Arts & Letters

Excellent “Best of” List from The Middle Stage

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One of my favorite blogs is The Middle Stage, written by Chandrahas Choudhury.

Chandrahas writes about literature as well as history, fiction and nonfiction, and very frequently alerts me to books I have never heard of, but which I wish I had time to read. In particular, he writes about Indian history, a vast subject I want to know more about.

His list of best nonfiction for 2008 contains several which might interest the ChicagoBoyz team, and our readers.

I would particularly like to hear about what others think about his choices related to India.

Cross-posted on Antilibrary.

Ramblings Late at Night, Looking into the Darkness

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Probably most of you have seen these, but if not they may amuse you:

As we infantilize ourselves.  (I view this somewhat ruefully because, unlike apparently most of   the Chicagoboyz, I’m totally incompetent.   Last New Year’s Day my brother walked into our kitchen, asked what was wrong with the sink I said we were going to phone a plumber after the holiday.   He looked at it, climbed under the sink, screwed the head on the hose, and it has worked ever since.)

The friend who forwarded that (who I might say is skilled at both dressing for success and hacking down a tree, at editing a paper and remodeling a room)  sent two sons to the first  Gulf War and one of them  forwarded this to her.  

And this rant is cheerful (even if the Iowa Trades are not likely to make us feel the sentiment is as widespread as we’d like).

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NEW BOOK: The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy and War

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Re-posted from Zenpundit.com at the request of my co-author Lexington Green:

boydbook2.jpg

The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy, and War

This post has been a long time coming.

A while back, we had a a symposium at Chicago Boyz to discuss and debate the superb book Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd by Colonel Frans Osinga. It was a great discussion from which I learned far more about the ideas of the iconoclastic military theorist John Boyd than I had ever previously considered. Not everyone involved was an admirer of John Boyd, a few were initially skeptical and we had one certified critic ( though I had tried to recruit several more). Overall, it was the kind of exchange that makes the blogosphere special as a medium when it is at it’s intellectual best.

Shortly thereafter, via Dan of tdaxp I was approached by the publisher of Nimble Books, W.F. Zimmerman, who happened to be a military history buff and who was interested in working our loose online discussion of Dr. Osinga’s prodigious tome into a book. Initially, I was somewhat dubious but I warmed to the project at the urging of tdaxp and Lexington Green, and agreed to serve as the Editor and “herder of cats” in a project that would involve a large number of contributors with very different backgrounds and some fairly dense and esoteric material on strategic theory to digest and make comprehensible to a general reader.

A wonderful experience.

We had an excellent roster of contributors for The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy, and War – Dr. Chet Richards, Daniel Abbott, Shane Deichman, Frank Hoffman, Adam Elkus, Lexington Green, Thomas Wade and Dr. Frans Osinga, who contributed several essays. Dr. Thomas Barnett sets the intellectual tone in the foreword after which the authors brought a wide range of professional perspectives to bear – cognitive psychology, military history, physics, strategy, journalism and, of course, blogging – in a series of articles that tried to explain the essence and dimensions of John Boyd’s contribution to strategic thought. Hopefully, we succeeded in creating an interesting and useful primer but the readers will be the ultimate judges, free to dispute our conclusions and offer contending arguments of their own.

I’d like to think that Colonel Boyd would have wanted it that way.

Art and the Left

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I am not an artist but I do try to appreciate art where I can find it. I visit museums and particularly like the Milwaukee Art Museum, with its famous rooftop “wings”. The site is almost as interesting as the art inside its walls.

Much art, however, is aimed at a strange insular world of elitists. The arbiters of taste for art are generally on the coasts and inevitably extremely liberal. To say that their tastes are out of the mainstream is a vast understatement.

This article, which I clipped from the Chicago Tribune book review about 6 months ago (sorry, it sat in my “blog folder” and I recently found it) inadvertently captures this elitist gap with a non-ironic subtitle:

“Photographer Gregory Crewdson’s America is filled with people and places that reflect life at its most hopeless”

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Ancient Wisdom

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A paraphrase of Beowulf (starting around line 1383).

Beowulf said “We must mourn our friends later; they have died, but we have not yet avenged them. While we live, we win whatever victories we can; so now let us hunt the monster, whether its trail lead through the middle of the earth or the bottom of the sea.”

The monster is hiding, but heroes are hunting it.