Angelina Jolie Writes for the Economist

Angelina Jolie has written an article for the Economist. It came out today. The Economist's annual issue "The World in 2008" features Jolie's take on the situation in Darfur.

Some bloggers have noted that Jolie should stick to acting and forget about her 'UN stuff.'

I couldn't disagree more.

A human being is capable of performing many functions and roles at the same time. One function does not preclude the presence of others. An actor may and can be a politically and socially aware person, just like an academic can find joy in rock concerts and San Diego surf shops at the same time.

Kudos to Jolie for wanting to make a difference and bringing awareness to many things of substance in the world arena.

Here is a quote from her piece which I thought was well penned.

“Accountability is perhaps the only force powerful enough to break the cycle of violence and retribution that marks so many conflicts.”


as per the Economist

Book Review: Goethe

John Armstrong's "Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet" is now available.

Goethe is more than just a 'Sturm und Drang' German writer. Much, much more.
His philosophical, cultural, political and literary insights are necessary information not only to higher academics and theorists but any reading-interested individual. He wrote well because he historicized and contextualized well.

Armstrong observes the following at the end of the book about his Goethe project:

"In working on this book I was surprised by how much I liked some of Goethe's works that I feared I would have to read merely from a sense of duty. In particular the plays Egmont and Tasso stuck me as really wonderful. I delayed reading Faust for as long as possible, finally getting round to it during a family winter holiday at a small coastal town..."

And reading Goethe is a life-changing experience. Whether it's the sufferings of Werther, or the torments of Faust and Gretchen, or Egmont's journey, Goethe can touch like very few can and have.

And John Armstrong seems to have done justice to his predilection for context.

Here's to Goethe.


graph per amazon

Norman Mailer Dies at 84

The American writer Norman Mailer died on the 10th of November and this is indeed a literary loss.
Mailer was nothing if not controversial, however the controversy he usually engendered was culturally and literarily relevant.

He married six times, refused not to comment on unpopular topics, and went after interesting political, social, and literary topics obssessively.

Many blogs were written about Mailer this past weekend and I was surprised to read some which depicted him as mediocre and irrelevant. He was anything but.

Today, however, I read a good tribute to him on the Huffington Post by Arianna Huffington.

Huffington, herself one with the literary bug and one who knew Mailer personally, wrote a respectful entry celebrating Mailer's idiosyncracies.

Huffington's winning sentence was: "Mailer was all about possibility -- about asking why things are the way they are and showing, through his writing, there are other ways they could be."

I felt compelled to comment on her piece as well and I just posted the following:

"If we don't take a minute to positively review the life of one who so frequently provided us with text, then we're not being respectful of his literary contribution to us. If nothing else, Mailer was indeed relevant and dialog-inviting and that, especally at the end of one's life, should beg for positive attention.
He was after all, a great American text himself."


graph per huffington post

A Professor of International Law: Slovenia's New President

Danilo Türk, who is currently employed as a professor of International Law and Dean of Student Affairs at the Faculty of Law of the University of Ljubljana, is the new president-elect of Slovenia.

According to unofficial results, he is said to have won the run-off on 11 November 2007 with 70.8% of the votes thus beating the convervative Lojze Peterle.

Definitely blog-worthy, I thought. Not every day that a prof becomes pres.



graph per wikipedia

Fact of the Day: Borders Adds TV Watching to Its Bookstores’ Entertainment

Today's The New York Times informs me that Borders bookstores will now have huge flat TV's.

I and mine have spent many, many hours at Borders. I like to drink their mango or peach smoothies while I speed-read as many new books as I can, or get info on new beats and albums. TV screens won't bother me since I never look up anyway. I do find it funny, however, that readers are being targeted so much by advertisers.

Aren't they better off going after teenagers who then go after their parents for more cash?


Here are some snippets from the article.

A new strategy at Borders will reinforce the message that its stores are not just about books: the company has been installing 37-inch flat-screen televisions to show original programming, advertisements, news and weather.

George L. Jones, the chief executive of the Borders Group, said each store would have two screens. The broadcast service, called Borders TV, has arrived in nearly 60 stores and is scheduled to reach an additional 250 stores by the end of February.

The screens are “not designed to be intrusive,” Mr. Jones said. Rather, he said, they are “part of a master plan to create content that will do several things for us,” like directing traffic to the Borders Web site and paving the way to more cross-promotional deals with large media companies.

Will literary-minded customers bristle at the intrusion, or will the screens be welcomed as fun? Mr. Jones has a firm opinion: at Borders, “you browse, buy a latte, read a magazine. It’s entertaining.” The televisions are “another way that we can bring knowledge and entertainment,” he said.

per NYT

Larry David Takes a Bow: Season Finale of CYB

Well, folks, this is it.
"Curb Your Enthusiasm" season just ended tonight.
We had to watch it tonight instead of opting for the later On Demand features. It was the finale, after all and the event begged for priority.

One of the few reasons I see some use for cable, or TV at all for that matter, is Larry David’s humor and his informed commentaries. No, I don't think TV Larry is just a hub of neuroses or that he is too 'abnormal' for that matter. I enjoy him, ergo, my reading of his work is bound to be biased. But it's a bias I stand by cognitively. He makes sense to me. Every single time.

And Season Six ended tonight.

It involved, among other things, Larry, a gerbil, a visit to the doctor, Loretta Black, the always-cussing Susie, and a bat mitzvah.

The last 2 minutes of the finale were sweet, tender, melancholy, and belly-achingly funny.

Larry sadly looks at his estranged wife Cheryl, who was dancing with her new beau at the bat mitzvah, and Larry finds himself alone amidst the dancing group. He then looks at Loretta Black, Vivica A. Fox’s character and asks her to dance with him. That point signals Larry's 'assimilation' into the Black family.

The Blacks do family things, play sports, get loud in movie theaters and for the first time in "Curb Your Enthusiasm" history, Susie Green is finally shut up. By Loretta. While on one of her cussing rants to Larry, Loretta stands up for her man and Susie is thrown out, silent. I bet, to you Curb fans out there, this was one of the highlights of the episode. It sure was mine. The look on Susie's confused face was priceless. The look on Larry's incomparable!

The episode ends with Larry and the Blacks taking a family holiday picture saying ‘Happy Holidays, Larry and the Blacks.”

And as far as I'm concerned, it was a hilarious conclusion.

Hoping CYE comes back within the year, I sign off.


graph per HBO

Cultural Generalizations: Easy, Tyler!

The well-known economist, Tyler Cowen is a regular blogger. I read him. I found one of his recent blogs a tad too, well, culturally marked. I reckon, stereotypes can be seen as a learning tool but, more often than not, they manage to blur cultural understanding.

Here is a snippet of his post:

'A group of Swiss businessmen will hear first Pascal Lamy on economic globalization and then me [ie Tyler Cowen] on cultural globalization.

I must keep in mind the fundamental principles of speaking to the Swiss. Unlike virtually all American audiences, the listeners do not expect to be entertained. Efforts to entertain will insult some of them. I need not reach my main point until the end of the talk. Taxonomy for its own sake is not detested, but PowerPoint is viewed with suspicion.'


This is why this post bothered me. Cowen was in Switzerland to talk about 'cultural globalization' yet the post oozes cultural stereotypes. The tone struck me as a tad colonial.

The Swiss don't enjoy humorous remarks, says Cowen, but wait, since he is writing predominantly for an American blogger audience, 'Swiss' jokes may be used. My question is, at whose expense?

After all, as he notes in his post, American audiences like to be entertained.

Book Review

Randall Collins has a book out: "Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory."

Its premise is that popular music has reshaped high school status networks.

Here is a snippet from it:

As popular music consumption became the central identifying point of youth cultures, it also came to support greater pluralism in student status hierarchies, punk and other alternative culture groups acquired their own venues where they could generate their own collective effervescence, dominating in their own emotional attention spaces. Moshers became the leading edge of punk culture, the attention-getters within their chief cultural rituals and gathering places. Not surprisingly, there is strong antagonism between moshers and jocks, their chief counterparts in the use of controlled violence in the conventional youth culture.


It could be an interesting read for those intrigued by the immediate effects of popular culture. And those who still think punk music and punk culture is inconsequential, well.... Perhaps these folks will find this new text particularly informative.


graph per amazon

Fact of the Day

Here is an interesting fact I read today:

Beijing is now Europe's largest source of manufactured imports, but the 27-nation bloc, with a population of about 470 million people, exports less to China than it does to Switzerland.

Quote of the Day

Gym person: What does 'ameliorate' mean?

B: Oh, it means 'to better', from a comparative form of the adjective. It's from Latin.

Gym person: Why don't they just write 'better' then?