Israel > Arabia

"...Mama was in the hospital for almost three weeks. During that time I learned a great deal about the ethics and values of the Israelis. There were also constant reminders of the differences between the Israelis and the Arab world. After the mercy the Israelis showed their enemies, the thing that impressed me the most was the respect with which women were treated. I loved to watch the Israeli women, particularly the young women in the army. Some of them were only a year or two older than I. I was amazed by how assertive and self-confident they were. I did not yet understand the language that they spoke, but I could tell from their tone of voice and the way that they carried themselves that they felt accepted and respected by the men. Some of them were even officers! This was such a stark contrast to the Arab world in which I had grown up. No Arab soldier would take an order from a woman. In the Arab world, women were property. We were owned by our parents, and then we were reowned by our husbands. Israel was truly a different world."

- Brigitte Gabriel, ibid. [see previous post]

Brigitte Gabriel

"I broke out crying again, but this time not from fear and uncertainty, but because of the compassion and love being bestowed upon me. For the first time in my life, I experienced a human quality that I knew my culture would not have shown to its enemy. I experienced the values of the Israelis, who were able to love their enemy in their most trying moments. Lea didn't even know whether I was a Lebanese Christian or a Muslim, or a Palestinian. I realized at that moment that I had been sold a fabricated lie by my government and culture about the Jews and Israel that was far from reality. I knew for a fact, as someone raised in the Arab world, that if I had been a Jew in an Arab hospital, I would have been lynched and then thrown to the ground, and joyous shouts of "Allahu Akbar" would have echoed through the hospital and the surrounding streets."

- Brigitte Gabriel [learning what Ayaan Hirsi Ali also learned about Israel] from 'Because They Hate : A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America' [2006; St Martin's Press] 

Heretic II

"It simply will not do for Muslims to claim that their religion has been "hijacked" by extremists. The killers of IS and Boko Haram cite the same religious texts that every other Muslim in the world considers sacrosanct. And instead of letting them off the hook with bland cliches about Islam as a religion of peace, we in the West need to challenge and debate the very substance of Islamic thought and practice. We need to hold Islam accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts. At the same time, we need to stand up for our own principles as liberals. Specifically, we need to say to offended Western Muslims (and their liberal supporters) that it is not we who must accommodate their beliefs and sensitivities. Rather, it is they who must learn to live with our commitment to free speech." - - Ayaan Hirsi Ali from the Introduction to her 2015 book Heretic

Heretic

"Why are these people impelled to try to silence me, to protest against my public appearances, to stigmatize my views and drive me off the stage with threats of violence and death? It is not because I am ignorant or ill-informed. On the contrary, my views on Islam are based on my knowledge and experience of being a Muslim, of living in Muslim societies - including Mecca itself, the very center of Islamic belief - and on my years of study of Islam as a practitioner, student, and teacher. The real explanation is clear. It is because they cannot actually refute what I am saying. And I am not alone. Shortly after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Asra Nomani, a Muslim reformer, spoke out against what she calls the "honor brigade" - an organized international cabal hell-bent on silencing debate on Islam. The shameful thing is that this campaign is effective in the West. Western liberals now seem to collude against critical thought and debate. I never cease to be amazed by the fact that non-Muslims who consider themselves liberals - including feminists and advocates of gay rights - are so readily persuaded by these crass means to take the Islamists' side against Muslim and non-Muslim critics." - Ayaan Hirsi Ali from the Introduction to her 2015 book Heretic

Cotard's Syndrome

French military surgeon Jules Cotard lived only 49 years (1840-1889), but he will be forever remembered for discovering one of nature's most sincerely fucked-up mental illnesses: Cotard's syndrome is a mental disorder where the victim concludes that he or she is dead. Sometimes the symptoms are more specific: Patients believe that they are missing certain internal organs, or that there is no blood in their veins, or that they have lost their soul. However, the ultimate manifestation of Cotard's syndrome (classified medically as a nihilistic delusional disorder) is the victim's unshakable conviction that he or she does not exist. It is not that these people fear they are dying; it's that they are certain they are already dead.
Sometimes the victims of Cotard's syndrome think they can smell their own flesh rotting.
- from Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman

Holding On

Finished a very good book today called Holding On : Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics and Other American Heroes by David Isay and Harvey Wang. Isay travelled around the US for three years (around 1991-93) interviewing these people, and Wang took their photographs.

I only found out about this book because I saw the obituary of Robert Shields in the Sydney Morning Herald. He was a guy who took diary-writing to an extreme, and he is featured here along with many other wonderfully unique individuals.

Miles Mahan is the creator of Hula Ville, a dusty theme park on the edge of the Mojave Desert. His inspiration came from a wooden cutout of a hula girl he salvaged from a Hawaiian restaurant in 1955.

Father Louis H. Greving is continuing the work of Father Paul Dobberstein who began building a Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa. The grotto consists of eight caves connected to one another by stone paths and winding stairways. The entire structure has been covered with millions of tiny shards of stone and shell pressed into concrete and arranged into intricate patterns and pictures depicting scenes from the life of Jesus Christ.

Dewy Chafin and his mother, Barbara Elkins handle serpents (chiefly rattlesnakes) in their small church in Jolo, West Virginia. Scientists have not figured out how more of these people do not die from their occasional snakebites.

Jim Searles is the President of the Brooklyn Elite Checker Club. All the members are in their seventies and eighties, with minds sharp as tacks from their passion for checkers.

Dugout Dick Zimmerman was a hermit who settled in a remote Idaho cave. People came by and told him they wanted a cave too, so he began excavating other caves, so now he rents caves for two bucks night. "The rooms are surprisingly pleasant, even cosy. Each has a wood-burning stove made from a trash can, and a box-spring mattress. The more deluxe rooms have an old school-bus seat fro a couch, and an empty icebox in which to hang clothes.

Stanley Killar from Klamath Falls, Oregon is a record collector who has collected so many records his house is buckling under the weight.

And that's only a handful. There are 43 more. This book is so wonderful. It's one of those books that is hard to quit reading. Each profile is from two to six pages, so it's very easy to read 'just one more'. And it's the kind of book you will go back to, maybe when your life seems grim and robotic, depressing, or utterly meaningless. Books like these show us that it's never too late to get a life.

The Night

'Why did God make this? Since the night is destined for sleep, unconsciousness, repose, forgetfulness of everything, why make it more charming than day, softer than dawn or evening? And why does this seductive planet, more poetic than the sun, that seems destined, so discreet is it, to illuminate things too delicate and mysterious for the light of day, make the darkness so transparent?
Why does not the greatest of feathered songsters* sleep like the others? Why does it pour forth its voice in the mysterious night?
Why this half-veil cast over the world? Why these tremblings of the heart, this emotion of the spirit, this enervation of the body? Why this display of enchantments that human beings do not see, since they are lying in their beds? For whom is destined this sublime spectacle, this abundance of poetry cast from Heaven to earth?'

- from the short story 'Clair de Lune' by Guy de Maupassant.

* the nightingale

Love Her!

Then, Estella being gone and we two left alone, she turned to me and said in a whisper:
'Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her?'
'Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham.'
She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers as she sat in the chair. 'Love her, love her, love her! How does she use you?'
Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question at all), she repeated, 'Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces - and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeply - love her, love her!'

-from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Devil May Cry II

I spent most of the afternoon reading my new book (The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - the Devil appears on Earth and torments Moscow's literary and theatrical community) but tonight I have been playing Devil May Cry. (Devils and demons everywhere! No wonder I've been dreaming about them.)
I'm at around the halfway point and now can do some pretty spectacular moves. My favourite one right now is double-jumping against a wall for height, blasting the hellfiends with Dante's twin handguns which also makes him hover in the air for a while, then on the descent come screaming down with a devastating meteor blast. The way the automatic camera spins around to get the action, sometimes you will have Dante in the air letting rip with his guns (he calls them Ebony & Ivory) and the camera is behind the enemy, so you see Dante high in the air in the distance, so when you do the meteor charge, he comes blasting in toward you, that is, the camera. It is impossible to convey just how awesome stunning amazing breathtaking and cool this looks. Not only that, but there is one breed of fiend called Sin Scissors - insane cackling witches with big scissors - and they fly around so you can land on them with your meteor strike move, jump higher when they block it, open up with the handguns, the witches will slash at you with their big scissors but if you jump at the right moment you bounce off the scissors and fly up even higher, so these battles can take place fifty metres in the air. This game is so pumped full of style it's ridiculous.
The game never gets boring. The missions are never too long. It's never too hard. OK, well I am actually playing on Easy mode (yes, by all means feel free to have a big laugh at Stratu who is not a hardcore gamer at all, ha ha!)
Anyway, even though I'm only halfway through, it's already become one of my favourite videogames. What are those games, you say? I'm glad you asked! ... The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, LoZ: The Wind Waker, Ico, Final Fantasy X, Resident Evil 4, Beyond Good and Evil, Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time and Animal Crossing.

The Sun Also Rises

Today I finished another book, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. It was very good. It was about a group of friends who are hanging out in Paris, then they all go to Pamplona in Spain to watch the bullfights. They seem to drink all the time. On just about every page they are drinking, drinking. Drinking and talking. They really drink a hell of a lot, and they talk, then have another drink. I have never read a book with so much boozing going on. (Well, not since I last read a Charles Bukowski book that is.)
Anyway, it was an excellent book, and contained some of the funniest dialogue I have ever read.

Operation: Space Opera

Yesterday was a big day for me. Why was that? Well, I finally finished this humongous space opera, the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F Hamilton. Did I tell you that each one of these books is 1200+ pages? Yes I did. Why would somebody write a story with that many pages? Don't they know that there are many other books that we haven't read yet and want to read? Time is money and all that jazz. Are these people sadists?
Well, was it worth it? Was it worth spending six weeks reading this story? It was in one way because now I can say I've read a 3724-page story. Also, now I know what this "space opera" business is all about.
So what is it all about? The story is set in the year 2600 and something and the main focus is a starship pilot Joshua Calvert. This guy is a handsome devil indeed, and quite the ladies' man. Any pretty girl he meets, he has sex with. And in the future everybody is handsome or pretty because they have this thing called *geneering*, so when you have a baby you can program all the good stuff in and bad stuff out. Anyway, Calvert is not only good looking, he is also very smart, very confident and very lucky. Everything works out perfectly for him, everybody either admires him or wants to sleep with him, nothing goes wrong for him, although he will get into a tight jam here and there. After one of those tight jams, he got wounded on the arm, quite a bad injury, but he got back to his starship with everbody's eyes popping out with concern and he just shrugs it off, says no sweat dudes, I'm OK, only a flesh wound, then does a perfectly excecuted somersault into his captain's chair.
Another thing about this space opera biz, there are so many people to keep track of. There's Joshua Calvert and his starship crew; another starship crew led by a girl he had sex with; a big living (bitek) space city (or *habitat*) ruled by another girl he had sex with; a primitive *stage one* planet where people are going to get away from Earth which is totally messed up (weather so screwed you got big domes around cities while outside rage almost constant MEGAstorms); numerous asteroids and their mining colonies; other planets; other habitats; and other starships. And the action jumps around so fast between all these different places and scenarios and people, it really takes some memorypower to keep up with. So it is like a soap opera in that respect, only with amazing technology and living starships and people coming back from the dead and possessing people. You see, the big deal in the story is that the dead are coming back from *the beyond* and possessing people. This brings in a theological angle: in this story, everybody who dies goes to this *beyond* place which is horrible, a place of constant torment. Then this thing happens that gives dead people a way to come back and possess the living, but that person must be tortured by a possessed so they will admit the *beyond* soul into their body. Then that possessed constantly has the voices of other souls from the beyond screaming begging them to let them come back so they do it, they can't help it. But some don't like doing it, and refuse. There are some actual *good* possessed. But they are possessing somebody so how can they be good? Well, some are, like Fletcher Christian. He comes back and he's a good egg.
So the possessed are expanding and taking over planets all over the place, and the Confederation (the military) forces have to take action. But! The dilemma they face is that if they kill these possessed, they also kill the person who was possessed by that soul from the beyond. How can they get around it? Now you see how tricky this situation is!
Anyway, a big part of it all is the life after death angle, but as much as Mr Hamilton attempts to incorporate these theological matters, it gets pretty wacky, and is hard to take seriously, especially with the Dexter Quinn character, who is some kind of superior possessed *Satanist* and his monologues are ridiculous. He's supposed to be some major evil force but he sounds like a teenager with inverted cross earrings squawking obscenities at his parents for not letting him stay out too late.
This review could go on forever. There is a LOT going on here in this big fat space opera. Half of it was interesting, pretty amazing for sure, but the other half was really boring. I had to find out how it ended, but it was hard work getting there. I'm glad I read it, but also feel some kind of shameful wonder that I read it through to the end. In the end, there's no way I can recommend it, unless you are a big sci-fi fan, or want to know what this space opera biz is all about, and have LOTS of time to kill.

Magical Realism

While I've been plowing through the final book in this monster space opera (Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy) I realised what I needed was a book for the bus. These 1200+ page Hamilton books are really not suited to mobile reading, that's for sure, so I got another book from the library.
Ironically enough, the book I chose was a collection of short stories about libraries and librarians called In the Stacks. Most of the writers I'd never heard of, but there were some, like Italo Calvino, Ray Bradbury and John Cheever, but even with those writers, I'd never read anything by them.
Anyway, the best story in there was the John Cheever one, 'The Trouble of Marcie Flint'. It was about a married couple and it started off with the guy (Charles Flint) leaving his wife and kids and heading for Italy or some place. He was writing in his diary about how sick he was of that suburb where he lived, and how glad he was to be going to Torino. He had a suitcase full of peanut butter because he said the girls in Torino love peanut butter.
Then there's his wife (Marcie) back in that suburb and she is trying to go on with life, wondering if her husband is going to come back or not. Why did he take off anyway? Oh well. I guess we'll find out. So the wife is there and she goes along to a town council meeting where there is a discussion about whether to open a public library. Most of the people at the meeting don't want a public library because it will bring poor people into the town, this town which seems to be made up of snooty snobs, but at the meeting one guy (Markham) gets up in his tatty hat and old clothes and he tells everybody about when he was a kid and how great it was going to the local library. Then another guy (Barrett) gets up, he's a jock type, a real bully, and he says now I was a poor kid but I never went into a public library unless it was to get out of the rain or follow some pretty girl, but I did pretty good, I'm a big success, you don't need a public library to have success. Then Markham suggests that Barrett can't read anyway to which Barrett gets mad and jumps up and down. Then the meeting ends and Marcie meets up with Markham outside and apologises for Barrett's behaviour, she or her husband had that bastard over for dinner one night. They know him somehow anyway.
Then it's back to the husband Charles and he remembers back to an afternoon when he felt really happy, he was walking around the house and he could see Marcie in the bedroom asleep with the sheet dropped down exposing her breasts, that made him happy but he didn't go and wake her. He looked out the window and saw his two kids flying a wind-up plane, winding the rubber band and the plane was going up out of the late afternoon shadows into the sunlight, and that made him happy too. He went into the kitchen for a beer or something and saw all these ants, so he put some ant poison in a saucer and went out to the backyard.
Later, his kids got sick and started vomiting. They had eaten the ant poison thinking it was some kind of treat.
Then the story flashed back to Marcie and that Markham guy, and Markham was going to go to the local paper and ask the editor to print a letter in favour of opening a public library, but that Barrett guy interfered somehow and the editor said he wouldn't print it. Then Barrett that rotten bastard goes to visit Marcie and says I know that Markham guy is coming over but he is a total loser (he compares him to a *meatball* he knew in school - see *Popular* post below) so you better call him and tell him not to come. Marcie says I ain't gonna do that. Barrett says you better. Marcie says well I won't. Barrett gets heavy about it, a real jerk, then Marcie tells him to get the hell out of the house.
Marcies's husband Charles remembers about the kids eating the ant poison and he ran to the store where he got it, and asks the guy for the number of the supplier so he can call them and ask what to do with his poisoned kids. But the shopkeeper only says Mister you didn't buy that from me, and repeats it over and over.
Markham goes over to visit Marcie and tracks mud into the house, but Marcie doesn't mind.
Charles is on his way to Torino with the peanut butter when he suddenly wonders what the hell he is doing, it doesn't matter what crazy thing happened before, he can go back and see his kids and his wife. But what we wonder is, what happened to the kids? Did they survive or did that ant poison kill them? Has Charles gone mad?
Well, what a great story. This Cheever guy reminds me of Raymond Carver actually, these stories of regular suburban people, quite average seeming people, and normal suburban scenes and dramas yet blown up and magnified, made powerful and strange, in fact also reminds me of the way David Lynch can do that.
I recently heard the words *magical realism* and wondered what it meant, but I think stories like this must be like that, a regular everyday kind of realism but injected with certain mysterious elements to create a magical, almost otherworldly effect.
Anyway, when I FINALLY finish this horribly addictive great awful exciting boring ludicrously time-consuming epic *space opera*, I'll definitely be hunting down more of John Cheever's stuff.

Popular

Today I read about a high school girl who got hit and killed by a train when she ran across the tracks and tried to scramble up onto the platform. A tragic event indeed. But then I read this:
'She was a very popular girl among her peers...'
Was she really very popular? Could the other kids have said to the reporter that they really liked her so they wouldn't look bad? You have to admit it's a possibility. If you are a kid at that school and some newsperson turns up, jams a microphone in front of your head and asks did you like that other kid who got hit by a train, what the hell are you gonna say? Of course you liked that other kid! If you admit that you got big kicks from spitting on her and flushing her head in the toilet, you might look bad, then not be popular anymore.
Anyway, the thing is, whenever I read or hear a news report about a high school kid who got killed somehow, they are always *popular* with the other schoolkids. Only popular high school kids seem to get killed. Or could it be that when unpopular high school kids get killed, the news people don't report it. 'Oh well, he or she was unpopular anyway, no need to report it. No big loss, really.'
When they say that these kids were popular, it seems to imply that it is tragic that a popular kid got killed, whereas if the kid was unpopular it wouldn't be so tragic, that maybe it was even for the best. After all, that unpopular kid must have had a pretty miserable existence there, without the approval of those other kids. I mean, what is life when it is not a popular life? Surely it is no life at all. And a sudden violent end to such a life would in fact be a blessing, and not worthy of being reported in the news.
I'll leave you with this excerpt from a short story I read (coincidentally) today:

"When I was in school, there was a meatball just like Mackham. Nobody liked him. Nobody spoke to him. Well, I was a high-spirited kid, Marcie, with plenty of friends, and I began to wonder about this meatball. I began to wonder if it wasn't my responsibility to befriend him and make him feel that he was a member of the group. Well, I spoke to him, and I wouldn't be surprised if I was the first person who did. I took a walk with him. I asked him to come up to my room. I did everything I could to make him feel accepted.
It was a terrible mistake. First, he began going around the school telling everybody that he and I were going to do this and he and I were going to do that. Then he went to the Dean's office and had himself moved into my room without consulting me. Then his mother began to send me these lousy cookies, and his sister - I'd never laid eyes on her - began to write me love letters, and he got to be such a leech that I had to tell him to lay off. I spoke frankly to him; I told him the only reason I'd spoken to him was because I pitied him. This didn't make any difference. When you're stuck with a meatball, it doesn't matter what you tell them. He kept hanging around, waiting for me after classes, and after football practice he was always down in the locker room. It got so bad that we had to give him the works. We asked him up to Pete Fenton's room for a cup of cocoa, roughed him up, threw his clothes out the window, painted his rear end with iodine, and stuck his head in a pail of water until he damned near drowned."
- from 'The Trouble of Marcie Flint' by John Cheever