ROBERTO CALASSO

Roberto Calasso, Ardor, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014) (See Pankaj Mishra, "Quest for Enlightenment," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/21/2014.).

Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps, translated from the Italian by John Shepley (Minneapolis: U. oF Minnesota Press, 2001) (From "On Public Opinion": "The most obscure history is the history of the obvious. There is nothing more obvious than public opinion, a term that public opinion holds to be innocuous and that's come to comprise in itself huge areas of what can be said: The vast pastures of public opinion are the pride of civilization. And yet public opinion is a fearful thing, whites undergone tortuous, ridiculous vicissitudes until its triumph in the present. There was a time when philosophers used to start with facts, which have now fled among the unicorns. Public opinion remains: mistress of all regimes, shapeless, everywhere, and nowhere, its oversized presence is such as to allow only a negative theology. With the fall of divine rule and the debasement of the vicariate of metaphysics, public opinion has been left in the open as the last foundation stone t cover swarms of worms, some iguanas, and a few ancient serpents. How does one recognize it? Or rather, how does one recognize what is not public opinion? There is no map of opinions, and even if there were it would not be of any use. For public opinion is first of all a formal power, a virtuosity that grows endlessly and lacks any material. Its hoax is to accept any meaning, thereby preventing it from being recognized for whatever ideas it has to offer. Indiscriminate, perinde ac cadaver, public opinion swallow up thought and reproduces it in similar terms, only with a few slight modifications." Id. at 186, 186.).

Roberto Calasso, K, translated form the Italian by Geoffrey Brock (New York: Knopf, 2005).

Roberto Calasso, Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, translated form the Italian by Tim Parks (New York: Knopf, 1998).

Roberto Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire, translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008, 2012) ("From "The Dream of the Brothel-Muse": "There is something incongruous. even hilarious, about the solemnity with which the dreamer approves his own metaphysics. But perhaps this is the crux of all Baudelaire. He could not substantiate his thought except in dreams, precisely because only dream admitted and prescribed the 'most monstrous paralogisms.' In the waking state, his thought could issue only sporadically, with sudden and circumscribed eruptions on the page. In this way, little by little, Baudelaire's oeuvre was composed." Id. at 129, 149.).

Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods, translated form the Italian by Tim Parks (New York: Knopf, 2001) (From "Incipit paradia": "While he was writing The Birth of Tragedy, sketching out the shape of a civilization that had been radically renewed, Nietzsche was also preparing The Future of Our Schools, the most formidable attack ever launched on what is the foundation of the modern conception of culture: education. Nietzsche's premise was that the very institution that ought to represent the culture of the time in its most severe and exemplary form--the illustrious German high school--in fact bore witness to a 'growing barbarity in the duties assigned to culture.' Nietzsche saw only the ferocious determination of the state--and first and foremost the German state--to breed reliable employees. 'The factory rules,' he noted, summing up the century to come in just a few words. Whenever we claim that culture must serve some purpose, he goes on, then sovereignty passes from culture to utility: 'You only need to start thinking of culture as something useful and all too soon you'll be confusing what is useful with culture. Generalized culture turns into hatred against true culture.' Hence, precisely in its most enlightened and celebrated endeavor, its attempts to bring education to everybody, the modern world was actually guided by a profound aversion to culture." Id. at 51, 67-68.).

Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks (New York: Knopf, 1993) ("How can Achilles, 'for just one girl!' turn down the seven girls of Lesbos, plus 'some even better ones,' together with a host of other gifts Agamemnon is offering to keep him sweet. Phoenix, in his tribal devotion, can't even conceive of the claim to uniqueness. But it is precisely to Achilles that the poem gives the speech that for the first time announces this discovery, this emotion that will put its stamp on history from that moment on and has survived intact to this very day: a foothold in the vast shipwreck of ideas, the only thing still self-evident to everybody, blasphemous and devout alike, in this age that no longer manages to be either blasphemous or devout. This is what Achilles says: 'Fat sheep and oxen you can steal; cooking pots and golden-maned horses you can buy; but once it has left the circle of his teeth, the life of a man [andros psyche] can be neither replaced, nor stolen, not bought.' Not only have these words never been confuted with the passing centuries, but they have gathered further intensity and urgency, as beliefs and principles withered away all around to leave them standing alone. Today, whenever somebody who doesn't belong to any creed refuses to kill, Achilles' words live on in him." Id. at 116-117. "Initiation involves a physiological metamorphosis: the circulating blood and thought patterns of the mind absorb a new substance, the flavor of a secret wisdom. That flavor is the flavor of totality: but, in the Spartan version, it is the flavor of the society as totality. Thus we pass from the old to the new regime." "Equality only comes into being through initiation. It does not exist in nature, and society wouldn't be able to conceive of the idea if it weren't structured and articulated by initiation. Later, there comes a moment when equality is geared into history and thence marches on and on until the unsuspecting theorists of democracy imagine they have discovered it--and set it against initiation, as though it were its opposite." "That moment is Sparta. The Spartans were above all homoioi, 'equals,' insofar as they had all been initiated into the same group. But that group was the entire society, Sparta; the only place in Greece, and in all European history since, where the whole citizenry constituted an initiatory sect." Id. at 250-251.).

Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, translated from the Italian by William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 1994) ("'Meanwhile Gauthier was finishing his speech, with these words: '. . . but there are no Americans in France.'  ''Take a little tradesman from Rouen or Lyon, greedy and without imagination, and you will have an American!' 'Ah, how you grieve me!' cried Gauthier, sadly rising to leave, as it was striking one." Id, at 23-24.).

Roberto Calasso, Tiepolo Pink, translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen (New York: Knopf, 2009).

THE CHALLENGES OF MUSLIM INTEGRATION IN CHRISTIAN-HERITAGE SOCIETIES

Before reading the main recommendation below, I suggest reading Gary Becker, The Economics of Discrimination (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1957). Becker argued that people may have a "taste" for discrimination. Though Becker did not make the following point, and may well not have agreed, I would suggest people have a need or taste for feeling superior. And that need to feel superior is what underlies the taste for discrimination. And that need/taste for superiority can take many different avenues for satisfaction: race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, class, genealogy, occupation, schooling and education, automobiles (BMWs versus Fords, Prius versus Outback), house size, neighborhoods, and on and on. In the finally analysis, most of us are immature and insecure little piss ants trying to make ourselves believe we are unicorns.

So, the recommendation:

Claire L. Adida, David D. Laitin & Marie-Anne Valfort, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Amid mounting fears of violent Islamic extremism, many Europeans ask whether Muslim immigrants can integrate into historically Christian countries. In a grounding breaking ethnographic investigation of France's Muslim migrant population, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies explores this complex question. The author conclude that both Muslim and non-Muslim French must share responsibility for the slow progress of Muslim integration." The authors "found that in France Muslims are widely perceived as threatening, based in large part on cultural differences between Muslim and rooted French that feed both rational and irrational Islamophobia. Relying on a unique methodology to isolate the religious component of discrimination, the authors identify a discriminatory equilibrium in which both Muslim immigrants and native French act negatively toward one another in as self-perpetuating, vicious circle." "Disentangling the rational and irrational threads of Islamophobia is essential if Europe hopes to repair a social fabric that has frayed around the issue of Muslim immigration, and Europeans must acknowledge that antiIslam sentiments at the root of their antagonism. The authors outline public policy solutions aimed at promoting religious diversity in fair-minded hist societies.")

Perhaps there is something from which the United States, and the American peoples could learn. [Note: I use the plural "peoples" because I no longer believe Americans are in any way, shape or form a united people, and especially not politically or culturally. We may not look at each other as enemies, but we do increasing look at each other with distrust and, at time, complete distain. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, a people so divided cannot stand.]

LUDWIG VON MISES ON THE SCEINCE OF HUMAN ACTION

Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics, translated from the German by George Reisman, edited and with a foreword by Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2013) (From the "Preface": "This book's main contribution is in explaining that economics is 'the science of human action that strives for universally valid knowledge.' The science of human action is economic theory; it is not a history of economic phenomena." Id. at xiii.).

"AMERICANS . . . MORE FOREIGN THAN ANY PEOPLE . . . "

Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, with photos by Steve McCurry (Boston & New York: An Eamon Dolan Book/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) ("While all roads in America are pretty much the same, and predictably smooth, American places and its people are distinctly different and pose other problems. The roads in general represent effortless and standardized pleasure, even with traffic, which no one wants to hear about. This makes the abrupt arrivals, and encounters, somewhat surrealistic--in one day, driving from my house on Cape Code, an abode of familiarity, and on the same road, at nightfall, finding myself in an utterly different landscape, among people who, while polite enough, did not want to be known." "In Africa and China and India and Patagonia, the locals seem grateful to be visited by a stranger. This is the drama, the color, the encounter in the familiar travel book. But in the United States, a visit by another citizen is not an occasion to rehearse traditional hospitality, or to utter the Arabic formula 'Salam aleikum ya dayf al-Rahman! Peace upon you, guest of the Merciful One!' or the Hindi version, 'Welcome! Atithi devo Bhava! The guest is God!'" "One is more often greeted with suspicion, hostility, or indifference. In this way Americans could be more challenging, more difficult to get acquainted with, more secretive and suspicious and in many respects more foreign, than any people I have met." Id. at 23.).

THE MIDDLE AGES WERE NOT AS 'DARK' AS OFTEN SUGGESTED

Johannes Fried, The Middle Ages, translated from the German by Peter Lewis (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2015) ("The division of human capacities into the Liberal arts and Mechanical Arts has its origins in the educational doctrines of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The term 'Liberal Arts' denoted those disciplines that could be mastered without manual labor, and which one could pursue without having to make a living from them. In Antiquity, then, this conception was premised on the figure of the free, wealthy aristocrat, whose livelihood was maintained by an army of people more of less dependent upon him. But this social stratum no longer existed; his place was now primarily taken by monks and scribes, and very occasionally lay people. Every activity that require manual work, by contrast, was designated as 'mechanical,' including for example surgery and medicine, hunting skills, maritime navigation and any form of commercial enterprise." Id. at 53-54.).

"THE SENATE AND PEOPLE OF ROME"

Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (New York & London: Liveright, 2015) ("Ancient Rome is important. To ignore the Romans is not just to turn a blind eye to the distant past. Rome still helps to define the way we understand our world and think about ourselves, from high theory to low comedy. After 2,000 years, it continues to underpin Western culture and politics, what we write and how we see the world, and our place in it." Id. at 15. [Note: However, it is a arrogant misunderstanding, on our part, if not a joke, for us to think or characterize the United States as the "new" Rome.] "The rebellions that we know about were not the work of high-principled, or narrow-minded, nationalists. Getting rid of the Romans was never the same as an independence movement in the modern sense. Nor were they driven by an excluded underclass or religious zealotry. Religion often confirmed the aspirations of the rebels and provided unifying rituals and symbols--from the messianic hopes of the Jews to the human sacrifices reputedly carried out by Arminius in the Teutoburg Forest--but rebellions were not specifically religious uprisings. They were usually led by the provincial aristocracy and were a sign that the relationship of collusion between the local elites and the Roman authorities had broken down. To put it another way, they were the price the Romans paid for their dependence on collaboration. Rebellions were usually sparked by some isolated inflammatory or offensive act on the part of the Romans which c upset the delicate balance." Id. at 512-513.).

LIBRARY OF ARABIC LITERATURE 4

Abu Ala' al-Ma'arri, The Epistle of Forgiveness or Pardon to Enter the Garden: Volume One: A Vision of Heaven and Hell, preceded by Ibn al-Qarih's Epistle (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translated from the Arabic by Geert Jan van Gelder & Gregor Schoeler (New York & London: New York U. Press, 2014).

Abu Ala' al-Ma'arri, The Epistle of Forgiveness or Pardon to Enter the Garden: Volume Two: Hypocrites, Heretics, and Other Sinners (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translated from the Arabic by Geert Jan van Gelder & Gregor Schoeler (New York: & London: New York U. Press, 2014) ("Many an ascent to knowledge was ill-directed and has turned, without dispute, into an ascent to ignorance." Id. at 161.).

YEHUDA AMICHAI (1924-2000)

Yehuda Amichai, The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter, with translations into English by Glenda Abramson, Robert Alter, Yehuda Amichai, Chana Bloch, Assia Gutmann, Barbara Harshaw, Benjamin Harshaw, Ted Hughes, Chana Kronfeld, Stephen Mitchell, Ruth Nevo, Tudor Parfitt, Harold Schimmel, and Leon Wieseltier (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015) (Yehudi Amichai is considered to be Israel's greatest contemporary poet.).

THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN CULTURE

Brian T. Edwards, After the American Century: The End of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2015) ("In this book, I argue that because of the ways in which culture circulates in the digital age and because of the changed geopolitical status of the United States in the twenty-first century, we have entered a period after the American century--meaning that American culture, long popular globally and assumed to have a positive message or benefit to the U.S. politics, is generally taken up by individuals in ways that detach the cultural product from its American referent and thereby shatter the presumption of their close relationship. Focusing on a series of cases from three contexts in North Africa and the Middle East, I try to make sense of the fragmented meaning that American cultural objects and forms--with recognizably American sources but unfamiliar in their use of application--now take in new and frequently unpredicted locations. In so doing, I am trying to map out what the period after the American century looks like from the perspective of literature, film, and cultural production." Id. at1. "One of the assumptions about globalization in the realm of culture is that there is endless circulation, that the technologies of the digital age that have brought so many cultural products from the United States to the Middle East and North Africa might bring them back home to Americans after their journey abroad--safe and sound, as it were. In our technocentric moment, digital technologies and circulation are imagined as intertwined, with everything propelled seamlessly via the former and nothing outside the reach of the latter. If my discussion of some of the ways in which American cultural forms have been altered, localized, and disoriented in their Egyptian, Iranian, and Moroccan adaptions is accurate, we should wonder if perhaps in their return to the United States they might become repatriated. With a little debriefing, maybe they can teach us something about ourselves we didn't know." Id. at 199.).

AMERICAN ESSAYS 1986-2000

I reread these collections of American essays thinking I would discard/donate them afterward. However, I realized how timely and relevant many of the underlying themes of these collections remain. So, I will retain them in the hope of being able to reread them again in another twenty years when, sadly, they will still be relevant.

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1986, edited and with an Introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1986) (From Kai Erikson, "Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters" (originally from The Nation, 1985): "The United States did not become a nuclear power on August 6, with the destruction of Hiroshima. It became a nuclear power on July 16, when the first test device was exploded in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Uncertainties remained, of course, many of them. But from that moment on, the United States knew how to produce a bomb, knew how to deliver it and knew it would work. Stimson said shortly after the war that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 'ended the ghastly specter of a clash of great land armies,' but he could have said, with greater justice, that the ghastly specter ended at Alamogordo. Churchill came close to making exactly that point when he first learned of the New Mexico test: 'To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that number o British. . . . Now all that nightmare picture vanished.' " "It had vanished. The age of inch-by-inch crawling over enemy territory, the age of Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima and Okinawa, was just plain over." "The point is that once we had the bomb and were committed to its use, the terrible weight of invasion no longer hung over our heads. The Japanese were incapable of mounting any kind of offensive, as every observer has agreed, and it was our option when to close with the enemy and thus risk casualties. So we could have easily afforded to hold for a moment, to think it over, to introduce what Dwight Eisenhower called 'that awful thing' to the world on the basis of something closer to mature consideration. We could have afforded to detonate a bomb over some less lethal target and then pause to see what happened. And do it a second time, maybe a third. And if none of those demonstration had made a difference, presumably we would have had to strike harder: Hiroshima and Nagasaki would still have been there a few weeks later for that purpose, silent and untouched--'unspoiled' was the term Gen. H. H Arnold used--for whatever came next. Common lore also has it that there were not bombs enough for such niceties, but that seems not to have been the case. The United States was ready to deliver a third bomb toward the end of August, and Groves had already informed Marshall and Stimson that three or four more bombs would be available in September, a like number in October, at least five in November, and seven in December, with substantial increases to follow in early 1946. Even if we assume that Groves was being too hopeful about the productive machinery he had set in motion, as one expert close to the matter has suggested, a formidable number of bombs would d have been available by the date originally set for invasion." "Which brings us back to the matter of momentum. The best way to tell the story of those days is to say that the 'decision to drop' had become a force of gravity. It had taken life, The fact that it existed supplied its meaning, its reason for being. Elting E. Morison, Stimson's biographer, put it well: 'Any process started by men toward a special end tends, for reason logical, biological, aesthetic or whatever they may be, to carry forward, if other things remain equal, to its climax. [This is] the inertia developed in a human system. . . . In a process where such a general tendency has been set to work it is difficult to separate the moment when men were still free to choose from the moment, if such there was, when they were no longer free to choose.' " Id. at 116, 125-126.).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1987, edited and with an Introduction by Gay Talese (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1987) (From Joseph Epstein, "They Said You Was High Class" (originally from The American Scholar, 1986): "Intellectually, the University of Chicago strove much higher, holding four tasks in life to be worthwhile: to be an artist, to be a scientist, to be a statesman, or to be a teacher of artists, scientists, or statesmen. In this regard the University of Chicago was not anti-middle class in the abrasive manner of Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken; it was para-middle class by its tacit implication that there were higher things in life than getting a good job, earning a living, raising a family, and getting on. Chamfort [aka Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, 6 April 1741 – 13 April 1794] once said that society was divided between those who had more dinners than appetite and those who had more appetite than dinners, but at the University of Chicago the division was between those lived loved art and learning and those who did not, and those who loved it were thought better." Id. at 85, 89-90. From William Pfaff, "The Lay Intellectual (Apologia Pro Vita Sua) (originally from Salugundi, 1986): "The private scholar has all but vanished. . . . By 'intellectual,' of course, I mean the person who deals in ideas primarily for their own sake, for the pleasure they give, and only then for their practical effect and application. There are plenty of intelligent professional people, officials, business and organizational executives, journalists and broadcasters, scientists, engineers, who are not intellectuals. There are people in the university who are not intellectuals; but the university is nonetheless the intellectuals' institution, the community of learned men and women the center of speculation. Why then are there some of us whose lives revolve about ideas but who avoid the university, lack its credentials, and certification, and find only a qualified pleasure in the university community?" Id. at 172, 172-173. Were Pfaff to ask himself that last question today, I think a significant part of the answer would simply be that most colleges and university are no longer "the intellectual's institution." Rather, many universities and colleges), and the departments of which they are comprised, have become profit/cost centers: the emphasis is not on ideas, or even learning; rather the emphasis is on revenue streams, outputs and inputs per unit.).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1988, edited and with an Introduction by Anne Dillard (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988) (From Mary Lee Settle, "London--1944" (originally from The Virginia Quarterly Review, 1987): "It has taken me a long time since that night to realize that the war years were not wasted. I have had to face the fact that social change does not change evil people. There is only this difference. Their seduction is no longer official tolerated in democracies. Evil men and evil prejudices are with us still; 'nice' people belong to anti-Semitic country clubs, and their imitators drive pick-up trucks with gun racks and hate 'niggers.' The only thing that saves us is that such beliefs have been  unacceptable to decent people since 1945. I know that 'unacceptable' is a small word for this enormity, but the world runs on shallowness for the most part. We are left at least, with a residue of social shame as a weapon." Id. at 1, 20. And here is what, in 2016, seems to be an original thought was previously understood and said in 1987, which underscores how slow society and its policymakers are in learning.  From Kimberly Wozencraft, "Notes from the Country Club (originally from Witness, 1987): "Politicians know that an antidrug stance is an easy way to get votes from parents who are terrified that their children might wind up addicts. I do not advocate drug use. Yet, having seen the criminal justice system from serval angles, as a police officer, a court bailiff, a defendant, and a prisoner, I am convinced that prison is not the answer to the drug problem, or for that matter to many other white-collar crimes. If the taxpayers knew how their dollars were being spend inside some prisons, they might actually scream out loud." Id. at 236, 242-243.).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1989, edited and with an Introduction by Geoffrey Wolff  (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989) (From Joan Didion, "Insider Baseball" (originally from The New York Review of Books, 1988): "What made the 1988 [Jesse] Jackson candidacy a bomb that had to be defused, then, was not that blacks were supporting a black candidate, but that significant numbers of whites were supporting--not only supporting but in my cases overcoming deep emotional and economic conflicts of their own in order to support--a candidate who was attractive to them not because but in spite of the fact that he was black, a candidate whose most potent attraction was that he 'didn't sound like a politician.' 'Character' seemed not to be, among those voters, the point-of-sale issue the narrative made it out to be: a number of white Jackson supporters to whom I talked would quite serenely describe their candidate as a 'con man,' or even as, in George Bush's word, a hustler.' " " 'And yet . . . ' they would say, What 'and yet' turned out to mean, almost without variation, was that they were willing to walk off the edge of the known political map for a candidate who was running against, as he repeatedly said, 'politics as usual,' against what he called 'consensualist centrist politics'; against what had come to be the very premise of the process, the notion that the winning and the maintaining of public office warranted the invention of a public narrative based only tangentially on observable reality." "In other words they were not idealists, these white Jackson voters, but empiricists . . . I recall talking to a rich and politically well-connected Californian who had been, through the primary campaign there, virtually the only prominent Democrat on the famously liberal west side of Los Angeles who was backing Jackson. He said that he could afford 'the luxury of being more interested in issues than in process,' but that he would pay for it: 'When I want something, I'll have a hard time getting people to pick up the phone. I recognize that. I made the choice.' " "On the June night in os Angeles when Michael Dukakis was declared the winner of the California Democratic primary, and the bomb officially defused, there took place in the Crystal Room of the Biltmore Hotel a 'victory party' that was less a celebration than a ratification by the professionals, a ritual convergence of those California Democrats for whom the phones would continue to get picked up. . . ." "In the end the predictable desks was made to go with the process, with predictable, if equivocal, results. . . . " Id. at 44, 66-69.).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1990, edited and with an Introduction by Justin Kaplan (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1990) (From Joseph Epstein, "A Few Kind Words for Envy" (originally from The American Scholar, 1989): ("The only expensive item I continue to envy is a small, well-made house with a fine view of water and of a naturally elegant landscape. For the rest, I envy things on which a price tag cannot be put, many but not all of them fairly trivial. Permit me to list them. I envy anyone who can do a backward somersault in midair air from a standing potion. I envy men who have fought a war and survived it. I envy people who speak foreign languages easily. I envy performing artists who have the power to move and amuse audiences to the point where the audience wants the performance never to end. I envy people who can travel abroad with a single piece of carry-on luggage. I envy people who have good posture. Above all, I envy those few people who truly understand that life is a fragile bargain, rescindable at any time by the other party, and live their lives accordingly." Id. at 83, 97-98.).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1991, edited and with an Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991) (From Jane Tompkins, "At the Buffalo Bill Museum--June 1988" (originally from The South Atlantic Quarterly, 1990): "Major historical events like genocide and major acts of destruction are not simply produced by impersonal historical processes or economic imperatives or ecological blunders; human intentionality is involved and human knowledge of the self. Therefore, if you're really interested in not having any more genocide or killing of animals, no matter what else you might do--condemning imperialism or shaking your finger at history--if you don't first, or also, come to recognize the violence in yourself and your own anger and your own destructiveness, whatever else you don won't work. It isn't that genocide doesn't matter, Genocide matters and it starts at home." Id. at 203, 222.).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1992, edited and with an Introduction by Susan Sontag (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992) (From Patricia Storace, "Look Away, Dixie Land"(originally from The New York Review of Books, 1992): "Now, with the blessing of the Mitchell estate, we can tote the weary load of a sequel, written by the romance novelist Alexander Ripley." [] "Scarlett, the product of the land of the fee and the home of the slave, is excruciatingly dull." [] "The taboo against interracial sex remains central to white and black racism, partly because interracial sex represents to racists a relinquishing of power, an acceptance of the common humanity of the partners. It is a marvelous irony that being human is the greatest terror of all. Given the treacherous complexities of the history of blacks and whites in relation to each other, and given the pressures exerted on interracial lovers by both whites and blacks, interracial romance is always a matter of emotional intricacy, and at times of heroic love. It is a paradoxical spectacle to see this display of contempt for human love by a writer whose trade is the romance novel. It is also a paradoxical spectacle to see that a novel in which shopping is the principal erotic experience is not considered sexually bizarre. "Alexander Ripley, the Mitchell heirs, and the publishers who cooperated with this agreement are still whistling Dixie, that defunct national anthem whose message to its followers is still 'Look away, look away.'" Id at 268, 295-296.).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1993, edited and with an Introduction by Susan Sontag (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993) (From Thomas Palmer, "The Case for HumanBeings" (originally from The Atlantic Monthly): "The difference between life and nonlife, according to the biologists, is a matter of degree. A glass of seawater, for instance, contains many of the same materials as a condor (or a green turtle). What makes one alive and the other not are the varying chemical pathways those materials follow. The glass of water contains few internal boundaries, and gases diffuse freely across its surface. In the condor, in contrast, a much more complex array of reactions is in progress, reactions that maintain certain molecular-energy potentials in an oddly elevated state, even though the bird as a whole shows a net energy loss. In other words, both the condor and the glass of water cycle energy, but in the condor the energy goes to support a level of complexity not present in the water." "Perhaps the condor is more like a candle flame--both burn energy, and that burning keeps certain patterns intact. The condor, like the candle, can burn out. But although one can relight the candle, one cannot relight the condor--it is too delicately tuned, too dependent on various internal continuities." Id. 254, 259.).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1994, edited and with an Introduction by Tracy Kidder (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994) (From the "Introduction": "We live in an autobiographical age. An unusually large number of poets and novelists are writing their memoirs, Almost everyone who reports for magazines and journals uses the first person, Even academics and book reviewers begin essays with personal anecdotes, like waiters introducing themselves before getting down to business." Id. at xi. Unfortunately, the '"autobiographical age' has, in the early twentieth century, become the self-congratulatory age. It is rare that a writer or speaker is not, at his or her core, saying look at me, see what I have done, am I not special. Even groups cannot resist engaging in mutual admiration. Look what we have done! We may have come in last in a competition, but we desire kudos for the effort. I am so proud of us. We are one big, continuous, Special Olympics. Is that progress? But, then again, have things really changed? "The thoroughgoing first person is a demanding mode, It asks for the literary equivalent of perfect pitch, Even good writers occasionally lose control of their tone and let a self0congratulatory quality slip in. Eager to explain that their heart is in the right place, they baldly state that they care deeply about matters with which they appear to be only marginally acquainted, Pretending to confess to their bad behavior, they revel in their colorfulness. Insistently describing their own biases, they make it all to obvious that they wish to appear uncommonly reliable Obviously, the first person doesn't guarantee honesty. Just because they are committing words to paper does not mean that writers stop telling themselves the lies that they've invented, for getting through the night. Not everyone has Montaigne's gift foot candor. Certainly some people are less likely to write honestly about themselves than about anyone else on earth." Id. at xii. Today where we are encouraged to brand ourselves, sadly, we believe our own, self-written, marketing material. We may fool others, but the biggest rube is ourselves.).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1995, edited and with an Introduction by Tracy Kidder (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995) (From William H. Gass, "The Art of Self" (originally from Harper's Magazine, 1994): "But now for a little history of the corruption of a form. Once upon a time, history concerned itself only with what it considered important, along with the agents of these actions, the contrivers of significant events, and the forces that such happenings enlisted or expressed. Historians had difficulty deciding whether history was the result of the remarkable actions of remarkable men or the significant consequences, or of social structures, diet, geography, and the secret entelechies of Being, but whatever was the boss, the boss was big, massive, all-powerful, and hogged the center of the state; however, as machines began to replicate objects, and little people began to multiply faster than wars or famines could reduce their numbers, and democracy arrived to flatter the multitude and tell them they ruled, and commerce flourished, sales grew, and money became the really risen god, then numbers replaced significant individuals, the trivial assumed the throne that was a camp  chair on a movie set, and history looked about for gossip, not for laws, preferring lies about secret lives to the intentions of Fate." Id. at 100, 107.).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1996, edited and with an Introduction by Geoffrey C. Ward (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996) (From Bruce Shapiro, "One Violent Crime" (originally from The Nation) 1995): ""One the evening of August 7, 1994, I was among seven people stabbed and seriously wounded in a coffee bar a few blocks form my house. . . ." Id. at 319, 319. "While I lay in the hospital, the big story on CNN was the Clinton administration's 1994 crime bill, then being debated in Congress. Even fogged by morphine I was aware of the irony. I was flat on my back, the result of a particularly violent assault, while Congress eventually passed the anti-crime package I had editorialized against in The Nation just a few week earlier. Night after night in the hospital, unable to sleep, I watched the crime-bill debate replayed and heard Republicans and Democrats (who had sponsored the bill in the fill place) fall over each other to prove who could be the toughest on crime." "The bill passed on August 21, a few days after I returned home. In early autumn I read the entire text of the crime bill--all 312 pages, What I found was perhaps obvious, yet under the circumstances compelling: not a single one of those 312 pages would have protected me or Ann or Martin or any of the others form our assent, Not the enhanced prison terms, not the forty-four new health-penalty offense, not the three-strikes-you're-out requirements; not the summary deportations of criminal aliens. And the new tougher-than-tough anticrime provisions of the Contract with America, like the proposed abolition of the Fourth Amendment's search and seizure protections, offer no more practical protections." "On he other hand, the mental-health and social-welfare safety net shredded by Reaganomics and conservatives of both parties might have made a difference in the life of someone like my assailant--and thus in the life of someone like me. My assailant's growing distress in the days before August 7 was obvious to his neighbors, He had muttered darkly about relatives planning to burn down his house, A better-funded, more comprehensive safety net misstate just have saved me and six others for untold pain and trouble." "From my perspective--the perspective of a crime victim--the Contract with America and its conservative Democratic analogs are really blueprints for making the streets even less safe. Want to take away that socialist income subsidy called welfare? Fine. Connecticut Governor John Rowland proposes cutting off all benefits after either months, So more people in New Haven and other cities will turn to the violence-breeding economy of crack, or emotionally implode from sheer desperation. Cut funding for those softheaded social workers? Fine; let more children be beaten without the prospect of outside intervention, more Daniel Silvas carrying their own traumatic scars into violent adulthood Get rid of the few amenities prisoners enjoy, like sports equipment, musical instruments, and the i=right to get college degrees, as proposed by the congressional right?  Fine, we'll make sure that those inmates are released to their own neighborhoods tormented with unhealed rage." Id. at 323-324.).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1997, edited with an introduction by Ian Frazier (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997) (From Verlyn Klinkenborg, "We Are Still Only Human" (originally from The New York Times Magazine, 1996): "For in reality this is a brutally impolite world where bad intentions frequently prevail, and nothing is going to change that, certainly not the passing of another hundred years. It is common to talk about the twentieth century as though it were an aberration in human history, unique in the suffering it has created. It is common to cite the Armenian massacres in the early century, the world wars, the Holocaust, to adduce Stalin's crimes and to name Bosnia and Rwanda as evidence of this century's peculiar offenses against humanity. But only the tools have changed. All of human history has been an offense, of one kind or another, against humanity. What's shocking about this century isn't the evil or the unusal efficiency of its most malevolent actors. It is the collaboration in indifference, the spiritual profiteering of the intentionless masses who are paving a road to hell with politieness." "Looking back over this century, you realize that humanity is capable of being governed but incapable of governing itself. Most visions of the future I have come across, utopian and dystopian alike, have tended to look like pure projections of will, of self-governance, not projections of drift. But any vision of the future that depends in the collective interdependent self-governance of this species is essentially a delusion, for what most people contribute to their own governance is resignation. Humanity is the occasion of its own suffering. It suffers far more capably than it reasons. It endures more readily than it acts. It seems to abide without changing. The illusion of the future is that it will contain things no one has ever seen before instead of the very things we have chosen not to notice or remember, But the future will  be erected from the same raw materials as the past, and whether that prospest depresses you or not depends on how you assess our native substance." Id. at 67,  67-68.).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1998, edited and with an Introduction by Cynthia Ozick (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998) (From Joseph Epstein, "Will You Still Feed Me?" (originally from The American Scholar, 1997): "I am, I fear, a sucker for the notion, first formulated by Novalis, that character is destiny. I feel reassured when people of strong character win out and people of poor character go down the drink. Evidence of a clean cause-and-effect relation clears the intellectual sinuses. Unfortunately, too often people of good character also go down the drink--for want of energy or because of bad breaks and crucially mistaken decisions--while the shoddy, the dreary, and the miscreants flourish, as the Greeks said, like the green bay tree. Naturally, I ascribe my own little successes in life to good character, though such character as I have is owing to my wish to avoid guilt and shame and to the loss, family early in life, of my taste for serious delinquency." Id. at 102, 113.).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1999, edited and with an Introduction by Edward Hoagland (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) (From David Quammen, "Planet of Weeds" (originally from Harper's Magazine, 1998): "Some people will tell you that we as a species, Homo sapiens, the savvy ape, all 5.9 billion of us in our collective impact, are destroying the world. Me, I won't tell you that, because 'the world' is so vague, whereas what we are or aren't destroying is quite specific. Some people will tell you that we are rampaging suicidally toward a degree of global wreckage that will result in our own extinction. I won't tell you that either. Some people say that the environment will be the paramount political and social concern of the twenty-first century, but what they mean by 'the environment' is anyone's guess. Polluted air? Polluted water. Acid rain? A frayed skein of ozone over Antarctica? Greenhouse gases emitted by smokestacks and cars? Toxic wastes? None of these concerns is the big one, paleontological in scope, though some are more closely entangled with it than others. If the world's air is clean for humans to breathe but supports no birds or butterflies, if the world's waters are pure for humans to drink but contain no fish or crustaceans or diatoms, have we solved our environmental problems? Well, I suppose so, at least as environmentalism is commonly construed. That clumsy, confused, and presumptuous formulation 'the environment' implies viewing air, water, soil, forests, rivers swamps, desserts, and oceans as merely a milieu within which something important is set: human life, human history. But what's at issue in fact is not an environment; it's a living world." "Here instead is what I'd like to tell you: The consensus among conscientious biologists is that we're headed into another mass extinction, a vale of biological impoverishment commensurate with the big five. Many experts remain hopeful that we can brake that decent but my own view is that we're likely to go all the way down. . . . " Id. at 212,, 214-215. "The concept of mass extinction implies a biological crisis that spanned large parts of the planet and, in a relatively short time, eradicated a sizable number of species from a variety of groups. There's no absolute threshold of magnitude, and dozens of different episodes in geologic history might qualify, but five if ones stand out: Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic Cretaceous, . . . In between these five episodes occurred some lesser mass extinctions, and throughout the intervening lulls extinction continues, too--but at a much slower pace, known as a background rate, claiming only about one species in any major group every million years. At the background rate, extinction is infrequent enough to be counterbalanced by the evolution of new species. zEach of the five major episodes, in contrast, represents a drastic net loss of species diversity, a deep trough of biological impoverishment form which earth only slowly recovered. How long is the lag between a nadir of impoverishment and a recovery to ecological fullness? . . . [R[ough estimates run to 5 to 10 million years. . . . Id. at 213-214. Again, we are likely to be on our way all the way down!!!).

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 2000, edited and with an Introduction by Alan Lightman (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000) (From Andrew Sullivan, "What's So Bad About hate?" (originally from The New York Times Magazine, 1999): "I wonder what was going on in John William King's head two years ago when he tied James Byrd, Jr.'s feet to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him three mile down a road in rural Texas. King and two friends had picked up Byrd, who was black, when he was walking home, half drunk, from a party. As part of a bonding ritual in their fledging white supremacists group, the three men took Byrd to a remote part of town, beat him, and chained his legs together before attaching them to the truck. Pathologists at King's trial testified that Byrd was probably alive and conscious until his body finally hit a culvert and spit in two. When King was offered a chance to say something to Byrd's family at the trial, he smirked and uttered an obscenity." "We know all these details now, many months later. We know quite a large amount about what happened before and after. But I am still drawn, again and again, to the flash of ignition, the moment when fear and loathing became hate, the instant of transformation when King became hunter and Byrd became prey." "What was that? And what was it when Buford Furrow, Jr., long-time member of the Aryan Nations, calmly walked up to a Filipino-American mailman he happened to spot, asked him to mail a letter, and then shot him at point-blank range? Or when Russell Henderson beat Matthew Shepard, a young gay man, to a pulp, removed his shoes, and then, with the help of a friend, tied him to a post, like a dead coyote, to warn off others." "For all our documentation of those crimes and others, our political and moral disgust at them, our morbid fascination with them, our sensitivity to their social meaning, we seem at times to have no better idea now than we ever had of what exactly they were about. About what that moment means when, for some reason or other, one human being asserts absolute, immutable superiority over another. About not the violence, but what the violence expresses. About what--exactly--hate is. And what our own part in it may be." Id. at 182, 182-183.).

POVERTY AWARENESS

Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Crown Publishers, 2016) ("The idea of a 'rent certificate program' was first proposed in the 1930s, not by some Washington bureaucrat or tenants' union representative but by the National Association of Real Estate Boards. That group would later change its name to the National Association of Realtors and become the largest trade association for real estate agents, with more than a million members. A rent certificate program would be superior to public housing they argued. Landlords and Realtors saw government-built and -managed buildings offered at cut-rate rents as a direct threat to their legitimacy and bottom line. At first, federal policymakers disagreed and at midcentury decided to fund the construction of massive public housing complexes. But the real estate interests kept lobbying for vouchers and were joined by numerous other groups of various political persuasions, including civil rights activists who thought vouchers would advance racial integration. Eventually, after America's public housing experiment was defunded and declared a failure (in that order), they would have their day. As housing projects were demolished, the voucher program grew into the nation's largest housing subsidy program for low-income families. In policy circles, vouchers were known as a 'public-private partnership.' In real estate circles, they were known as 'a win'." Id at 149. "Courts have shown little interest in addressing the fact that the majority of tenants facing eviction never show up. If anything, they have come to depend on this because each day brings a pile of eviction cases, and the goal of every person working in housing court, no matter where their sympathies lie, is just to get through the pile because the next day another pile will be there waiting. The principle of due process has been replaced by mere process: pushing cases through. Tenant lawyers would change that. This would cost money, not only in attorney salaries, but also in the hiring of more commissioners, judges, and clerks to handle the business of justice. Every housing court would need to be adequately funded so that it could function like a court, instead of an eviction assembly line: stamp. stamp, stamp." Id. at 304. This is just one of the sorts of things one should think about when people say they want "smaller government;" that is, who would smaller government serve?, and who would be served by the appropriate "large(s) government"?).

ON JUSTIFYING VIOLENCE IN NATURAL LAW AND POSITIVE LAW

Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobio-graphical Writings, edited and with an introduction by Peter Demetz , translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986) (From "Critique of Violence": "The task of a critique of violence can be summarized as that of expounding its relation to law and justice. For a cause, however, effective, becomes violent, in the precise sense of the word, only when it bears on moral issues. The sphere of these issues is defined by the concepts of law and justice. With regard to the first of these, it is clear that the most elementary relationship within any legal system is that of ends to means, and, further, that violence can first be sought only in the realm of means, not ends. For if violence is a means, a criterion for criticizing it might seem immediately available, It imposes itself in the question whether violence, in a given case, is a means to a just or an unjust end. A critique of it would then be implied in a system of just ends. This,however, is not so. For what such a system, assuming it to be secure against all doubt, would contain is not a criterion for violence itself as a principle, but, rather, the criterion for cases of its use. The question would remain open whether violence, as a principle, could be a moral means even to just ends. To resolve this question a more exact criterion is needed, which would discriminate within the sphere of means themselves, without regard for the ends they serve." "The exclusion of this more precise critical approach is perhaps the predominant feature of a main current of legal philosophy: natural law. It perceives in the use of violent means to just ends no greater problem than man sees in his 'right' to move his body in the direction of a desired goal. According to this view (for which the terrorism in the French Revolution provided an ideological foundation), violence is a product of nature, as it were a raw material, the use of which is in no way problematical, unless force is misused for unjust ends. If, corroding to the theory of state of natural law, people give up all their violence for the sake of the state, this is done on the assumption . . . that the individual, before the conclusion of this rational contract, has de jure the right to use at will the violence that is de facto at his disposal. Perhaps these views have been recently rekindled by Darwin's biology, which, a throughly dogmatic manner, regards violence as the only original means, besides natural selection, appropriate to all the vital ends of nature. Popular Darwinistic philosophy has often shown how short a step it is from this dogma of natural history to the still cruder one of legal philosophy, which holds that violence that is, almost alone, appropriate to natural ends is thereby also legal." "This thesis of natural law that regards violence as a natural datum is diametrically opposed to that of positive law, which sees violence as a product of history. If natural law can judge all existing law only in criticizing its ends, so positive law can judge all evolving law on y in criticizing its means. If justice is the criterion of ends, legality is that of means. Notwithstanding this antithesis, hover, both schools meet in their common basic dogma: just ends can be attained by justified means, justified means used for just ends. natural law attempts, by the justness of the ends, to 'justify' the means, positive law to 'guarantee' the justness of the ends through the justification of the means, This antinomy would prove insoluble if the common dogmatic assumption were false, if justified means on the one hand and just ends of the other were in irreconcilable conflict, No insight into this problem could be gained, however, until the circular argument had been broken, and mutually independent criteria both of just ends and of justified means were established." Id. at 277 277-278.).

"THE GATE TO JUSTICE IS LEARNING"

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt , translated from the German by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1978) (From "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death": "Werner Kraft once wrote an interpretation of this story [Franz Kafka's K.). After giving careful attention to every detail of the text, Kraft notes: 'Nowhere else in literature is there such a powerful and penetrating criticism of the myth in its full scope.' According to Kraft, Kafka does not use the world 'justice,' yet it is justice which serves as the point of departure for his critique of the myth. But pnce we have reached this point, we are in danger of missing Kafka by stopping here. Is it really law which could thus be invoked against the mythic in the name of justice? No, as a legal scholar Bucephalus remains true to his origins, except that he does not seem to be practicing law--and this is probably something new, in Kafka's sense, for both Bucephalus and the bar. The law which is studied and not practiced any longer is the gate to justice." "The gate to justice is learning." Id. at 111, 139.).

LIBRARY OF ARABIC LITERATURE 3

Muhammad Ibn Idris al-Shafi'i, The Epistle on Legal Theory (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translated from the Arabic by Joseph E. Lowry (New York & London: New York U. Press, 2013) ("[T]here is no denying that [Muhammad Ibn Idris al-Shafi'i] is a centrally important figure in the history of Islamic law, and that his Epistle on Legal Theory is the first work in Arabic, or at least the earliest surviving such work, to offer a sustained theoretical account of textual interpretation, legal epistemology, and legal reasoning in Islamic law." Id. at xv.).

OLD BOOKS!

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/videos/#176210