The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold BloomMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
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Friday, January 23, 2026
Review: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold BloomMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
View all my reviews
Thursday, January 22, 2026
Review: The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory
The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory by Kenny FriesMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Disalbed from birth
Throughout my life, friends and strangers have asked me "What happened to your legs?" There was a time earlier in my life when I, too, could not stop asking why at birth I was missing bones in my legs. Chance, the fuel of natural selection, was not at that time a satisfactory explanation.
Disability studies theorist Lennard J. Davis echoes Bagemihl, showing how, when we speak of disability, we associate it with a story, place it in a narrative. A person became deaf, became blind, was born blind, became quadriplegic. The impairment becomes part of a sequential narrative.
By doing this we think of disability as linked to individualism and the individual story. What is actually a physical fact becomes a story with a hero or a victim. Disability becomes divorced from the cultural context, and becomes the problem of the individual, not a category defined by the society. The dialectic of normalcy-for someone to be normal, someone has to be not normal is kept intact.
Gilded age
The global economic recession of the 1870s encouraged the view of societies in competition in a hostile world. In the United States, business leaders such as Andrew Carnegie believed that unrestrained competition was natural selection at work. Human intervention could not mitigate the struggle for existence.
In the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century, Social Darwinism transformed into eugenics. Whereas Spencer and the Social Darwinists advocated a laissez-faire policy, sup-porting the status quo of the economic and social hierarchy, eugenicists advocated an active governmental and institutional role in "purifying" society of perceived "weakness."
In 1881, Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, researched deafness in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. He concluded that deafness was hereditary. In "Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race" he recommended a marriage prohibition for the deaf. He warned that boarding schools for the deaf could become breeding grounds for a deaf human race. In 1896, Connecticut became the first state to prohibit the marriage between anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded."
By the 1880s, European studies stressing the heredity of criminality had become the basis for "criminal anthropology" in the United States. In 1887, the superintendent of the Cincinnati Sanitarium issued the first published recommendation of sterilization for criminal activity.
Race increasingly became a focus for eugenics. Darwin rejected the idea that different races were different species.
....
After the stock market collapse of 1929, it became difficult to believe the correlation between economic status and intelligence. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, social scientists shifted their emphasis to the social causes of human difference.
...
After the war, when asked why eugenics declined so quickly in the United States, Popenoe admitted "the major factor ... was undeniably Hitlerism." But as early as the 1880s, reformers such as Powell and Boas spread Darwin's message that no one stayed on top, because change and adjustment were the order of nature. Boas, invoking the Darwinian notion of constant change, asked: Was it possible that traits thought to be desirable today, would be viewed otherwise in the future?
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Review: Front Lines: A Lifetime of Drawing Resistance
Front Lines: A Lifetime of Drawing Resistance by Susan Simensky BietilaMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
biography start
Bessarabia
1920s
Palmer raids,, ice Bondi raids
Family fled 1921 year of second 1919 1921 pogrom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_H...
"TRUMP FLAMBOYANTLY PROCLAIMS HIS IRRATIONAL WHIMS LIKE A TRUE CZAR.
HE COMMANDS TOADIES TO SCAPEGOAT IMMIGRANTS, MEXICANS & MUSLIMS, IMPRISONING EVEN CHILDREN.
WHEN HE WAS MADE AN HONORARY COSSACK IT WAS CLEAR THAT THEY RECOGNIZED ONE OF THEIR OWN."
"chose Brooklyn College and started there in 1964.
The summer before college, I worked at a racially integrated summer camp in the Catskills run by communist-influenced, antiracist organizers from my neighborhood. I learned about people a year or two older who had joined civil rights marches and voter registration drives in the South, as well as some guys who were moving to Canada to avoid the military draft. At night, after the campers were tucked in, the camp counselors sat around a campfire, where I learned that the US was at war with Vietnam. I felt physically shaken by the realization that the US was not a democracy but instead the number-one imperialist power after World War II's destruction of Europe. One of the other counselors was in the newly formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and gave me the name of the student who was starting a chapter...
The New Left introduced me to unvarnished history and critical thinking. This changed my life."
Chapter worth of text interspersed graphic novel like panels
Brooklyn College Vietnam antiwar student demonstrations
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Sunday, January 18, 2026
Review: Chicken Little: The Inside Story: A Jungian Romance
Chicken Little: The Inside Story: A Jungian Romance by Daryl SharpMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
The "American Journal of Chickle Schtick" isn't a real academic publication but a humorous, fictional reference used in texts about the folklore of Chicken Little, often cited with fake volume/issue numbers (like Vol. 17, No. 3, 1964) to add satirical weight to discussions about paranoia or "sky falling" narratives, highlighting the absurdity in seriousness
It's a joke or trope, not a legitimate scholarly journal, used in books like Chicken Little: The Inside Story to playfully mock serious analysis of simple fables.
You'll find it cited in footnotes for comedic effect
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Saturday, January 17, 2026
Thursday, January 15, 2026
Review: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter BiskindMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Still, increasingly conservative though Friedkin sounded, The French Connection was far from a conventional picture. He was comfortable with the documentary idiom and used it, giving the film a loose, handheld feel that anticipated Hill Street Blues by a decade. Often, he wouldn't bother to block a scene, just told the cameraman to follow the actors. Moreover, the moral landscape of the film was dark, complicated, and European. "In those days, Coppola and I and other guys, we'd sit around and talk about which way film was heading," he recalls. "You know, Godard or Fellini, documentary and street reality, or formalism and works of the imagination. They were not, it seemed to me, diametrically opposed. I had seen Z by Costa-Gavras. It made me realize you could take an actual story and make it as exciting as good fiction. I thought, I know how to do that. Fuck, that's like introducing documentary technique. It was a big influence on The French Connection."
Jaws
How Steven Spielberg's Jaws made the world safe for blockbusters, BBS enjoyed its last hurrah, while Bogdanovich's bubble burst, and Paramount and Warners turned over, slamming the door on the New Hollywood.
"Jaws was devastating to making artistic, smaller films. They forgot how to do it. They're no longer interested."
PETER BOGDANOVICH
Nashville
Sylbert's distribution of Altman's 'Nashville' and Kael's screening invitation led to a delayed release, highlighting the film's critical acclaim and its eventual box office underperformance, which was attributed to the lack of blockbuster appeal.
One of the first things Sylbert did was pick up Altman's Nashville for distribution. Kael created something of a scandal by accepting the director's invitation to a screening of the rough cut, reviewing the picture off that screening, thereby jumping the release date - and all the other reviewers - by months. It was a typical Kael move, calculated to prevent Paramount from recutting the movie and to goad the studio into putting some marketing muscle behind it. Her piece was full of the excitement of discovering a great work. She called it "an orgy for movie-lovers," and wrote, “I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness." Nashville was Altman's best film, and the studio had high hopes for it. With its large, ensemble cast of character actors, wandering narrative, and refusal of genre, it was an echt New Hollywood creation. Its failure to perform at the box office, despite the blitz of good press, was not only another indication that the passions that animated the first half of the decade were on the wane, it also underlined the limits of Kael's power. When Altman was asked why it hadn't done better, he said, "Because we didn't have King Kong or a shark."
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Sunday, January 11, 2026
Wednesday, January 7, 2026
Review: Why are We at War?
Why are We at War? by Norman MailerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
page 43
As John le Carré had put it to The Times of Lon-don: "America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember."
Harold Pinter no longer chose to be subtle in language:... The American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government, but seem to be helpless.
Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist American power, Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen's declaration "We are not the doctors. We are the disease."
B bush experts
Bush, on a given morning, decides that Expert A’s voice sounds the best. Three days later, Expert D comes in better. The result is that he’s always tweaking his policies just a little. If that is his one intellectual strength, he still has the persona of a fraternity president, sententious, full of cant, pleased with his assertions and always indifferent to their lack of verisimilitude and/or specificity. Mottos and platitudes are steak tartare to him. He knows exactly what he’s doing. So, that one good half of America, composed of religious people who are not particularly political, is with him all the way. Give us more of your mottos and platitudes, they ask. Spice them, please, with your incomparably holy touch of mendacity.
Tv
https://www.theamericanconservative.c...
“I Am Not For World Empire”
A conversation with Norman Mailer about Iraq, Israel, the perils of technology and why he is a Left-Conservative.
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE: Go back to the integrity of races. I know it is a politically incorrect thought, but it doesn’t have to be expressed with rancor. It might be interesting.
NORMAN MAILER: Let me put it this way: I don’t see immigration as a pressing problem other than that it gets some white people so furious that they can’t think about more important things. They feel America is being lost. All right, America is being lost, but in ways that have nothing to do with races or excessive immigration. America, for one example, is being lost through television. Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a seven- or eight-year-old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don’t do that much anymore. The habit has been lost. Every seven to ten minutes, a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV. Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption.
Israel
It is in the interest of the Arab nations to have Israel as the great villain. Although I’m Jewish, bone and blood, I’m not a patriotic Jew in the sense of Israel right or wrong, my Israel. I don’t have those feelings. But I do think that the end of the Holocaust gave us one grand example of how inhuman the sheiks and leaders at the top of many an Arab nation were then. They could’ve said, “Let these Jews have that land. It’s not going to hurt us. We might even be able to use each other to good purpose.” They didn’t. They chose to see these Holocaust survivors as the enemy. They used Israel to divert hatred away from their own regimes.
...
...it could prove a dangerous support. For a good many powerful Americans, the future question in Empire might become: How much is our support of Israel still to our advantage and how much to our disadvantage? The realpolitikers in the American establishment have to have mixed feelings even now about Israel. The neocons may feel this is their best shot, this is the moment when they have to take a chance because if they don’t now, Israel is likely to be doomed ten, twenty, thirty years down the road.
Corporate
Totalitarian
...We do not really know what works in a modern society, but the odds against flourishing in a society of the center (given its potentiality to narrow the exits and promote a single, central, secure point of view) may prove to be the least good answer of all. Until the Left and that part of the Right that is still loyal to its old values can come to recognize that no matter their essential differences, they also share one profound value they might look to protect in common—the vulnerable dignity of the human creation. At present, we are all obliged to travel willy-nilly into the vain land of corporate hegemony, with its self-serving notion that democracy is a nutrient to be injected into any country anywhere, a totally oppressive misconception of the delicate promise of democracy, which relies on the organic need to grow out of itself and learn from its own human errors.
By now, our nation has become a democracy that is bereft of a few of the essential elements. Nobody ever said, so far as I know, that a democracy should be a place where the richest people in the country earn a thousand times more than the poorest. Should the richest man in a town amass ten times more, even fifty times more, it is not hard to conceive of a reasonably decent society. When you get to the point where you’re speaking of thousands to one, something outrageous is taking place. The people who feel this lack of balance probably make up two thirds of the country, but they don’t want to think about it. They can’t, after all, do a damn thing about it. We don’t control our country. Corporate power is running this country now. The notion that we have an active democracy that controls our fate is not true. Was I ever able to vote on how high buildings could or should be? No. Was I ever able to say I don’t want food frozen? No. Was I ever able to say I want tax money to pay for political campaigns, not interest groups? Nobody’s ever been able to vote on many an item that truly matters in terms of how our lives are led. And, of course, we see the political process become more and more money-mechanized. We’re on a power trip in which only one small fraction of America manages to participate.
They speak of pre-cancerous conditions in bodies, and I think we have a pre-totalitarian situation here now. I hope we’ll muddle through, provided there are no more large disasters. There are pro-democratic forces in America that assert themselves when you don’t expect them to.
But the situation is serious. If we have a depression or fall into desperate economic times, I don’t know what’s going to hold the country together. There’s just too much anger here, too much ruptured vanity, too much shock, too much identity crisis. And, worst of all, too much patriotism. ...
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Monday, January 5, 2026
Review: Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship. With an introduction by Peter Werbe.
Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship. With an introduction by Peter Werbe. by NOAM CHOMSKY; Introduction by Peter WerbeMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Gabriel Jackson
The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931-39
The complexities of modern society that baffled and confounded the unsuspecting anarchist workers of Barcelona, as Jackson enumerates them, were the following: the accumulating food and supply problems and the administration of frontier posts, villages, and public utilities. As just noted, the food and supply problems seem to have accumulated most rapidly under the brilliant leadership of Juan Comorera. So far as the frontier posts are concerned, the situation, as Jackson elsewhere de-scribes it (p. 368), was basically as follows: "In Catalonia the anarchists had, ever since July 18, controlled the customs stations at the French border. On April 17, 1937, the reorganized carabineros, acting on orders of the Finance Minister, Juan Negrín, began to reoccupy the frontier. At least eight anarchists were killed in clashes with the carabineros." Apart from this difficulty, admittedly serious, there seems little rea-son to suppose that the problem of manning frontier posts contributed to the ebbing of the revolutionary tide.
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Saturday, January 3, 2026
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Review: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom My rating: 4 of 5 stars ...
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