There has never been a place on TNC to post comments about “The Libraries of Sarajevo and the Book that Saved Our Lives” by Kemal Bakarsic.
Now, thoughts may be posted here below.
I didn’t know this was on the web. A documentary from 1976, featuring hero Roger Craig, by hero Mark Lane.
Very much worth watching. Five parts, all there on YouTube.
Hard to look away all the time …
.
.
.
Thoughts looking back . . .
.
.
.
.
.
.
I’ve never yet been able to get into DFW, although the problem is general: I’m rarely able to enjoy any American novelist my age or younger. Perhaps something to do with the fact that I’ve tried to be one myself.
But both he and his recent suicide certainly deserve notice. The world is poorer that he’s gone. And I intend to finish something he left behind.
I haven’t seen anything to indicate why he hung himself, aside from family reports of chronic depression. I recall that when Hunter Thompson checked out, in February 2005, he left behind a note indicating great distress that football season had ended.
As we pack our lives into pickup trucks and head down the dusty road of dearth for Depression, the Times is good to point out that by at least one measure of socioeconomic production the US is still number one.
An old friend who was raised to hate the Soviet Union always refused to grasp that since the advent of the War on Drugs the US has a higher rate of incarceration than the Reds at the height of Stalinism.
(One angle: Seems we freed the slaves then put them in jail.)
Do we live in a Sane Society?
There are other measures. Suicide rates. The now fairly well entrenched fad of adolescents massacring fellow students.
I’ve never, at least since the passing of Santa Claus, been a faithful Christian. But since that same time it has also been clear, in the bones if not between the ears, that the American Civilization (as certain stodgy Brit historians insist on calling it) or, better, the Scientific Civilization, which in the west succeeded Christendom immaturely when the latter blew its brains out in 1914, is off its rocker.
Ungovernable. At odds with the Kind-of-Being-that- is-Human. Chronically mass murderous. And (the most Inconvenient Truth of all) suicidal.
But the new Grand Theft Auto is dynamite. And there’s always Second Life when your first one gets snuffed. (Or …? How does that work?)
Happy to find this morning that William F. Buckley, CIA agent and then publicist during the time of its most reprehensible and unpatriotic behavior, colleague and friend of E. Howard Hunt, apologist for the corporate takeover of the republic and servant of Cowboy wealth, is dead.
1. Several years ago, while ruminating upon the question of who wrote Shakespeare, I realized that Hamlet is not a play, but a novel.
This is why it’s all but impossible to satisfactorily stage and perform.
And why, nevertheless, with its bounty of psychology and its inviting hero (the stuff of novels), it’s so popular and beguiling (provoking more commentary over the centuries since Gutenberg than any piece in English aside from the bible).
2. The first part of Don Quixote was offered for publication in 1604, according to this (oft dubious) source.
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, pub’d in 1719, is often named as the first novel in English.
Same source observes “The era of “romances” had ended before 1719 and “novels” had been appreciated as an alternative as early as 1613, the date when the Novelas Exemplares were published.”
It would seem, then, that Hamlet was the first novel.
Wonder who wrote it …
I haven’t yet seen this in the American press: Nigeria prosecuting Pfizer for operating a la mode The Constant Gardener.
From the German magazine Der Spiegel:
USING AFRICANS AS GUINEA PIGS
Nigeria Takes On Pfizer over ‘Killer Drug’
By Hauke Goos
The Nigerian government is taking on Pfizer, the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company. It accuses the company of using a meningitis epidemic to test an unapproved drug on Nigerian children. Eleven children who participated in the tests died and others were left with disabilities. … END QUOTE
The case is rooted in 1996. Perhaps in part inspired Le Carre’s novel? Which was published in 2001.
It seems art, in any case, imitated life.
Meanwhile, as Democratic candidates debate how many tens of millions of Americans should live without health care, the scientific so-called community heralds progress in the immortalization project: the cloning of primate embryos, and the production of stem cells from skin (rather than embryos).
Most news reports and commentators seem to be presuming that the latter innovation removes all/most ethical roadblocks to stem cell work.
If so, according to the technoprophets who briefly came out of the closet at the turn of the millennium — including some of the scientist businessmen running the primary biotech companies involved — the grandchildren of the very rich may perhaps needn’t die unless they want to. Brave new world that hath such creatures in’t.
From the Associated Press:
A barber who killed himself at a city council meeting Thursday hadn’t seemed suicidal during a private meeting three weeks earlier, the mayor said Friday.
“It’s a sad situation,” Mayor Johnny Piper told Nashiville’s WTVF-TV. “You don’t … know what people go through in life.”
Piper had met with Ronald “Bo” Ward and his wife after the barber requested a meeting about his rezoning request.
When that request was denied by a 7-5 vote Thursday night, Ward pulled out a small handgun and shot himself in the head.
“Y’all have put me under. … I’m out of here,” Ward said before firing.
Seven Iraq Vets: “The War as We Saw It.”
A group of U.S. veterans fresh from Iraq describe the political debate in Washington on the war as “surreal.”
