Grab the Nearest Book...

[trysail]

Milton believed that most people are natural slaves. He got this idea from Aristotle, who used it to rationalize ancient Greek society's dependence on slave labor. In Aristotle, a slave is a person whose actions serve the purposes of somebody else: a person whose own activity is alien to him, because it belongs to another. By serving the purposes of another he ceases to belong to himself— he becomes an attribute, a "property," of the other person. Serving alien purposes is unnatural, because it is human nature to pursue one's own purposes, but many, perhaps most, people are attracted to this unnatural way of life. These people would rather be slaves than free.

It is easy to dismiss the concept of natural slavery as a piece of self-interested fiction. Of course the ruling class in a slave-owning society will need to believe that slaves are naturally suited to their condition. But Milton was well aware that legally enslaved people are not necessarily natural slaves and that many natural slaves are not legally enslaved. The Aristotelian argument describes the nature of servility, not the empirical characteristics of slaves. Milton believed that every individual was naturally inclined toward mental slavery. Not everyone acted on his or her natural inclinations, however, and in fact a virtuous life should be a continuous act of resistance to slavish temptations...

...a natural slave will be unable to distinguish between appearance and reality, between sign and thing. He will assume that signs are all there is; he will believe that the world of appearances is the real world. He will live in a kind of hyper-reality, in which simulacra are all that exist. In other words, he will enter what twenty-first century philosophers call "the postmodern condition."

A natural slave will also be a literalist... The religious fundamentalists of the twenty-first century would, by Milton's standards, exhibit a slavish mentality. But the same would be true of most secular inhabitants of the liberal, relativist, pragmatic Western world, with its postmodernist philosophers who celebrate the plethora of depthless simulacra that distinguishes our era. He would have judged these two modes of thought, which seem polar opposites to us, as different versions of the same underlying slave mentality, different ways of fetishizing images.

​

-David Hawkes
John Milton: A Hero of Our Time
Berkeley, California 2009.



I didn't know a damn thing about John Milton before I picked up this book. Of course, I'd heard of Paradise Lost but that was the entire extent of my acquaintence with him. Never— in a million years— would I have guessed that Milton was closely associated with the Roundheads of the English Civil War and— at some risk— emerged as one of their leading spokesmen. He was a bit of a "weird unit." Possessed of intelligence and a titanic ego, he was convinced of his place in posterity nothwithstanding a long delayed emergence into prominence.

Hawkes' prose is orthodox and pedestrian. His attitude toward his subject is difficult to divine. Hawkes seems to want to make a point using Milton's life but I'll be damned if I can figure out what that point is. While the knowledge of Milton's life that I gained reading the book made the effort worthwhile, I'm nevertheless left with a feeling that Hawkes swung and missed.

 

[chris2c4u]

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,
secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to
the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
& especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys
too,

Allen Ginzberg, Howl.

 

[chris2c4u]

I can...only "tell stories." Whether or not the stories are "true" is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable or my truth.

C G Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

 

[Bloodsoul]

"...feel my power bring you face-to-face with... ...being no more!"

— Warrior #1 by Warrior - Jim Callahan - JD Smith​

 

[Noon_Shadow]

It was indeed a bad road, merely two matted wheel tracks either side of a strip of grass and weeds, and littered with rocks large enough to break a wagon or gun wheel.

 

[trysail]

Four thousand Turks surrendered at Jaffa on condition that they be allowed to live. Without food, or manpower to police them, Napoleon made a decision there that would become one of the darkest elements of his legacy. He ordered the defenseless, unarmed Turkish prisoners taken to the seashore and killed. To save powder and bullets, the general ordered his men to massacre them with their bayonets, which they did, chasing those who tried to flee into the surf and stabbing them until the sand was stained red. "The atrocious scene makes me shudder when I think of it," wrote Napoleon's own secretary, Bourrienne, describing how the French soldiers used the Turkish sign of truce to lure the escaping swimmers off the rocks only to attack them again with their bayonets. "All that can be imagined of this day of blood, would fall short of the reality." Travelers claimed Jaffa still stank of rotting corpses two years later.

​

-Nina Burleigh
Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt
New York, N.Y. 2007.



The book is a fascinating account of the brief French occupation of Egypt from 1798-1801. As a child, I learned the role of the Rosetta Stone in Champollion's decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics and because of my later interest in naval history, I knew of Nelson's utter annihilation of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay but I never knew what in hell the French were doing in Egypt in the first place. Subsequent to the military fiasco, many of the French found themselves asking the same question. Likewise, I never understood why, if the French found it, the Rosetta Stone ended up where I last saw it— in the British Museum !

Eventually, due to lack of supplies, military reversals, bubonic plague, abandonment by Napoleon and all the discomforts that tend to be suffered by invading occupiers, the French surrendered to the British and the Ottomans and the survivors were permitted to return to France. Unsurprisingly, the book does not burnish Napoleon's reputation.

The episode did serve as the first "modern" Western exposure to Egypt and was responsible for the birth and development of archaeology and Egyptology.

 

[lookingfor_ruth]

The Complete Farmhouse Kitchen Cookbook

.....

 

[ControllingKink]

So remember, when you get into trouble, I absolutely forbid you to say that you are my discipline.

"Monkey," an abridgement and translation by Arthur Waley of "Journey to the West" by Wu Cheng'en, written in China around the time Shakespeare was writing in England. And get into trouble Monkey does.

 

[chris2c4u]

The craze for mass organisation wrenches everyone out of his (sic) private world into the defining tumult of the market place making him (sic) an unconscious meaningless particle...and the helpless prey of every kind of suggestion.
Carl G. Jung. Collected Works. (1345).

 

[trysail]

'The nub of it is, they've accepted the whole package in principle.'

'What principle?'

'D'you mind? I've been listening to over-educated arseholes from Whitehall splitting hairs all morning and I don't need another. We've got a deal. As long as our boy comes through with the goods, the rest of them follow with due expedition. That's their promise, and I've got to believe them.'

Perry closed his eyes and took a breath of mountain air.

'What are you asking me to do?'

'No more than you've done from day one. Compromise your noble principles for the greater good. Soft-soap him. If you tell him it's a maybe, he won't come. If you tell him we accept his terms without qualification, but there will be a short delay before he's reunited with his loved ones, he will. Are you still there?'

'Partly.'

'You tell him the truth, but you tell it to him selectively. Give him half a chance to think we're playing dirty on him, he'll grab it. We may be fair-play English gentlemen, but we're also perfidious Albion shits. Did you hear that or am I talking to the wall?'

'I heard it.'
​

-John le Carré ( David Cornwall )
Our Kind of Traitor
New York, N.Y. 2010.




John le Carré's entire oeuvre has focused on the struggle of individuals with organizations. All of them are about betrayal, risk, and trust and all of them ring true to anyone who has ever spent time in a large organization filled with humans. The best-selling books that made his reputation just happened to feature spies set in the Cold War. After the fall of the Soviet Union, le Carré's novels have had various settings but the theme hasn't changed.

Princes in this case
Do hate the traitor, though they love the treason.

-Samuel Daniel​

 

[DeathsKnight]

Schaefer was clearly not convinced of that, but he stopped arguing.

Nathan Archer - Predator Concrete Jungle

 

[trysail]

...This sort of cruelty is a problem in any narrative about American Indians, because Americans like to think of their native aboriginals as in some ways heroic or noble. Indians were, in fact, heroic and noble in many ways, especially in defense of their families. Yet in the moral universe of the West— in spite of our own rich tradition of torture, which includes officially sanctioned torments in Counter-Reformation Europe and sovereign regimes such as that of Peter the Great in Russia— a person who tortures or rapes another person or who steals another person's child and then sells him cannot possibly be seen that way...

...Such behavior was common to all Indians in the Americas. The more civilized agrarian tribes of the east, in fact, were far more adept at devising lengthy and agonizing tortures than the Comanches or other plains tribes. The difference lay in the Plains Indians' treatment of female captives and victims. Rape or abuse, including maiming, of females had existed when eastern tribes had sold captives as slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But that practice had long ago been abandoned. Some tribes, including the Iroquois federation, had never treated women captives that way. Women could be killed, and scalped. But not gang-raped. What happened to the Parker captives could only have happened west of the Mississippi. If the Comanches were better known for cruelty and violence, that was because, as one of history's great warring peoples, they were in a position to inflict far more pain than they ever received...

...But the Indians did not fight that way— not by choice, anyway. They did not advance in regimental ranks across open fields. They never took a direct charge, scattering and disappearing whenever one was made. They never attacked an armed fort. They relished surprise, insisted on tactical advantage. They would attack whole villages and burn them, raping, torturing, and killing their inhabitants, leaving young women with their entrails carved out, men burned alive; they skewered infants and took young boys and girls as captives... Torture of survivors was the norm, as it was all across the plains...

​

-S. C. Gwynne
Empire of The Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
New York, N.Y. 2010.





I've read a fair portion of the "modern" revisionist, aboriginal-centric histories spawned by Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, but I'd never run across much mention of the Comanches before. Sure, there were brief mentions of them but mainly in passing. At the risk of revealing a LEast Coast orientation, I always associated "Plains Indians" with the Lakotas, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Blackfeet, Kiowas, Crows, Utes, Dakotas, Pawnees, et al. I'm embarrassed to admit that it never occured to me that Plains Indians inhabited West Texas. I always thought of the southwest as the home of the Apaches and the Navajo. For some reason, I'd gotten an impression that the word Comanche described a variegated, mixed race band of native Americans, mestizos, and whites. Nothing could be further from the truth. This book was an eye-opener. The amazing saga of the Parker family and the origin of the Texas Rangers is a bonus.

S. C. Gwynne is a new author to me. I'd never seen his name before. He writes well and tells a good story.

 

[chris2c4u]

Then falter not O book, fulfil your destiny,
You not a reminiscence of the land alone,
You too as a lone bark cleaving the ether, purpos'd I know not
whither, yet ever full of faith,
Consort to every ship that sails, sail you!
Bear forth to them folded my love, (dear mariners, for you I fold it
here in every leaf)
Speed on my book! spread your white sails my little bark athwart the
imperious waves,
Chant on, sail on, bear o'er the boundless blue from me to every sea,
This song for mariners and all their ships.

Leaves of Grass, In Cabin'd ships at Sea.
Walt Whitman.

 

[trysail]

Zong

For those from the more egalitarian societies of the United States, Denmark, Iceland, and Australia, it can be hard to comprehend how hierarchical many business cultures are. If you are used to getting in the front of a cab and calling your driver "mate," it may seem absurd, if not downright wrong, that such a straightforward approach to others of all backgrounds is not universal. But respect comes in many different forms. In China it means knowing someone's title and deferring to their rank. You do not confuse the changzhang ( factory manager ) with the chejian zhuren ( shop foreman ); nor should you fail to pay homage to the zong jingli ( general manager ). In France, Germany, and Italy, likewise, where businesses are structured vertically, respect for higher-ups is important, and your counterpart remains monsieur, Frau Doktor, or Commendatore until they tell you otherwise.
​

-Mark McCrum
Going Dutch in Beijing: How To Behave Properly When Far From Home
New York, N.Y. 2007.




We've all heard of or witnessed the "ugly American" who was apparently raised with no manners and no sense of decorum making a perfect fool of themselves ( and simultaneously embarrassing those who might potentially be identified as guilty by association ) abroad. Fortunately, the problem seems to have diminished somewhat over time— in part due to caricatures, in part due to "globalization," heightened awareness and sensitivity to cultural differences, and— in part— due to books such as this one.

Most of us know by now that, in countries where cutlery is not employed ( generally in Africa and the Middle East), you don't eat with your left hand. As a rule, prior to making finger or hand gestures, it might be a very good idea to consult this book— you wouldn't want to send a message that was the exact opposite of what you intended, would you?

 

[DeathsKnight]

"You must think I'm crazy, like everyone else does."

Russel Blackford - The new John Conner Chronicles 1 - Dark Futures

 

[HerNameIsFlinka]

You might even be able to verify that the apparent shift is inversely proportional to the distance to the pencil.

 

[trysail]

...The person she thought she could depend on was of course James Harrison, the scribe she had employed in 1806. The mercenary wretch was probably Oliver, with whom she had quarrelled in 1809. Perry did not publish her denial, and the two volumes were duly published in May. Emma should properly have asked Earl Nelson, as heir to his brother's copyright, to apply to the court for a common-law order restraining publication on grounds of copyright breach. The letters which Nelson had enjoined Lady Hamilton to burn, which had been her comfort after Nelson's death, were now available for all to read. The book was a fine illustration of the old saying: "Do right to men, do not write to women." Emma's despair at seeing Nelson's letters to her made public seems to have manifested itself in an outbreak of rage of stupendous proportions. How else to account for a bill for "breakages," mostly china, for £13.4s.11d, which Alderman Smith paid her landlord in July?

​

-Flora Fraser
Emma; Lady Hamilton
New York, N.Y. 1987.




As one with a longstanding interest in naval history, I was well aware of Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson's scandalous relationship with Emma Hamilton but never knew much about her. As is so often the case, by pure chance, I spied this book on the shelf and couldn't resist its call to me. It was a very pleasant surprise to discover that the author is none other than a daughter of the highly accomplished Lady Antonia Fraser ( biographer and historian extraordinaire and one-time panelist on the sui generis BBC radio program[me] My Word! ).

The book is praiseworthy for its thorough research, fascinating subject and lively prose. I had absolutely no idea of just how humble Emma's origins were, having always assumed that she was a social equal of her diplomat husband, Sir William Hamilton; nothing could could have been further from the truth. Were a novelist to attempt to construct a tale that would contain all the elements of the ultimate Georgian scandal, the actual facts would suffice— in this case, truth was undeniably stranger than fiction. It had been such a long time since I read a biography of Nelson that I'd completely forgotten the sequence of events that caused Nelson and Lady Hamilton to meet. My memory of my first acquaintance with the tale was one of mild surprise that now stands in stark contrast with the astonishment that remains following Fraser's account.

 

[chris2c4u]

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.

Red Wind, Raymond Chandler, in Dime Detective, 1938.

 

[trysail]

...The Shakespearian fool, that highly individual and arresting figure, is no quaint anachronism from the courts of medieval kings, but a highly sophisticated truth teller. He is a fool because he tells the truth...

...It is easy to forget what a genealogical tour de force the history plays are. Shakespeare's deep knowledge of the ruling families of late medieval England, many of whom were still in power in his own time, and their various interrelationships, to say nothing of the complex threads leading from them to the throne, is quite astonishing. Talbot, Neville, Mowbray, Blunt, Hastings, Mortimer, Percy, Plantagenet, Beaufort, Stanley, Vernon, Grey, Scroope, Clifford, Woodville, Willoughby, de la Pole: these great figures from English history are treated as household names by Shakespeare.

​

-Charles Beauclerk
Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom: The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth
New York, N.Y. 2010.




This is Beauclerk's extended effort to prove that the author of the best-known plays and sonnets in English was not the country bumpkin of Stratford but Beauclerk's distant ancestor, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Along the way, Beauclerk claims that not only was Oxford Elizabeth's bastard son but in a replay of Œdipus, he also became her lover. Sorry, I'm not buying it— and neither should you. While there's a fairly strong case to be made that "Shakespeare" isn't who we think, Beauclerk goes too far. Don't bother with this book.

 

[chris2c4u]

"Let me check," Roz said. She got her copy of the Audebon guide to New England bugs and birds and miscellaneous other things - the one with the frightening picture of the star-nosed mole - a book that used to lie on the little rusty table on our porch and now she has it, because it's her book.

The Anthologist, N. Baker.

I am not alone...

 

[effmyass]

I'll take responsibility for her presence if the Council disapproves.

 

[OnHarry]

"The Philadelphia militia soon faced a Hobson's choice: emerge from the roundhouse whence they had retreated or be roasted."

Jill Jones; 'Conquering Gotham'

The reference in this quote pertains to the Railroad strike of 1877. The book is an excellent read if you have any interest in railways, politics or engineering as it is about the building of the Pennsylvania Railroad's tunnels under the Hudson River, the magnificent Penn Station and every thing that led up to it. There is a lot about the Tamanny Hall politicians as well.

 

[Andaho]

"In rain any street not paved with macadam oozed a fragrant muck of horse manure, mud, and garbage that swelled between granite blocks like pus from a wound."

Erik Larson: The Devil in the White City

(Bonus points if you know the city. Or live in it.)

 

[Luna_Wolf72]

"And I ought to be glad that Zabulon hadn't handed me over to the Light Ones."


From the book DayWatch by Sergei Lukyanenko...as translated from the original Russian by Andrew Bromfield.

 

[chris2c4u]

Some will ask if I believe all that this book contains, and I will not know how to answer. Does the word belief, used as they will use it, belong to our age, can I think of the world as there and I here judging it?

‘Introduction to “A Vision” from A Packet for Ezra Pound (1929), W B Yeats.