humans are genuinely humble and modest because very few humans have the hearts and souls of angels and wise men. Humans mostly are emotional and given to outward expressions of their emotions. In addition, they have a strong need to seek affirmation and validation of their worth, hence a constant push for narcissism and megalomania. Just look at the size and shape of monuments and public buildings. Look also at the extremes and excesses of human behavior. Humans are the animals who constantly explore the limits and boundaries. Self-satisfaction is not the norm. Restless exploration of frontiers is in the DNA.
I like narcissism. I glorify it. I wallow in it. I strongly believe most works of art and even of science have deep roots in the celebration of the superiority of the self over the humdrum, humbug mediocrity of the masses.
Yes, sir, I know there is a short step between narcissism and megalomania. And I am not sure if megalomania is even that bad as long as the person who is afflicted with that mindset can deliver. At any rate, inferiority complex and self-hatred and self-doubt have proven to be more pernicious than narcissism and megalomania because the former block any attempts of self-expression.
What's about old-fashioned virtues like humility and modesty? Aren't they better than narcissism and megalomania? It depends. Humility and modesty are certainly more conducive to smoother social relations and definitely not jarring and offensive to tender sensibilities if they are genuine and heart-felt. The reality is that very few humans are genuinely humble and modest because very few humans have the hearts and souls of angels and wise men. Humans mostly are emotional and given to outward expressions of their emotions. In addition, they have a strong need to seek affirmation and validation of their worth, hence a constant push for narcissism and megalomania. Just look at the size and shape of monuments and public buildings. Look also at the extremes and excesses of human behavior. Humans are the animals who constantly explore the limits and boundaries. Self-satisfaction is not the norm. Restless exploration of frontiers is in the DNA.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Suicide
Humans are very curious animals. They are also often unwittingly guilty of anthropomorphism. Since sub-humans don't really share their innermost feelings with us in a clear, unmistakeable verbal language except through ambiguous bodily gestures, all human thoughts and ideas about the so-called sub-human animal behavior, including suicide, are just speculations and conjectures. Time should be more beneficially spent on contemplating on our own death by suicide.
We have to give Freud some credit for the insight of death wish as opposed to life force (dualism is useful in explaining most of phenomenon, physical or otherwise. Unitarianism is for deeper or more knowledgeable minds. Buddha had such mind).
To my way of thinking, there are three types of (human) suicidal behavior:
1. The conscious, deliberate, attention-getting kind where the act of taking one's life is for the common good of the group/tribe/nation (kamikaze pilots, contemporary suicide bombers), assertion of human dignity or protest.
2. The quiet, slow surrender to the idea that one's life no longer has meaning and thus death is preferable to living. The idea takes hold in one's mind and proves to be irresistible: a very interesting phenomenon/process where an irrational, harmful thought/ idea drives the mind and the mind is incapable of holding it down or keeping it at bay. Madness no longer stands at the door. It is now in the master bedroom and takes over the house. Why is it so? A failure, breakdown at the cellular level or is it a result of weak will power? What is will power, anyway? Why do some humans seem to have it abundantly while do others seem to lack?
3. The self-destructive, suicidal lifestyle either as a cry for help or a sign of lack of will power to resist harmful impulses.
Conclusion: to really live, one must have a clear purpose and mission other than just mere preoccupation with sell-preservation, otherwise one can never be more than an animal, pure and simple. To be born as a human is a privilege and an honor. One must live one's life as such.
Addendum 1:
Suicide is a fascinating subject to me. I don't pretend that I am an ethologist, but I submit that only humans commit suicide because only humans possess a conscious will that can routinely override many instincts if they so wish. One of the instincts that humans routinely think of and sometimes do override is self-preservation. Sub-human behavior is largely governed by instincts. Sometimes their instincts are overridden, especially with human interference (animal training) at an early age. I agree with you that mammals do get stressed out, and that may result in their extreme loss of appetite or some abnormal behavior resulting in death, but to say that some mammals consciously seek their own self-destruction is to say that similar to humans, they possess a free, conscious will. I am not prepared to go that far as we don't really know what's going on in the brains of the sub-humans because there is not yet a free flow of deep info exchange between humans and sub-humans, despite some attempts to teach sign language to chimps. At least with respect to humans, some of them left written records behind to tell us that they willingly killed themselves.
To think about/come to terms with death is to try to find a meaning of life. After all, we all have to die someday, willingly or not.
Addendum 2:
Suicide is not simply death. It is a conscious, deliberate act of hastening death, an act may or may not define or ennoble or degrade the individual, but it does raise philosophical questions about Being. A person's attitude about Being determines/has an effect on the his behavior. Albert Camus even went as far as saying that suicide is the only true, important philosophical question. Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Nazi concentration camp, wrote "Man's Search for Meaning" where he dwelled on the meaning of Being, hence existentialism, despite the squalid and demeaning environment, without giving in to nihilism and suicide.
Salmons die after laying eggs and sperms at where they were spawned because of built-up toxins from the exhausting homecoming journey.They don't consciously kill themselves before their time is up as some humans do.
Cowards don't commit suicide. Nor do they really love their countries of birth or adoption. They just love themselves above everybody and everything else. I don't really know if they really possess a zest for life or they are so consumed with a desire of self-preservation that all else do not matter to them, except perhaps self-justification in order to cling to a false pride. Fear of death can drive a man to do anything, including a regression to pre-human state. That's why the image of men fighting for freedom in Libya despite being outgunned and thus facing a high probability of being killed is so beautiful and uplifting to me. It speaks of Man's inherent nobility and yearning for dignity and honor. Contrary to cowards, these men are not afraid of an early death. To them, life without dignity and freedom is not worth living whereas to cowards, life simply means to cling to self-preservation at all costs. In other words, with freedom fighters, life is quality; with cowards, life is longevity (quantity).
Addendum 3:
Yes, suicide only has import if its meaning is understood. And I agree with you that very possibly only humans possess that understanding. Sub-humans probably also know about death, otherwise they would not flee from physical danger or predators. But I am not sure if a salmon knows it's going to die when it gets back to its spawning ground. Likewise, I don't think a dog consciously know it's going to die when it refuses to eat. Please note that I consciously use "qualifiers" in the preceding two sentences because I am neither a fish nor a dog, I cannot logically claim that I understand what and how a fish or a dog thinks or feels. Recall that I have made a comment about a penchant of most humans to engage in anthropomorphism. That is what people do when they claim and assert that sub-humans (or non-humans, if you wish to hear a nicer expression) commit suicide. It's hard enough to understand our fellow humans with whom we share a common language with clear meanings, let alone trying to understand how and what species other than humans feel and think. Of course, humans throughout ages have established some rapport with domesticated animals and pets, so some kind of mutual understanding exists, but to get into a complex subject like suicide, we need to be careful not to tread into anthropomorphism.
As for my own penchant to drag the age-old contrast between cowardice and heroism into a discussion, I think it is germane to the subject of suicide. Also, I do think the dualism of cowardice and heroism pervades quite extensively in human conduct and affairs. We tend to paint our fellow humans in broad strokes for easy identification and assessment. Since the cowardice/heroism dichotomy is such a useful yardstick, it is widely used. In addition, I would submit that ordinarily we would like and line to associate ourselves with heroes than cowards because heroes are inspiring and can also help us when we are in danger while cowards are useless to us and can also pose a danger to us. Finally, a man constantly meditates on the cowardice/heroism dualism tends to be the one who is instinctively averse to cowardice and is open to possibilities of heroism, otherwise he would keep his mouth shut. I have belatedly concluded that Obama is not endowed with heroism. A hero is somebody who's willing to take risks-- calculated, preferably---, not someone who is cautious, deliberate, tentative when innocent civilian lives are at stake, as was the case of the situation in Libya. Good timing, decisiveness, and willingness to take risks and enduring personal sacrifice for the common good are hallmarks of heroes. I now regard Obama as an opportunistic politician who has taken advantage of the political and social situations in America to advance his personal ambitions. I am no longer sure he is willing to take on the entrenched interests to steer America back on a right course. It also seems to me that he is not really a statesman. Nor does he seem to me that he really cares about the world at large.
We have to give Freud some credit for the insight of death wish as opposed to life force (dualism is useful in explaining most of phenomenon, physical or otherwise. Unitarianism is for deeper or more knowledgeable minds. Buddha had such mind).
To my way of thinking, there are three types of (human) suicidal behavior:
1. The conscious, deliberate, attention-getting kind where the act of taking one's life is for the common good of the group/tribe/nation (kamikaze pilots, contemporary suicide bombers), assertion of human dignity or protest.
2. The quiet, slow surrender to the idea that one's life no longer has meaning and thus death is preferable to living. The idea takes hold in one's mind and proves to be irresistible: a very interesting phenomenon/process where an irrational, harmful thought/ idea drives the mind and the mind is incapable of holding it down or keeping it at bay. Madness no longer stands at the door. It is now in the master bedroom and takes over the house. Why is it so? A failure, breakdown at the cellular level or is it a result of weak will power? What is will power, anyway? Why do some humans seem to have it abundantly while do others seem to lack?
3. The self-destructive, suicidal lifestyle either as a cry for help or a sign of lack of will power to resist harmful impulses.
Conclusion: to really live, one must have a clear purpose and mission other than just mere preoccupation with sell-preservation, otherwise one can never be more than an animal, pure and simple. To be born as a human is a privilege and an honor. One must live one's life as such.
Addendum 1:
Suicide is a fascinating subject to me. I don't pretend that I am an ethologist, but I submit that only humans commit suicide because only humans possess a conscious will that can routinely override many instincts if they so wish. One of the instincts that humans routinely think of and sometimes do override is self-preservation. Sub-human behavior is largely governed by instincts. Sometimes their instincts are overridden, especially with human interference (animal training) at an early age. I agree with you that mammals do get stressed out, and that may result in their extreme loss of appetite or some abnormal behavior resulting in death, but to say that some mammals consciously seek their own self-destruction is to say that similar to humans, they possess a free, conscious will. I am not prepared to go that far as we don't really know what's going on in the brains of the sub-humans because there is not yet a free flow of deep info exchange between humans and sub-humans, despite some attempts to teach sign language to chimps. At least with respect to humans, some of them left written records behind to tell us that they willingly killed themselves.
To think about/come to terms with death is to try to find a meaning of life. After all, we all have to die someday, willingly or not.
Addendum 2:
Suicide is not simply death. It is a conscious, deliberate act of hastening death, an act may or may not define or ennoble or degrade the individual, but it does raise philosophical questions about Being. A person's attitude about Being determines/has an effect on the his behavior. Albert Camus even went as far as saying that suicide is the only true, important philosophical question. Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Nazi concentration camp, wrote "Man's Search for Meaning" where he dwelled on the meaning of Being, hence existentialism, despite the squalid and demeaning environment, without giving in to nihilism and suicide.
Salmons die after laying eggs and sperms at where they were spawned because of built-up toxins from the exhausting homecoming journey.They don't consciously kill themselves before their time is up as some humans do.
Cowards don't commit suicide. Nor do they really love their countries of birth or adoption. They just love themselves above everybody and everything else. I don't really know if they really possess a zest for life or they are so consumed with a desire of self-preservation that all else do not matter to them, except perhaps self-justification in order to cling to a false pride. Fear of death can drive a man to do anything, including a regression to pre-human state. That's why the image of men fighting for freedom in Libya despite being outgunned and thus facing a high probability of being killed is so beautiful and uplifting to me. It speaks of Man's inherent nobility and yearning for dignity and honor. Contrary to cowards, these men are not afraid of an early death. To them, life without dignity and freedom is not worth living whereas to cowards, life simply means to cling to self-preservation at all costs. In other words, with freedom fighters, life is quality; with cowards, life is longevity (quantity).
Addendum 3:
Yes, suicide only has import if its meaning is understood. And I agree with you that very possibly only humans possess that understanding. Sub-humans probably also know about death, otherwise they would not flee from physical danger or predators. But I am not sure if a salmon knows it's going to die when it gets back to its spawning ground. Likewise, I don't think a dog consciously know it's going to die when it refuses to eat. Please note that I consciously use "qualifiers" in the preceding two sentences because I am neither a fish nor a dog, I cannot logically claim that I understand what and how a fish or a dog thinks or feels. Recall that I have made a comment about a penchant of most humans to engage in anthropomorphism. That is what people do when they claim and assert that sub-humans (or non-humans, if you wish to hear a nicer expression) commit suicide. It's hard enough to understand our fellow humans with whom we share a common language with clear meanings, let alone trying to understand how and what species other than humans feel and think. Of course, humans throughout ages have established some rapport with domesticated animals and pets, so some kind of mutual understanding exists, but to get into a complex subject like suicide, we need to be careful not to tread into anthropomorphism.
As for my own penchant to drag the age-old contrast between cowardice and heroism into a discussion, I think it is germane to the subject of suicide. Also, I do think the dualism of cowardice and heroism pervades quite extensively in human conduct and affairs. We tend to paint our fellow humans in broad strokes for easy identification and assessment. Since the cowardice/heroism dichotomy is such a useful yardstick, it is widely used. In addition, I would submit that ordinarily we would like and line to associate ourselves with heroes than cowards because heroes are inspiring and can also help us when we are in danger while cowards are useless to us and can also pose a danger to us. Finally, a man constantly meditates on the cowardice/heroism dualism tends to be the one who is instinctively averse to cowardice and is open to possibilities of heroism, otherwise he would keep his mouth shut. I have belatedly concluded that Obama is not endowed with heroism. A hero is somebody who's willing to take risks-- calculated, preferably---, not someone who is cautious, deliberate, tentative when innocent civilian lives are at stake, as was the case of the situation in Libya. Good timing, decisiveness, and willingness to take risks and enduring personal sacrifice for the common good are hallmarks of heroes. I now regard Obama as an opportunistic politician who has taken advantage of the political and social situations in America to advance his personal ambitions. I am no longer sure he is willing to take on the entrenched interests to steer America back on a right course. It also seems to me that he is not really a statesman. Nor does he seem to me that he really cares about the world at large.
Self-Image versus Regard of Others
allded to Albert Camus and Viktor Frankl in one of my previous emails about suicide. I just looked up Frankl in Wikipedia. I was glad my recollection of the main views of Frankl was not far from the mark. I read Frankl more than 30 years ago. Suicide is not a foreign subject to me. I have read and thought about the subject for a long time. When I write about anything, I usually know what I am talking about. I don't just pontificate. I write from the heart and from the wellsprings of my stored knowledge.
I have an audacity and arrogance to think that I have built upon my formal education a serious pursuit of knowledge and critical thinking. I do read quite extensively and thus command a much wider knowledge than most fools ever dream of. Thus, I cannot help but evince an ill-disguised and vexing contempt for ignoramuses and cowards.
I am a person of my word:
My translation of the recent poem by Baudelaire proved that I do know French quite well (several of my ex-girlfriends as well as my wife were graduates of the lycee Marie Curie) and my translation was far better than the other three translations of the native speakers of English that came to my attention.
My continued and vociferous opposition to the Vietcong has proven that I am not a feckless, cowardly person. What has bothered me about certain individuals is that they are cowards but ironically love power, thus they are the objects of my deep contempt. They think just because they have university degrees, they are educated. To me, they are nothing but a bunch of ignoramuses, based from the way they express themselves. They know very little outside their fields of study and their chosen careers whereas I am a rare bird: a true critical thinker. My lofty self-image has led me to take on anybody who wishes to debate with me because I don't think not many humans are up to the task.
I have an audacity and arrogance to think that I have built upon my formal education a serious pursuit of knowledge and critical thinking. I do read quite extensively and thus command a much wider knowledge than most fools ever dream of. Thus, I cannot help but evince an ill-disguised and vexing contempt for ignoramuses and cowards.
I am a person of my word:
My translation of the recent poem by Baudelaire proved that I do know French quite well (several of my ex-girlfriends as well as my wife were graduates of the lycee Marie Curie) and my translation was far better than the other three translations of the native speakers of English that came to my attention.
My continued and vociferous opposition to the Vietcong has proven that I am not a feckless, cowardly person. What has bothered me about certain individuals is that they are cowards but ironically love power, thus they are the objects of my deep contempt. They think just because they have university degrees, they are educated. To me, they are nothing but a bunch of ignoramuses, based from the way they express themselves. They know very little outside their fields of study and their chosen careers whereas I am a rare bird: a true critical thinker. My lofty self-image has led me to take on anybody who wishes to debate with me because I don't think not many humans are up to the task.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Ego, Contempt, and Honesty
The more I interact with others, the more I discover most humans are truly despicable and cowardly and yet nurture an undeserving ego as if they have to cling to an illusion of self-worth so they have the strength to carry on the burden of living. The whole spectacle is so pathetic and yet farcical. No wonder, I have tried not to laugh at their face and point out their pitiful, contemptible countenance and role-playing. Nowadays, I just sport a sardonic smile in silence and contempt while trying very hard not to be like them. I must get my finance in order, take care of my health, and constantly improve my mind.
The Ditherings of a former community organizer
http://mobile.washingtonpost.com/rss.jsp?rssid=609&item=http%3a%2f%2fwww.washingtonpost.com%2fopinions%2fobamas-muddled-message-on-the-middle-east%2f2011%2f03%2f21%2fABBOa48_mobile.mobile&cid=980913&page=3
Dear all:
This is an article I wish I could write to express my profound disappointment with this modern-day Hamlet President: over-cautious, too eager to compromise (note his kowtowing to the Republican demand of extending tax cuts to people making over $250,000 per year), fearful of taking risks, and a man with soaring rhetoric but no decisiveness. All the unsavory traits just listed could be various manifestations of unprincipledness.
Article by Cohen:
In the Oval Office, President Obama keeps busts of his heroes — Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. He should add one of Milton Berle, the so-called Mr. Television of the 1950s. Berle used to signal his studio audience to both continue and stop applauding by holding up one hand to wave them on and another to quiet them. This is the president’s Libya policy in a nutshell.
The Berle Doctrine, the closest thing this administration has to a coherent foreign policy, has almost certainly cost lives. It entailed a heroic amount of dithering as the Obama administration first went to war with itself — to intervene or not to intervene — with the so-called boys (Bob Gates, Tom Donilon) arguing with the girls (Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power), a summer-camp metaphor unbecoming the seriousness of the situation. Clinton ultimately got her no-fly zone but claimed no credit. “We did not lead this,” she said in Paris.
That’s for sure. The French did this, with President Nicolas Sarkozy saying “France has decided to assume its role, its role before history.” Oui! For all the galling Gallic-ness of that statement, Sarkozy was right — as was Sen. John Kerry, who called for international intervention in the Libyan civil war almost from the onset. Along with some others, Kerry and Sarkozy appreciated that Moammar Gaddafi is a sociopath, a killer of innocents, and that should he corner his foes in Benghazi, he would massacre them with utmost glee. He virtually promised as much, and when it comes to murder, he has usually been true to his word.
The Middle East is a mess and a muddle, all of it happening at pretty close to warp speed. The search for a Unified Theory of What Is Happening is futile. Bahrain is our pal; Libya is not. Saudi Arabia has all that oil; Egypt doesn’t. Iran is our enemy and its enemies must be our friends. The scorpion that lethally stings the frog that’s transporting it across the Suez Canal is not a metaphor for the Middle East but a virtual position paper. Look: The Arab League’s Amr Moussa — its departing secretary general — called for a no-fly zone and then, appalled at the violence of this military strike, expressed second thoughts. Moussa has the countenance of a Las Vegas blackjack dealer, a rare manifestation of form following function.
Still, the Obama administration has applied incoherence to confusion. It is an odd, dangerous, mix. A day into the operation, the bedraggled chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, appeared everywhere but on Animal Planet to say that the operation he himself clearly did not favor might end with the man the president said he wanted gone — a certain Col. Gaddafi — still in power. “That’s certainly, potentially, one outcome,” Mullen said on “Meet The Press"
The change that Obama promised has settled on us all like an irritating drizzle. His ideas were untested by either age or experience. It is one thing to decry American unilateralism and quite another to await international action when time is of the essence. It is not necessary for America always to lead, but it is sometimes necessary for it to do so — and always necessary for the president to know when that moment has arrived. Obama seems not to know. He often solves problems by ignoring them.
To tell you the truth, I don’t know whether it was appropriate for Obama to go through with his trip to South America, but it sure was symbolic. Here was his country entering yet another military operation, and there was the president in Brazil. The contrast was jarring — as if he was quite literally distancing himself from the consequences of his own policy. The man supposed to be the center of it all was on the periphery.
Obama has no stomach for the war in Afghanistan but fights it anyway. The same holds for what remains of our effort in Iraq. Now it is Libya. These missions lack clarity, and the first two were so botched by the previous administration they are beyond salvation. But Libya is — and ought to remain — a humanitarian mission, one that would have been better undertaken sooner rather than later by a unified administration that had a coherent message and was clear on its goals. It could have made an argument for staying out or it could have made a more forceful argument for going in. Instead it made both. Milton Berle now plays the White House.
Dear all:
This is an article I wish I could write to express my profound disappointment with this modern-day Hamlet President: over-cautious, too eager to compromise (note his kowtowing to the Republican demand of extending tax cuts to people making over $250,000 per year), fearful of taking risks, and a man with soaring rhetoric but no decisiveness. All the unsavory traits just listed could be various manifestations of unprincipledness.
Article by Cohen:
In the Oval Office, President Obama keeps busts of his heroes — Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. He should add one of Milton Berle, the so-called Mr. Television of the 1950s. Berle used to signal his studio audience to both continue and stop applauding by holding up one hand to wave them on and another to quiet them. This is the president’s Libya policy in a nutshell.
The Berle Doctrine, the closest thing this administration has to a coherent foreign policy, has almost certainly cost lives. It entailed a heroic amount of dithering as the Obama administration first went to war with itself — to intervene or not to intervene — with the so-called boys (Bob Gates, Tom Donilon) arguing with the girls (Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power), a summer-camp metaphor unbecoming the seriousness of the situation. Clinton ultimately got her no-fly zone but claimed no credit. “We did not lead this,” she said in Paris.
That’s for sure. The French did this, with President Nicolas Sarkozy saying “France has decided to assume its role, its role before history.” Oui! For all the galling Gallic-ness of that statement, Sarkozy was right — as was Sen. John Kerry, who called for international intervention in the Libyan civil war almost from the onset. Along with some others, Kerry and Sarkozy appreciated that Moammar Gaddafi is a sociopath, a killer of innocents, and that should he corner his foes in Benghazi, he would massacre them with utmost glee. He virtually promised as much, and when it comes to murder, he has usually been true to his word.
The Middle East is a mess and a muddle, all of it happening at pretty close to warp speed. The search for a Unified Theory of What Is Happening is futile. Bahrain is our pal; Libya is not. Saudi Arabia has all that oil; Egypt doesn’t. Iran is our enemy and its enemies must be our friends. The scorpion that lethally stings the frog that’s transporting it across the Suez Canal is not a metaphor for the Middle East but a virtual position paper. Look: The Arab League’s Amr Moussa — its departing secretary general — called for a no-fly zone and then, appalled at the violence of this military strike, expressed second thoughts. Moussa has the countenance of a Las Vegas blackjack dealer, a rare manifestation of form following function.
Still, the Obama administration has applied incoherence to confusion. It is an odd, dangerous, mix. A day into the operation, the bedraggled chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, appeared everywhere but on Animal Planet to say that the operation he himself clearly did not favor might end with the man the president said he wanted gone — a certain Col. Gaddafi — still in power. “That’s certainly, potentially, one outcome,” Mullen said on “Meet The Press"
The change that Obama promised has settled on us all like an irritating drizzle. His ideas were untested by either age or experience. It is one thing to decry American unilateralism and quite another to await international action when time is of the essence. It is not necessary for America always to lead, but it is sometimes necessary for it to do so — and always necessary for the president to know when that moment has arrived. Obama seems not to know. He often solves problems by ignoring them.
To tell you the truth, I don’t know whether it was appropriate for Obama to go through with his trip to South America, but it sure was symbolic. Here was his country entering yet another military operation, and there was the president in Brazil. The contrast was jarring — as if he was quite literally distancing himself from the consequences of his own policy. The man supposed to be the center of it all was on the periphery.
Obama has no stomach for the war in Afghanistan but fights it anyway. The same holds for what remains of our effort in Iraq. Now it is Libya. These missions lack clarity, and the first two were so botched by the previous administration they are beyond salvation. But Libya is — and ought to remain — a humanitarian mission, one that would have been better undertaken sooner rather than later by a unified administration that had a coherent message and was clear on its goals. It could have made an argument for staying out or it could have made a more forceful argument for going in. Instead it made both. Milton Berle now plays the White House.
He ain't no statesman
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703858404576214611827641054.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t
This article should be savored word by word, slowly, again and again for the power of its arguments, its poetry, and its truth. It is the perfect complement to the one in the Washington Post by Cohen that yours truly also posted here in this blog for your reading pleasure . Cohen's piece was caustic, biting, and hilarious in expressing contempt for the fraud that bears the names Barak Obama. Ajami's article was passionate and sarcastic yet civilized in its denunciation of the man who claimed to be a student of history, but lacked the inherent gutsiness and gumption to meet the standards of decency, let alone to be part of history or to make history. I have a dawning awareness that Obama is just an ordinary despicable politician, like so many other politicians: an opportunist who is worried about his own skin and interests, and an unprincipled man who does not answer to the calls of morality and conscience. Sarkozy, that flamboyant Frenchman, on the other hand, showed courage and leadership which are sorely lacking in Obama.
To be a decent politician is to know how to use power for the good of humanity and to bring changes for the better, and NOT to be concerned with one's own interests. A decent politician/ leader must be a true public servant who performs a service for the masses, whether at home or abroad. The U.S. President is the de facto emperor of an empire, though declining, that still matters and that still is the strongest in the world. As such, he must conduct himself responsibly. His ditherings have shown that he lacks both vision and gravitas. He is better off to be back to where he started: small-time community organizer. He ain't no statesman.
Article by Ajami:
By FOUAD AJAMI
The right thing, at last. The cavalry arrived in the nick of time. Help came as Moammar Gadhafi's loyalists were at the gates of the free city of Benghazi. There was no mystery in the fate that awaited them. The despot had pretty much said what he intended. He would hunt down those who had found the courage to stand up to him, show them no mercy and no pity.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had seemed particularly obtuse. A decent opposition had coalesced in Benghazi—judges and teachers, businessmen and former members of the Ghadafi regime who wanted to cleanse the shame of their association with the tyranny. Rather than embrace them, rather than give them the diplomatic recognition that France would come to grant them, the secretary of state of the pre- eminent liberal power worried aloud that we didn't know this opposition, that there were "opportunists" within their ranks. And to cap it all, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper took away from the uprising the slender hope that it could still hold back the tide. The despot, he said, out in the open for one and all to hear, was destined to prevail.
We don't yet have the details of what can be called the Holbrooke moment—after the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke who all but dragged a reluctant Bill Clinton into Bosnia in 1995.
In Bosnia, as in Libya a generation later, the standard-bearer of American power had a stark choice: It was either rescue or calamity. Benghazi would have been Barack Obama's Srebrenica, the town that the powers had left to the mercy of Ratko Mladic and his killers. No less than 8,000 Bosnian men and boys had paid with their lives for that abdication.
When American power was finally deployed, after 30 months of Clintonian doublespeak and evasion, the bluff was laid bare. The Serbian challengers were put to flight with embarrassing ease. It is of course too early to know the likely course of this intervention, but the ease and the speed with which the no-fly zone over northern Libya was put into effect has echoes of that Balkan episode.
This would be an American rescue mission, with a difference: We would not take the lead, we would defer to France and Britain, and we would let it be known ahead of time that we are not eager to assume a bigger burden in that North African country. This was a break with the record of American rescue missions in other Islamic settings—Kuwait in 1991, Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003. In all of these previous endeavors, it was America that supplied the will and the sense of moral and strategic urgency.
View Full Image
Getty Images
Gen. Ratko Mladic (right) prepares for massacre at Srebrenica as cameras and U.N. forces watch, July 12, 1995.
But President Obama came to this Libyan engagement imbued by a curious doctrine of American guilt. By his light, we are an imperialistic power, and our embrace would sully those we would seek to help.
Middle Eastern rulers and oppositionists alike had come to an unsentimental reading of Mr. Obama: He was no friend of liberty, he had made peace with the order of power in Arab-Islamic lands. Nothing had remained of that false moment of intimacy, in June 2009, when he had traveled to Cairo, the self-styled herald of a new American message to the Arab world. No, what mattered to Mr. Obama, above all, was his differentness, his break with the legacy of George W. Bush. The irony was lost on the liberal devotees of Mr. Obama: a conservative American president who had taken up the cause of liberty in Arab-Islamic lands, and his New Age successor who was nothing but a retread of Brent Scowcroft.
Everywhere Mr. Obama looked, he saw Iraq. We couldn't rescue Tripoli and Benghazi because of what we had witnessed in Fallujah and Sadr City. Iraq was Mr. Obama's entry into the foreign world, it was his opposition to that war that gave him a sense of worldliness and gravitas. He had made much of being "a student of history." But history didn't stretch far for him, and in a man who claimed affinity with distant peoples and places, there was a heavy dosage of parochialism. It was history's odd timing: A great historical rupture in the Arab world, bearing within it the promise of remaking a flawed political tradition that knew no middle ground between despotism and nihilistic violence, happened on the watch of an American president proud of his deliberateness and his detachment from history's passions.
The Obama administration was doubtless surprised by the unexpected decision of the Arab League to grant the green light to the imposition of the no-fly zone. Moral and political clarity had never been an attribute of the Arab League. That organization had never given sustenance to any dissident, never drew a line for the Arab despots. The head of the Arab League for a good number of years now, the Egyptian Amr Moussa, was a creature of the Arab order of power with all its pathologies. His stock-in-trade was that debilitating mix of anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism. He was beloved by that fabled Arab street because he indulged its ruinous passions and alibis. This was never a good jury to appeal to.
But we needed no warrant from the league of dictators. The warrant came from the Libyan people who pleaded for help and made a case for that help by their own bravery. These were not people sitting on the sidelines, or idling their time away in exile. They were men and women in a long captivity anxious to reclaim their tormented country.
In what seems like a whole age ago, a fortnight back, when the Libyan people fleetingly felt the end of their captivity, an unnamed Libyan blogger gave voice to that promise:
The silence has broken, we will be victorious.
The gentle waves break into the golden shore,
The breezes of freedom reach our souls.
The hearts bleed, our destiny is nearly there.
There was truth in that hopeful and simple verse. For the Libyans, there is a thin line between catastrophe and deliverance. They have given it all, and now their liberty depends on whether the democracies believe that it is worth their while to give the cause of freedom a boost—to provide evidence that justice in the affairs of nations, though it has tarried, is not yet dead.
Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
This article should be savored word by word, slowly, again and again for the power of its arguments, its poetry, and its truth. It is the perfect complement to the one in the Washington Post by Cohen that yours truly also posted here in this blog for your reading pleasure . Cohen's piece was caustic, biting, and hilarious in expressing contempt for the fraud that bears the names Barak Obama. Ajami's article was passionate and sarcastic yet civilized in its denunciation of the man who claimed to be a student of history, but lacked the inherent gutsiness and gumption to meet the standards of decency, let alone to be part of history or to make history. I have a dawning awareness that Obama is just an ordinary despicable politician, like so many other politicians: an opportunist who is worried about his own skin and interests, and an unprincipled man who does not answer to the calls of morality and conscience. Sarkozy, that flamboyant Frenchman, on the other hand, showed courage and leadership which are sorely lacking in Obama.
To be a decent politician is to know how to use power for the good of humanity and to bring changes for the better, and NOT to be concerned with one's own interests. A decent politician/ leader must be a true public servant who performs a service for the masses, whether at home or abroad. The U.S. President is the de facto emperor of an empire, though declining, that still matters and that still is the strongest in the world. As such, he must conduct himself responsibly. His ditherings have shown that he lacks both vision and gravitas. He is better off to be back to where he started: small-time community organizer. He ain't no statesman.
Article by Ajami:
By FOUAD AJAMI
The right thing, at last. The cavalry arrived in the nick of time. Help came as Moammar Gadhafi's loyalists were at the gates of the free city of Benghazi. There was no mystery in the fate that awaited them. The despot had pretty much said what he intended. He would hunt down those who had found the courage to stand up to him, show them no mercy and no pity.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had seemed particularly obtuse. A decent opposition had coalesced in Benghazi—judges and teachers, businessmen and former members of the Ghadafi regime who wanted to cleanse the shame of their association with the tyranny. Rather than embrace them, rather than give them the diplomatic recognition that France would come to grant them, the secretary of state of the pre- eminent liberal power worried aloud that we didn't know this opposition, that there were "opportunists" within their ranks. And to cap it all, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper took away from the uprising the slender hope that it could still hold back the tide. The despot, he said, out in the open for one and all to hear, was destined to prevail.
We don't yet have the details of what can be called the Holbrooke moment—after the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke who all but dragged a reluctant Bill Clinton into Bosnia in 1995.
In Bosnia, as in Libya a generation later, the standard-bearer of American power had a stark choice: It was either rescue or calamity. Benghazi would have been Barack Obama's Srebrenica, the town that the powers had left to the mercy of Ratko Mladic and his killers. No less than 8,000 Bosnian men and boys had paid with their lives for that abdication.
When American power was finally deployed, after 30 months of Clintonian doublespeak and evasion, the bluff was laid bare. The Serbian challengers were put to flight with embarrassing ease. It is of course too early to know the likely course of this intervention, but the ease and the speed with which the no-fly zone over northern Libya was put into effect has echoes of that Balkan episode.
This would be an American rescue mission, with a difference: We would not take the lead, we would defer to France and Britain, and we would let it be known ahead of time that we are not eager to assume a bigger burden in that North African country. This was a break with the record of American rescue missions in other Islamic settings—Kuwait in 1991, Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003. In all of these previous endeavors, it was America that supplied the will and the sense of moral and strategic urgency.
View Full Image
Getty Images
Gen. Ratko Mladic (right) prepares for massacre at Srebrenica as cameras and U.N. forces watch, July 12, 1995.
But President Obama came to this Libyan engagement imbued by a curious doctrine of American guilt. By his light, we are an imperialistic power, and our embrace would sully those we would seek to help.
Middle Eastern rulers and oppositionists alike had come to an unsentimental reading of Mr. Obama: He was no friend of liberty, he had made peace with the order of power in Arab-Islamic lands. Nothing had remained of that false moment of intimacy, in June 2009, when he had traveled to Cairo, the self-styled herald of a new American message to the Arab world. No, what mattered to Mr. Obama, above all, was his differentness, his break with the legacy of George W. Bush. The irony was lost on the liberal devotees of Mr. Obama: a conservative American president who had taken up the cause of liberty in Arab-Islamic lands, and his New Age successor who was nothing but a retread of Brent Scowcroft.
Everywhere Mr. Obama looked, he saw Iraq. We couldn't rescue Tripoli and Benghazi because of what we had witnessed in Fallujah and Sadr City. Iraq was Mr. Obama's entry into the foreign world, it was his opposition to that war that gave him a sense of worldliness and gravitas. He had made much of being "a student of history." But history didn't stretch far for him, and in a man who claimed affinity with distant peoples and places, there was a heavy dosage of parochialism. It was history's odd timing: A great historical rupture in the Arab world, bearing within it the promise of remaking a flawed political tradition that knew no middle ground between despotism and nihilistic violence, happened on the watch of an American president proud of his deliberateness and his detachment from history's passions.
The Obama administration was doubtless surprised by the unexpected decision of the Arab League to grant the green light to the imposition of the no-fly zone. Moral and political clarity had never been an attribute of the Arab League. That organization had never given sustenance to any dissident, never drew a line for the Arab despots. The head of the Arab League for a good number of years now, the Egyptian Amr Moussa, was a creature of the Arab order of power with all its pathologies. His stock-in-trade was that debilitating mix of anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism. He was beloved by that fabled Arab street because he indulged its ruinous passions and alibis. This was never a good jury to appeal to.
But we needed no warrant from the league of dictators. The warrant came from the Libyan people who pleaded for help and made a case for that help by their own bravery. These were not people sitting on the sidelines, or idling their time away in exile. They were men and women in a long captivity anxious to reclaim their tormented country.
In what seems like a whole age ago, a fortnight back, when the Libyan people fleetingly felt the end of their captivity, an unnamed Libyan blogger gave voice to that promise:
The silence has broken, we will be victorious.
The gentle waves break into the golden shore,
The breezes of freedom reach our souls.
The hearts bleed, our destiny is nearly there.
There was truth in that hopeful and simple verse. For the Libyans, there is a thin line between catastrophe and deliverance. They have given it all, and now their liberty depends on whether the democracies believe that it is worth their while to give the cause of freedom a boost—to provide evidence that justice in the affairs of nations, though it has tarried, is not yet dead.
Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Do animals really commit suicide?
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Do-Animals-Commit-Suicide-63441.shtml
Here's another article on animal suicide.
Humans are very curious animals. They are also often unwittingly guilty of anthropomorphism. Since sub-humans don't really share their innermost feelings with us in a clear, unmistakeable verbal language except through ambiguous bodily gestures, all human thoughts and ideas about sub-human animal behavior, including suicide, are just speculations and conjectures. Time should be more beneficially spent on contemplating on our own death by suicide.
We have to give Freud some credit for the insight of death wish as opposed to life force (dualism is useful in explaining most phenomenon, physical or otherwise. Unitarianism is for deeper or more knowledgeable minds. Buddha had such mind).
To my way of thinking, there are three types of (human) suicidal behavior:
1. The conscious, deliberate, attention-getting kind where the act of taking one's life is for the common good of the group/tribe/nation (kamikaze pilots, contemporary suicide bombers), assertion of human dignity or protest (sell-immolation of the Tunisian fruit vendor that triggered the Tunisian Revolution)
2. The quiet, slow surrender to the idea that one's life no longer has meaning and thus death is preferable to living. The idea takes hold in one's mind and proves to be irresistible: a very interesting phenomenon/process where an irrational, harmful thought/ idea drives the mind and the mind is incapable of holding it down or keeping it at bay. Madness no longer stands at the door. It is now in the master bedroom and takes over the house. Why is it so? A failure, breakdown at the cellular level or is it a result of weak will power? What is will power, anyway? Why do some humans seem to have it abundantly while do others seem to lack it?
3. The self-destructive, suicidal lifestyle either as a cry for help or a sign of lack of will power to resist harmful impulses.
Conclusion: to really live, one must have a clear purpose and mission other than just mere preoccupation with self-preservation, otherwise one can never be more than an animal, pure and simple. To be born as a human is a privilege and an honor. One must live one's life as such.
Here's another article on animal suicide.
Humans are very curious animals. They are also often unwittingly guilty of anthropomorphism. Since sub-humans don't really share their innermost feelings with us in a clear, unmistakeable verbal language except through ambiguous bodily gestures, all human thoughts and ideas about sub-human animal behavior, including suicide, are just speculations and conjectures. Time should be more beneficially spent on contemplating on our own death by suicide.
We have to give Freud some credit for the insight of death wish as opposed to life force (dualism is useful in explaining most phenomenon, physical or otherwise. Unitarianism is for deeper or more knowledgeable minds. Buddha had such mind).
To my way of thinking, there are three types of (human) suicidal behavior:
1. The conscious, deliberate, attention-getting kind where the act of taking one's life is for the common good of the group/tribe/nation (kamikaze pilots, contemporary suicide bombers), assertion of human dignity or protest (sell-immolation of the Tunisian fruit vendor that triggered the Tunisian Revolution)
2. The quiet, slow surrender to the idea that one's life no longer has meaning and thus death is preferable to living. The idea takes hold in one's mind and proves to be irresistible: a very interesting phenomenon/process where an irrational, harmful thought/ idea drives the mind and the mind is incapable of holding it down or keeping it at bay. Madness no longer stands at the door. It is now in the master bedroom and takes over the house. Why is it so? A failure, breakdown at the cellular level or is it a result of weak will power? What is will power, anyway? Why do some humans seem to have it abundantly while do others seem to lack it?
3. The self-destructive, suicidal lifestyle either as a cry for help or a sign of lack of will power to resist harmful impulses.
Conclusion: to really live, one must have a clear purpose and mission other than just mere preoccupation with self-preservation, otherwise one can never be more than an animal, pure and simple. To be born as a human is a privilege and an honor. One must live one's life as such.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
We are what we are...
We are what we are through accidents in history/life and the force of our personality.
In the long run, justice will prevail, but humans don't actually live in the long run. We demand justice now. Politics is ultimately about obtaining power, and hopefully dispensing justice. Meanwhile in the short term we must face specific realities, make specific decisions, and prepare for the likely consequences of those decisions.
We can bring about real changes if we are not fearful of death. Some of us will die in the struggle, but the group will live on and get what we want. Impossible is the standard mantra of cowards and naysayers. In less than 6 months, the common people through solidarity have brought down regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, and 2 others (Libya and Yemen) are tottering. Several others (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Vietnam [all Vietnam needs as a catalyst is an economic collapse]) could fall as well.
Wissai
In the long run, justice will prevail, but humans don't actually live in the long run. We demand justice now. Politics is ultimately about obtaining power, and hopefully dispensing justice. Meanwhile in the short term we must face specific realities, make specific decisions, and prepare for the likely consequences of those decisions.
We can bring about real changes if we are not fearful of death. Some of us will die in the struggle, but the group will live on and get what we want. Impossible is the standard mantra of cowards and naysayers. In less than 6 months, the common people through solidarity have brought down regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, and 2 others (Libya and Yemen) are tottering. Several others (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Vietnam [all Vietnam needs as a catalyst is an economic collapse]) could fall as well.
Wissai
Monday, March 21, 2011
Otiose and Odious
It is odious to engage in otiose advertisement of oneself. So, I am going to do so for others. I just came back from the library where I came across two old friends: Elridge Cleaver and Thom Jones. One was deceased; the other still hangs around. Both were macho and vulnerable. They sought salvation in words. I like their prose. Instead of hemming and hawing, stuttering and sputtering in suffocating and constipating prose that has assaulted your sensibilities day in and day out, their words are fluid, vigorous, sparkling, and muscular and yet funny and tender and gentle like the first Spring rain in one early Saturday morning after a night rolling in the hay with the one you secretly fell in love with since high school days.
I don't know how the weather is like where you are, but where I am the day is just absolutely splendid, a perfect Spring day with brisk winds bringing cool, fresh air and plenty of sunshine. In fact there is not a single cloud in the sky right now (unlike yesterday when "I stood upon a hill amidst the blooming clouds"/ while winds were swirling around me with a whisling sound). The sky is perfectly blue and the air is suffused and awash with sunlight. I am taking a walk in the park and every molecule of my body is dancing with joy. I am glad to be alive on the day like this. All morbid thoughts are kept at bay.
Slowly I am regaining my will power. My contempt for the scumbags is as deep as ever, but I don't have to let them know. Showing off my contempt is a sign of weakness.
PS:
After I posted these words of mine, I came across some stupid words of an ignoramus that reminded me that we should never underestimate stupidity and ignorance. Understanding oneself is not easy, let alone understanding others and the world we live in. No wonder, most assholes, douche bags, and scumbags just move along the highway of life, pretending that they see what is going on around them, but in actuality, they have no clue of what's going on. They are overwhelmed. So they avert their eyes in secret shame and live lives of quiet, unvoiced desperation and mounting inner anxiety which is numbed by food, sex, and drugs. No wonder when you look at their faces, you see emptiness, bewilderment, and ocassional gestures of bravado which is nothing but a desperate attempt to mask feelings of inferiority and anxiety. Life is running away from them. They have no control over their lives. They talk tough, but in their words lies a insufferable despair.
"You talked tough;
You raised your voice;
You said you would play rough
And insisted you had a choice.
But you know and I do, too
That you couldn't walk the talk
And your meaningless life was almost through.
Time for you to take your last walk.
Goodbye!
I don't know how the weather is like where you are, but where I am the day is just absolutely splendid, a perfect Spring day with brisk winds bringing cool, fresh air and plenty of sunshine. In fact there is not a single cloud in the sky right now (unlike yesterday when "I stood upon a hill amidst the blooming clouds"/ while winds were swirling around me with a whisling sound). The sky is perfectly blue and the air is suffused and awash with sunlight. I am taking a walk in the park and every molecule of my body is dancing with joy. I am glad to be alive on the day like this. All morbid thoughts are kept at bay.
Slowly I am regaining my will power. My contempt for the scumbags is as deep as ever, but I don't have to let them know. Showing off my contempt is a sign of weakness.
PS:
After I posted these words of mine, I came across some stupid words of an ignoramus that reminded me that we should never underestimate stupidity and ignorance. Understanding oneself is not easy, let alone understanding others and the world we live in. No wonder, most assholes, douche bags, and scumbags just move along the highway of life, pretending that they see what is going on around them, but in actuality, they have no clue of what's going on. They are overwhelmed. So they avert their eyes in secret shame and live lives of quiet, unvoiced desperation and mounting inner anxiety which is numbed by food, sex, and drugs. No wonder when you look at their faces, you see emptiness, bewilderment, and ocassional gestures of bravado which is nothing but a desperate attempt to mask feelings of inferiority and anxiety. Life is running away from them. They have no control over their lives. They talk tough, but in their words lies a insufferable despair.
"You talked tough;
You raised your voice;
You said you would play rough
And insisted you had a choice.
But you know and I do, too
That you couldn't walk the talk
And your meaningless life was almost through.
Time for you to take your last walk.
Goodbye!
Authentic and Energized
-You said, be real with you. I was and I told you I loved you. Now you are saying my love is suffocating you and you want to be left alone so you can breathe. I don't understand what's going on, Roberto.
-What's going on, Sylvia, is simply this: I am a fraud or at least I feel and think I am. I haven't been true to my words. I have talked a good game, but I have not delivered anything. On the contrary, I'm floundering in the sea of discontent and quiet self-disgust. It's time for me to roll up my sleeves, get off my butt, and start delivering. And I can't do that with you being by my side and hovering over me, telling me how great and gorgeous and beautiful you are. Beauty has its limitations. Beauty is barren without a heart to go with it.
-What's going on, Sylvia, is simply this: I am a fraud or at least I feel and think I am. I haven't been true to my words. I have talked a good game, but I have not delivered anything. On the contrary, I'm floundering in the sea of discontent and quiet self-disgust. It's time for me to roll up my sleeves, get off my butt, and start delivering. And I can't do that with you being by my side and hovering over me, telling me how great and gorgeous and beautiful you are. Beauty has its limitations. Beauty is barren without a heart to go with it.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Karma, my foot !
LeDuKhanh wrote:
Anh Hẹ và các anh chị thân mến,
.................................................................................................................................................................................................
Thảm họa Nhật Bản thật là bi thảm, điều này không cần phải nói nữa. Nhưng có lúc tôi chạnh nghĩ không biết có phải là do Thượng đế đã trừng phạt dân tộc Phù Tang vì những tội ác tày trời của họ trong quá khứ hay không ?
Các anh chị còn nhớ là khi Nhật đảo chánh Pháp ngày 9 tháng 3 năm 1945 hay không ? Sau đó bọn Nhật đã đổ gạo xuống sông Hồng khiến 2 triệu người miền Bắc phải chết đói (để tránh bạo động) . Và khi Nhật tiến chiếm Trung Hoa trong Đệ nhị thế chiến thì họ đã giết không biết bao nhiêu triệu người Hoa vô tội. Người ta nói ''cha ăn mặn con khát nước'' theo luật nhân quả, thật là đáng buồn mặc dù nước Nhật ngày nay đã hoàn toàn đổi khác .
Thế giới vô thường, không ai đoán được ngày mai. Mong là chúng ta tìm được bình an trong tâm hồn...
Một lần nữa, xin chúc các anh chị cuối tuần vui vẻ .
Khánh
Before & after the sunami - Xem cảnh biến đổi trước & sau khi động đất trên cùng 1 ảnh
chỉ việc dùng mouse để di chuyển qua lại tùy ý "đường phân chia thẳng đứng" trong mỗi ảnh qua link dưới đây:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/japan-quake-2011/beforeafter.htm
I don't know who LeDuKhanh is and what kind of formal education he has obtained, but his thoughts about "karma" and the tragedy involving the earthquake and the resulting tsunami in Japan would be best to remain private and not aired in cyberspace as they would do harm to Vietnamese-Japanese relations. In addition, his views were simply wrong for the following reasons:
1. Karma should involve human actions only, and have nothing to do with acts of nature.
2. It's getting more common and indeed correct and scientifically sound to call incidents involving earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, and the like as natural disasters or acts of nature, and no longer as "Acts of God". We live in 21st Century now and anybody who has a high school education should know why and how those acts of nature take place. They absolutely have nothing to do with the will of God. Just like God, if there is indeed such an entity, didn't use AIDS as a punishment tool for homosexuals, as the American evangelical preacher Robertson alleged.
3. To attribute the current plight and suffering of the Japanese people from the earthquake and the tsunami as a result of the past sins and horrible misdeeds of the previous Japanese generation who took part in WW II misadventures is disingenuous and patently false and ignorant. The destruction occurred because it so happened that Japan is situated in an earthquake-prone area.
4. What the Japanese military did to the Chinese and Vietnamese during WW II were indeed horrible and inexcusable. However, that should not give LeDuKhanh any right to resort to Schadenfreude and the slippery concept of karma (which does not involve acts of nature anyway) to explain the reason for the current suffering of the Japanese people. LeDuKhanh has a right to nurture undying hatred of the Japanese for what their military personnel did to the Vietnamese. He also has a right to be unmoved, unconcerned, and indifferent to the earthquake and tsunami tragedy. And he also has a right to free speech and air his wacko, infantile mode of thinking in cyberspace, but we, part of the more enlightened and rigorous-thinking group of Vietnamese, have a duty to let the public know the views of LeDuKhanh don't reflect the mainstream thinking of the Viet people. In fact, the Viet people prefer letting bygones be bygones (note our current friendly, not toxic, relations with both France the U.S., the two countries which also wreaked havoc on our land and the people). We should let the world, especially Japan, know that we are the people who practice compassion and forgiveness, and thus view the current suffering of the Japanese people with much sympathy, and not with indifference or smug satisfaction.
Anh Hẹ và các anh chị thân mến,
.................................................................................................................................................................................................
Thảm họa Nhật Bản thật là bi thảm, điều này không cần phải nói nữa. Nhưng có lúc tôi chạnh nghĩ không biết có phải là do Thượng đế đã trừng phạt dân tộc Phù Tang vì những tội ác tày trời của họ trong quá khứ hay không ?
Các anh chị còn nhớ là khi Nhật đảo chánh Pháp ngày 9 tháng 3 năm 1945 hay không ? Sau đó bọn Nhật đã đổ gạo xuống sông Hồng khiến 2 triệu người miền Bắc phải chết đói (để tránh bạo động) . Và khi Nhật tiến chiếm Trung Hoa trong Đệ nhị thế chiến thì họ đã giết không biết bao nhiêu triệu người Hoa vô tội. Người ta nói ''cha ăn mặn con khát nước'' theo luật nhân quả, thật là đáng buồn mặc dù nước Nhật ngày nay đã hoàn toàn đổi khác .
Thế giới vô thường, không ai đoán được ngày mai. Mong là chúng ta tìm được bình an trong tâm hồn...
Một lần nữa, xin chúc các anh chị cuối tuần vui vẻ .
Khánh
Before & after the sunami - Xem cảnh biến đổi trước & sau khi động đất trên cùng 1 ảnh
chỉ việc dùng mouse để di chuyển qua lại tùy ý "đường phân chia thẳng đứng" trong mỗi ảnh qua link dưới đây:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/japan-quake-2011/beforeafter.htm
I don't know who LeDuKhanh is and what kind of formal education he has obtained, but his thoughts about "karma" and the tragedy involving the earthquake and the resulting tsunami in Japan would be best to remain private and not aired in cyberspace as they would do harm to Vietnamese-Japanese relations. In addition, his views were simply wrong for the following reasons:
1. Karma should involve human actions only, and have nothing to do with acts of nature.
2. It's getting more common and indeed correct and scientifically sound to call incidents involving earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, and the like as natural disasters or acts of nature, and no longer as "Acts of God". We live in 21st Century now and anybody who has a high school education should know why and how those acts of nature take place. They absolutely have nothing to do with the will of God. Just like God, if there is indeed such an entity, didn't use AIDS as a punishment tool for homosexuals, as the American evangelical preacher Robertson alleged.
3. To attribute the current plight and suffering of the Japanese people from the earthquake and the tsunami as a result of the past sins and horrible misdeeds of the previous Japanese generation who took part in WW II misadventures is disingenuous and patently false and ignorant. The destruction occurred because it so happened that Japan is situated in an earthquake-prone area.
4. What the Japanese military did to the Chinese and Vietnamese during WW II were indeed horrible and inexcusable. However, that should not give LeDuKhanh any right to resort to Schadenfreude and the slippery concept of karma (which does not involve acts of nature anyway) to explain the reason for the current suffering of the Japanese people. LeDuKhanh has a right to nurture undying hatred of the Japanese for what their military personnel did to the Vietnamese. He also has a right to be unmoved, unconcerned, and indifferent to the earthquake and tsunami tragedy. And he also has a right to free speech and air his wacko, infantile mode of thinking in cyberspace, but we, part of the more enlightened and rigorous-thinking group of Vietnamese, have a duty to let the public know the views of LeDuKhanh don't reflect the mainstream thinking of the Viet people. In fact, the Viet people prefer letting bygones be bygones (note our current friendly, not toxic, relations with both France the U.S., the two countries which also wreaked havoc on our land and the people). We should let the world, especially Japan, know that we are the people who practice compassion and forgiveness, and thus view the current suffering of the Japanese people with much sympathy, and not with indifference or smug satisfaction.
Art, Madness, and Why Is It So Difficult To be An Artist of Renown?.
Where are the words you have written, as well as the ones you wished you had written? You know you are not an artist, but only "un artiste manque' ". You only have artistic sensibilities, but don't have enough talent to reach the artistic shore. Still, there are moments you actually feel that you possess a certain grandeur and beauty with words. That's why you feel suffocated if you keep imposing upon yourself an obscurity and internal exile. There has to be a meeting place somewhere between lacerating self-doubt and occasional bouts of overweening confidence. After living off the written words of others for years, you are now striking out on your own.
The stories and poems and essays you are pouring out are only lies and imaginings and embroideries. They are part of the process of your search for your place in the world of the written words. You embraced existentialism and atheism; you explored structuralism and deconstruction; you went into a serious reading of history; you read about cognitive science. You have trained your mind. You have improved upon your formal education. You could theorize but you have got nowhere of being who you want to be the most: an artist with words. Meanwhile death is looming at the door.
Many times, in the wee hours of the morning you sit up in bed in fear and trembling because you think you are a fraud: so much desire and so little accomplishment. You feel not only the universe is empty of meaning, but you yourself are also barren and empty on top of being lonely.
You have both eviscerated and romanticized love and loneliness. You have regarded raw, animal lust with disdain but fascinated by its energy and flamboyance. To achieve altered states of consciousness so you can have access to the mysterious source of inspiration, you practice fasting, meditation, sleep deprivation, and occasional beers. It works sometimes. Out of the blue, at unexpected moments, you experience a feeling of strange discomfort that only words can relieve. At those moments your thoughts soar and words arrive to carry you above the oceans that are heaving across the planet. Those moments make up for periods of agony and despair that make you feel that you are an abyss.
You are conscious that you have a few years left on this planet. This self-knowledge, by no means unique, does not deter you from pursuing a line of inquiry into a nagging question whether you are for real or merely a clumsy fraud.
Wissai
The stories and poems and essays you are pouring out are only lies and imaginings and embroideries. They are part of the process of your search for your place in the world of the written words. You embraced existentialism and atheism; you explored structuralism and deconstruction; you went into a serious reading of history; you read about cognitive science. You have trained your mind. You have improved upon your formal education. You could theorize but you have got nowhere of being who you want to be the most: an artist with words. Meanwhile death is looming at the door.
Many times, in the wee hours of the morning you sit up in bed in fear and trembling because you think you are a fraud: so much desire and so little accomplishment. You feel not only the universe is empty of meaning, but you yourself are also barren and empty on top of being lonely.
You have both eviscerated and romanticized love and loneliness. You have regarded raw, animal lust with disdain but fascinated by its energy and flamboyance. To achieve altered states of consciousness so you can have access to the mysterious source of inspiration, you practice fasting, meditation, sleep deprivation, and occasional beers. It works sometimes. Out of the blue, at unexpected moments, you experience a feeling of strange discomfort that only words can relieve. At those moments your thoughts soar and words arrive to carry you above the oceans that are heaving across the planet. Those moments make up for periods of agony and despair that make you feel that you are an abyss.
You are conscious that you have a few years left on this planet. This self-knowledge, by no means unique, does not deter you from pursuing a line of inquiry into a nagging question whether you are for real or merely a clumsy fraud.
Wissai
Story-Telling and Regular Lying
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/books/the-tigers-wife-brings-tea-obreht-acclaim.html?pagewanted=2&ref=books
Dear all:
To tell a story has some connection with the ill-defined, vague, slippery search for self and the complexity of "lying"/creativity. Ordinary liars lie to make them look good, to cast them in a better light or to deceive others in order to get what they want or to get out of a jam. Story tellers/ creative writers are also liars, but with a higher mission: to get to truths about themselves or to make sense of the world they live in. It's very interesting to read about what writers chose to write, especially their first novels.
In so many ways, some of us are afraid to be who we are and thus feel incumbent to create a fictional self when dealing with others. That anxiety and insecurity often translates into blatant and pathetic lying and posturing, and then scrambling for explanations when getting caught in the tangled web of lies of our own creation.
Wissai
Téa Obreht is just 25, and “The Tiger’s Wife” is her first book. It is also the first book ever sold by her agent, Seth Fishman, who is 30, and the second book bought by her editor, Noah Eaker, who was 26 when he acquired it and, strictly speaking, still an editorial assistant.
Born in Belgrade, Téa Obreht moved to Cyprus, then Egypt, before settling in the United States.
“We were all very new,” Ms. Obreht said recently, “and we were excited to find each other.” They might want to consider retirement, quitting while they’re ahead, because the kind of good fortune they are enjoying right now may never come their way again.
Ms. Obreht was included in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list of young fiction authors last summer and “The Tiger’s Wife” was previously excerpted in the magazine. On Sunday, the book made the cover of The New York Times Book Review. Just about everywhere, it has received the sort of reviews that many writers wait an entire career for. In The Times on Friday, Michiko Kakutani called it ‘“hugely ambitious, audaciously written.”
Set in an unnamed Balkan country in the aftermath of a civil war, “The Tiger’s Wife” is narrated by a young physician named Natalia Stefanovic, whose beloved grandfather, also a doctor, has recently died. The story links her efforts in the present to deliver vaccines to children in an orphanage with elaborate folk tales her grandfather used to tell: one involves a deaf and mute woman, abused by her husband, who befriends an escaped tiger in the woods, and another is about a vampirelike character known as the Deathless Man, himself immortal, who brings death to others.
The book begins by describing the ritual visits the narrator and her grandfather made to the zoo when she was young, and in the middle of her book tour last week, Ms. Obreht, who used to visit the zoo in Belgrade with her own grandfather, stopped by the zoo in Central Park, one of her favorite places in New York. She pointed out that the snow leopard and the polar bears had much more space to roam here than they would in Belgrade.
“These big, open environments for the animals — that’s a very luxurious, American concept,” she said.
Until she was 7, Ms. Obreht lived in Belgrade with her mother; her grandfather, who was a Roman Catholic from Slovenia; and her grandmother, a Muslim from Bosnia. Her father was never in the picture, she said. In 1992, with civil war breaking out in the former Yugoslavia, the family moved first to Cyprus and then to Cairo, where Ms. Obreht, who already knew a little English from watching bootleg copies of Disney movies, went to English schools.
In 1997, when the war had ended, Ms. Obreht’s grandparents moved back to their Belgrade apartment, but she and her mother emigrated to the United States, living outside Atlanta for a while before finally settling in Palo Alto, Calif. Ms. Obreht graduated from the University of Southern California and then got an M.F.A. at Cornell, where she began writing what would become “The Tiger’s Wife.”
Starting in Cyprus, she spent most of her spare time reading and writing, “to the point,” she said, “of not being socialized properly.” These days she is cheerful and gregarious, and recalled her childhood as a mostly happy one, but added: “I think I’m just starting to feel some of the repercussions. Moving every three or four years that way has made it extremely easy for me to leave people behind. I’m finding that when you get older and start to care about friends and mentors, you have to make an effort to stay connected.”
Her novel is not autobiographical. Not only did Ms. Obreht not live through the war in the Balkans, but her grandfather was also a successful aviation engineer, not a physician, and though he was a great storyteller, the stories he told were not folk tales so much as embroideries and exaggerations of his everyday life.
“That was part of his culture,” she explained. “When someone tells you a story, it’s a project. There’s a complex, deep undercurrent of vendettas and interesting narratives underlying even anything as simple as saying, ‘I went out to get milk.’ ”
Her grandfather died unexpectedly in the spring of 2007, and a few months later Ms. Obreht began working on a short story about a tiger, a deaf-mute circus performer and a young boy.
“The story was a failure,” she said, “but for some reason I wanted to stay with those characters, and eventually the little boy became the narrator’s grandfather, and that changed everything. When I go back through my notes now, I can’t find the place where that happened. I sometimes think the writing process is a state of total denial about what you’re doing or your motivations for doing it.”
She added: “Nothing in the plot is anything like what my grandfather told me, and yet the essence of our relationship is all there.” She and her grandfather were so close, she explained, because he was a self-made man from a poor background who had spent his whole life working hard and providing for others.
Related
Books of The Times: ‘The Tiger’s Wife’ by Téa Obreht (March 11, 2011)
Sunday Book Review: ‘The Tiger’s Wife’ by Téa Obreht (March 13, 2011)
Excerpt: ‘The Tiger’s Wife’ (March 11, 2011)
“Do it right. Don’t mess around. He really instilled that in me,” she said. “The burden of obligation was massive, and then when I came along, he was able to indulge in the fun of raising a child.”
Mr. Fishman signed up Ms. Obreht on the basis of just 60 pages of what would become “The Tiger’s Wife.” “I got about halfway through, and I was so excited I had to get up and walk around my chair,” he recalled.
Mr. Eaker remembered reading the book-length manuscript one Friday while on jury duty and becoming so enthusiastic that he e-mailed his boss, Susan Kamil, now the publisher and editor in chief of Random House, and insisted that she read the manuscript over the weekend.
By the end of 2008, Ms. Obreht said, she and Mr. Eaker thought they were finished with the manuscript, but she wound up substantially rewriting it in 2009, after Mr. Fishman got her an assignment from Harper’s Magazine that sent her to the Balkans to research an article on contemporary vampire lore.
“That was when I rediscovered Belgrade,” she said. “I noticed changes in the city itself, in people’s attitudes, and I got myself emotionally reconnected to the place and the culture in a way I needed to reshape the present-day story.”
About the critical success of the book, she said: “I still haven’t taken it all in. It already seems like such a long time from the moment when I said to myself, ‘Somebody likes it, somebody bought it, and it’s going to have a cover!’ The other evening I gave a reading, and someone came up to me afterwards and said, ‘The Deathless Man is my favorite character.’ My immediate reaction was: how do you know about the Deathless Man? When you’re writing, you’re working on this private world that becomes more and more real to you, but it’s still your own. And then to discover that suddenly other people can access it — in a way that really shocks me.”
Dear all:
To tell a story has some connection with the ill-defined, vague, slippery search for self and the complexity of "lying"/creativity. Ordinary liars lie to make them look good, to cast them in a better light or to deceive others in order to get what they want or to get out of a jam. Story tellers/ creative writers are also liars, but with a higher mission: to get to truths about themselves or to make sense of the world they live in. It's very interesting to read about what writers chose to write, especially their first novels.
In so many ways, some of us are afraid to be who we are and thus feel incumbent to create a fictional self when dealing with others. That anxiety and insecurity often translates into blatant and pathetic lying and posturing, and then scrambling for explanations when getting caught in the tangled web of lies of our own creation.
Wissai
Téa Obreht is just 25, and “The Tiger’s Wife” is her first book. It is also the first book ever sold by her agent, Seth Fishman, who is 30, and the second book bought by her editor, Noah Eaker, who was 26 when he acquired it and, strictly speaking, still an editorial assistant.
Born in Belgrade, Téa Obreht moved to Cyprus, then Egypt, before settling in the United States.
“We were all very new,” Ms. Obreht said recently, “and we were excited to find each other.” They might want to consider retirement, quitting while they’re ahead, because the kind of good fortune they are enjoying right now may never come their way again.
Ms. Obreht was included in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list of young fiction authors last summer and “The Tiger’s Wife” was previously excerpted in the magazine. On Sunday, the book made the cover of The New York Times Book Review. Just about everywhere, it has received the sort of reviews that many writers wait an entire career for. In The Times on Friday, Michiko Kakutani called it ‘“hugely ambitious, audaciously written.”
Set in an unnamed Balkan country in the aftermath of a civil war, “The Tiger’s Wife” is narrated by a young physician named Natalia Stefanovic, whose beloved grandfather, also a doctor, has recently died. The story links her efforts in the present to deliver vaccines to children in an orphanage with elaborate folk tales her grandfather used to tell: one involves a deaf and mute woman, abused by her husband, who befriends an escaped tiger in the woods, and another is about a vampirelike character known as the Deathless Man, himself immortal, who brings death to others.
The book begins by describing the ritual visits the narrator and her grandfather made to the zoo when she was young, and in the middle of her book tour last week, Ms. Obreht, who used to visit the zoo in Belgrade with her own grandfather, stopped by the zoo in Central Park, one of her favorite places in New York. She pointed out that the snow leopard and the polar bears had much more space to roam here than they would in Belgrade.
“These big, open environments for the animals — that’s a very luxurious, American concept,” she said.
Until she was 7, Ms. Obreht lived in Belgrade with her mother; her grandfather, who was a Roman Catholic from Slovenia; and her grandmother, a Muslim from Bosnia. Her father was never in the picture, she said. In 1992, with civil war breaking out in the former Yugoslavia, the family moved first to Cyprus and then to Cairo, where Ms. Obreht, who already knew a little English from watching bootleg copies of Disney movies, went to English schools.
In 1997, when the war had ended, Ms. Obreht’s grandparents moved back to their Belgrade apartment, but she and her mother emigrated to the United States, living outside Atlanta for a while before finally settling in Palo Alto, Calif. Ms. Obreht graduated from the University of Southern California and then got an M.F.A. at Cornell, where she began writing what would become “The Tiger’s Wife.”
Starting in Cyprus, she spent most of her spare time reading and writing, “to the point,” she said, “of not being socialized properly.” These days she is cheerful and gregarious, and recalled her childhood as a mostly happy one, but added: “I think I’m just starting to feel some of the repercussions. Moving every three or four years that way has made it extremely easy for me to leave people behind. I’m finding that when you get older and start to care about friends and mentors, you have to make an effort to stay connected.”
Her novel is not autobiographical. Not only did Ms. Obreht not live through the war in the Balkans, but her grandfather was also a successful aviation engineer, not a physician, and though he was a great storyteller, the stories he told were not folk tales so much as embroideries and exaggerations of his everyday life.
“That was part of his culture,” she explained. “When someone tells you a story, it’s a project. There’s a complex, deep undercurrent of vendettas and interesting narratives underlying even anything as simple as saying, ‘I went out to get milk.’ ”
Her grandfather died unexpectedly in the spring of 2007, and a few months later Ms. Obreht began working on a short story about a tiger, a deaf-mute circus performer and a young boy.
“The story was a failure,” she said, “but for some reason I wanted to stay with those characters, and eventually the little boy became the narrator’s grandfather, and that changed everything. When I go back through my notes now, I can’t find the place where that happened. I sometimes think the writing process is a state of total denial about what you’re doing or your motivations for doing it.”
She added: “Nothing in the plot is anything like what my grandfather told me, and yet the essence of our relationship is all there.” She and her grandfather were so close, she explained, because he was a self-made man from a poor background who had spent his whole life working hard and providing for others.
Related
Books of The Times: ‘The Tiger’s Wife’ by Téa Obreht (March 11, 2011)
Sunday Book Review: ‘The Tiger’s Wife’ by Téa Obreht (March 13, 2011)
Excerpt: ‘The Tiger’s Wife’ (March 11, 2011)
“Do it right. Don’t mess around. He really instilled that in me,” she said. “The burden of obligation was massive, and then when I came along, he was able to indulge in the fun of raising a child.”
Mr. Fishman signed up Ms. Obreht on the basis of just 60 pages of what would become “The Tiger’s Wife.” “I got about halfway through, and I was so excited I had to get up and walk around my chair,” he recalled.
Mr. Eaker remembered reading the book-length manuscript one Friday while on jury duty and becoming so enthusiastic that he e-mailed his boss, Susan Kamil, now the publisher and editor in chief of Random House, and insisted that she read the manuscript over the weekend.
By the end of 2008, Ms. Obreht said, she and Mr. Eaker thought they were finished with the manuscript, but she wound up substantially rewriting it in 2009, after Mr. Fishman got her an assignment from Harper’s Magazine that sent her to the Balkans to research an article on contemporary vampire lore.
“That was when I rediscovered Belgrade,” she said. “I noticed changes in the city itself, in people’s attitudes, and I got myself emotionally reconnected to the place and the culture in a way I needed to reshape the present-day story.”
About the critical success of the book, she said: “I still haven’t taken it all in. It already seems like such a long time from the moment when I said to myself, ‘Somebody likes it, somebody bought it, and it’s going to have a cover!’ The other evening I gave a reading, and someone came up to me afterwards and said, ‘The Deathless Man is my favorite character.’ My immediate reaction was: how do you know about the Deathless Man? When you’re writing, you’re working on this private world that becomes more and more real to you, but it’s still your own. And then to discover that suddenly other people can access it — in a way that really shocks me.”
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Photographs burned in Bourne Identity
The photo burning scene brought to mind of what you did many years ago in the summer of 1975. You didn't want anything to remind you of her. The pain would be unbearable. Now almost 40 years later, flashes of her are coming back anyway. You feel bitter and cynical. Of course, you don't love her anymore.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
This widely anthologized story by Flannery O'Connor never tires of me, nor I of it. We are made for each other. I just read it again. The impact, the effect, the eerie haunting silence the story cast over me is as fresh now as many times before. The title has been disrespectfully parodied by insensitive clods as "A Hard Man is Good to Find".
I strongly urge you to read it. You will find it very modern and timeless and enduring. It will be read hundreds and thousands of years from now, especially if Christianity is still around then. Despite its seemingly grosteque and horrific violence, it is a very moral story, as much as, if not much more than, Pulp Fiction is a moral movie and a love story told from various angles in spite of its graphic violence.
Reading it helps me understand many events and interesting people, namely the unspeakable "life-like" horrific dreams I have had, the pending demise of Gaddafi, the indefatigable do-gooder Hung Cao, the weird, strange, odd cast of various characters I have met. Most importantly, I think, the story has helped me face reality and has prepared me to accept my moments of grace, even in defeats and failures, whenever they occur.
Wissai
I strongly urge you to read it. You will find it very modern and timeless and enduring. It will be read hundreds and thousands of years from now, especially if Christianity is still around then. Despite its seemingly grosteque and horrific violence, it is a very moral story, as much as, if not much more than, Pulp Fiction is a moral movie and a love story told from various angles in spite of its graphic violence.
Reading it helps me understand many events and interesting people, namely the unspeakable "life-like" horrific dreams I have had, the pending demise of Gaddafi, the indefatigable do-gooder Hung Cao, the weird, strange, odd cast of various characters I have met. Most importantly, I think, the story has helped me face reality and has prepared me to accept my moments of grace, even in defeats and failures, whenever they occur.
Wissai
Friday, March 18, 2011
Baudelaire
À une passante
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair... puis la nuit! — Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!
— Charles Baudelaire
To a Passer-By
The street about me roared with a deafening sound.
Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt;
Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue's.
Tense as in a delirium, I drank
From her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate,
The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills.
A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?
Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never perhaps!
For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go,
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!
— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
A Passer-by
The deafening street roared on. Full, slim, and grand
In mourning and majestic grief, passed down
A woman, lifting with a stately hand
And swaying the black borders of her gown;
Noble and swift, her leg with statues matching;
I drank, convulsed, out of her pensive eye,
A livid sky where hurricanes were hatching,
Sweetness that charms, and joy that makes one die.
A lighting-flash — then darkness! Fleeting chance
Whose look was my rebirth — a single glance!
Through endless time shall I not meet with you?
Far off! too late! or never! — I not knowing
Who you may be, nor you where I am going —
You, whom I might have loved, who know it too!
— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)
To a Woman Passing By
The deafening road around me roared.
Tall, slim, in deep mourning, making majestic grief,
A woman passed, lifting and swinging
With a pompous gesture the ornamental hem of her garment,
Swift and noble, with statuesque limb.
As for me, I drank, twitching like an old roué,
From her eye, livid sky where the hurricane is born,
The softness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills,
A gleam... then night! O fleeting beauty,
Your glance has given me sudden rebirth,
Shall I see you again only in eternity?
Somewhere else, very far from here! Too late! Perhaps never!
For I do not know where you flee, nor you where I am going,
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!
— Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974)
To The Lady Who Passed Me By
Around me the street roared with the deafening sound
In grand mourning and majestic grief, a tall, slender
Lady passed me by, and with a glittering hand
Raising and swaying the hem and flounce of her gown;
Gracile and agile, legs were statues-like.
Tense and trembling, I drank, from her eyes,
Pallid sky where storms are born,
The sweetness that enslaves and the pleasure that kills.
A flash of Light, and then back to Night. Beauty in flight.
Whose looks at me suddenly made me feel reborn.
Will I only see you again when I am rejoined with the sky?
Maybe never. So far away and so late, besides.
For I know not where you fled, and you don't know where I go,
Oh my lady whom I would have loved, and only you know it's so.
Wissai/NKBa'
Notes:
1. I couldn't find a word that rhymes with "born" and conveys the meaning of death. So right now, the prosaic "kills" serves the purpose until a better word surfaces.
2. When I was a sweet lad of sixteen, I came across the famous stanza of Ho Dzenh. It stayed with me for over 40 years until one day, out of the blue, I wrote:
Go ahead, make a date with me,
But don't bother to show up.
So, in sorrow, I'd walk around
In the courtyard, watching
The cigarette burning itself out on my fingers,
And softly saying to myself:
"Damn! I do miss her".
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair... puis la nuit! — Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!
— Charles Baudelaire
To a Passer-By
The street about me roared with a deafening sound.
Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt;
Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue's.
Tense as in a delirium, I drank
From her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate,
The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills.
A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?
Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never perhaps!
For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go,
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!
— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
A Passer-by
The deafening street roared on. Full, slim, and grand
In mourning and majestic grief, passed down
A woman, lifting with a stately hand
And swaying the black borders of her gown;
Noble and swift, her leg with statues matching;
I drank, convulsed, out of her pensive eye,
A livid sky where hurricanes were hatching,
Sweetness that charms, and joy that makes one die.
A lighting-flash — then darkness! Fleeting chance
Whose look was my rebirth — a single glance!
Through endless time shall I not meet with you?
Far off! too late! or never! — I not knowing
Who you may be, nor you where I am going —
You, whom I might have loved, who know it too!
— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)
To a Woman Passing By
The deafening road around me roared.
Tall, slim, in deep mourning, making majestic grief,
A woman passed, lifting and swinging
With a pompous gesture the ornamental hem of her garment,
Swift and noble, with statuesque limb.
As for me, I drank, twitching like an old roué,
From her eye, livid sky where the hurricane is born,
The softness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills,
A gleam... then night! O fleeting beauty,
Your glance has given me sudden rebirth,
Shall I see you again only in eternity?
Somewhere else, very far from here! Too late! Perhaps never!
For I do not know where you flee, nor you where I am going,
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!
— Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974)
To The Lady Who Passed Me By
Around me the street roared with the deafening sound
In grand mourning and majestic grief, a tall, slender
Lady passed me by, and with a glittering hand
Raising and swaying the hem and flounce of her gown;
Gracile and agile, legs were statues-like.
Tense and trembling, I drank, from her eyes,
Pallid sky where storms are born,
The sweetness that enslaves and the pleasure that kills.
A flash of Light, and then back to Night. Beauty in flight.
Whose looks at me suddenly made me feel reborn.
Will I only see you again when I am rejoined with the sky?
Maybe never. So far away and so late, besides.
For I know not where you fled, and you don't know where I go,
Oh my lady whom I would have loved, and only you know it's so.
Wissai/NKBa'
Notes:
1. I couldn't find a word that rhymes with "born" and conveys the meaning of death. So right now, the prosaic "kills" serves the purpose until a better word surfaces.
2. When I was a sweet lad of sixteen, I came across the famous stanza of Ho Dzenh. It stayed with me for over 40 years until one day, out of the blue, I wrote:
Go ahead, make a date with me,
But don't bother to show up.
So, in sorrow, I'd walk around
In the courtyard, watching
The cigarette burning itself out on my fingers,
And softly saying to myself:
"Damn! I do miss her".
Pham Cong Thien, Byron, Baudelaire, and Ba'
Ba' is my given (first) name. My father, being an expert in botany and a tree-lover, named all his five sons after trees. I accepted the name, but I have never particularly liked it. When I decided to enter the world of writing, I gave myself a whole slew of new names: Wissai, Roberto, and Silvio (many more might be forthcoming). I like Wissai best. It sounds Indian and German. It has a whistling, thrilling, melodious quality. It also reminds me that I have to seriously study German, if I don't wish to make a monkey of myself as I often see others doing. What others might see me as a publicity hound is actually a lonely yet proud man trying to hang onto sanity and find relevance and purpose of the business of living.
I noted the passing away of PCT with much regret because I read two of his books when I was 18. He impressed me with his knowledge of many languages and of philosophy, the same areas of which I had a budding interest. I still remember he blasted Suzuki very hard about the meaning of Zen Buddhism. I didn't know much about Zen Buddhism then and I still don't know much about it now. But I am satisfied that I got from Buddhism two concepts that I found useful and relevant: 1) impermanence of compound beings and thus detachment, not attachment, is the solution to suffering. 2) Self and Others are One.
I didn't know that PCT wrote poetry, again, the activity in which I dabble from time to time. So when a post about him was in the forum with somebody by the name of Jason Gibbs at San Francisco Library having taken a stab of translating stanza # 8 bearing the title "Hiu Hat Que Huong" from the long poem "Ngay Sinh Cua Ran" caught my interest. I shuddered as I was reading Jason's rendition. I didn't know if Jason was a native speaker of Vietnamese or not. I decided to do justice to the strikingly original and compact stanza. I didn't see much point in translating the title of the stanza as "Homeland, wistfully." To me, as much of the stanza was about the winds blowing across hills, I put down the title as "Over my homeland gently blew the winds", a long-winded translation but I liked it, and that was what it counted. As Chung, a poet himself, noted, PCT's words are resistant to translation, it was indeed a struggle for me and it was a labor of love. I had a great deal of pleasure of being able to express in English "While I stand upon a hill amidst the blooming clouds" for "Tôi đứng trên đồi mây trổ bông". I was further gratified when Chung liked my translation enough to request my permission to post it in the VSG. Later on, I realized there were two other efforts, besides Jason's, to translate the stanza. Comparing my version with the three other versions that have come to my attention, I don't feel that I need to bury myself in shame and embarrassment.
Regarding "She walked in beauty", as explained earlier, it came to me out of nowhere, i.e., from deep within the subconscious. I wrote it very quickly, no more than 10 minutes. It was more like a variant of a limerick than a serious poem although the sentiments were heart-felt and experienced more than once. Love at first sight, can be exquisite and wildly pulsating, the feeling only a precious and impulsive few have the privilege to experience. The poem reminded Hien of Baudelaire's "À une passante". One thing led to another, and I found myself translating the maudlin Baudelaire. I had the advantage of consulting the three other English translations that Hien had kindly supplied me with. Once again, I had the audacity and temerity to fancy that my translation topped the other three, beginning with the translation of the title of the poem itself. While I know all too well of my deficiency in French, my feel for the English language has a long history, starting with my masters Shakespeare, T.S.Elliot, and e.e.Cummings.
Wissai
(to be continued)
I noted the passing away of PCT with much regret because I read two of his books when I was 18. He impressed me with his knowledge of many languages and of philosophy, the same areas of which I had a budding interest. I still remember he blasted Suzuki very hard about the meaning of Zen Buddhism. I didn't know much about Zen Buddhism then and I still don't know much about it now. But I am satisfied that I got from Buddhism two concepts that I found useful and relevant: 1) impermanence of compound beings and thus detachment, not attachment, is the solution to suffering. 2) Self and Others are One.
I didn't know that PCT wrote poetry, again, the activity in which I dabble from time to time. So when a post about him was in the forum with somebody by the name of Jason Gibbs at San Francisco Library having taken a stab of translating stanza # 8 bearing the title "Hiu Hat Que Huong" from the long poem "Ngay Sinh Cua Ran" caught my interest. I shuddered as I was reading Jason's rendition. I didn't know if Jason was a native speaker of Vietnamese or not. I decided to do justice to the strikingly original and compact stanza. I didn't see much point in translating the title of the stanza as "Homeland, wistfully." To me, as much of the stanza was about the winds blowing across hills, I put down the title as "Over my homeland gently blew the winds", a long-winded translation but I liked it, and that was what it counted. As Chung, a poet himself, noted, PCT's words are resistant to translation, it was indeed a struggle for me and it was a labor of love. I had a great deal of pleasure of being able to express in English "While I stand upon a hill amidst the blooming clouds" for "Tôi đứng trên đồi mây trổ bông". I was further gratified when Chung liked my translation enough to request my permission to post it in the VSG. Later on, I realized there were two other efforts, besides Jason's, to translate the stanza. Comparing my version with the three other versions that have come to my attention, I don't feel that I need to bury myself in shame and embarrassment.
Regarding "She walked in beauty", as explained earlier, it came to me out of nowhere, i.e., from deep within the subconscious. I wrote it very quickly, no more than 10 minutes. It was more like a variant of a limerick than a serious poem although the sentiments were heart-felt and experienced more than once. Love at first sight, can be exquisite and wildly pulsating, the feeling only a precious and impulsive few have the privilege to experience. The poem reminded Hien of Baudelaire's "À une passante". One thing led to another, and I found myself translating the maudlin Baudelaire. I had the advantage of consulting the three other English translations that Hien had kindly supplied me with. Once again, I had the audacity and temerity to fancy that my translation topped the other three, beginning with the translation of the title of the poem itself. While I know all too well of my deficiency in French, my feel for the English language has a long history, starting with my masters Shakespeare, T.S.Elliot, and e.e.Cummings.
Wissai
(to be continued)
Thursday, March 17, 2011
You can try
You can try and you can strive,
But all you will end up is to cry
You might as well sigh and give it up
For you're merely a little pup
You bite is weak; your bark is a pathetic whine.
You will never outshine.
You hold no promise at what you try to do.
You might as well admit you are through.
Wissai
But all you will end up is to cry
You might as well sigh and give it up
For you're merely a little pup
You bite is weak; your bark is a pathetic whine.
You will never outshine.
You hold no promise at what you try to do.
You might as well admit you are through.
Wissai
"She Walked In Beauty..."
"She walked in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies."
I looked at her, what a sight!
She looked back at me and smiled.
And I knew I would love her till I die.
Months and moons, rains and shines,
They came and went, but this heart of mine
Forever for her it pines.
Wissai
Of cloudless climes and starry skies."
I looked at her, what a sight!
She looked back at me and smiled.
And I knew I would love her till I die.
Months and moons, rains and shines,
They came and went, but this heart of mine
Forever for her it pines.
Wissai
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Why Do I Abhor Hypocrisy?
My recent thesis about human behavior is that most, if not all, conflicts between individuals involve sexual rivalry, greed, and lack of respect. Lack of respect manifests in language, gestures, and hypocrisy. Although lack of respect usually is symbolic and does't often result in concrete actions towards the target, it arouses in the target visceral reactions which often end up in destruction and bloodshed.
I call somebody a hypocrite when he righteously corrected me publicly when I used a common Anglo Saxon word depicting an act of sexual congress, spoken by a soldier in a work of fiction, and then in a few weeks later the same individual posted several risque' sex jokes, one of which crudely compared the porthole of a cruise cabin with the size of a female sex organ. I call somebody a hypocrite when he exhibited physical cowardice and didn't bother to get involved in a campaign against Red China's mistreatments and killings of Vietnamese fishermen, and then he enthusiastically displayed his thirst, hunger, and zeal for power in his role as a co-moderator of a forum in cyberspace.
As I hate hypocrisy so much, I am very much on guard not to commit acts of hypocrisy myself. I always try to be consistent in words and deeds. I don't deny that I sometimes I can't resist the urge to show that I am gifted in logic and dialectics as well as my felicity with words and some familiarity with literature and philosophy. But I never claim I know more than I do, nor do I engage in acts that are contrary to what I say who I am. Deep down, contrary to hypocrites and cowards, I do have pride and self-respect.
Wissai
I call somebody a hypocrite when he righteously corrected me publicly when I used a common Anglo Saxon word depicting an act of sexual congress, spoken by a soldier in a work of fiction, and then in a few weeks later the same individual posted several risque' sex jokes, one of which crudely compared the porthole of a cruise cabin with the size of a female sex organ. I call somebody a hypocrite when he exhibited physical cowardice and didn't bother to get involved in a campaign against Red China's mistreatments and killings of Vietnamese fishermen, and then he enthusiastically displayed his thirst, hunger, and zeal for power in his role as a co-moderator of a forum in cyberspace.
As I hate hypocrisy so much, I am very much on guard not to commit acts of hypocrisy myself. I always try to be consistent in words and deeds. I don't deny that I sometimes I can't resist the urge to show that I am gifted in logic and dialectics as well as my felicity with words and some familiarity with literature and philosophy. But I never claim I know more than I do, nor do I engage in acts that are contrary to what I say who I am. Deep down, contrary to hypocrites and cowards, I do have pride and self-respect.
Wissai
Thoughts inspired by Fukuyama's latest book on Political Order
Hard (physical) sciences explain/help us understand the behavior/process of the physical world.
2. Liberal arts studies/disciplines try to understand/ explain human behavior individually and socially. Since Man is a slippery being, full of contradictions, and not quite determinable because of intangible factors such as pride/ego and irrational/religious beliefs which have no basis in physical reality, it is harder to have a single, universally accepted view (and incrementally improved upon) of human behavior. That's why there are different ideas/theories about human behavior. Fukuyama's latest book is just another view, albeit cogently argued about the political order.
3. I submit any attempt to understand behavior must take into account the following (by no means exhaustive and comprehensive) questions:
a) Why are we here? What happens to us after we die?
b) What is the purpose of our lives (related to (a) above)? I submit that only humans have this question because, unlike animals, most humans follow more than biological imperatives of self-preservation and propagation. I think most humans want their lives to have meanings rather than just are mere accidents in the lotto of life. (Ref. Maslow's hierarchy of needs).
c) Marx glorified economics (productive forces and the relations of production) as the foundation of society and failed to take into proper account the role of human self-interest. Man always experiences the tension between selfishness and altruism.
d) Precisely Man is an animal/being/organism that is acutely aware of the clashes of his own needs as an individual versus the needs of the other individuals, he realizes that life is about power and the allocation of resources and access to resources. Thus, politics is intimately tied up with religion. Early political theories all have religious aspects ( divine right of rule, Sons of Heaven). Religion is a tool of social control through a system of rewards and punishments, not only in this life, but also in the alleged next life. The only good thing about religion is ethics. The metaphysics part is just an exercise in sophistry.
4. To sum up my inarticulate, half-baked "grand conception" of Man. Basically, there are only two types of Man: One lives no differently from that of an animal, totally concerned with biological imperatives: food, shelter, sex, and everything necessary to ensure a long life: lying, cheating, and bragging to puff up one's image. The other type goes beyond concerns for biological needs. He will fight for freedom and dignity. He is interested in acts of artistic creativity. Most importantly, he has true pride and love. Thus, he is also into altruism. He avoids needless lying and bragging. He honors his words and pledges. To evaluate/assess an individual human, we just simply look for evidence that determines what type of Man he belongs to. As for the behavior of humans as a group, I am not smart enough to formulate any theory except a few preliminary ideas about leadership, power, and political legitimacy which I will expound shortly.
''The Origins of Political Order ''
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/science/08fukuyama.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
2. Liberal arts studies/disciplines try to understand/ explain human behavior individually and socially. Since Man is a slippery being, full of contradictions, and not quite determinable because of intangible factors such as pride/ego and irrational/religious beliefs which have no basis in physical reality, it is harder to have a single, universally accepted view (and incrementally improved upon) of human behavior. That's why there are different ideas/theories about human behavior. Fukuyama's latest book is just another view, albeit cogently argued about the political order.
3. I submit any attempt to understand behavior must take into account the following (by no means exhaustive and comprehensive) questions:
a) Why are we here? What happens to us after we die?
b) What is the purpose of our lives (related to (a) above)? I submit that only humans have this question because, unlike animals, most humans follow more than biological imperatives of self-preservation and propagation. I think most humans want their lives to have meanings rather than just are mere accidents in the lotto of life. (Ref. Maslow's hierarchy of needs).
c) Marx glorified economics (productive forces and the relations of production) as the foundation of society and failed to take into proper account the role of human self-interest. Man always experiences the tension between selfishness and altruism.
d) Precisely Man is an animal/being/organism that is acutely aware of the clashes of his own needs as an individual versus the needs of the other individuals, he realizes that life is about power and the allocation of resources and access to resources. Thus, politics is intimately tied up with religion. Early political theories all have religious aspects ( divine right of rule, Sons of Heaven). Religion is a tool of social control through a system of rewards and punishments, not only in this life, but also in the alleged next life. The only good thing about religion is ethics. The metaphysics part is just an exercise in sophistry.
4. To sum up my inarticulate, half-baked "grand conception" of Man. Basically, there are only two types of Man: One lives no differently from that of an animal, totally concerned with biological imperatives: food, shelter, sex, and everything necessary to ensure a long life: lying, cheating, and bragging to puff up one's image. The other type goes beyond concerns for biological needs. He will fight for freedom and dignity. He is interested in acts of artistic creativity. Most importantly, he has true pride and love. Thus, he is also into altruism. He avoids needless lying and bragging. He honors his words and pledges. To evaluate/assess an individual human, we just simply look for evidence that determines what type of Man he belongs to. As for the behavior of humans as a group, I am not smart enough to formulate any theory except a few preliminary ideas about leadership, power, and political legitimacy which I will expound shortly.
''The Origins of Political Order ''
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/science/08fukuyama.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
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