Does IT give good ROI for SAP?

John Wicker doesn't think so. I found this link in a mailing from Publishers Marketplace. You know what IT is, I suppose, since you're using it right now. ROI is not the king of France, but Return On Investment, and SAP is not what you think it is either (or who you think it is), but (I think -- at least this is the first listed of the acronym definitions I found) Systems, Applications and Products. Now you know. Or maybe you don't. I think what Wicker is talking about is whether computer technology is a good investment for publishers, and he suspects it is not.

John Wicker, Executive Vice President, VISTA International, speaking at the 25th annual Supply Chain Specialists Meeting during the Frankfurt Book Fair, October 2003.

More on Vargas Llosa

I wonder if Vargas Llosa's recent provocative comments about indigenous movements may not be an act of jealousy -- probably unconscious -- in the face of all the attention being given to his one-time hero, friend and rival Gabriel García Márquez? (Years ago, Vargas Llosa wrote a 600-page biography of GGM, admiringly calling him a "deicide.")

Over the years, I've made notes on my readings of Vargas Llosa's fiction (which I find fascinating). Most are handwritten, and I haven't yet transferred them to my website file of readings. Here is one, though, that I had in a computer file and have just uploaded, if you want to see my take on (and quarrels with) his Historia de Mayta.

Gabriel García Márquez

Just a reminder, now that Gabo is so much in the news with the translation of Volume I of his memoirs. If anybody who does not read Spanish is interested in getting all the in-jokes and more of the context of his most famous novel, there's a pretty good "Monarch Note" available from Barnes & Noble on One Hundred Years of Solitude. I wrote it.

In the first volume of his memoirs, Vivir para contarla (2002), Gabriel García Márquez writes (this is my translation): "my library has never been much more than a working tool, where I can consult instantly a chapter of Dostoyevski, or verify a fact about Julius Caesar's epilepsy or about the mechanism of an automobile carburetor. I even have a manual for committing perfect murders, in case one of my poor characters ever needs one." He also says of the North American novelists he was reading while writing his first novel, La hojarasca (1955; translated as "Leafstorm"), that he read them with "insatiable curiosity" to discover how they were written. He read them first "right side up, then backwards, and I submitted them to a kind of surgical disemboweling until I uncovered the most deeply hidden mysteries of their structure."

I loved that description. I think that's the way any serious writer must work.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Monarch Note)

The two Mario Vargas Llosas

My faithful correspondent Daniel del Solar has forwarded an article datelined Quito, about reactions by indigenous leaders to a talk by Mario Vargas Llosa. The Peruvian novelist and one-time candidate for president recently (once again) criticized them severely for radical actions in Ecuador, Peru and -- most recently and dramatically -- Bolivia.

I don't believe that Vargas Llosa is "racist" (though that word has shifting meanings), but he has long been a neo-conservative (in US political terms) and may even have become a neo-liberal (in Latin American terms), which is worse. Many years ago, in a very public debate, his tocayo (meaning someone who shares your first name), Mario Benedetti, pointed out something that is still is true of Vargas Llosa: His fiction is far to the left of his "public intellectual" statements. It is as though he can only feel what the disadvantaged feel when he imagines them as characters, and when he steps before a microphone or a lectern as himself, he must distance himself from them. Sometimes he becomes aware of this conflict, or split vision, even within a novel -- like the quite amazing Historia de Mayta. Mostly, though, he is empathic in his fiction and coldly, very coldly, analytic outside it.

For the author's own words: Artículos de Vargas Llosa

For an article by another of my friends, Peruvian historian José Luis Rénique, which puts Vargas Llosa in an understandable context: Flores Galindo y Vargas Llosa: Un debate ficticio sobre utopías reales

Revolution and Venezuela's audacity

Last night I finally saw the movie I've needed to see for months, the one that shows just how the attempted coup against Hugo Chávez was foiled by a combination of spontaneous popular mobilization and courageously decisive action by military men loyal to the constitution. The opposition, almost all white and backed by the richest sectors, controlled all the private TV stations and took over the single state channel, Canal 8, to present a totally distorted view of the government and then of their own coup. But even without TV to tell them what was going on, the masses moved from the barrios to the presidential palace to confront and surround the usurpers, and the palace guard then decided on their own to retake the place and put the coup-makers under arrest. But it was a very tense 48 hours, and without (1) the decision of Chávez to avoid the threatened bombing of the palace by accepting arrest by the military and (2) the decisive action of a few young soldiers, it could have ended as bloodily and disastrously as the coup in Chile 30 years ago. Powerful film. Makes very clear the strength and directness of the connection between Chávez and the masses.

For a note on my brief, intense conversation with Hugo Chávez in March, 2002, the month before the coup: Chatting with Chávez

For images and background of the movie: The Revolution will not be Televised

Armistice Day

Today, November 11, 2003, is the 85th anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended the bloody carnage we now remember as World War I. It was the war that brought us into the 20th century, destroying utterly the empires of Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottomans, and postponing the imperial pretensions of Germany. It was supposed to be the war to end all wars. And yet, imperial ambitions surged again, in Germany and in Japan, which threatened the remaining empires of France (in Indochina and North Africa), Britain (in Hong Kong, Burma and India, and Egypt) and the Netherlands (Indonesia). Those old imperial powers were joined by the United States to defeat the upstart imperialists, but within the next two decades lost their empires anyway. So then a new imperial power arose, disguised as a democracy -- but how can a democracy, which means rule by the people, impose its rule on other people? As events show in Iraq, it cannot, at least not for long or very securely. Check out what our fighting men and women have to say about this bloody, self-inflicted folly.
Last Letters Home
Veterans Letter to the President

Lobster in the library

At a dinner party in Montauk one year I was seated next to a marine biologist whose name was almost, but not quite, Langostino and whose specialty was lobsters. He had been observing them as they clanked along the sea bed in their bony armor. I was especially fascinated by his description of how they make love -- though "love" may not by the scientific term for crustacean congress. He -- Mr. Lobster -- has to wait until she -- Ms. Lobsterette -- molts, her soft body escaping from the shell she has outgrown, and before her soft underskin hardens into something like my old Levis. At that point, she is vulnerable and he with his great horny claw sort of protects her while he rolls her this way and that and has his way with her. (When he molts, he hides in a cave until his new armor is hard.)

The other thing that impressed me was the lobsters' dining habits. The seabeds that my conversation partner had observed were full of good things for a lobster to eat, mostly shellfish. The lobster would meander by, grab at a clam or an oyster, crack its shell with a mighty claw, and take a nibble -- then discard it and meander on to crack, kill and nibble on something else, but ignoring most of what's there because it is so abundant. And that's pretty much the way I behave in my actual and potential library -- the books that are on my shelves plus all those I know about and could easily acquire.

"Nibble, nibble, nibble, eh, Mr Gibbon?"

On lobsters in love

Literary "postmodernism" explained

My old mentor Walter James Miller, poet, literary critic and long-time professor of English at New York University, was kind enough to send me the CD of a lecture he delivered recently, Postmodernism, based on a book of that title edited by Derek Maus (Greenhaven, 2001). If you, like me, are interested in the topic but haven't made it a special project to keep up on all the literature about postmodern literature, you'll find this a really clear, sensible, good-humored introduction. And if you already know all about it but have trouble explaining it to others, you'll want to hear how this master teacher puts it all together.

For other lectures & info on Walter James Miller
For a review (by me) of Walter's most recent collection of poetry, Love's Mainland.

Opting for failure and other Iraq notes

William Safire concludes today's gung-ho column (NYT) thus: "We will help Iraqis win the final war against Baathist terror. Failure is not an option."

The problem is that the Bush administration already opted for failure by invading Iraq. War is a failure of politics. In this case it was a failure of diplomacy, of respect for the popular will (those millions of us who demonstrated in bitter cold to keep this war from happening!), and obviously of planning -- as David Rieff's article in the Sunday NYT Magazine reminds us (in case you needed reminding). As too often has happened in world history, the men with power refuse to recognize their failures and persist in a doomed course.

A couple of days ago Thomas Friedman wrote that France and Germany's refusal to give millions to support the U.S. occupation of Iraq, in contrast to the open coffers of the Saudis, proved that Saudi Arabia was more committed to stability and democracy in Iraq than are those two great European powers. This is loony! Can Friedman have forgotten that democracy means "government by the people"? As some people in France and Germany see clearly, there can be no democracy in Iraq as long as it is occupied by a foreign power. Paying for the U.S. to stay there, and thus to further subsidize Bechtel and the other profiteers, will only delay the process.

Recent readings: a vivid novel of war

I'm still trying to read a few more of the great books before I start on my after-death reading list. (See blog note from yesterday, 2003/11/01.) Here's a note on J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun. This vivid and chilling account of survival in a Japanese P.O.W. camp may help us imagine what those guys are going through in Guantánamo and other parts of the world. (Not that the Americans are cruel in the same ways as the Japanese -- they have different ways. But the experience of being penned up and under constant surveillance, and for nothing you can understand as a crime, must be similar.)