orbis quintus

A few days ago, Richard Powers The Echo Maker finally made its way back into the bookstore. It’s been on backorder for what seems to be at least a month. I never saw anyone buy the original copies that came in, but someone bought them before it was awarded the National Book Award. Hammond is not much for literary fiction, so i’m curious as to who these people are.

I read the book last week, but it’s too early to post about it. I’m still digesting it.

While i still have time, i’m trying to run through as much new fiction as possible. Ed Champion said great things about The Echo Maker, and gave the thumb’s up to Danielewski’s Only Revolutions. I trust the guy, so i gave it a shot… only to find Only Revolutions to be unreadable dross. Three nights i tried it, but each time it only made me want to scrub my eyes.

Tales from the Town of Widows is what i have checked out now. One of the blurbs on the back namechecked every major Latin American author, and another compared the author to Pamuk in “braininess.” So far it’s readable, even enjoyable, but what i’m getting is hero worship of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Ehhh… it’s likable, but i was hoping for more. Perhaps it’ll pick up as it goes along. It won’t cause me any serious damage to continue.

Next up is O.Z. Livaneli’s Bliss. I’ve already read a few pages on various breaks, and it’s living up to my hopes.

It is practically old news now, but a few nights ago, when i was watching cable news, with shouting pundits, it doesn’t seem to have sunk through into the mainstream. Aside from the fact that Shia militia infiltrated the execution, Juan Cole pointed out that the timing of Saddam’s hanging could not have been worse:

The tribunal also had a unique sense of timing when choosing the day for Saddam’s hanging. It was a slap in the face to Sunni Arabs. This weekend marks Eid al-Adha, the Holy Day of Sacrifice, on which Muslims commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son for God. Shiites celebrate it Sunday. Sunnis celebrate it Saturday –- and Iraqi law forbids executing the condemned on a major holiday. Hanging Saddam on Saturday was perceived by Sunni Arabs as the act of a Shiite government that had accepted the Shiite ritual calendar.

The timing also allowed Saddam, in his farewell address to Iraq, to pose as a “sacrifice” for his nation, an explicit reference to Eid al-Adha. The tribunal had given the old secular nationalist the chance to use religious language to play on the sympathies of the whole Iraqi public.

Bush’s nonsense about Saddam’s death, “I wish, obviously, that the proceedings had … gone in a more dignified way. But nevertheless, he was given justice,” and the photos of the execution being “revolting and barbaric” is disgusting. Someone already compared the theater we saw as making the U.S. worse than Pontius Pilate, in pretending to absolve itself of the poor judgement. Kneejerk rightwingers will feign indignation that there is a comparison being drawn between Jesus and Saddam, which is absurd. This is about a leader trying to wash blame from his own hands by using a lynch mob as his proxy.

AP article on Cycladic culture of Keros. The theory of the statues being smashed in ritual is still curious. I keep intending to look for other examples in other contemporary cultures of such behavior.

The Jackin’ Pop 2006 poll threw me off a little bit. I was expecting something a little less… um…. rock? I quite expected The Knife to top the Album list that poll, not TV on The Radio, who i listen to more, but feel that most of my appreciation came from seeing them at ACL. That list didn’t look too much different from Pitchfork or Stylus.

The Top Tracks was far better, but again… i dunno… i barely blogged about music in 2006, because i was not listening to much of anything new, either out of depression, laziness, or lack of opportunity. It’s been a struggle to catch up and create my own 2006 lists, cherry picking tracks from other people’s lists. There was no opportunity to wade through the undistilled ocean of music for myself. Everything has been preselected for me. Maybe in a few days, i can stammer out some stuff that stuck for me.

I’m just glad to have ILX back online honestly.

Since i’ve begun using Google Reader, i’ve been reading an awful lot of RSS feeds. When i was test driving the thing, i subscribed the Thinker bundle. After a couple of weeks of reading Malcolm Gladwell, i began to feel unclean. I was aware of his books The Tipping Point and Blink, but I never picked them up. My district manager had urged all of his managers to read the damned things long ago, but i steadfastly refuse to consider the babble of any of these pop psychology cults. The last straw with Gladwell was when i read his praise of Milton Friedman.

Maud Newton’s dismantling of Malcolm Gladwell’s defense of Enron’s Jeff Skilling makes me very happy indeed. However, this paragraph of Gladwell i find especially offensive:

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The C.I.A. had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think-tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.

Gladwell is an idiot. It’s one thing to be a blinkered acolyte of the free market, but quite another not to be able to admit that there was never a mystery about what would happen in Iraq. It was obvious from the very beginning that the American public was being lied to. Having a “position” and having database of facts that have been objectively assessed are two entirely different things.