A Rat Race We Can Deal With
An unlikely fog enveloped Charleston, SC this morning. A solitary cherry picker led the pack of cars down the blinded road. After passing him and cresting the arc of a bridge, there was nothing in front of us, nothing to see. The experience reminded us of our sailing days, days spent anxiously rocking in the stillness of an offshore fog. This fog, though, was different; it infused our morning with a touch of serenity. And for that we are grateful. But we don’t want you to go into your morning blind. So how about a little reading? The Boston Globe loves Paul Auster’s Invisible. Academia is wary of the Abbeville Institute, as it should be. Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States is revisited by a group of celebrities. Archeologists and geophysicists revisit Troy’s existence, and The Australian delves into one of the foundations of literature — The Iliad. Finally, Jake Adelstein makes his living fighting Japan’s foremost gangsters, which makes a battle with American media sound downright cruel. Into the foggy abyss we go. – Andrew Geer
– Occasionally, a novel is so masterful it leaves you breathless. Paul Auster’s “Invisible’’ is such a novel. In it, he explores the shadowy, perilous, maddening netherworld between what we know about ourselves and others, and what we long to know, the latter invisible to us. Absent such knowledge, we tell stories that may or may not be true but affect our lives either way. – Paul Auster in The Boston Globe
Let's Not Do This Thing Again
– In 1991, Donald W. Livingston threw a party—well, a conference—and nobody showed up. It was during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and Mr. Livingston, a professor of philosophy at Emory University and raised in South Carolina, decided there should be more thoughtful discourse on the topic of secession. — The Abbeville Institute in The Chronicle of Higher Education
– The history of the United States is, essentially, one of dissent. Certain elected officials may have managed to establish legacies of transformation, but real change in this country has inevitably begun not with politicians but the peanut gallery. — The People Speak in The Los Angeles Times
No, We Are Not Driving Up Hits
– Homer’s Iliad enjoys an exalted status in our culture. It is the taproot of the Western literary tradition, no less. And for many sage heads this martial epic sung in vivid hexameter verse is not only the first, but the greatest, product of this tradition. The French philosopher Simone Weil, a loner in many things, was not alone when in her penetrating 1940 essay entitled The Iliad, or Poem of Force, she declared: “Nothing the peoples of Europe have produced is worth the first known poem that appeared among them.” — The Iliad in The Australian
– ”The fucking Jew American reporter, I’d like to kill him,” is one of Jake Adelstein’s favorite accolades, courtesy of yakuza boss Tadamasa Goto. Adelstein’s career in Japan has literally almost killed him. He calls his first book, Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan—about his career as a journalist for the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper based in Tokyo—an “insurance policy.” He knows if anyone tries to kill him after this, it’ll be bad press for the yakuza, which could result in stricter laws in a country where organized-crime syndicates are technically legal entities. — Jake Adelstein in The Stranger
Video: Jake Adelstein on Japanese Crime
