Books and stuff…

Because I can… add this update: Cuba, bloggers and the internet wars: a review of Antony Loewenstein’s `The Blogging Revolution’, Tim Anderson, Links, September 7, 2008. “Antony Loewenstein is confused. Flushed with the success of his first book, My Israel Question, he has ventured into the wider world of global politics and has stumbled.” Essentially, Anderson argues that, in his treatment of blogging in Cuba, Lowenstein places far too much emphasis on government censorship and far too little on the structural and technical issues — “where [restrictions] exist, we need to consider whether these are for reasons of bandwidth or of censorship” — which apparently inhibit ‘free’ use of teh Interwebs. Antony responds: Don’t touch our boy Castro (September 9, 2008).

Gosh! What an exciting week it’s been!

I bought some books!

How about that eh?

1) After Theory by Terry Eagleton (2003). Purchased as part of an ongoing but generally feeble attempt to maintain the charade of being a serious student of Philosophy (Theory) and er, the Big Ideas of (Once) Important Thinkers. And because Terry has a sense of humour: “Fate pushed Roland Barthes under a Parisian laundry van, and afflicted Michel Foucault with AIDS. It dispatched Lacan, Williams and Bourdieu,* and banished Louis Althusser to a psychiatric hospital for the murder of his wife. It seemed that God was not a structuralist.” Nice one Terry. See also : What Terry did next… “John Mullan enjoys After Theory, the latest ‘text’ from the high priest of theory, Terry Eagleton” (The Guardian, November 29, 2003) | Terry Eagleton’s After Theory, Amardeep Singh, April 1, 2005 | After Theory by Terry Eagleton, “Abdelkader Aoudjit discusses Terry Eagleton’s take on what comes after postmodernism”, Philosophy Now, #55, May/June 2006.

*NewLiberalSpeak: Notes on the new planetary vulgate, Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, Radical Philosophy, No.105, January/February 2001:

“Within a matter of a few years, in all the advanced societies, employers, international officials, high-ranking civil servants, media intellectuals and high-flying journalists have all started to voice a strange Newspeak. Its vocabulary, which seems to have sprung out of nowhere, is now on everyone’s lips: `globalization’ and `flexibility’, `governance’ and `employability’, `underclass’ and `exclusion’, `new economy’ and `zero tolerance’, `communitarianism’ and `multiculturalism’, not to mention their so-called postmodern cousins, `minority’, `ethnicity’, `identity’, `fragmentation’, and so on. The diffusion of this new planetary vulgate – from which the terms `capitalism’, `class’, `exploitation’, `domination’ and `inequality’ are conspicuous by their absence, having been peremptorily dismissed under the pretext that they are obsolete and non-pertinent – is the result of a new type of imperialism. Its effects are all the more powerful and pernicious in that it is promoted not only by the partisans of the neoliberal revolution who, under cover of `modernization’, intend to remake the world by sweeping away the social and economic conquests of a century of social struggles, henceforth depicted as so many archaisms and obstacles to the emergent new order, but also by cultural producers (researchers, writers and artists) and left-wing activists, the vast majority of whom still think of themselves as progressives…”

2) The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan. I was gonna buy this when it was first published (in 2006), but I don’t read much fiction, and didn’t wanna shell out $30… so I waited two years and got it for $12. (Which I suspect is a good deal less than DreamWorks Pictures paid for the film rights.) Curiously, in an interview with Stephen Moss in The Guardian, Moss notes that:

As the book was fermenting, Flanagan recognised the echoes of Heinrich Böll‘s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, and the dues are paid in a note at the end of the novel. “I was after a police thrillerish-type story,” he says. “I tried a couple of different things and came up with this, which I then realised was Katharina Blum. I’d read it 20 years ago, and I thought, ‘Does that matter or not?’ I decided it didn’t, because everybody takes stories from everybody else, and when I went back and looked at it I realised that it’s not the same at all.”

Like Terrorist, Blum (1974) was made into a film (1975). I saw the film before I read the novel — both are… neat. No really: go see and read them. Both. And if you want quality lit and music crit, try this on for size.

3) Terror Laws: Asio, Counter-Terrorism and the Threat to Democracy by Jenny Hocking. A useful, if now slightly (slightly meaning 2003) dated text on the the raft of repressive laws passed in the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington (and Bali), and the historical evolution of state control in Australia via such agencies as ASIO. Speaking of Jenny, Mum gave me a copy of another of her books: Frank Hardy: Politics Literature Life. (One day, I’ll read it, but I’m not sure if I should read Power Without Glory first. Probably.)

4) My Israel Question by Antony Lowenstein (I got the first edition, published in 2006 — there’s a second). Antony has a new book coming out right about now the funk soul brother. It’s called The Blogging Revolution.

5) The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton. I’ve read the first chapter and it reads well… See also : A carnival of unreason…, Terry Eagleton’s review, The New Statesman, May 3, 2004.

Jo gave me a book for my birthday: The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk. (Actually, she gave me a copy of The Story of Crass by George Berger, but seeing as I already had a copy, we swapped.) Robert Fisk is a very poor authority, according to some, but a popular speaker in Aotearoa / New Zealand nevertheless. As for his book… I think I might finish reading it before I comment on its contents. Also, Dr. Cam gave me a copy of Leviathan by Harrison Biscuit.

Oh yeah:

Barricade Infoshop is re-opening and to celebrate there’s a sale:

WHEN : 5pm, Saturday, September 13
WHERE : 62 St Georges Road, Northcote
WHAT : Food, beer, wine, exciting new stock, heavily discounted old stock…
HOW to get there : By public transport: Barricade is located on the No.112 West Preston tram route, very near stop number 27, approximately 20 minutes from the CBD. The closest railway station is Merri on the Epping Line.