UPDATE: Here’s the restaurant. Worth visiting if you’re in the area.
Month: April 2011
“The Contemporary Art Of The Novella”
Browsing a bookstore on a rainy and strangely November-like day for April, I came across a display of novellas from Melville House Publishing. Slim, neat volumes with the book titles printed on each stark white cover page in primary colors and black. Irresistible to the book lover who is busy at work, a bit tired of blogging and blog commenting (and yet, I’ve left over ten comments here and elsewhere over the course of the entire weekend. Physician, heal thyself!), and who misses reading fiction.
And so, the novella. After the fantastic comments about postmodernism left at my last blog post, “A Lazy Sunday’s Blogging,” the following blurb seemed especially intriguing:
Part murder mystery and all jet-black satire, and based on a real life scandal, this edgy novella tells the story of Leopold Sfax, world-renowned as the creator of “The Theory” – a bizarre literary theory that grew from an intellectual folly to a dominant school of criticism that enslaved college campuses across the country.
To make the satire even blacker, Leopold Sfax, the world-renowned theorist, is hiding his past as a Nazi collaborator. No wonder he is a proponent of words and text divorced from the author….
….and all of this is in Gilbert Adair’s novella
I proposed that, again in every text, there would fatally arrive what I called an aporia, a terminal impasse, a blank brick wall of impenetrability, an ultimatum of indetermination when its self-contradictory meanings could no longer be permitted to coexist in harmony and its fundamental “undecidability” would undermine for ever the reader’s most fundamental presuppositions.
It was, as it happens, at that last proposition that the long-suffering scoffers at the Theory were determined to draw the line – rather, it was by the window of opportunity offered by its theoretical incontinence and by the enormity of its affront to sheer common sense that they sought to infiltrate and invade the rest of the fortress. What? they squealed from Berkeley to Brown, and from Wesleyan to Columbia, is nothing to mean anything anymore? Hamlet, Faust, Moby-Dick, The Divine Comedy – that these possess not one meaning, fair enough, but are they then to possess so very many that it becomes meaningless for the reader to explore any of them? To which the screw-turners, nostrils twitching at the whiff of sulphur, would add: And Auschwitz? Dresden? Hiroshima? My Lai? All of them meaningless, indecipherable texts, saying the opposite of what we had always imagined they said? Wars as texts – go tell that, they protested, to the Marines, go tell that to the maimed, gassed, blinded, disfigured victims of civil texts and guerilla texts and one day, doubtless, the great nuclear text.
Around San Francisco April 2011
Recently Dan and I took a trip to San Francisco to run in the Presidio 10 across the Golden Gate bridge (they don’t close the bridge to car traffic like they do for the “Bay to Breakers” race but there is plenty of room to run on the sidewalk). Unfortunately I was unable to run but went anyways and Dan did well and was happy with his time.
Upper left – the ubiquitous Powell street cable cars. I don’t know if this is classified more as a “tourist attraction” or as a means of public transport. The sign shows all the “don’ts” especially for out-of-towners. Upper mid-left – we were at the Owl Tree bar which had great drinks on tap and the Ukrainian waitress made very strong drinks; this glass was pure alcohol and destined to be two martinis. Upper mid-right – there was an amazing shopping mall near the Powell street transit station which was packed to the rafters; it was as if the recession had never occurred. Dan and I were joking that everyone buying there came from a country with a positive trade balance. Upper right – a happy newlywed couple in a Powell street cable car. Lower left – Dan doing his version of the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”. Lower mid – someone is drawing on the sidewalk with Koi fish as well as a playful cat. Middle right – Alcatraz Island. Lower right – stretching before the race in front of the Golden Gate bridge.
Cross posted at LITGM
Happy That Russian Military Modernization is Failing
I read an article a few days ago that positively buoyed my spirits – this WSJ article titled
“Russia’s Fading Army Fights Losing Battle to Reform Itself”
Russia was attempting to move away from an all-conscription army and towards a mix of volunteers and conscripted soldiers. In common parlance an all-conscription army generally has poorer morale and is less able to run high technology equipment that is necessary for today’s battlefield. In addition, draft evasion is high and there is a great deal of incentive to avoid conscription due to its brutal nature as practiced by Russian officers, who commonly physically abuse the draftees as well as extorting their pay. From the article:
The enlistment drive’s failure puts constraints on Russia’s reach. When ethnic rioting in June threatened to tear Kyrgyzstan apart, its president appealed for Russian peacekeepers, the kind of force Moscow once deployed routinely as a political tool. This time the Kremlin demurred—in part, defense analysts say, because the army couldn’t spare a full brigade of professional soldiers.
I remember books from the 70’s about how America’s post-Vietnam war fighting was being crippled by the difficulties of the transition from a conscription-based army to an all-volunteer army. Someone who is closer to this could provide better information but I’d say it wasn’t until the first Iraq war that we’d made this type of long term change and worked effectively into an all-volunteer army that was capable of dealing with wartime issues.
While we currently are not having significant difficulties with Russia, their invasion of Georgia shows that they are capable of projecting force to protect their interests, and often their interests are not compatible with their neighbors. It is generally good news for the US that this modernization effort failed; how you can run a high technology army with integrated command control consisting of demoralized conscripts that represent the “bottom of the barrel” since all others desperately try to avoid the draft, is beyond me.
Another element I found surprising is that individual Russian soldiers spoke about their conditions in the army and were named…. this takes a lot of bravery in Putin’s Russia today and I hope that they escape with their lives.