Photo by Chris Collins
Drawing by James Fotopoulos
From the desk of Joe Carducci...
Ernie Terrell leaves Roseland.
Ali was a version of Staggerlee loose in the roiling pop culture of then, when many a psychotic trod their pathologies while disguised as communitarians of one sort or another. Nick Tosches wrote up his investigation into whether the Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight(s) which launched Ali’s fame was a mob fix. Tosches judges Yes and wrote it up for Vanity Fair and as a book, The Devil and Sonny Liston.
Clay didn't know it according to Tosches, but then that makes him appear even more the fool as he verbally trashes his opponents. And his current condition leaves the stories told today coming from those who survived those titanic battles intact.
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Ex-Chicago Tribune writer on the NYT hires for the coming Chicago edition.
They'd be hiring Sun-Times cast-offs if they really intended to cover the city. Meanwhile the new figures show only the WSJ gains circulation.
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Crib-notes for the NYT on Chicago Personality Disorder by precinct.
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In Wyoming news: Pete Williams on rancher-pol Cliff Hansen's death.
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"The Muslim World Needs Reform"
Whatever Islam's doctrinal shortcomings, the faith is often used as cover for ancient cultural practices it was meant to supplant. It failed in this because its metaphysics seem conceived first to address sectarian concerns vis-a-vis Christendom and Judasim, and secondly to answer administrative problems on earth with the one-size-fits-all command: Submit. This can only work a short while.
Christ's story is more socially useful in today's world of economic and cultural dynamism -- its metaphysics are rooted in nature and man’s struggle to temper nature, rather than merely the political realm. Judaism has no evangelical aspect, but Islam might have been the faith growing in the new China -- it is one of the officially recognized religions. That that is inconceivable and there are now almost a hundred million Christians in China are of a piece. A dynamic China feels it needs something to temper the new business culture; they've tried the purely civic metaphysics of socialism and barely survived. Islam today is roiled not so much over Jews and Christians which it knows, but by the rising of Buddhist and Hindu nations above the Islamic world. These aren't even people of the Book, and that's a crisis.
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Lightbourne turned me onto the book, Wittgenstein's Vienna, by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, and though it’s full of high-flyin’ stuff I barely got through, it also is the book that sent me on to more other books and subjects I didn't know I was interested in than anything I've read since Mark Lilla's The Reckless Mind. The first thing I looked for was an anthology in translation of the work of Karl Kraus, who may have been the first modern newspaper columnist and media critic. Too expensive the last I looked but there is The Anti-Journalist by Paul Reitter (Chicago).
I haven't finished it but I will get back to it soon. I earlier hadn't finished Robert Musil's novel of that Vienna, The Man Without Qualities, which Chris had called to my attention a couple years ago. What is striking is how much of the modernist project centered in Vienna, rather than Berlin or Paris or London. The names include Freud, Schoenberg, Klimt, Wittgenstein, Loos and others. Kraus was unknown to me so I started with him. But Vienna itself -- Kraus called it "the proving ground for world destruction" -- where Islam was stopped, and the twin-crowned Austro-Hungarian Empire what did the stopping and whose heir to the throne's murder set The Great War in motion is on my radar now. Here's a nice appreciation of Vienna's Golden Ringstrasse, "great landmark of human freedom and urban design."
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[Image: Spain-Portugal treaty]
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And speaking of that Iberian weight upon LatAm: "The terror of Spanish painting" is at the National Gallery in London, and will move to the National Gallery of Art in DC.
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And speaking of blood: The Modern Period.
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Delete, the book, runs counter to conventional wisdom, but not so much about what the web is doing to memory. Instead, author Viktor Mayer-Schönberger stresses the importance of retaining the ability to forget. And in this interview with novelist Jonathan Lethem he recalls being advised culturally by the late Paul Nelson in the days before films could be easily accessed.
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Fred Halliday’s answer to his own query, "What was communism?" is interesting, but his phrase “the great global civil war of 1914-91” in the first paragraph tips off his sympathy’s limitations. Elsewhere, Timothy Garton Ash reviews the books just out at the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall. He notes that the deaths on Tiananmen Square in China, which occurred in June 1989, helped turn European Communist opinion away from that live option later in that year. And Open Democracy also reprints a Russian analysis of that country’s difficulty with its 20th Century past. WWII as a world-historical event becomes a block to comprehension in a culture’s “historical memory”. In this country too, though mostly on domestic policy. In Russia it runs deeper as Stalin himself hid behind Mother Russia’s skirts to fight the Great Patriotic War. Remembering the four-year fight against the Germans is easy but, as Arseny Roginsky writes of the rest of the Soviet decades, “we mainly killed our own people, and our consciousness refuses to accept this fact.”
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Jack Shafer veers near the subject of the scale of damage FDR did to this country and its political culture over his three-plus terms in order to put a gloss on President Obama's war on Fox News. And again, WWII as historical backstop disguises all everywhere. No danger we'll prosecute this war that way though. Standards have changed, returned to the pre-FDR norm, and risen just slightly from there perhaps.
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[Ink painting by Joe Carducci, 1977]
Martin Shaw on the violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, "to call it 'fighting' would be to dignify what are mainly atrocities against civilians."
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Here is a classic example of NYT politicized editing:
"Ten months after the Israeli military said it invaded this Palestinian coastal strip to stop the daily rocket fire of its Islamist rulers, there are many ways to measure the misery of Gaza."
The words "said it" dropped in do whatever it is the editors think needs doing to prove the Times is a neutral arbiter of the coming middle east peace of their dreams. They want to think of themselves as a player and it messes with the job they do. There used to be a guy here in Naperville who read the NY Times at the library and he would copy-edit with a ballpoint all the articles on the middle east what he surely saw as exhibiting the creeping anti-semitism of the New York Times. That was over a decade ago, and if it isn't that, it is worse whatever it is.
(Thanks: Roger Trilling, Andy Schwartz)
Wednesday, October 21, Along the DuPage River, Naperville, Illinois
Photo by Joe Carducci
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• The New Vulgate
• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne
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