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Galileo started modern science by using the pendulum as a tool to make accurate measurements of time. Ancient Greek science was based on geometry, measuring space but not time. Archimedes understood statics but did not understand dynamics. Galileo with his pendulum and his falling weights made the decisive step from a static to a dynamic view of nature. He introduced time as a quantity accessible to mathematical analysis. He said, "Nature's great book is written in mathematical symbols." That remark of Galileo was the lever that moved the world into the modern era of scientific understanding. >Freeman Dyson, "Writing Nature's Greatest Book"
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MacArthur assured Hirohito he would defend Japan as if it were California, in one of their 11 meetings after the war.
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Late Meji Japan was an insignificant island nation in the far East which had only just begun to rise from obscurity. >Yoshida
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Schlomo, an old Hasid you will soon meet, exclaimed in despair: "What have I gained by becoming blind, since i continue to see myself." >E. Wiesel
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Fall marked by indescribably serenity and nostalgia
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Fall, in our town, was always marked by indescribable serenity and nostalgia. We liked it better than Spring, which we deemed too arrogant and too eager to impose its rule. Fall, in our town, departed reluctantly, all living things trying to hold it back.
"Dear you hear the wind?" the young patient asked. "It is chasing the Fall away."
>E. Wiesel Beggar in Jerusalem
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A Jew wakes up in a town that was the "most Jewish in the region" and now without a trace. Terrified, he comes to understand, walking amidst its silent mouldering ruins, that he has been left alone here, that the town continues to exist, inaccessible to him, far, and he alone is left outside and away, remembering. >Wiesel
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I am possessed. That's the explanation: the dybuk is the culprit. And I am the one to suffer most from it, my town, with its Jews and its myths, its songs and its holidays, my town goes on existing -- but without me, outside of me: on the other side. >Wiesel
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Her voice, broken and humble, reminds me of my mother's voice. That night, before our separation, she ? name on her lips. Like word. She too had wanted to understand, but there was nothing left to understand. That night names and beings were torn apart from each other. Only later did I perceive the secret of creation: only the unnamable is immortal. >Wiesel
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Since donning his uniform, he could no longer accept the validity of a link between a Talmud two thousand years old and everyday life. And his father explained very gently: "The link my son, is you. You are the bridge between the Babylonian sages and generations t come. Each man must consider himself responsible for both, each man contains all."
"Don't you think father you are placing too heavy a burden on my shoulders?"
"Yes, perhaps. But you won't always have to bear it alone. You'll soon take a wife, you'll raise children, and they will transmit my name and yours so that one day the Messiah himself will hear their voice."
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1979 Zealots armed seize Grand Mosque in Mecca
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She considered it an embarrassing failure to be happy.
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Altamira caves/ Lascaux Caves (cavepainting sights in Europe)
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calls to mind the expulsion, naked and trembling, of our ancestral parents from prelapsarian Eden into a world where choice is obligatory and error inevitable, a blessing and a burden upon themselves and what Milton called, with mixed feelings, their "hapless seed." >Jason Epstein
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a prodigiously creative people
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Those who harbour viceral hatred of liberalism in all its forms, which the y consider a "principle evil."
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Leo Strauss of U of C, who became one of the Gurus of American conservatism, saw in liberalism a diseased, pathetically self-destructive outgrowth of the Enlightenment; Stern saw liberalism as ultimately the only antidote to totalitarianism. Fall of Soviet Union proved him right.
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Vile attack of a vulgar reactionary...Regan said of the Demos: "Liberal, Liberal, Liberal!"
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On Willy Brandt on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto: "the most poignant gesture we have of true political contrition -- of apology as an act of courage." >Frite Stern
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Proust backed his sentences in and out of garages like a first class journalist. >Violet Hunt
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"Three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principle verb, making one wonder, as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tromp, so many guns, and such expensive dogs." >E.M. Forester on Proust's writing style
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One absorbs the new product...with delicious anticipation of the unknown. The heart pounds as it does on one's first meeting with a lover...By what strange paths, up to what peaks and into what unexplored abysses will the omnipotent master lead us? What new series of sensations will we discover on this journey? >Proust on drugs, writing in voice of Bergotte
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monsoon area -- rice cultivation -- landlords enjoy virtual monopoly of economic and political power.
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The great Tuscarora deep off Japan's eastern flank descends more than 5 miles below sea level. Japan's highest peaks are 2 miles above sea level. A range of 7 miles.
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Kamu-Yamato-Iware-Biko (original name of Jinomu Tenno, which is itself a Chinese appellation)
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Sesshu was invited to reside in Yamaguchi at the invitation of Ouchi Masahiro of the powerful Ouchi clan.
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venturing towards ideals
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Through end of T'ang empire and its bustling captial Ch'angan collapse marks dismantling of the heavy-handed oriental cultural sphere. Particularly decline of silk road traffic.
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In his willingness/need to travel Sesshu joins other such wanders as renga (linked-verse) poet Sogi (1421-1502), who lived in the same period, the poet-priest Saigyo, who lived in the 12th Century; and the haiku poet Basho (1644-94) who lived in the Edo period.
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Signature dampness to the tone of the ink
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In an instant, luck changes/ In an instant, children die. >Euripides (Herakles speaking)
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Human nature derives from human limitation
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force moral reasoning to an extreme confrontation with itself.
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tragedy is not connected with human justice. Tragedy is the statement of an expiation, but not the miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement organized by the knaves for the fools. The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of...having been born. >Samuel Beckett Proust
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I was doing my hair, I was binding my hair, staring down into the bottomless lake of my mirror, before I fell into bed -- a scream out the town, a roar swept the street...>chours of Hekabe, on the fall of Troy
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"what cowers behind it begins to seep through." >Beckett
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A shade of the public voice is audible; the intimacy looks beyond itself. (of a diary, written for more than one)
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"suddenly seeing them one stopped astonished and everything including one's breathing for one second also stopped as it does when in a picture gallery you suddenly come face to face with a great Rembrandt or Velasquez." >Leonard Woolf
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mathematically illiterate
-
"As the country grows ever more distracted and mesmerized by mass culture...literature, has a function, beyond entertainment, as a form of social opposition."
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the beautiful rolling countryside of Sandzak (small v above the z)
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consciousness is not a part of nature but stands outside of nature observing it.
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the mysterious yearning towards the chasm
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the imagination as demiurgic power
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That man is blessed on who day by day evil does not fall. >Hekabe
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Something new and strange is beginning in the house >Hippolytos
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When asked leaving the constitutional convention hall in 1787 by a bystander what the meeting had produced: "A republic," Franklin said. "If you can keep it."
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Millionaires and a plumber (on Eisenhower's cabinet)

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That's what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events.
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"So I took Anse. And when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and this was the answer to it. That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don't ever fit what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride. >As I Lay Dying
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And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who have never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget thw words. Like Cora, who could never even cook. >138
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And then he died. He did not know he was dead. I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the dark land talking of God's love and His beauty and His sin; hearing the dark voicelesness in which the words are the deeds, and the other words that are not deeds, that are just the gaps in people's lacks, coming down like the cries of the geese out of the wile darkness in the terrible nights, [?] of the deeds like orphans to whom are pointed out in a crowd two faces and told, That is your father, your mother. >138
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of Ghosts: they seemed to be like normal people, but as soon as you looked more closely their faces blurred and flickered at the edges.
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That is hard on a man, He may ask the animal: "why do you just look at one instead of telling me about your happiness?" The animal wants to reply: "Because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say" but then forgets even this answer and says nothing. >Nietzsche
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totally unhistorical: Nietzsche on animals
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The dilemma: the inherent distance between language (words) and what it names. "all symbolism harbors the curse of mendacity: it is bound to obscure what it seeks to reveal...Literature can transcend this dilemma only by keeping faith with unsocial, banned language, and by learning to use the opaque images of broken rebellion as a means of communication." >Sebald
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"or was all this just the stage set for a fantastic opera?" >Kasack
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The reason for the murder of memory lies in the fear that Orpheus' love for Eurydice might turn to a passion for the goddess of death; it knows nothing of the positive potential of melancholy. >Nussbaum?
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"The outcast dared not look back, since there was nothing behind him but fire." >See Elias Canetti, on Hiroshima diaries of Dr. Hachiya
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Human beings learn as much from catastrophes as laboratory rabbits learn about biology. >Brecht's dictum
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The [?] (German) have come home with "the sniffed insight that it smells everywhere, and not only in quaint one-family houses, that sometimes frankly and pungently, sometimes lavender-sweetened, here masked by refrigeration, there streaked with mold, and next door unspeakably, it stinks, because here, there and next door the cellars harbor corpses." >Grass on German war guilt
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a despair that is moving in itself.
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Wolfgang Hildesheimer's novel Tyuset: 1st person narrator tormented by insomnia and melancholy, uneasy and disturbed by unsanctioned legacy. All around him he begins to choose names out of a phonebook or calls them say that everything has been revealed. calls randomly but invariably the call is followed by a departure and disappearance. One day he picks up the phone and hears the telltale crackle and knows that his experimental system of Persecution has been turned against him. He leaves town.
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Claude Levi-Strauss' proposition that in American Indian myths the hair-lip was the remaining trace of a twin who was never actually born. This duality in one person makes the hare, with its split face, one of the highest deities, mediating between heaven and earth. >Sebald
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"The greater the suffering the greater the poet. The harder the work, the deeper the meaning." >Ernst Herbeck schizo poet in Germany
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Thunderstorms appeared on the day of Beethoven's death, also on the day of Kafka's death, over Low Sanatorium.
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Nabakov tried, he vowed, to cast a little light on the darkness lying on both sides of our life, thus to illuminate our incomprehensible existence.
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Claritas was always for St. Thomas Aquinas the true sign of epiphany
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"Life is a chequer-board of Nights and days/ Where Destiny with men for pieces plays:/ Hither and Thither moves, and mates, and slays,/ And one by one back in the closet lays." >Edward Fitzgerald and his translation of a Persian poet.
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So great a temptation is akin to that of St. Anthony in the desert (Egypt precisely) see Flaubert "Temptation of St. Anthony"
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Sebald says Zionism took its cues from the early 19th C emergent German nationalist ideology -- physical health, hardiness, haleness
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Hitler settled on a irrefutable proof for the annihilation of the Jews: there could not be two chosen peoples.
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January 1901 Milan: As Verdi lay dying the people on his street covered the paving stones with hay so the carts would pass in silence and the composer could die in peace and quiet.
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Receive me kindly, stranger that I am

"Am I to fare like the thousands who in their springtime days lived in both foreboding and love, but were seized by the avenging Parcae on a drunken day, secretly and silently destroyed, to do penance in the dark of an all to sober realm where wild confusion prevails in the treacherous light, where they count slow time in frost and drought, and man still praises immortality in sighs alone? >Sebald on Holderlin
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In Roman mythology, the Parcae (three) were the personifications of destiny (their Greek equivalent were the Moirae). They controlled the metaphorical thread of life of every mortal and immortal from birth to death. Even gods feared the Parcae. Jupiter was subject to their power.
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adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life. >Sebald on his own writing
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Hebel: rode a pale horse
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Japanese cedar can be buried in the earth until it becomes a deep green color and is regarded as a semi-precious stone.
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18th C Kantian dreams of perpetual peace
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It is no accident that our European allies -- for whom the twentieth century was a traumatic catastrophe -- are predisposed to accept that cooperation, not combat, is the necessary condition of survival -- even at the expense of some formal sovereign autonomy. British military casualties at the Battle of Psscherdaele in 1917 alone exceed all US losses in WWI and II combined. The French army lost twice the total number of US vietnam casualties in the course of just six weeks fighting in 1940. Italy, Poland, Germany and Russia all lost more soldiers and civilians in World War I than the US has lost in all its foreign wars put together (in the Russian case by a factor of 10 on both occasions). Such contrasts make quite a difference in how you see the world. >Pfaff, see reading notes on nyrb article
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George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlan (?) -- American diplomatic titans
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in 1984 people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
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Decologue 2nd commandment -- no graven images
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In our culture lawyers do not have to be wise, they have to be well-briefed. >Postman
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Truth does not come unadorned. It is in all cases a kind of cultural prejudice. >Postman
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"immunity to eloquence" >Bertrand Russell looking to meaning not tone
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Rationality and scholarship, legalistic hallmarks
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The aim to save civilization in America by "creating rationality in the land." >John Marshall
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Voting, we might say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent (the last being a poll) >Postman
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Flux and infinite variety
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The "Pseudo-event" was one staged just to be reported (press conference) -- see Boorstein "The Image"
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Culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence, impotence
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When Bernard Shaw first saw the lights of Broadway he remarked: "It would be beautiful if you couldn't read."
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The medium forms us to it thus we are brought to heel, like a man of intellect, or a man of severity, in front of the television camera.
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"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies." >Walter (Walta) Lippmann
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"Big brother turns out to be Howdy Doody"
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technological changes to our means of communication are ideology-landen -- they change cognitive habits, social relations, notions of community, history and religion. >157
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On the old roots of American exceptionalism: "the case and circumstances of America present themselves as in the beginning of the world...we have no occasion to roam for information into the obscure field of antiquity, nor hazard ourselves upon conjecture. We are...as if we had lived at the beginning of time. >Thomas Paine
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Bush and his historicisms: America's foreign policy objective had become: "ending tyranny in our world." Karl Popper called it historicism: faith in large scale laws of historical development.
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It is in the nature of political relationships that an effort to translate a position of material superiority into a power over others will provoke resistance, and may fail, possibly in costly ways. >William Pfaff
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Kennan was above all author of cold-war containment policy
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Epicetus: "watch out for yourself like an enemy lying in wait."
-
She acknowledges a certain passivity before the world.
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Proust calls emotions "geological Upheavals of thought."
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Pharaoh gave the name to Joseph: Zaphenath-paneah "God speaks, he lives" "creation of life"

Notebook Transcription 58
transcribed February 15, 2007
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"his mind was full of terrible inquiry" on Lincoln (a penetrating observer)
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I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,/ the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. >Hosea 6:6
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The nostalgia is a measure of the feeling of spiritual elation which the observant Jew experiences on the Sabbath: the sense of being transported from the flawed world of everyday struggle into a realm of transcendental perfection. Jewish literature tries to convey something of this mysterious power and beauty of the Sabbath by describing it as the choicest of days, a royal bride, a garland of glory, a crown of salvation, a divine gift, conferring peace and tranquility, quietness and safety, light and rejoicing, endowing those who faithfully obscure it with an "extra soul" (neshamah yeterah); according to one interpretation of the hadalach spices, their fragrance is a fond farewell-gift offered to this soul as it it takes its leave and giving them "a foretaste" of the world to come. >from "The Jewish People" 344
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Bach's B Minor Mass
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It's not everybody can eat their mistakes, I can tell him. >Faulkner
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It was not the resistance heroes that fascinated me, as a youth in Holland during the war, but "the frightened man who betrayed to save his life, who looked the other way, who grasped the wrong horn of a hideous moral dilemma." >Ian Buruma
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The course of world history and world culture shows us that there are, and should be, moral authorities...In the twentieth century, the universal tendency, not only in the west but everywhere, was to destroy any hierarchies so that everyone could act just as he or she wants without regarding any moral authority...The level of world culture has been lowered as a result. >Solzhenitsyn
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What is life? A frenzy.
What is life? An illusion.
A shadow, a fiction,
And the greatest good is nothing,
For life is a dream (La vida es sueno)
And dreams are only reams. >Pedro Calderon de La Barca
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Noli me tangere (do not want to touch me) -- words spoken by Jesus to Mary Magdalene.
-
"wonder rather that doubt is the root of all knowledge." >Abraham Joshua Heschel
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...our liberty will not be secured at sword's point...we must secure it by making ourselves worthy of it. And then when a people reaches that height God will provide a weapon, the idols will be shattered, tyranny will crumble like a house of cards and liberty will shine out like the first dawn. >Jose Rizal
-
His eyes look like piece of burnt-out cinder fixed in his face, looking out over the land. >As I lay dying
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The sun, an hour above the horizon, is posed like a cloody(?) egg upon the crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the rose sulfurous, smelling of lightening. When Peabody comes, they will have to use the rope. He has pussel-gutted himself eating cold greens. With the rope they will haul him up the path, balloon-like on the sulfurous airs. >As I lay dying
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That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image. >38
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300 years in a convent and 40 years in Hollywood have left the Philippines culturally dispossessed. "at this point and time we are not yet fully Filipino" (1986)
-
he did not particularly like him; rather, as do so many, he likes power.
-
Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early 5th Century.
-
When I was about to achieve the spontaneous combustion of all this corruption, this loathsome accumulation of garbage, and when frenzied greed, taken unawares, was rushing about to seize whatever was at hand like an old woman surprised by fire, you showed up with your slogans of pro-Hispanism, with your calls for faith in the government and faith in what will never come!...You ask for parity rights, the Spanish way of life, and you do not realize that what you are asking for is death, the destruction of your national identity, the disappearance of your homeland, the ratification of Tyranny. What is to become of you? A people without a soul? >Jose Rizal, excerpted from El Filibusterismo
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"Mahorlika" a pre-hispanic term "chief" or literally "big phallus" was Marco's nom de guerre as a guerrilla soldier fighting against the Japanese.
-
We are to treat rational beings as ends, and never as means only >Scruton on "Morality"
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I went to the furrow and picked up a clod. It was warm and moist.
Hilda was lying on the sled. I sat beside her and told her to raise the hem of her dress up to the navel. She turned to me, half-rising, and said angrily, "I will do no such thin."
I told her the, "I wantyou to belong to Carmay, to be free from the sickness of other earths. I will rub this on your stomach" -- I held the clod before her eyes -- "and just as grandfather said, you will never get sick, not while you are here." ...She finally raised her dress, "You are like an old man," she said, shaking her head. "You believe in spirits."
I did not speak. her legs were white and clean and her skin was smooth. I crushed the clod and let particles trickle on her skin. The grains fell on her navel and rolled down her sides. With my palm, I spread the clod on her belly, slowly, softly, and when this was done, she snapped her dress down and pinched by hand.
"Foolish!" she said, laughing. >Don Vincente F. Sionil Jose
-
Words so delicate they seemed more sighed then said.
-
...hovers over us like a dance of unearthly figures.
-
The constitution is about more than efficiency, and more than democracy; it is a collective commitment to the equal worth and dignity of all human beings.
-
"It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether: the man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the storng man has extened his love to all places; the perfect man has extinegursled (?) this." >Hugo St. Victor Saxony the monk, from Edward Said -- "Reflections on Exile"
-
The familiar ethical/moral septet: wisdom, temperance, courage, justice, faith, hope, love (charity)
-
Cicero's two virtues: humility, greatness of spirit

-
From "The Undertaking"
I'd rather it be February, the month I first became a father in, the month my father died. I want it cold. I want a mess made in te snow so that the earth looks wounded, forced open, an unwilling participant. Forgo the tent, stand openly to the weather. Get the larger equipment out of sight. it's a distraction. But have the sextant, all dirt and indifference, remain at hand. Go to the hole in the ground, stand over it, look into it, wonder, and be cold. But stand until it's over. Until it's done. >Thomas Lynch
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"We stopped before every stove. Asher the diaryman was still living. His beard had turned gray. This man who rode each day to the tram depot to fetch cans of mil was a charitable person, my father's good friend. When we left Warsaw, my father owed him twenty-five rubles. Father went to say goodbye to him and to apologize for his debt, but Asher took fifty German marks from his purse and gave them to father. >Isaac Bashevis Singer "Shosha"
-
"Whenever I expect life to remain status quo, something unexpected pops up. World history is made of the same dough as bagels. It must be fresh. This is why democracy and capitalism are going down the drain. They have become stale. This is the reason idolatry was so exciting. You could buy a new god every year. We Jews burdened the nations with an eternal God, and therefore they hate us. Gibbon tried so hard to find the reason for the fall of the Roman empire. It fell only because it was old. I hear there is a passion for newness in the sky also. A star gets tired of being a star and it explodes and becomes a nova. The Milky Way got weary of its sour mil and began to run the devil knows where. Does she have a job? I mean your financee, not the milky way?
"She has no job and cannot have one," I said.
"Is she sick?"
"Yes, sick."
"When the body gets tired of being healthy it becomes sick. When it gets tired of living, it dies. When it has enough of being dead, it reincarnates into a frog or a windmill. The coffee here is the best in the whole of Warsaw. May I order another glass, Miss Slonim?"
"Ten glasses, but please don't call me Miss Slonim -- my name is Betty."
"I drink to much coffee and I smoke too many cigars. How is it possible that one never gets tired of tobacco and coffee? This is really a riddle." >Singer "Shosha" 137
-
We Jews keep on wishing ourselves eternal life, or at least immortality of the soul. In fact, eternal life would be a calamity. Imagine some little storekeeper dying and his soul flying around for millions of years still remembering that once it sold chicory, yeast and beans, and that a customer owes it eighteen groschen. Or the soul of an author ten millions years later resenting a bad review he got.
-
My bed was in the Cheder room where the children studied by day. The two windows had shutters and they must have faced east, because the sun shone through them in the mornings. What I am speaking of now has no connection with the so-called occult but with a feeling that everything is full of mysteries. I recall once I woke quite early -- my parents, brother, and sister were still asleep. The rising sun shone through the cracks in the shutters, and columns of dust rose from sunbeams. I remember that morning with remarkable clarity. Obviously, I was too young to think in the context of words, but I wondered "what is all this?" "Where does it all come from?" Other children no doubt go through the same thing, but on that morning my feeling was unusually strong, and I knew instinctively that I shouldn't ask about this and that my parents couldn't supply any answers. Our ceiling had beams, and a web of sun and shadow played across it. I realized that I myself and and what I was seeing--the walls, the floors, the pillow on which I rested my head--were all one. In later years I read about cosmic consciousness, monism, pantheism, but I never experienced it with such impact. More, it provided me with a reare pleasure. I had merged with eternity and relished it. At times I think it was like the state of passing over from life to what we call death. We may experience it in the final moments or perhaps immediately after. I say this because no matter how many dead people I have seen in my life, they have had the same expression on their faces: "Ah, so that's what it is! What a shame I can't tell the others about it!" Even a dead bird or mouse presents this expression, though not as distinctly as man" > Shosha, 145
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In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead.... I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England.... This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze. >Edmund Burke, speech to parliament about the soon to be rebellious colonies
-
A permanent revolution is about as possible as permanent surgery
-
History is a book man can read only forward. He cannot turn the pages backward, but everything that had ever been still existed.
-
"like you I must play my game until the last minute."
This the baker's daughter who stood on Krochmalna street with a basket of warm bagels.
-
Come to me, my sweetheart
Parting the bamboo blinds!
Should my mother ask me
I'll say 'twas but a gust of wind
>from collection of ancient Japanese poetry "Manyoshu" from earliest times to 760.
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This mortal life is brief of span. Let me seek the Way, contemplating the pure hills and streams. > Manyoshu
-
The Japanese aesthetic inclination: "anima naturaliter poetica"
-
Olives
Sometimes the taste of these strong olives curved slowly in oil,
with cloves of garlic,
bay leaves and chilies and lemon and salt,
conjures a whiff of a bygone age: rocky crannies,
goats, shade and the sound of pipes,
the tune of the breath of primeval times.
The chill of a cave, a hidden cottage in a vineyard,
a lodge in a garden, a slice of barley bread and well water.
You are from there. You have lost your way.
There is exile, Your death will come, and lay a knowing hand on your shoulder.
Come, it's time to go.
>Amos Oz
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Here he has made a list of words: in the word woods there is a vague dread. In the word hills is a world of lust. If you say shack, or wayfarer, rain, compassion, at once he lights up like a miser who has sniffed a rumor of gold. Or if, for instance, the evening paper prints the phrase "New Horizons", at once I am on my way to bathe twice in the same river.
>Oz, "Same Sea" 54
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Naked I come forth from my mother's womb and naked I shall return thither. >Job
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Dita and I went together to the old cemetery in a kibbutz called Ayyelet Hashahar, where you can sometimes hear a short sound that promises you tonight whatever you wan on condition that you don't look back. >Amos Oz, 134 Same Sea
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The sky is dark and empty. A mist flows through a mist. >Oz 189
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"The institutions that used to aggregate citizen values have declined."
-
It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. >Atonement
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The Japanese system of mutual obligation
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"How can you win if you have prepared to escape."
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If you think of saving your own life you had better not go to war at all. >Yoshitsune
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One locus of Japanese concern for effect of actions on future generations is the Buddhist doctrine of Karma "Inga" in Japanese
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"even at the cost of your life and your family, holding to the good, not yielding to the strong...this deep faith is what makes the warrior." >367
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It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can't be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it. >"No Country" 64 Cormac McCarthy
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Poetic Justice: a principled defense of a humanistic and multivalued conception of public rationality that is powerfully exemplified in the common law tradition. ie PUBLIC REASONING
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Political economy/education for public rationality
"wherever the public imagination is shaped"
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Aristotle's view is that literary art is "more philosophical" than history because history shows us what happened, whereas literary art shows us things "such as might happen"
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"For any view you put forward the next question simply has to be 'what would the world be like if this idea were actually taken up." >Nussbaum
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"Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter."
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The "bully of humility" name is Bounderby Bounderby
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We invest our lives with an interlacing patter of "complex significances."
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Bentham's central posit of classical utilitarianism is as follows: "each person is to count as one and none as more than one."
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The middle-class tax revolt became a permanent fixture of American politics during the Reagan era. For many Republicans noninterference with the marketplace became an article of faith.
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"People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." FDR in 1944
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Alexander Hamilton First treasury secretary and great believer in the potentials and profits of a strong central government...fluid capital markets, nationalized debt etc. public works (roads etc.) financed by the gov.
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Andalus...might be here or there, or anywhere...a meeting place of strangers in the project of building human culture...It is not only that there was Jewish-Muslim coexistence, but that the fates of the two people were similar...Al-Andalus for me is the realization of the dream of the poem. >Mahamoud Darwish
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Judges exercise "public power"
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Dead, empty language, designed to fill as much space as possible while saying as little as possible.
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"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals. We now know it is bad economics..." FDR
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Ronald Dworkin "Law's Empire"
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Ronald Dworkin on law as integrity: "Law as integrity accepts law and legal rights whole heartedly...It supposes that law's constraints benefit society not just by providing predictability or procedural fairness, or in some other instrumental way, but by serving a kind of equality among citizens that makes their community more genuine and improves its moral justification for exercising the political power it does...It argues that rights and responsibilities flow from past decisions and so count as legal, not just when they are explicit in these decisions but also when they follow from the principles and political morality the explicit decisions presuppose by way of justification."
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Dworkin is primarily concerned with "moral legitimacy" as a primary element of the law, and of a political community as an association of principle.
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For Dworkin rights trump liberty. i.e. equality trumps liberty
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The 3 generations of Human Rights
1) negative civil and political rights -- Hobbes, Locke, Mill. Prohibit interference with the right-holder's freedom.
2) Positive Rights -- economic and social cultural rights -- e.g. Right to education, work etc.
3) Collective rights (Article 28 Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- "everyone is entitled to social order in which rights set down can be realized." e.g. Solidarity rights -- right to benefit from resources, and technical information, right to healthy environment peace disaster relief etc...
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Deonotological systems of ethics: rightness or wrongness is independent of its consequences
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Corrective justice: (Aristotle) makes redress of a wrong
Distributive justice: gives each person their due -- generally legislative
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Under the Roman legal code Corpus Juris Civilis (Justinian 482-565) justice is defined as "the constant and perpetual wish to give everyone what they deserve"
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Themis: lady justice
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Jeremy Bentham: positivism and utilitarianism
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Concepts of efficacy (both measured in readiness to pay)
1) Pareto Optimality: describes a situation that cannot be altered without making at least one person worse off than he was prior to the change
2) Kaldor-Hicks Test: a change is Kaldor-Hicks efficient when the increase in value to those who gain exceeds the loses to those who lose.
3) Posner uses "diminishing marginal utility": a dollar given to a beggar would have a major effect on his wealth. To a millionaire one dollar would make no difference.
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I offer you that kernel of myself, that I have saved, somehow -- that central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities. >Borges
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In the bureaucratic state authority lives not in persons but in rules.
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"Reification" for Marx was the process by which social relations assume the form of relations between things. For example, in a Capitalist society their is the reification as a result of the alienation of workers from the product of their work.
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a desperate error of intellectual abstraction
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If you want to know the law and nothing else you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict. >Oliver Wendell Holmes
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The ideal condition of philosophical anarchy where the state does not attempt to regulate by legislation but depends upon the beneficence of natural law and the virtue of the sovereign
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The Poles say Grunwald, the Germans Tannenberg
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Wee must be knitt together in this worke as one man, wee must entertaine each other in brother Affeccion, wee must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities, wee must uphold a familiar Commerce together in all weakness, gentleness, patience and liberality, wee must delight in eache other... for we must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us. >John Winthrop on the deck of Arbella to the Puritans 1630
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if by chance I scribe U.S. Politics, Wisdom, Meditation, theories of art, It's because I read a newspaper loved teachers skimmed books or visited a museum >Allen Ginsburg
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a society governed less by rule of conduct than by a rule of taste. >146 Sansom
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we are inclined to think that the more we govern the better we behave, though the truer proposition might be that the better we behave the less we need to be governed.
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little-known lower court judge John Sinca (Spelling?) who kept watergate going
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Defeated by an enemy who wins not by virtue of their strengths but by default. As a result of our weakness.
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Galbraith: "insecurity is something that is cherished only for others." >107
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A common fatal flaw shared by both classical liberals and marxists is that "capitalism would be crippled by efforts to civilize it." >113
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To some: It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought. >160
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The same process which makes the economy large makes large the private demands upon it and makes small what seemingly can be spared for public use. >178
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the liberal program up to the 1930s
1) progressive income tax
2) development of government services
3) protection of public resources from private appropriation
4) extensions of social security
5) aid to farmers or especially disadvantaged groups
6) strengthening of trade unions
7) regulation of corporations
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1936 John Maynard Keynes
In the Keynesian system the notion of an aggregate demand for the output of the economy which determines the total production of the economy was central. Depending on various factors, production might find its equilibrium at a high level or a low one. There was no immutable tendency for it to settle at the particular level where all willing workers had a chance for employment. And by manipulating the level of aggregate demand--the most obvious devices were to add to demand by government spending in excess of taxation, or to subtract from it by taxation in excess of spending--the government could influence the level of production. >188
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In the 30s the liberal program became increased production and reduced unemployment...won votes
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Few ideas are so immutable as the addiction of political groups to ideas by which they have once won office. >192
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The Puritan ethos (save now enjoy later) was not abandoned. It was merely overwhelmed by the massive power of modern merchandising. >200
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"Economics isn't about ethics. As the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once observed: "If people want morality, let them get it from their archbishops."
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The new master narrative--the way we think of our world--has abandoned the social for the economic. >Tony Judt
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In the early years of the French revolution the Marquis de Condorcet was dismayed at the prospect of commercial society that was opening before him the idea "that liberty will be no more, in the eyes of an avid nation, than a necessary condition for the security of financial operations."
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the local peasants expressed their patriotism in much the same way as nations: by denigrating their neighbors and celebrating their own nobility.
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It is at the very heart of Greene's creed of paradoxes that it is the impulse to help or save others that always condemns us, and that "innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men." >The heart of the matter
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What was taken by force must be regained by force. >Palestinian's on the unacceptability of nonviolence
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study actions and their effects. Be weary of those actions for which a reliable effect cannot be determined or predicted.
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look for full context, be weary of partial context
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It is not till it is discovered that high individual incomes will not purchase the mass of mankind immunity from cholera, typhus and ignorance, still less secure them positive advantages of educational opportunity and economic security, that slowly and reluctantly, amid prophecies of moral degeneration and economic disaster, society begins to make collective provision for needs which no ordinary individual, even if he works overtime all his life, can provide himself. >R.H. Tawney
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In one sense all private wants, where the individual can choose, are inherently superior to all public desires which must be paid for by taxation and which are an inevitable component of compulsion. >267 Galbraith
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men of high position are allowed, by a special act of grace, to accommodate their reasoning to the answer they need. Logic is only required in those of lesser rank.
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Why should life be intolerable to make things of small urgency? >288, on the problems of production
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the victim of inflation is the government and the poor.
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The economy is geared to the least urgent set of human wants. It would be far more secure if it were based on the whole range of need. >309
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The original condition of all civilization is that of respect to godhead: "they cannot establish an order without believing in its sanctity. >Eric Voegelin
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"History is a history in the process of revelation"...an open field where the divine and human meet, not a highway without exits. >Voegelin
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a view of democracy centered on: Swaraj (self-rule), in which control of one's inner life and respect for other people create self-aware and engaged rather than passive citizens. A Gandhian idea: "The thesis of this book is the Gandhian claim that the real struggle that democracy must wage is a struggle within the individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality. >Nussbaum in preface to her book on Indian Democracy
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Traditional attitudes towards the natural environment make Indians, like the Japanese, more disposed than Americans to pursue happiness modestly. For democracy to flourish it must learn to cultivate the inner world of human beings, equipping each citizen to contend against the passion for domination and to accept the reality, and the equality, of others. >Nussbaum after Gandhi..."self-abnegation"
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the ethical vision of democracy
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leaving a barricade, one no longer knows what one has seen...Swept up in a battle of ideas endowed with human faces, one's head has been in the light of the future. There were corpses lying down, and phantoms standing up...Hands with blood on them. A horrific, deafening din. An atrocious silence...ONe seems to have touched the sinister perspiration of unknown depths. There is something red under one's finger nails. One remembers nothing. >Victor Hugo, Les Miserables VI8
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In Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge the population in 1975 was about 7 million; within 3 years 1.5 had been executed, starved to death, or died of exhaustion. No other country has lost so great a proportion of its population in a single politically inspired hecatomb brought on by its own leaders.
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law's complexity is largely responsible to variations under circumstances, rather than a device of lawyers to befuddle everyone else. >Kent Greenwalt
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"Life in exile broadens horizons, limits parochialism, further skepticism and impartiality." >David Asheri writing on Herodotus
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"Interest," argued O'Holbach in his Systeme de la Nature, "is nothing but what each of us considers necessary for his happiness." >distilattion of mid 19th Century Utilitarianism
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"There is always a fashionable taste
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There is always a fashionable taste: a taste for driving the mail--a taste for acting Hamlet--a taste for philosophical lectures--a taste for the marvellous-a taste for the simple--a taste for the brilliant--a taste for the sombre--a taste for the tender--a taste for the grim--a taste for banditti--a taste for ghosts--a taste for the devil--a taste for French dancers and Italian singers, and German whiskers and tragedies--a taste for enjoying the country in November and wintering in London till the end of the dogdays--a taste for shoes--a taste for picturesque tours--a taste for taste itself, or for essays on taste. >The Hon Mrs. Pinmoney in T.L. Peacock, Melincourt (1816)
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It is plainly no accident that the revival or birth of national literate cultures in Germany, Urssia, Poland, Hungry, the Scandinavian countries and elsewhere should coincide with--and indeed should often be the first manifestation of--the assertion of the cultural supremacy of the vernacular language and the native people, against a cosmopolitan aristocratic culture often employing a foreign language. Naturally enough, such nationalism found its most obvious cultural expression in literature and music; both public arts, which could, moreover, draw on the powerful creative heritage of the common people--language and folksong. It is equally understandable that the arts traditionally dependent on commissions from the established ruling classes, courts and governments, architecture and sculpture and to a lesser extent painting, reflected these national revivals less. >Hobsbawm
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Of the Romantics: "The wanderer's song is their signature tune, nostalgia their companion."
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The literary monument of 19th century (from 1848) Romantic disillusionment: "Euducation Sentimental"
-
I sit on the shore and wait for the wind" says an old Russian proverb. "What will become of Russia" it has been asked elsewhere.
-
French Revolution: July 14 1789, and then Year II
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American Revolution to signing of Constitution: 1776-1783
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Reading and walking and swimming into lucid depths, powerfully -- that's how I put it. And people impend, but can be shelved for the moment. >Woolf, journals
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"That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don't ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride...
And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words." >William Faulkner "As I Lay Dying"
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I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, t the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and the funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin. >end of the first chapter of Speak, Memory, Vladamir Nabokov
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We...shook hands; I took off my hat and then held it to my chest, we stepped back as one does whe a train is about to start, as if to show that all is over and one is reconciled to it. But the train did not start yet, and we approached each other again; I was glad of that, she asked after my sisters. All of a sudden thet rain slowly began to move, Frau Klug got her handkerchief ready to wave, called that I must write to her, did I have her address? She was already too far off for me to be able to reply in words; I pointed to Lowy from whom I could get her address, good, she nodded quickly to me and to him and waved her handkerchief, I raised my hat, clumsily at first, with more ease the farther away she was. Later I remembered my impression that the train was not really moving away but only going the short distance through the station to act a scene for us and then disappear. When i was half aslep that same evening Frau Klug appeared to me, unnaturally small, almost without legs, wringing her hands with a despairing expression, as if some great misfortune had befallen her. >From Kafka's journal
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Life is become like a movie. Kafka wrote that, thought it on a tram trying hard to read passing notices through the window.
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delinquency is more a product of social rather than individual pathology.
...
It was what happened when a culture excited middle-class aspirations and then maintained barriers--of status, income, education, race--that made these aspirations unattainable for the poor by legitimate means. >410 Schlessinger
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God save us always from the innocent and the good.
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Success will require recognition by the US, Israel, and Palestinians that divisions between Fatah and Hamas are not a prerequisite for a peace deal. They are a debilitating obstacle on the path toward one. >Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, NYRB
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Updike had already been in Venice for 2 weeks, "inspecting Church walls and holy images" (and beginning to grow a little weary of them), when he decided to see what the Biennale had to offer. Tramping from one national pavilion to another, he was confronted by artificial fog, electronic numbers, hundreds of tattoos (from Slovakia), unintelligible whispers and showers of magenta dust (from America), the recorded roar of racing cars, photographs taken by a chimpanzee...you know the kind of thing. The Germans had mounted huge videos of nothing in particular; the French had taken apart the floor of their exhibit hall and were showing fragments of it under a grate, ten feet down. "Everywhere, " in short, "abrasive irony and nihilism"; everywhere a frantic search for "an inch of the void, of disgust, of scorn that hadn't yet been exposed." >John Gross on Updike in "Due Considerations"
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Most famous people are people most people have never heard of. >Garrison Keillor
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Regulated activity is not incompatible with profit.
-
"The Middle class were at last moving from their living rooms to the street, from dinner parties into political parties." >William Dalrymple --- A New Deal in Pakistan
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"I have heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing any man's opinion. Mr. Lincoln's eloquence was of another type, which produced conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself." >Horace White
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an eloquent tower of logic
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"With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statues or pronounces decisions." >Lincoln
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"He is blowing out the moral lights around us." >Lincoln on Douglas borrowing from Henry Clay
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"He sees all who go there, hears all they have to say, talks freely with everybody, reads whatever is written to him; but thinks and acts by himself." >Weed on Lincoln-elect in Springfield
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"The South has eyes but does not see, and ears but does not hear."
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"That dear old domestic bird, the Public, was sure she had brooded out an eagle-chick at last." >on the arrival of George McClelan
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"We cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation." >Lincoln
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"I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the very sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens." >Lincoln/ 523
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"He who fights the battles of America may claim America as his country--and have that claim respected." >Douglas on why a black man should enlist.
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"The bare sight of 50,000 armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Missippi, would end the rebellion at once." >Lincoln, 549
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felicity of thought trumps felicity of speech
-
"He can snake a sophism out of its hole, better than all the trained logicians of all schools." >555
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"It was by ignoring men, and ignoring all small causes, but by closely calculating the tendencies of events and great farces which were producing logical results." >572
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"Lincoln (is) the most truly progressive man of the age, because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles." >John Forney in the Washington Daily Chronicle
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I would rather be dead than live in dread. We must come to all without fear. >Lincoln
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"love one another." >Seward advice on his deathbed to his daughter in-law
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Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding. The poor man has always a precise view of his problem and its remedy: he hasn't enough and he needs more. The rich man can assume or imagine a much greater variety of ills and will be correspondingly less certain of their remedy. Also, until he learns to live with his wealth, he will have a well-observed tendency to put it to the wrong purposes or otherwise to make himself foolish. As with individuals, so with nations. >Galbraith
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illusion is a comprehensive ill
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"The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events." (ie voters decide)
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They call it the "American War" (in Vietnam)
-
A university student in Vietnam says her generation is "interested in doing business, not politics" and does not have much respect for those in power.
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Jules Ferry ... "colonial policy is the daughter of industrial policy."
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"The figure of justice has had such a rough voyage from France to Indochina that she has lost everything but her sword. >Ho Chi Minh
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Ho Chi Minh 1946 on a concession to France "Better to sniff a bit of French shit briefly than eat Chinese shit for the rest of our lives."
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"I want to rail against the wind and the tide, kill the whales in the sea, sweep the whole country to save the people from slavery, and I reuse to be abused." Vietnamese Joan of Arc Trieu An who led a revolt that failed in 248 AD
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1946--battle of Hanoi
"A pattern was emerging that was repeated by France and later the United States: negotiations with the Communists could only be pursued if first the Communists capitulated. "
-
Dean Acheson, Under Secretary of State had supported America's intervention in WWII
-
late 1947 US launches Marshall plan, contrived to curb soviet inroads in Europe
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George Kennan laid out his containment policy in an essay published anonymously in Foreign Affairs entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct."
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The troops will march in, the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It's like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another. >Kennedy to Schlesigner
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The US information service tabulated the incoming returns of the 1960 election in the window of its Saigon library in an effort to publicize democracy in action. American officials were ecstatic at the turnout--until they learned that the crowd of Vietnamese had assembled solely to lay bets on the numbers appearing on the scoreboard. >255
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CIA's department of dirty tricks
-
why they stay in service though they may not agree with policy: "I figured that I could do better by remaining on the inside. Had I quit, the story would have made the front page of the NYT next day--and then I would have been promptly forgotten." >Ball against Viet war 404
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a postwar mission from State determined bombing of Germany during WWII barely dented the German Industry
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George Ball responding to those who said American prestige was on the line: "What we might gain by establishing the steadfastness of our commitments, we could lose by an erosion of confidence in our judgments. >405
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"It is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but its continual increase, which occasions a rise in the wages of labor..." >Adam Smith, via Galbraith 26
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"The traders or producers, who find that a rival is offering goods at a lower price than will yield them a good profit, are angered at his intrusion, and complain of being wronged, even though it may be true that those who buy the cheaper goods are in greater need than themselves, and that the energy and resourcefulness of their rival is a social gain." >Marshall..."Principles of Economics"
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Ricardo: income distribution... there is a ceiling to wages-- laborers will always hover around starvation.
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Malthus: increased food supply will be met by expanding populations that will consume the surplus
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We are told it is normal these ups an downs, booms and busts. Natural fluctuations of the market: leads us to an interested observation, about what lies beneath a vaneer of American optimism: "Behind the facade of hope and optimism there remained the haunting fear of poverty, inequality, and insecurity. Partly latent, partly in the suppressed background of conviction, these doubts could easily be aroused by such an occurrence as the Great Depression. >Galbraith, 47
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Herbert Spencer: 1820-1903...top social Darwinist..gave us the phrase "survival of the fittest"...to seek to mitigate misery was to put in abeyance the fundamental arrangements by which nature insured progress.
-
Though Spencer was an Englishman, Social Darwinism had much of its greatest success in the United States.
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[In America] Here, if anywhere, the ordinary man had a chance. Perhaps he did, but he also had to face that all economic life was a natural struggle. He might win but he also might lose, and for him to accept the full consequences of loss--hunger, privation, and death--was a social necessity. >62
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Poverty and insecurity thus became inherent in the economic life of even the most favored country. So of course did inequality, and this was firmly sanctified by the fact that those who enjoyed it were better.
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Karl Marx 1818-1883 ... a man of passion and Jovian wrath--"The Ricardian conclusions--the inevitable impoverishment of the masses, the progressive enrichment of those who own the natural means of production, the inevitable conflict between wages and profits and the priority of the latter for progress--could become, in the hands of an angry man, a call to revolution. >64
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Marx's materialistic conception of history: Even where there was some other ostensible cause--love, honor, patriotism, or religion--a more penetrating or cynical view could be expected to discern some economic motive. ... It is something the modern business man accepts as a matter of course.
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Depend on it, when a man knows he is going to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. > Dr. Johnson
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Conservatives argue egalitarian systems prevent capital formation. "But Norway, an even more egalitarian country, has had since the war one of the highest rates of capital formation and of economic growth of any country in the non-communist world. Middle Eastern countries, where inequality is greatest, are among those with the lowest rate of capital formation. All or most gets spent. >81
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In 1194 the crusading knight Henry of Champagne, paid a visit to the headquarters of the Assassins at the castle of al-Kahf on a rugged peak in the Nosairi Mountains. The Assassins, though a fanatical Moslem sect, had, in general, been on good terms with the Christians, to whom they often rendered, by arrangement, the useful service of resolving disputes by eliminating one of the disputants. Henry was sumptuously received. IN on of the most impressive entertainments a succession of the loyal members of the cult, at a word from the sheik, expertly immolated themselves. >89
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The development of modern business enterprise can be understood only as a comprehensive effort to reduce risk. >101

Notebook Transcription 62
May 10, 2008

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The abdicated emperor whispered three times in the ear of his sister's new infant. "Heaven your father, Earth your mother. Take these ninety-nine pieces (coins) as a sign of long life."
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The bell was ringing for the dawn watch
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Change is my theme.
You gods, whose power has wrought
All transformations, aid the poet's thought,
And make my song's unbroken sequence flow
From earth's beginnings to the days we know.
>Ovid
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King Themus rejects the offer of literacy from God Theuth:
"What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder." And "it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance. For by telling them many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows." >Ferris 13
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Things are as they are because they were as they were.
>Physicist Thomas Gold
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"The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance." >Lewis Thomas
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Karl Popper: our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance is infinite. This is the ultimate source of ignorance.
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all metaphors are imperfect said Robert Frost. That is their beauty.
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"Nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse." >Sophocles
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"Big Government is not foisted on us by politicians. It has grown upon us because certain things have to be done which no one but the government can do." >Joseph Kennedy
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There was an ancient practice of carrying a burning, smoking biazien? at the head of an army or caravan to indicate the line of march by day and night. ...in Exodus x320 it is the lord, accompanying the people.
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After the Lord drowned Pharaoh's army the Israelites look back on the sea: "Thus the Lord delivered Israel that day from the Egyptians. Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the shore of the sea. And when Israel saw the wondrous power which the Lord had wielded against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord. They had faith in the Lord and His servant Moses."
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All earth is mine, but you shall be to me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. > Exodus 19-5.6
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He restricts his vision in order to see more; he limits his world in order to transcend these limitations. >Richie on Ozu
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His Cinema is formal and the formality is that of poetry, the creation of an ordered context that destroys habit and familiarity, returning to each word, to each image, its original freshness and urgency. >111
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"I always tell people that I don't make anything besides tofu and that is because I am strictly a tofu dealer." > Ozu
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Behind every great fortune there is a crime. >Balzac
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"The young secretaries were encouraged to interest themselves in the life of the people among whom they lived. It was even thought rather priggish to attend the Chancery in the afternoon. You were supposed to go to parties and meet your friends or take up the study of some aspects of society -- the theater, the arts, travel, or whatever interested you most. There was plenty of time. The bag left once a month for the foreign office, and there was no point in hurrying to write dispatches until just before sailing time, when you could give the very latest news." >Sir G.S.
-
It goes rather slowly, as I will not allow myself to use existing works in English, and have to go to the Japanese sources, which are voluminous and confused, so that a little fact takes a long time to establish.
>Sir George and Japan 38
-
It is really a pity that he will only have one life to perform in.
-
The poem hung by G. Sansom above his study desk:
Business men boast of their skills and cunning
But in philosophy they are like little children.
Bragging to each other of successful depredations
They neglect to consider the ultimate fate of the body.
What should they know of the Master of Dark Truth
Who saw the wide world in a Jade cup,
By illumined conception got clean of Heaven and earth:
On the chariot of mutual ... [ripped page]
-
In retrospect, it was a very strange war. > Atsushi Moriyama, lecturer at U. of Shizouka
-
Sansom speaking to pilgrims NY Nov. NY 1935: "Diplomacy, of course, has its important and essential functions; but it cannot move faster than national sentiment. And if collective security is to succeed it must be based on what I may call collective understanding."
-
Here we are in the orient, where passionate events occur but the fundamentals seem to remain unchanged.
-
American policy, all over the place in partial enthusiasms.
-
distress, as a lover watching his mistress losing her mind. >Sansom on the downward spiral, 1938
-
he wants to understand things, not merely pontificate.
-
Hobbes wrote of the greatest impediment to good governance as "the frequency of insignificant speech."
-
mono no aware
-
"He wears his clothes well" MacArthur on Hirohito.
-
Wabi: the aesthetic sameness, simplicity but complete depth of Ozu and others. Thus: "Breaking a plum branch, I put it in an earthen jar. / Although the blossoms are not yet open, / the soul of spring hovers unseen." > 1495 Hekizan Hichiroku
-
Picture on Ozaki it is only trough the ordinary that the spiritual can be revealed.
-
Traditions itself cannot constitute a force. It always has a decadent tendency to promote formalization and repetition. What is needed to direct it into creative channels is a fresh energy that repudiates dead forms and prevents living ones from becoming static. It on sense, for a tradition to live it must constantly be destroyed. At the same time, destruction by itself clearly cannot create new cultural forms. There must be some other force which restrains destructive energy and prevents it from reducing all about it to havoc. The dialectical synthesis of tradition and anti-tradition is the structure of true creativeness. >Architect Kenzo Tange
-
Don't you people realize that if you were to get into a war with Russia and you should be in any way successful and should advance into that country, you would never find a place to stop? The further you went in, the weaker you would become, and nobody would surrender to you. >Bismark
-
"Behold how tragedy comes about. When chance events befall fools." >Stoic view, Epictetus
-
We are reminded of Sophocles' description of Philoctetes, with his small sunless cave, his rudimentary ..p, the disfiguring wound that revolted all normal citizens.
-
The constitution stands between human beings and unfettered expediency, to the extent that the interests protected in the 14th Amendment are valued so highly that they are protected against expediency arguments as a matter of constitutional principle. >104 Poetic Justice.
-
"the asymmetry of positions must be considered." >Posner
-
Can there be lasting, true, justice without understanding?
-
The judge's imagination and scope thereof is tied to strict institutional constraints.
-
I am he, attesting sympathy. >Walt Whitman
-
To the poets and teachers:
"Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America? / Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men? / ... Have you considered the organic compact of the first day of the first year of independence, signed by the commissioners, ratified by the states, and read by Washington at the head of the army? Have you possess'd yourself o the Fedearl Constitution? / Have you sped through fleeting customs, popularities? / Can you hold your hand against all seductions, follies, whirls, fierce contentions? Are you very strong? Are you really of the whole people? / Are you not of some coterie? Some school or mere religion? / Do you hold the like love for those hardening to maturity? for the last-born? little and big? and for the errant? > W.W.
-
Of Edmund Wilson and later Malcolm Gladwell: "He gives ideas the quality of action."

end 62

Notebook Transcription 63
May 15, 2008

-
The most dangerous power of the the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he things he should get, rather than pikc cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a far chance of pinning at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost everyone...It is in this realm--in which the prosecutor picks some person he dislikes or desires to be embarrassed, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. >AJ Robert H Jackson in Bobby and his Times 383
-
known criminals, unknown crimes
-
The presidency is the center of American energy
-
Burke Marshall(!)L.
-
Burke and the crisis of Federalism in dealing w/ civil rights abuses by state justice systems 305-306
-
amicus curiae
-
Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of al classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth. Tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. >G.K. Chesterton
-
Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta">
Friar Barnardine: Though hast committed...
Barabas: Fornication; but that was in another country. And besides, the wench is dead.
-
"An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered." >Chesterton
-
"If thou gaze too long into the abyss the abyss will gaze into thee." Nietzche
-
There are three things which are real: God, human folly and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension. So we must do what we can with the third. >Ramayana
-
"The search for conspiracy only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country...It obscures our necessary understanding, all of us, that in this life there is often tragedy without reason." >Anthony Lewis on JFK's assassination
-
All things are to be examined and called into question--there are no limits set to thought. >RFK notes on yellow sheet after assassination
-
"Having done what men could, they did what men must." >Thucydides on the Greeks that died in Syracuses' mines
-
"men are not made for safe heavens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life...to the heroic, desperate odds fling a challenge." >618
-
"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God." >Aeschylus in the Agamemnon
-
"The long days store up many things nearer to grief than joy.../Death at the last, the deliverer./ Not to be born is past all prizing best/ Next best by far when one has seen the light/ Is to go thither swiftly whence he came." >Oedipus Tyrannus
-
Greek: "What a pity it had to be this way."
Catholic: "What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise."
The tragedy of necessity rather than the tragedy of possibility.
-
when he shall die
take him out and cut him out in little stars
and he will make the face of heaven so fine
that all the world will be in love with night,
and pay no worship to the garish sun.
> Romeo and Juliet
-
"Statement that we will not deal with assassins or murderers make it difficult for the other side to believe that they are being asked to come to the negotiating table for anything other than to surrender." >RFK 738 on Vietnam and US attitude towards talks
-
"I thought I could make him more like me, but I've found in the last several months that I am becoming more like him; so I got out." >Myers on LBJ
-
those that cling to the present, which is always dying ...for the illusion of security
-
"like a meteor, Mr. Kennedy has flashed across the South African sky, and has gone...South Africa remains has it was." >749
-
RFK's questions
1. What do you want?
2. How can I help?
-
"When you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try and reconcile yourself with the world...Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself i you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age." >Emerson, Essays 801
-
No one understood practical politics better, "yet the imagining heart was always in the hills, leading some guerrilla army, without speeches or contaminating compromise, fighting to translate the utmost purity of intention into the power to change a nation or the world." >Richard M Goodwin on RFK 802
-
"originalists have nothing to trade.' We can't do horse-trading. Our view is what it is, and we write our dissents." >Scalia and his dogmatism ....others: a living constitution
-
"an elegant young rough-neck" >Gatsby
-
"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please--you can never have both." >Emerson's Commonplace Book
-
Is night only your torchlight wards gone black,
White wake on wave,
Pyre set for the fire that fell.
>Robert Lowell on Kennedy
-
a deafening silence
-
legal originalism Scalia - Bork
-
"Jurisprudence of original intention." -- the words of the constitution mean only what the founders thought they meant at the time of writing. "The framers' intentions with respect to freedoms are the sole legitimate premise from which constitutional analysis may proceed." >Bork
-
Great advocate of originalism: William Brennan

Why do I do this? Well, I have a terrible memory. I recall that I completed my first notebook in Perugia some years ago. But what was the reason? To discover my original intentions I might do a word search through my master list, where I paste all of these transcriptions once they are complete, in search of that passage I vaguely remember reading, or writing myself, that has something to do with the need to remember, the fervent desire to remember; to not forget. I type in "memory" and come up with the following:

It is the season of rain, and sudden days of sun that appear one morning like a torch lit in a dark room. A season of cold breezes and the smell of flowers and earth, when the shadows of the branches of a tree flutter in the air, knitting their intricate shapes on stone. A season of time and all its weight, when we rise from each our own burden and consider the passage. A season of weight and the rush of trees, and a slanting light that cuts low across the flanks of a valley, casting its light on one side of everything. A season of memory, of friends and lovers, and fallen leaves that lie on a wooden porch and brown and crisp in the sun.

Did I write this? I can't remember. I think so, but can't be sure. At times I am sloppy and forget to write down authors and page numbers. I'll claim it as mine for now and say that it is the reason I do this.

Note (2): I do not proofread these transcriptions carefully. I am sure there are errors everywhere. But I don't think that is the point. Doing them has been, and I hope will remain, the point. Also, formatting may not come through, which is especially a problem with poetry and dialogue.

Notebook Transcription 61
May 8, 2008

-
From "The Undertaking"
I'd rather it be February, the month I first became a father in, the month my father died. I want it cold. I want a mess made in te snow so that the earth looks wounded, forced open, an unwilling participant. Forgo the tent, stand openly to the weather. Get the larger equipment out of sight. it's a distraction. But have the sextant, all dirt and indifference, remain at hand. Go to the hole in the ground, stand over it, look into it, wonder, and be cold. But stand until it's over. Until it's done. >Thomas Lynch
-
"We stopped before every stove. Asher the diaryman was still living. His beard had turned gray. This man who rode each day to the tram depot to fetch cans of mil was a charitable person, my father's good friend. When we left Warsaw, my father owed him twenty-five rubles. Father went to say goodbye to him and to apologize for his debt, but Asher took fifty German marks from his purse and gave them to father. >Isaac Bashevis Singer "Shosha"
-
"Whenever I expect life to remain status quo, something unexpected pops up. World history is made of the same dough as bagels. It must be fresh. This is why democracy and capitalism are going down the drain. They have become stale. This is the reason idolatry was so exciting. You could buy a new god every year. We Jews burdened the nations with an eternal God, and therefore they hate us. Gibbon tried so hard to find the reason for the fall of the Roman empire. It fell only because it was old. I hear there is a passion for newness in the sky also. A star gets tired of being a star and it explodes and becomes a nova. The Milky Way got weary of its sour mil and began to run the devil knows where. Does she have a job? I mean your financee, not the milky way?
"She has no job and cannot have one," I said.
"Is she sick?"
"Yes, sick."
"When the body gets tired of being healthy it becomes sick. When it gets tired of living, it dies. When it has enough of being dead, it reincarnates into a frog or a windmill. The coffee here is the best in the whole of Warsaw. May I order another glass, Miss Slonim?"
"Ten glasses, but please don't call me Miss Slonim -- my name is Betty."
"I drink to much coffee and I smoke too many cigars. How is it possible that one never gets tired of tobacco and coffee? This is really a riddle." >Singer "Shosha" 137
-
We Jews keep on wishing ourselves eternal life, or at least immortality of the soul. In fact, eternal life would be a calamity. Imagine some little storekeeper dying and his soul flying around for millions of years still remembering that once it sold chicory, yeast and beans, and that a customer owes it eighteen groschen. Or the soul of an author ten millions years later resenting a bad review he got.
-
My bed was in the Cheder room where the children studied by day. The two windows had shutters and they must have faced east, because the sun shone through them in the mornings. What I am speaking of now has no connection with the so-called occult but with a feeling that everything is full of mysteries. I recall once I woke quite early -- my parents, brother, and sister were still asleep. The rising sun shone through the cracks in the shutters, and columns of dust rose from sunbeams. I remember that morning with remarkable clarity. Obviously, I was too young to think in the context of words, but I wondered "what is all this?" "Where does it all come from?" Other children no doubt go through the same thing, but on that morning my feeling was unusually strong, and I knew instinctively that I shouldn't ask about this and that my parents couldn't supply any answers. our ceiling had beams, and a web of sun and shadow played across it. I realized that I myself and and what I was seeing--the walls, the floors, the pillow on which I rested my head--were all one. In later years I read about cosmic consciousness, monism, pantheism, but I never experienced it with such impact. More, it provided me with a reare pleasure. I had merged with eternity and relished it. At times I think it was like the state of passing over from life to what we call death. We may experience it in the final moments or perhaps immediately after. I say this because no matter how many dead people I have seen in my life, they have had the same expression on their faces: "Ah, so that's what it is! What a shame I can't tell the others about it!" Even a dead bird or mouse presents this expression, though not as distinctly as man" > Shosha, 145
-
In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead.... I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England.... This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze. >Edmund Burke, speech to parliament about the soon to be rebellious colonies
-
A permanent revolution is about as possible as permanent surgery
-
History is a book man can read only forward. He cannot turn the pages backward, but everything that had ever been still existed.
-
"like you I must play my game until the last minute."
This the baker's daughter who stood on Krochmalna street with a basket of warm bagels.
-
Come to me, my sweetheart
Parting the bamboo blinds!
Should my mother ask me
I'll say 'twas but a gust of wind
>from collection of ancient Japanese poetry "Manyoshu" from earliest times to 760.
-
This mortal life is brief of span. Let me seek the Way, contemplating the pure hills and streams. > Manyoshu
-
The Japanese aesthetic inclination: "anima naturaliter poetica"
-
Olives
Sometimes the taste of these strong olives curved slowly in oil,
with cloves of garlic,
bay leaves and chilies and lemon and salt,
conjures a whiff of a bygone age: rocky crannies,
goats, shade and the sound of pipes,
the tune of the breath of primeval times.
The chill of a cave, a hidden cottage in a vineyard,
a lodge in a garden, a slice of barley bread and well water.
You are from there. You have lost your way.
There is exile, Your death will come, and lay a knowing hand on your shoulder.
Come, it's time to go.
>Amos Oz
-
Here he has made a list of words: in the word woods there is a vague dread. In the word hills is a world of lust. If you say shack, or wayfarer, rain, compassion, at once he lights up like a miser who has sniffed a rumor of gold. Or if, for instance, the evening paper prints the phrase "New Horizons", at once I am on my way to bathe twice in the same river.
>Oz, "Same Sea" 54
-
Naked I come forth from my mother's womb and naked I shall return thither. >Job
-
Dita and I went together to the old cemetery in a kibbutz called Ayyelet Hashahar, where you can sometimes hear a short sound that promises you tonight whatever you wan on condition that you don't look back. >Amos Oz, 134 Same Sea
-
The sky is dark and empty. A mist flows through a mist. >Oz 189
-
"The institutions that used to aggregate citizen values have declined."
-
It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. >Atonement
-
The Japanese system of mutual obligation
-
"How can you win if you have prepared to escape?"
-
If you think of saving your own life you had better not go to war at all. >Yoshitsune
-
One locus of Japanese concern for effect of actions on future generations is the Buddhist doctrine of Karma "Inga" in Japanese
-
"even at the cost of your life and your family, holding to the good, not yielding to the strong...this deep faith is what makes the warrior." >367
-
It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can't be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it. >"No Country" 64 Cormac McCarthy
-
Poetic Justice: a principled defense of a humanistic and multivalued conception of public rationality that is powerfully exemplified in the common law tradition. ie PUBLIC REASONING
-
Political economy/education for public rationality
"wherever the public imagination is shaped"
-
Aristotle's view is that literary art is "more philosophical" than history because history shows us what happened, whereas literary art shows us things "such as might happen"
-
"For any view you put forward the next question simply has to be 'what would the world be like if this idea were actually taken up." >Nussbaum
-
"Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter."
-
The "bully of humility" name is Bounderby Bounderby
-
We invest our lives with an interlacing patter of "complex significances."
-
Bentham's central posit of classical utilitarianism is as follows: "each person is to count as one and none as more than one."
-

I was inspired by the now silent blog Crescat Sententia to start this list...

Books Read 2008

Shosha -- Issac Bashives Singer
The Nine -- Jeffrey Toobin
A History of Japan 1334-1615 -- George Sansom
Sir George Sansom and Modern Japan: A memoir -- Katharine Sansom
No Country for Old Men -- Cormac McCarthy
Blink -- Malcolm Gladwell
The Tipping Point -- Malcolm Gladwell
Atonement -- Ian McEwan
On Chesil Beach -- Ian McEwan
Poetic Justice -- Martha Nussbaum
In Defense of Food -- Michael Pollen
Coming of Age in the Milky Way -- Timothy Ferris
Robert Kennedy and His Times -- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Beloved -- Toni Morrison
The Same Sea -- Amos Oz
A History of Japan 1615-1867 -- George Sansom
Team of Rivals -- Doris Kearns Goodwin
Vietnam, A History -- Stanely Karnow

to be continued...

Shocking as those numbers should be, they provide little insight into the heart of the issue. What is a refugee exactly? What does it mean to live as a refugee? What of the pain and sadness, the hopes and dreams of these many millions of human beings?

In the hopes of addressing some of those questions for Japanese audiences, the UNHCR launched the second annual Refugee Film Festival at venues throughout Tokyo on July 18. "The idea is to bring the humanity and experiences of people who are forced to leave their homes to life for audiences," says the event's founder and current head Kirill Konin. "How many people are touched when they hear on the news that another 100,000 people from Sudan crossed the border to Chad? Films on the other hand really touch and change people's hearts."

The former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata, who headed the UNHCR from 1991 to 2000, is in frequent attendance at film screenings and has praised the RFF's attempt to present refugees as human beings who have all the rights to live with dignity, rather than as mere reports of misery.

The festival features 30 films from across the globe that are all directly or indirectly related to refugee issues. They range from relatively big-budget studio productions like this year's closing film, "Shooting Dogs," about the Rwandan genocide to rough-cut amateur productions made by first-time filmmakers like "Invisible Children," shot and directed by three college students from the United States who went to southern Sudan, and then Uganda, in search of adventure, only to be confronted and deeply changed by the misery but strange hopefulness of Sudanese and Ugandan refugees, and child soldiers.

Konin first conceived of the festival while he was based at the U.N. offices in Cambodia documenting internally displaced persons. He has spent the last decade working on refugee issues in nongovernmental organizations including Amnesty International and the United Nations, and in Phnom Penh with several colleagues and support from the French Embassy he launched the first Refugee Film Festival in 2005.

Officials at the UNHCR in Tokyo were greatly impressed with the program and invited Konin to Japan to run the event from here.

Last summer, the festival drew an estimated audience of over 2,500 to see 18 films screened throughout Tokyo. This year the program has grown to 30 films, and though the U.N. still covers well over 50 percent of its operating budget, it counts several major corporations among its sponsors as well as the Italian, German, French and Swedish cultural institutions in Tokyo.

Among the highlights of the current program are a selection of short films made by Sudanese refugees from Kenya, a retrospective tribute to Cambodian filmmaker and former refugee Rithy Panh, and a documentary by an American director that tells the story of Chinue Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat based in Lithuania during World War II, who at great personal risk helped thousands of Jews to flee Europe by illegally issuing Japanese transit visas. Though long recognized by Lithuania as a wartime hero, Sugihara has only recently received posthumous official commendation for his deeds from the Japanese government, which had long looked askance at his breaches of protocol.

Also of note is the highly acclaimed "Iraq in Fragments," the winner of several documentary film awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival, which will have its Japanese premiere at the festival, as will four other feature films.

Given Japan's well-known unwillingness to welcome refugees seeking political asylum, despite the fact that it is the third largest donor to the UNHCR behind the United States and the European Union, this would seem to be a rather unlikely place to find the world's largest film festival devoted to refugees. But for Konin that seems to be precisely the point.

"Will the festival change Japan's policy toward asylum seekers?," he asks. "I don't know. Will it raise awareness of what is an enormous and fast-growing problem? I certainly hope so. We see film as a wonderful platform to tell stories, and we see refugees as having many stories that are in terrible need of telling. Refugee stories are not just stories of despair and suffering, but stories of hope in spite of losing home and family. The films we show at our festival have the power to encourage us all."

--end--

Link: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ff20070720i1.html

Instead, I will draw your attention to a single moment of transformation, experienced on the 52nd floor of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower on a particularly fine fall day of the sort we have often in Tokyo, when the misty veil of summer lifts all the way up, revealing a gargantuan, pensive city, home to millions, the product of untold and invisible busy bees bent on building and building and building their nest.

As I gazed out from behind a bank of enormous windows, for the first time in the two years since I had arrived in Tokyo I felt that I had left the jumbled Escheresque city below where outside is inside and geography in the traditional north, south, east, west sense has ceased to exist, replaced by destinations and departure points scattered across a universe of flesh, glass, stone and steel.

There on high, Tokyo as Tokyo revealed itself at last: a point, albeit an extraordinarily large point, on the globe. One place, among many. In a suddenly pensive mood I considered the green mountains of Takao [3] and Shizuoka, whose names I did not yet know, that rise like sentinels to the west, with distant snow-capped Fuji looming on its purple throne beyond. I took in the sweeping scope of the Kanto plain that stretches out to the north, the fertile ground of modern Japan’s growth. And to the east the languid bay, far closer than I had ever imagined from the confines of my cubby-hole Shibuya apartment, with Chiba’s Boso Peninsula further on, high above which jumbo jets flashed like distant panes of glass in the last rays of the setting sun, bound, or so I imagined, for Calcutta, New york, Toronto, Paris, Lisbon, Sao Paolo and Honolulu.

A handful of years on I often find myself thinking of that day. Go up, I tell myself whenever I begin to forget. Remember where you are in this massive, strange, lovely place among places. A city among cities. This point in space.

Link: http://hitotoki.org/tokyo/011

If there's a reason for the itinerancy of this vigorously mustachioed Ukrainian-born frontman, perhaps it is because his musical vision is inspired by the kind of music that exists in its own permanent artistic exile. He and his band travel far and wide, much like the Gypsy and Jewish communities whose striking melodies and rhythms serve as Hutz's guiding light, adopting local ideas and sounds, changing them, and -- through heavy and not necessarily kosher use -- making them their own.

Hutz calls it a "folkloric way of making music"; the result is a kind of visceral, aural embodiment of human diversity, poetry and desire. And it is turning heads.

"I have always taken things from everywhere, whatever I like, and made it my own," Hutz says on the phone on tour in London. "I think that is the key to really making anything artistically. For me, enjoying just one kind of music is like drinking one kind of drink. We're all yearning for variety, for spiritual, emotional, intellectual variety. And that is what this music is all about. It's about processing giant amounts of information from all over the world, making it our own."

Nonetheless, the group's four records to date (a fifth is due out this summer) and notoriously hyperactive live sets leave little doubt that the sources of inspiration closest to the group's heart are the genres of Gypsy folk, punk and dub -- what Hutz has called "the three legs that Gogol walks on." The result is a kinetic, fiercely up-tempo, rhythm-heavy sound with Gypsy and klezmer melodies picked out by an aggressively bowed fiddle above the frenetic um-pa-pas of the brass, drums and accordion. Saying much more would be like trying to articulate a system of spacial relations between splatters in a Jackson Pollock drip painting.

"I don't make music for logical reasons," Hutz says. "It is all quite instinctual. But I guess you also fill up the gap of stuff that you lack, that you don't see anywhere else. And that is what I was feeling when I arrived in the United States and first started connecting with people who I could maybe work with. If there had been people doing it, I wouldn't be doing it. I had been waiting for people to do something like this for 10 years, and finally I just said, 'What the hell, I'm going to do it.' "

Born in Ukraine in 1972, Hutz boasts varying degrees of Ukrainian, Romanian, and Gypsy ancestry. In 1986, Hutz was forced to flee with his family from his home in northern Ukraine in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. He spent much of the late '80s trolling through Kiev's burgeoning underground rock scene where he first began to play in different bands, playing an unclassifiable melange of rock, punk, reggae, dub, roots, klezmer and the free-wielding Gypsy folk music that he first heard as a child visiting family in the Roma communities of the Carpathian mountains.

After seeing the New York noise-punk band Sonic Youth bring down the house in Kiev in 1988, Hutz made a promise to himself that he was going to "whatever universe they came from." Following a circuitous path that took him through Poland, Hungary, Austria, Italy and Vermont, he got to New York -- a city Hutz describes as multicultural "psychosis" -- by the mid-'90s. There, he banged around the punk scene, making waves with the earliest versions of what would become Gogol Bordello, and playing music he creatively billed "Eastern European Ethno-punk Metal."

Along the way, Hutz gained a reputation for sparking the most ecstatic, and drunkest, parties during his DJ sessions on Thursday nights at Manhattan's Bulgarian Bar (also known as Mehanata). Almost a decade later, Gogol Bordello still seems unable to miss a beat.

Some of the more recent buzz surrounding the band might have something to do with Hutz's appearance opposite Elijah Wood in Liev Schreiber's critically acclaimed 2005 film "Everything is Illuminated," which also featured on its soundtrack music by Gogol Bordello, among others.

None of this success seems to surprise Hutz all that much. "The music is the backbone of everything, and if people didn't respond to it, nobody would care," he says. "Of course, the band has a certain career and trajectory, but it is an energy, a way of life, a thing in itself. Really this isn't about charts. There are always going to be people who want to see us. They have been there for years. And in that way we are a consistent band, like all my heroes, like Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Manu Chao. For me it is kind of funny to hear people say, 'Oh you're really hot right now.' I'm like, 'What are you talking about? We have been hot for years, and it is going to stay like that.' "

Gogol Bordello and Flogging Molly play April 12 at Osaka Big Cat (7 p.m); 13 at Nagoya Club Quattro (7 p.m.) and 16 at Shibuya Ax. All shows start at 7 p.m. and cost 6,000 yen. For more information, visit smash-jpn.com

The Japan Times
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Among the less well-known punitive measures implemented by Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the American GHQ from their roost in the Daiichi Seimei Building in Marunouchi was a complete ban on Japanese civil, and of course military, aviation, as well as airplane research, development and manufacturing of any kind.

Though it was just one of a long list of humiliating prohibitions that was part and parcel of Japan's complete and unconditional surrender, the aviation ban must have been particularly painful.

Only a few years before, already legendary Japanese Zeros were the terror of the Pacific, leading the young and proud soldiers of the Imperial Army to victories far and wide. The iconic Hinomaru national flag itself was a symbol of a nation in flight, in the process of rising to a high point that for a time seemed to have no limit.

In the end, the domestic Japanese aircraft industry never really recovered from the effects of the ban and today the vast majority of commercial and military aircraft operating in this country's busy skies are made by North American and European companies (though many parts used in Boeing airplanes are supplied by Japanese firms like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries).

Some even go so far as to credit the current dominance of Japanese automobile makers to the fact that the engineering skills and sprit of innovation that once made Japan's aerospace industry one of the most impressive in the world after the war quickly and permanently migrated to the unrestrained automobile sector.

While the ban seems to have curbed the growth of potential homegrown civil aerospace companies in fundamental ways, it could do nothing to hinder the enthusiasm individual Japanese had for flight itself, as evidenced by a quick proliferation of flying schools and clubs in the immediate post-Occupation period, and of course the development of a thriving domestic and international civil-aviation market.

But long before jumbo jets filled to the brim with pensioners were taking off from Japanese cities bound for distant ports of call, the first return of Japanese citizens to the skies over their own country came in humble fashion on May 7, 1952, when the Japan Soaring Club (JSC), the country's first postwar aviation organization of any kind, conducted a brief glider flight that failed to climb above 10 meters at the Tamagawa Speedway. Four days later they would do it again, a little higher, a little longer and in front of a crowd of over 20,000 spectators that had gathered in Tamagawa for the occasion.

Since 1961 the JSC has been conducting flights from their glider port in Itakura, Gunma Prefecture, making it the longest continuously operating aviation organization in Japanese history.

Located about 90-km north of Tokyo, the Itakura glider port consists of a long grass runway, a mobile command and communications post built into the back of an old service truck, a large hanger and a clubhouse housing the JSC's impressive stash of aviation memorabilia.

Each weekend and on many holidays dozens of sleek gliders are pulled onto the field by some of the club's 150 members, who come from all walks -- students, lawyers, cooks, engineers, commercial airline pilots, businessmen and women -- and all are brought together by a shared passion for flight. Most members own or co-own an aircraft, but the club maintains several of its own, including three two-seater gliders that are used for training purposes.

The club offers instruction courses in glider flying to interested beginners or those hoping to earn their flight certification, as well as one-time flights for visitors for 11,500 yen, which includes a fuel surcharge for reaching a release altitude of 600 meters.

The JSC operates a small single-prop airplane, which tows the gliders to a release point as high as 1,800 meters. After detaching from the tow, many pilots will keep their aircraft aloft for hours afterward, gently riding the currents that race high above the Kanto Plain.

Peak season for flying is from February to June when the cool and steady northern currents from Siberia create ideal conditions for cross-country soaring, but thanks to the mild climate of the area flights are operated all year-round.

For visitors who arrive here to strap themselves into the nose of one of the club's two-seat training gliders, with a certified pilot (speaking English if you require it) at the helm behind, the experience of soaring 600 meters above Gunma's rice fields with a view of Tokyo Bay (weather permitting) glittering in the distance is unspeakably cool.

Gliding is to flight as sailing is to sea travel. Reaching the designated release altitude and pulling the lever that detaches the cable connecting your glider to the tow-plane is akin to the moment on a sailboat when, with his sails out, the captain cuts the engine and the vessel seems to fall for a moment, before gently rebounding, rising up on the back of some giant and previously unseen force.

When you swallow that knot in your throat and your heart rate returns to somewhere near normal, you may well realize that flying has suddenly taken on a whole new meaning.
Visit the Japan Soaring Club Web site (English and Japanese) at www.glider.jp

The Japan Times
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Where are the wildernesses of lore?

The late scholar of curios, W.G. Sebald, wrote wistfully of the high forests of the Dalmatian Coast, the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa where fir trees rose like the spires of cathedrals to heights of over 50 meters. They were all gone by Christ's day.

Elsewhere in Europe the old-growth deciduous forests and sprawling wetlands of Germany and Gaul took longer to tame. But tamed they were, to such an extent that a modern traveler going back in time would find the Rhineland landscape of the 16th Century unrecognizable, overrun by flora and fauna best seen now in those little Flemish oil paintings where peasants perched on donkeys pick their way through the riffled darkness of gargantuan primeval wealds.

In Japan the transformation of ancient natural scenery has been similarly stark. Manic industrial expansion in the Meiji Period (1868-1912) and the postwar policy of single-species reforestation have resulted in the near-complete destruction of the ancient pine, cedar and cypress forests that could once be found everywhere on these islands. Today, while almost two-thirds of Japan remains forested, nearly all of that is slender new-growth vegetation, and 20 percent is cedar, a state of affairs responsible for the dastardly allergy season experienced here early each spring when a heavy cloud of cedar pollen blankets the land.

For those interested in visiting wilderness in the virgin state that not so long ago could have been found throughout the country, there are only a handful of destinations left. Perhaps the most spectacular of these is the island of Iriomote at the southern end of the Okinawan chain, lying just 200 km from the coast of Taiwan in the East China Sea.

Part of the Yaeyama Island group, Iriomote is about as far as you can get from the rampant overdevelopment of the mainland, and for those who can do without flashy resorts and good shopping it is a veritable garden of delights.

Though it is the second largest island of Okinawa, Iriomote boasts a permanent population of little more than 2,000 people spread out along the few flat coastal plains on the island's eastern flank between the ports of Ohara in the south and Shirahama in the north. Its only road clings to the coastline connecting a few meager settlements, and just beyond the handful of scraggly sugar-cane fields mountains invariably rise up like sentinels, guarding a lush, uninhabited interior.

More than 98 percent of Iriomote is covered in a thick blanket of broadleaf subtropical forest. Enormous mangrove forests occupy the wetlands found in the estuaries of the three major rivers that reach down from the island's belly to the sea. Iriomote National Park, the southernmost of Japan's national parks, covers a good third of the island, and 80 percent of the rest is protected state land.

Each year, thousands of tourists arrive at the island's two commercial ports -- Ohara in the South and Uehara in the North. The vast majority are day-trippers taking advantage of the fast ferries that connect Ishigaki to Iriomote and get you there in just 40 minutes.

Those visitors usually take one of the 2-to-3 hour boat cruises up Urauchi or Nakama rivers before heading back to their tour buses for the trip back. While such cruises offer a fleeting glimpse of the impressive forests and wetlands, the best way to soak up Iriomote's rugged charms is to stay overnight.

In recent years several comfortable and modern hotels have opened to serve the growing demand for accommodation on the island, and there are many companies operating land tours and waterborne excursions, especially kayaking and diving.

A handful of hiking trails lead into the island's interior, including easy routes taking just a few hours and a full-day cross-island trek that can only be done with a local guide. On the rivers, there are also half- and full-day kayak tours available, which let you explore the mangrove forests that are one of Iriomote's most famous draws. It's a place where you can spot some of the local wildlife, including sea turtles, a great number of birds and snakes and most famous of all, the endangered Iriomote Wildcat.

Visitors arriving on Iriomote generally fly from Naha, the prefecture's capital on the main island of Okinawa, to the Yaeyama Islands' only major airport on Ishigaki. From Ishigaki Port, several companies operate fast ferries to the other islands. While none can beat Iriomote when it comes to the sheer beauty of its natural habitat, there are numerous other splendid destinations of note. In particular, Taketomi, a flat oval-shaped island just 10 minutes by ferry from Ishigaki Port, is famous for its pristine beaches and the village's (population: 350) sandy streets, stone walls and traditional Ryukyu architecture.

Ishigaki itself, though by far the most developed island in the Yaeyama chain, is well worth a visit. Bucolic landscapes occupy the island's interior, and around its coast can be found many white-sand beaches and spectacular coral reefs. A new airport that will service direct jumbo-jet flights from the mainland is scheduled for completion in 2013, a development that will no doubt bring many more tourists to Japan's last stop in the South Pacific. While land prices on Ishigaki are sure to rise accordingly, given the protected status of the vast majority of Iriomote it seems set to remain much as it is: a rare jewel of untouched natural splendor, evidence of what was once a bounty common everywhere.
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