Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Plan B 3.0

A review of the new book by Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute on Global warming and eco-collapse. Interview too.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Real stories about women's leadersip for peace

Also from my trusty e-newsletter:

"Read the stories from an extraordinary group of women who are mediating conflict, caring for refugees, restoring communities and building more responsive governments. These 15 leaders came together for CEDPA’s (Centre for Development and Population Activities) Women lead in promoting peace and stability workshop, held Oct. 23–Nov. 17, 2006 in Washington, D.C. Each has a powerful story to tell about the conflict in her country, and how women are building lasting peace by rewriting constitutions, negotiating human rights protections, securing access to land and water, and changing mindsets that limit women’s roles in their communities."

To read the publication, please visit CEDPA.

New book on Aung San Suu Kyi out soon

(This info from a women's peace e-network I'm on)

Perfect hostage: a life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s prisoner of conscience

Justin Wintle (Skyhorse Publishing), has written a timely and important new book. The book’s subject, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been under house arrest since 1990, when Burma’s brutal military junta deemed her political ambitions a threat to their power. Despite imprisonment, failing health, and vilification at the hands of the Burmese media, Suu Kyi has persevered in an ongoing campaign of nonviolent protest and become an international icon for the peaceful pursuit of justice. Wintle’s beautifully crafted narrative offers the most thorough biography of Suu Kyi to date, as well as a complete, up-to-date account of the violent suppression of 50,000 peaceful demonstrators in September 2007.

The book will be available from March 2008 in bookstores everywhere.

Friday, January 04, 2008

Melbourne Library




A friend took me to the Reading Room of the Melbourne Library when I was there last year for work. What a room! Lovely. Very high vaulted ceiling as you can see from teh pics, and lovely old wooden desks with green reading lamps. Quotes from authors on the walls above bookshelves. I recomend a visit if you haven't been.

A real life Book Club for those in Sydney

Sunday Book Club at gleebooks

February book is The Memory Room by Christopher Koch:
(they say) "The events in this absorbing novel take place in the final phase of the Cold War, but they are highly relevant to today, and Christopher Koch’s widely admired prose style gives them a contemporary freshness. The aims of The Memory Room go far beyond those of a thriller. A psychological portrait of a brilliant but eccentric spy, it is also an exploration of the mystical nature of secrecy."

Published by: Vintage Australia
With Morgan Smith

Venue: gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe
When: Last Sunday of the month
Cost: Free ($5 donation for wine)
RSVP: gleebooks - 9660 2333 or email events@gleebooks.com.au

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Why read 'why read the classics?'

‘The classics are books which, upon reading, we find even fresher, more unexpected, and more marvellous than we had thought from hearing about them.’

The start of a new year and so it seems appropriate to begin as I wish to continue – that is by writing something on this new, first day of January. I say this because writing more regularly is one of the things I aim to do this year. As is reading more of the books on my ‘I’ve been meaning to read’ list.

Yesterday I cleaned out a bookshelf, putting some books in a bag to give away, maybe take to the backpackers for travellers to read over morning coffee or help amuse while buses are late, that kind of thing, and the others rearranging. I spent a while thinking about how to organise the books in some kind of order – not that there are so many that I wont be able to find them otherwise, but as a tool to help me plan and prioritise my reading for this year. I get excited in book shops and buy new books to add to my pile, then sometimes I despair at how many I have yet to read, how many authors who I already know I love that I haven’t managed to read the whole of their works. The list of authors I’d like to read but haven’t tried yet, or maybe have got half way through and then abandoned. The non-fiction in little clusters of topics that I think I will read and patch together an interesting picture of the state of play in a field, or finally figure out the range of arguments for and against and where I stand on the matter. My bookshelf has things I’ve read and loved (with gaps where I loved them and lent them out and haven’t had them returned), things I didn’t love that much and are now going to the backpackers around the corner, things I’ve bought and hope to read, a couple of guilty long term lends that need to be read and sent home, and the ghostly figures of books not there but dreamt of, the ones I sometimes think ‘oooh, wouldn’t it be good to read…’ (ancient philosophers and beat poets and mystics and recent releases by old favourites, that kind of thing).

Funnily enough one of the books I took off the neatly organised and newly inspiring bookshelf this morning was ‘The Literature Machine’ by Italo Calvino – a series of essays through the 1960’s to the early 80’s about writing and reading, as well as about specific authors and pieces of work, science and literature, philosophy and literature etc. He is one of my favourite writers, whose books are classics to me.

Generally I like his work because I find it clever and funny and awe-inspiring. His language (as I read it, once removed from the source, translated from the Italian) is clean and precise and lovingly used, not stale, not staid, it has depth and detail and contradiction and a lot of wry humour. He writes the reader into the work, often, and he writes in a matter of fact way about the foibles of people and the planets and the workings of nature. He tells silly little stories that have grace and meaning but aren’t overblown. Sometimes I get the feeling that I’m missing something, that he’s saying something that I haven’t quite grasped the meaning of, but I kind of like it, it’s like being a child around smart and capable grown ups who you know you will be like one day too.

Anyway, one of the essays, ‘why read the classics’ is brief but very engaging – he ranges through some definitions or key characteristics of what might make up a classic, and addresses the challenges in engaging in these works in a busy life, but talks about how they are valuable to a reader. The whole thing is great, and only about 10 pages long, so you may as well just read it yourself. I wont summarise but I’ll just talk about a couple of things that interested me.

Firstly, I liked the tone. I had a public school education and don’t speak French, Latin, Greek or Italian, so any opinionated writing about ‘the classics’ that sounds like dust and elbow pads and large country houses tends to annoy me. I don’t want someone to tell me that that unless I’ve read Dante and Montaigne and Plato that I really couldn’t possibly understand the human spirit, or that I’m seriously missing out on something wonderful and it’s probably too late to start now anyway. I am having to build my own relationship with the classics which is selfguided and tentative, any brow beating would be counterproductive. This essay is modern and light hearted (yet serious) and doesn’t tell you what you ‘should’ read, instead it supports the idea of being selective, and of there needing to be a very personal relationship with the books and the reader: ‘if the spark doesn’t come, that’s a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, only out of love. Except at school.’

‘There is nothing for it but to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count – leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries’.

This paragraph made me happy because it reminded me of yesterday and felt very synchronous to be reading about what I’ve just done and only be in a position to read it because I’d done the thing.

Also, this talk of books yet to be read made me think about how reading, unlike many other ‘interests’ of ways of interacting with the world through others (compared, say, to listening to music, or watching films) has a different time scale about it. If I decide to get to know a film director who has interested me, it is plausible that I can find an all day Saturday screening of their most famous works; I could watch a DVD a night for a week and see all their back catalogue if I put my mind to it. On music, I could digest a few new albums a week and ‘really listen’ to them, plus relisten to favourites – I can do this while doing the dishes, while walking down the street to the shops, while typing reports at work, while enjoying dinner with friends.

With reading, there is more time involved, and it is something you do alone. Getting to know an author (outside a university English course, or community college creative writing course or similar) might take place over a period of several years (even if you are quite interested in them you might only read one of their books a year, in amongst other things you read, or ). It takes a certain peaceful setting, other people to not need your attention, over the hours it takes to read it. You may be lucky enough to dedicate a day / week/ afternoon to reading, or you may find yourself picking up a chapter here and there, revisiting and asking yourself ‘now where was I? And where were they?’.

(And I’m not suggesting it’s a special and noble pursuit because of this difference, just that it has some different challenges).

The unread books on the bookshelf can be distressing because you have chosen them knowing that you want to go there, you have it on good faith that you will enjoy them, you are intrigued to know what this author will say, how they will speak, what their tone of voice is like, whether they smile as they talk, or frown, how they speak of people and places and ideas you already know and who and what new they will introduce you to. You want to have this conversation, to listen in to the story and find your own responses to it, but you must wait, can only be reading one at a time (even if reading several at once). It requires patience, delaying gratification, and faith that you’ll get to the other ones later, in the face of that niggling (perhaps technology age aided) sense of anxiety about all there is to know and read and experience, in such a short span as a life.

That’s why I liked his description of the book shelf, because it validates the ‘yet to be read’ and also the unknown that might find its way into your hands and heart.

I also like the way that he recognises, in the essay, the particular challenges that a modern reader faces in ‘reading the classics’. Not in terms of time available (that is more my concern) but he talks about how to balance the intake of inputs eg the classics and daily news and whether one would ideally abstain from popular culture altogether or whether connection with the daily grind is an important part of placing the reader and the work in historical context.

‘Maybe the ideal thing to do would be hearken to current events as we do to the din outside our window that informs us about traffic jams and sudden changes in the weather, while we listen to the voice of the classics sounding clear and articulate inside the room. But it is already a lot for most people if the presence of the classics is perceived as a distant rumble far outside a room that is swamped by the trivia of the moment, as by a television at full blast.’