Manhood

Summertime: Fiction by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this his third fictional autobiography, Coetzee portrays the early adulthood of a man very much like himself — with even the same name, "John Coetzee" — with similar origins and history (born into an English-speaking Afrikaner family near Capetown, returned to South Africa after some years abroad including the US, later to become a well-known writer). However this fictional John Coetzee is now dead, and what we learn about this period of his life, in his 30s and before he achieved fame as a writer, comes from journal notes and interviews by an English academic of people who were somehow involved with him then: a suburban housewife in an adulterous affair, an Afrikaans-speaking cousin with whom he had as a child fantasized marriage, a younger French woman and college-teaching colleague who saw her affair with him as a way to overcome a bad marriage, a Brazilian woman he ineffectually pursued, and a male teaching colleague with whom he had a cordial but rather distant friendship. The Coetzee portrayed here is a man very sensitive to injustice, hopelessly incompetent socially, who has left his acquaintances somewhat puzzled that he ever amounted to anything. Certainly, to some extent this is an effort by the author to see himself as others see him (as the Burns poem has it), but the novel is not so much about a real John Coetzee as about South Africa in the 1970s, the limitations and hypocrisies in Afrikaner culture, the indifference of most of the world (at least in that setting) to the literature that so much matters to the fictional and to the real John Coetzee. Besides the self-deprecating and often very amusing tone of the central protrait, the book offers clear-eyed, unsentimental perceptions of Afrikaner self-isolation (with a language spoken nowhere else in the world, as the fictitious Coetzee has jotted in his journal), the mind-dulling routines of college ritual, and the sharply contrasting concepts of manliness as between the protagonist himself and, most sharply, the Brazilian widow who remembers her big, bold husband.

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Eric Hobsbawm dies, aged 95 | Books | guardian.co.uk

Eric Hobsbawm dies, aged 95 | Books | guardian.co.uk

For my review of his most recent book, see How to Change the World.

Hunger on the Rise in Spain - NYTimes.com

Thanks to friend Jess Brodnax for forwarding this link: Hunger on the Rise in Spain - NYTimes.com

As I said to Jess, Yes, it's a terrible situation, and quite unnecessary. The government has accepted the Merkel/Brussels premise that more unemployment is the best way to increase employment — budget cuts for investment, public employees, etc., to reduce the deficit, which is supposed to make the economy grow again. It's an unsustainable policy. Either the euro will disintegrate (into a southern and northern euro, for example, or into many more fragments), or the policy will change, or the resistance will grow to massive to contain. Last Tuesday's police charges against demonstrators in Madrid a just a foretaste.

Personal update

Next spring will be the 50th reunion of my college graduating class, and the organizers have asked us for a personal essay. Here's mine, on one of the three suggested topics: the most important events for us in the past five years. It may help you understand "where I'm coming from," to judge the worth of any of my opinions here in the blog.

At the Librería Nobel, Vera, Almería, Spain, Dec. 2010

The two biggest changes in my life in the past 5 years have been our move from New York City to our new home in Carboneras, Almería, Spain, and the publication of my novel A Gift for the Sultan.

In 2009 my life partner Susana Torre and I moved into one of a complex of seven semi-detached houses, designed by Susana and built by our new Spanish company on a hillside on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Besides the constant conversation of the sea, from murmurs to roars, and our interactions with new friends and neighbors, our home gives us easy access to other parts of Europe and beyond. Leaving the hubub of 8 million for the slower, sometimes comical and always nosy life of a village of 8 thousand has also brought us the surprises and discoveries of immersion in the mother culture of the Latin American societies that we both know well— Susana from her birth and early education in Argentina, I through years of writing and research. 

The publication in 2010 of A Gift for the Sultan, inspired by real events during the 1402 Ottoman siege of Constantinople, marked a new stage in my writing career. This was my first book on anything but Latin America, and my largest work of fiction to date. The idea came to me after our first visit to Istanbul in 1996, which was a kind of celebration for completing my book on Latin Americans in the U.S., Hispanic Nation. Plunging into a period and cultures entirely new to me was exhilarating, but also challenging. But research was not the main problem. The greater challenge was to construct a coherent story and bring it to a conclusion which was not merely satisfying, but also true to the larger history and to the behaviours of such people in such a time. I think I succeeded: the book has received good reviews from readers and so impressed those in Turkey, where I’ve been invited to discuss it several times, that an Istanbul publisher, Nokta, has bought the translation rights and plans to publish it shortly.

In the summer of 2012 I invited three other experienced author-editors to join me in an editorial collective, Thoth Books , to edit and promote new works. Our first publication (August 2012)  has been an expanded e-book edition of my 1988 collection of short stories of Latin America, Welcome to My Contri.

Now that I’m operating from an ideal place to work, with good collegial relations and greater experience and confidence in my skills, I expect to have more works worth reading to share with you before our 60th class reunion. To stay tuned, check out my blog Literature & Society (http://geoffreyfox.blogspot.com.es/).

Mobilizations everywhere

Everywhere lately we have been seeing big, sudden and sometimes terribly violent rallies of angry people — the worst, with the deadliest consequences, in Benghazi, Cairo and other parts of the Islamic world beginning September 11, but almost simultaneously in Barcelona (also September 11), Madrid and Lisbon (both with huge rallies on September 15), Moscow and across China. Very different movements, but the fact that they are all happening now reflects the conjunction of two global phenomena: The explosion of electronic media, making it vastly easier to convoke a crowd, and deteriorating economic conditions everwhere.

About those violent assaults on U.S. embassies in Muslim countries that began on September 11, I think Ross Douthat is right about the immediate cause: it was not about a movie that, as far as we know, doesn't even exist (nobody seems to have seen any more than a 14-minute trailer) — though the video was sure convenient for the assailants.
 
It’s Not About the Video - NYTimes.com

The question remains, though: Why did such large numbers of angry people respond? Focusing on the video has got us into a useless and damaging debate about whether we should limit "blasphemy," a concept that has no place in a free society. It also encourages the notion that Muslims are generally crazed fanatics easily aroused if you push their sacred buttons. Those of us who are a little older remember when the really big political movement in Egypt and from there to other parts of the Arab world was entirely secular — Nasser and with his call for pan-Arabism could muster enormous enthusiastic crowds, even without Twitter or SMS. Religious fanaticism is not genetic or eternal, but a circumstantial response to some very dramatic circumstances.

Here, since I claim no special expertise on the region, all I want to offer is two lines of investigation to identify the forces that are inducing people to look for radical solutions. We should first look at demographics, and then who those interplay with economics, and only then do the particular doctrines of preachers, ulemas and other agitators become relevant. In the Arab world, and in almost all other Islamic countries as well, population has been growing too fast to be absorbed in a rigid, and closed, opportunity system, and the economic crisis— including in parts of the Near East, a long-lasting drought that has driven more and more people to the overcrowded cities, creating greater density of desperate folks.

There are other possible answers to the economic crisis, and other ways to mobilize mass discontent. Limiting anybody's freedom of expression, as in the proposed legislation to outlaw "blasphemy" as in Tunis, is just going to delay finding such a solution. We need the freest debate possible to find those answers.

I hope to say something about those other mobilizations (Spain, Portugal, and Catalonia among them) in future notes — not because I know the answers, but at least to clarify our questions, what is really at stake and what can we do about the really serious world problems?

Worried about South Africa? We should be

Appalling things have been happening in that country, violence and corruption that seem to betray the great hopes that came with the ending of apartheid. South Africa is important not just because of its size and economy and its example to the whole African continent, but as a vast social experiment showing what human beings with courage and vision can do — and what can happen to us when we lose that vision.

Daily Maverick - An open letter to Cosatu

The Story of "Fired up! Ready to go!" - Obama for America 2012 - YouTube

The Story of "Fired up! Ready to go!" - Obama for America 2012 - YouTube

Got me fired up. How 'bout you?

Nothing lasts forever — not even eternity

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Nothing lasts forever — not even eternity, as we learned from Steven Hawking a few years ago. The recent discovery of what may be the Higgs boson made me aware again of how little I understand about the universe. Or even about the questions now being posed by cosmologists. Greene makes it all about as clear as it can possibly be to someone — like me — who can't follow the math. For those who can follow it, he offers many of the necessary equations in the endnotes, which also include numerous references for further reading. To substitute for the math, Greene uses metaphors, generally pretty silly ones — Bart Simpson on a supersonic skateboard, for example — that at least give us an idea of, for example, what Einstein meant about space-time in the general theory of relativity. And then beyond Einstein, to quantum mechanics, and why the world and the whole universe appear to us in only three space dimensions (forward and back, side to side, up and down) and one time dimension, when quantum theory, confirmed experimentally, demonstrates that there must be ten space dimensions (but still only one time dimension). Is our universe really a kind of hologram projected by forces outside it, that is, beyond the universe we are capable of perceiving directly? Could be; Greene considers that hypothesis as at least plausible. And how did it all, everything, begin? Or did it? Was the Big Bang, the initial expansion of matter and energy that set everything in motion, just a new configuration of energy that is always, and that therefore may have been dispersed in some other entropic system(s), and may again — if our universe ever reaches the limit of its continuing expansion — shrink to extreme density, preparatory to a new explosion ("Big Bang") some billions of years hence? It took me weeks to get through this book, not because it was unclear, but because the news about the universe seemed so strange, so oddly contrary to our ordinary experience, that I had to keep checking back to re-understand parts of earlier chapters necessary for following the later ones. I remain amazed, and inspired with new speculations about philosophy and existence and what we do and cannot know. Guess it's time for me to learn some math.

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Romney Aides Scratch Their Heads Over Eastwood’s Speech - NYTimes.com

Romney Aides Scratch Their Heads Over Eastwood’s Speech - NYTimes.com

This is SO bad. Ol' Clint has never been a clear thinker, but here he's not even a decent performer. And the thoughts that come out of his rambling are just vague expressions of dislike of things he can't understand. And alas, he had an audience of nonthinkers to applaud him. (And he makes fun of Biden as an intellectual — good thing for Clint that he was talking to an empty chair that couldn't talk back.)

Ain't gonna let no (Romney, Ryan, fill in the blank) turn me roun'

Loved this! An antidote to the rhetoric spilling out of the Republican convention. Thanks to Anita Jones for reminding us of this event (she's right: we missed it the first time) and to Pete de Lissovoy for pointing me to Anita's blog.
 
Freedom Singers Performance at the White House in 2010 - Peach Seed Monkey