Deutsche Literatur (hauptsachlich in Ubersetzung)

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Panopticon: Twenty Ten-Minute Essays (The German List), translated from the German by Tess Lewis (London & New York: Seagull Books, 2018).

Peter Handke, Storm Still (The German List), translated from the German by Martin Chalmers (London & New York: Seagull Books, 2014).

Peter Handke, The Great Fall (The German List), translated from the German by Krishina Winston (London & New York: Seagull Books, 2018).

Herta Muller, Father's on the Phone With the Flies: A Selection (The German List), translated from the German by Thomas Cooper (London & New York: Seagull Books, 2018).

Christa Wolf, Eulogy for the Living (The German List), translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire (London & New York: Seagull Books, 2018).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #52

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Lazy Burglar (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Howard Curtis (New York: Penguin, 2018).

SUGGESTED FICTION

Tommy Orange, There, There: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2018):

If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don't know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.

Id. at 139.

R. O. Kwon, The Incendiaries: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018).

Kevin Powers, A Shout in the Ruins: A Novel (New York: Little, Brown, 2018).

Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (New York: Penguin Press, 2018).

Keith Gessen, A Terrible Country: A Novel (New York:Viking, 2018):

'These people think Karl Marx is a nice old man with a beard,' my advisor once said to me when a group of grad students demanding a union took over one of the campus cafeterias. [] They think he's Santa Claus! he said, of the grad students. 'I'd like to pluck these friends of the working-class down in Petrograd in 1917. See how long they'd last.'

Id. at 167.

Emma Donoghue, The Lotterys, More or Less, illustrated by Caroline Hadilaksono (New York: Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic, 2018).

Laird Hunt, In the House in the Dark of the Woods (New York: Little, Brown, 2018).

Helen Weinzweig, Basic Black With Pearls, afterword by Sarah Weinman (New York:NewYork Review Books/Classica, 2018).

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Novel (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018).

Joyce Carol Oates, Hazards of Time Travel: A Novel (New York: Ecco, 2018). "You can live a life even if it is not the life you would have chosen. You can live breath by breath. You can live." Id. at 245.

     Wolfman asked me who was president of NAS-23 but when I pronounced the name, Wolfman didn't recognize it.
     Presidents of the Reconstituted North American States were heads of the Patriot Party. The general population knew little about them though they were believed to be multi-billionaires or the associates of multi-billionaires. Their names were often invented names, fictitious names, attached to individuals or animated human figures replicated endlessly online and on TV; you were conditioned to 'like' them by their friendly, smiling facial expressions and by ingeniously addictive musical jingles that accompanied them, as you were urged to 'dislike' other figures. To attempt to learn facts about them was in violation of Homeland Security Information and could be considered treasonous.

Id. at 170-171.

Tana French, The Witch Elm: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2018).

Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver (New York: Del Rey, 2018).

Sigrid Nunez, The Friend: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018). "I once heard a stranger in agitated conversation with her pug: And I suppose it's all my fault again, isn't it? At which, I swear, the dog rolled its eyes." Id. at 152.

Lydia Kiesling, The Golden State: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018).

Lauren Groff, Florida (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018). From Flower Hunters:

She says to her dog, who is beside her at the window watching the candle man, One day you'll wake up and realize your favorite person has turned into a person-shaped cloud.
The dog ignores her, because the dogs wise.

Id. at 155, 155-156.

Dara Horn, Eternal: A Novel (New York: Norton, 2018).

Joan Chase, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, introduction by Meghan O'Rourke (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2014):

That night Uncle Dan shut himself in the parlor and played the trombone sonata he had practiced on and off over the years since his one year at college. Usually he told us that each time he played he got worse, instead of better, which he thought about summed up life anyway.

Id. at 215.

Peng Shepherd, The Book of M: A Novel (New York: Morrow, 2018).

Madeline Miller, Circe:A Novel (New York: Little, Brown, 2018). "'If you find yourself in want of company,' I said. 'tell the gods you will take their bad daughters. I think you will have the right touch for them.'" Id. at 380.

Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird: A Novel (New York: Ballatine Books, 2018).

Robert Galbraith (aka J.K.Rowling), Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel) (New York: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown, 2018).

Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry: A Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018):

It's nothing new, disunity. Disparity. Terminological conflict. There have always been dissenters, always those for whom the world is due a revolution and spilling of a little blood is the only way. The problem with the idea that history itself is that when it isn't making us wiser it's making us complacent. We should have learned something from Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Somalia, yes. On the other hand: humans kill. They take what isn't theirs and they defend what is, however little that may be. They use violence when words don't work, but sometimes the reason words don't work is because the ones holding all the cards don't appear to be listening.

Id. at 237-238.

Rachel Cusk, Outline: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015).

Rachel Cusk, Transit: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016):

'Parents sometimes have a problem with that,' he said. 'They have this child that's a sort of silent witness to their lives, then the child grows up and starts blabbing their secrets all over the place and they don't like it. I'd say to them: get a dog instead. You had a child but actually what you needed was a dog, something that would love you and obey you but would never say a word, because the thing about a dog,' he said, 'is that no matter what you do to it, it will never, ever be able to talk back. . . '

Id. at 93-94.

Rachel Cusk, Kudos: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018).

Rebecca Makkai,The Great Believers: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2018).

Jana Casale, The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky (New York: Knopf, 2018).

Ling Ma, Severance: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018).

Elif Shafak, Three Daughters of Eve: A Novel (NewYork: Bloomsbury, 2017):

     The moderator handed him a book. Promptly, Azur found the page he was looking for. 'Here it is!'
     Clearing his throat--rather theatrically, Peri thought--he began to read. 'The prevailing question whether God exists elicits one of the most tedious, unproductive and ill-advised disputations in which otherwise intelligent people have been engaged. We have seen, all too often, that neither theists nor atheists are ready to abandon their Hegemony of Certainty. Their seeming disagreement is a circle of refrains. It is not even accurate to call this battle of words a "debate", since the participants, irrespective of their points of view, are known to be intransigent in their positions. Where there is no possibility of change, there is no ground for real dialogue.'

Id. at 179.

Xhenet Aliu, Brass: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2018).

Christina Dalcher, Vox: A Novel  (New York: Berkley, 2018. "Think about what you need to do to stay free." Id. at 16.

Rachel Kushner, The Strange Case of Rachel K (New York: New Directions Books, 2015).

Eileen Chang, Little Reunions, translated from the Chinese by Jane Weizhen Pan & Martin Merz (New York: New York Review Books, 2018).

Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross, translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo, with an afterword by Thomas von Steinaecker (New York: New York Review Book, 2018). From the backcover:

The Seventh Cross is one of the most powerful, popular and influential novels of the twentieth century, a hair-raising thriller that helped to alert the world to the grim realities of Nazi Germany and that is no less exciting today that when it was first published in 1942. Seven political prisoners escape from a Nazi prison camp; in response, the camp commandant has seven trees harshly pruned to resemble seven crosses: they will serve as posts to torture each recaptured prisoner, and capture, of course, is certain. Meanwhile, the escapees split up and flee arose Germany, looking for such help and shelter as they can find along the way, determined to reach the border. Anne Seghers's novel is not only a supremely suspenseful story of flight and pursuit but also a detailed portrait of a nation in the grip and thrall of totalitarianism.

Marina Perezagua, The Story of H: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by Valerie Miles (New York:Ecco, 2018):

Uranium.The central ingredient of the bombs that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Uranium. . . . It's a relatively abundant material in the earth's crust, but can only be mined cost-effectively in regions where there is a high concentration of it, and where nobody cares about the ensuing environmental contamination from the extraction process, neither the country's government nor the international companies that hold mining rights. Which is to say, this type of mining takes place only in the trash dumps of the world, the landscapes that are of no interest to anyone, the air that can be poisoned because the lungs they fill belong to people who have no value whatsoever, the neglected class. Nuclear energy is much cleaner--I've heard it said so often--but believe me, I know something about uranium, and I know that, aside from the risks of accidents in nuclear power plants located in developed countries, the most polluting phase is the first one, the site of extraction, not only for the environment and nearby cities, but also for the hands of the people who mine it without knowing they're being murdered. Even if the workers knew their lives were at risk, they'd continue extracting the uranium because death by starvation seems more imminent than death by radiation poisoning. You can feel hunger--it pricks every day--but radiation poisoning is a silent killer. Besides, you know that in Africa there are always more workers than jobs. A thousand ants for each tiny crumb of bread. If they don't explain the risks of exposure, it's not for fear of being left without laborers, only that there's no time to waste; the white queen orders them to extract material, no break. Time isn't gold in Africa. It's more valuable than that. Time is uranium. Africans aren't informed about the hows and the whys of the death that is coming because the need to fill their bellies, o their sons' or daughters' or parents' bellies, is far more urgent. Starvation, that physiological law, doesn't hide; on the contrary, it is made manifest. Radiation, on the other hand, is the way death satiates its own hunger: silence.

Id. at 229-230.

Al Franken In Conversation with David Frum

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #51

Georges Simenon, Maigret Travels (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Howard Curtis (New York: Penguin, 2018).

Shields and Gerson on Mattis' resignation, congressional stalemate

If You Go Away - Helen Merrill & Stan Getz (Tribute to Virna Lisi)

END OF THE YEAR SUGGESTED FICTION

Margery Allingham, Hide My Eyes, illustrated by Alexandru Savescu (London:The Folio Society 2018).

Kate Atkinson, Transcription (New York: Little, Brown, 2018).

Larissa Boehning, Swallow Summer, translated from the German by Lyn Marven (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2016).

Carla Guelfenbein, In the Distance with You: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by John Cullen (New York: Other Press, 2018).

Golnaz Hasemzadeh Bonde, What We Owe, translated from the Swedish by Elizabeth Clark Wessel (London: Fleet, 2018).

Sebastian Faulks, Paris Echo: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 2018).

Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2018).

Olivia Laing, Crudo: A Novel (New York: Norton, 2018).

Patrick Modiano, Sleep of Memory, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti (New Haven & London: Margellos World Republic of Letters Book/Yale University Press, 2018).

Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2018).

Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore: A Novel, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel & Ted Gossen (New York: Knopf, 2018).

Juan Gabriel Vasquez, The Shape of the Ruins: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean (New York: Riverbed Books, 2018).

Kate Walbert, History Favorite: A Novel (New York & London: Scribner, 2018).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #50

Georges Simenon, Maigret Enjoys Himself (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by David Watson (New York: Penguin, 2017).

MISCELLANEOUS READS

Kaushik Basu, The Republic of Beliefs: A New Approach to Law and Economics (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018).

J. M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (New York: Viking, 2017).

Dave Eggers, The Monk of Mokha (New York: Knopf, 2018).

M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth: A Critical Edition, Translated from the original in Gujarati by Mahadev Desai, Introduced and Annotated by Tridip Suhrud (New Haven & London: Yale University Press 2018).

Michael Massing, Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind (New York: Harper, 2018).

Kenneth B. Pyle, Japan in the American Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2018).

David Stuttered, Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018).

Der Leiermann

Watch my heart crack: Fischer-Dieskau sings Schubert

WHAT TO DO WITH DEAD BODIES?

Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015).

Autumn Leaves

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #49

Georges Simenon, Maigret's Failure (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by William Hobson (New York: Penguin, 2017).

CNN's Fareed Zakaria EXPOSING The Trump Administration As a Criminal & L...

MARTIN NIEMOLLER

Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came For Me: Martin Niemoller, The Pastor Who Defied the Nazis (New York: Basic Books, 2018). From the book jacket:

Whereas previous biographers have portrayed Niemoller as a principled man who was led astray by the Nazis, Hockenos contends that he knew exactly what Hitler stood for, and only gradually and reluctantly shed his right-wing sympathies. In fact, Niemoller's postwar confession represents the start of his long moral journey, not its end. Revealing the challenges and limits human of transformation, Then They Came for Me ultimately forces each of us to ask ourselves, What would I have done?

Full Interview: Michelle Obama Talks To Stephen Colbert

The most feared song in jazz, explained

IT AINT EASY BEING HEAVY!

Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir (New York: Scribner, 2018).

Obama Responds To Heckler: You Won, So Why Are You "So Mad All The Time?"

Uncle Tom's Cabin Rag Classic Banjo

Jason Stanley, "How Fascism Works"

Chris Hedges - The American Empire Will Collapse Within a Decade, Two at...

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #48

Georges Simenon, Maigret Sets a Trap (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Sian Reynolds (New York: Penguin, 2017).

RACE IN AMERICA

Sarah Kelly Oehler & Esther Adler, eds., Charles White: A Retrospective (New Haven & London: The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; & Yale University Press, 2018).

Adena Spingarn, Uncle Tom: From Martyr to Traitor, foreword by Henry Louis Gate, Jr. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2018).

Anders Walker, The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2018).

READINGS IN BUDDHISM

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Rebecca Bloom, Kevin Carr, Chun Wa Chan, Ha Nul Jun, Carla Sinopoli, & Keiko Yokoto-Carter, Hyecho's Journey: The World of Buddhism (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2017).

Frederick J. Streng, Emptiness: A Study of Religious Meaning (Nashville & New York: Abingdon Press, 1967).

IMAGES OF THE BLACK

Vercoutter, Jean, Jean Leclant, Frank M. Snowden, Jr., & Jehan Desanges, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1976).

Devise, Jean, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II: From the Early Christian Era to the Age of Discovery Part 1: From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1979) ("May readers and researchers not forget this Notice, which is in effect a warning and which applies to both parts of the second volume. Indeed, [the authors] wish to state clearly that this book is a beginning, a groundbreaking, and invitation to look further, to be curious: it is not the soft pillow on which the hasty certitudes of hurried civilizations too often fall asleep." Id. at 8.).

Devise, Jean, & Mollat, Michel, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II: From the Early Christian Era to the Age of Discovery, Part 2: Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1979) ("Many see the sixteenth century as the starting point of relations between Europe and black Africa, and in a way this is not inexact, give or take fifty years. This book, however, proves that these relations had a long prehistory. If Africa hardly dreamed of Europe before the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe, on the other hand, had had certain ideas and certain images of the black continent and its peoples for centuries before. The least one can say is that a real conditioning of European reflexes and opinions was already in existent when actual contact with the black world was reestablished." "That contact coincided with the development of the African slave trade and also with the affirmation of a mentality and of a conception of art already modern. In a few years these facts eclipsed an image of the black that was the fruit of a centuries-old evolution. It seems to us all the more important to rediscover that image through the documents that fixed its various forms and so to show the vertiginous abysses from which have emerged some of the behavior patterns of the Europeans of today." Id. at 258.).

Bindman, David,  & Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the the "Age of Discovery" to the Age of Abolition: Part 1, Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2010).

Bindman, David,  & Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the the "Age of Discovery" to the Age of Abolition: Part 2, Europe and the World Beyond (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2011).

Bindman, David,  & Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the the "Age of Discovery" to the Age of Abolition: Part 3, The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2011).

Honor, Hugh, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV: From The American Revolution to World War I: Part 1, Slaves and Liberators (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1989).

Honor, Hugh, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV: From The American Revolution to World War I: Part 2, Black Models and White Myths (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1989).

Bindman, David,  & Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V: The Twentieth Century: Part 1, The Impact of Africa (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2014).

Bindman, David,  & Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V: The Twentieth Century: Part 2, The Rise of Black Artists (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2014).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #47

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Headless Corpse (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Curtis Howard (New York: Penguin, 2017).

"THE US CONSTITUTION WAS NOT A PANACEA . . ."

The American Revolution led to a constitution that incorporated the results of debate and compromise, in which long-established customs and expectations were defined and endorsed. The US Constitution was not a panacea, or a comprehensive doctrine by which all life should be guided. It left the citizens in charge, free to adopt whatever way of life might conform to the purely negative constrains of the central government–and that was its greatest virtue. All this is contained the famous first amendment, which affirms that 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (New York: All Points Books/St.Martin’s Press, 2018), at 71-72.

Doug Balliett - Dragonetti and the 3 Stringed Bass

Renaud Garcia-Fons: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

IMMATURE AMERICAN POLITICS

Alan Wolfe, The Politics of Petulance: America in an Age of Immaturity (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Brooks and Marcus on what's fueling the president's 'ramped up' rhetoric

The Mavericks, "How can you mend a broken heart"

THE IMPORTANCE OF LIBRARIES!

Susan Orlean, The Library Book (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

THE BANJO

Bacon Banjos Catalog (c.1930).

Bob Carlin, Banjo: AnIllustrated History, foreword by Tony Trischka (Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat Books, 2016).

Cecelia Conway, African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions  (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995).

Laurent Dubois, The Banjo: America's African Instrument (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2016).

Epiphone Banjos, Epiphone RecordingBanjos (c. 1928).

Gibson, Banjo Catalog (c.1930).

Philip F. Gura & James F. Bollman, America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Robert Shaw, J. Kenneth Moore, Rex Ellis, Bob Carlin, Peter Szego & George Wunderlich, The Birth of the Banjo: Katonah Museum of Art, November 9, 2003-February 1, 2004 (Katonah, NY: Katonah Museum of Art, 2003).

The Vega Banjo Co., Vega Banjos Catalog (c. 1930).

Robert Lloyd Webb & MIT Museum, Ring the Banjar!: The Banjo in America from Folklore to Factory (Anaheim, CA: Centerstream Publishing, 1984).

H. A. Weymann, Weymann Banjos Catalog (c. 1928).

Robert Winans, ed., Banjo Roots and Branches (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET # 46

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Minister (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (New York: Penguin, 2017).

Matt Whitaker's History Of Time-Travel, Toilets & Bigfoot

California Firefighters To President Trump: 'You Are Wrong' About Wildfi...

THE VOTE IN AMERICA

Allan J. Lichtman, The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present (Cambridge,Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018).

The mentally strong

HERMANN HESSE

Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow, translated from the German by Peter Lewis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018).

MINSTREL

Bob Carlin, The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy (Jefferson, North Carolina, & London, England: McFarland, 2007) ("Joe Sweeney was the Elvis Presley of this time, a white man who could sing like a blackman, to borrow and paraphrase the words of Elvis Presley's mentor Sam Phillips. Sweeney served a parallel role in the 1840s to Jimmie Rodgers in the 1920s, Bill Monroe in the 1940s, and to Hank Williams or Elvis in the 1950s. In their heydays, these men of Anglo-American heritage 'crossed the tracks' to sample African American music, adding to it white sounds of previous and current generations, and therefore creating something new and unusual out of their personal musical consciousness. At a time when African American music and musicians were unacceptable or inaccessible to main street America, these players provided a suitable version of black music for most listeners." Id. at 1.).

Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, with a foreword by Greil Marcus (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 2013) (From the back cover: "Taking up white America's long fraught relationship with African American culture, Love & Theft examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the years leading up to the Civil War.").

William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum America Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2005) ("In California I nearly starved to death in the streets, singing and dancing and begging people for money, and then I stole a banjo. The face of the man I took it from is a sleeping face. Did I really steal a banjo from a sleeping man? But I could play the instrument, and owning a banjo made it easier to loiter on the street corners and try to earn pennies from passersby who felt sorry for me. Easier than it was to beg the managers of the various theaters for work. All the way from Kansas and I had been reduced to a banjo-stealing, banjo-playing beggar. I know full well that what I did was wrong." Id. at 161.).

Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character, introduction by Greil Marcus (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 1931, 2004) ("[F]or the rise of the Negro minstrel coincided with a marked change in his place within the nation. Little Jim Crow appeared at almost the precise moment when The Liberator was founded; and minstrelsy spread over the land and grew in popularity as the struggle for emancipation gained in power through the '40's and '50's. The Negro minstrel joined with the Yankee and backwoodsman to make a comic trio, appearing in the same era, with the same timely intensity. The era of course was the turbulent era of the Jacksonian democracy, that stormy time when the whole mixed population of the United States seemed to pour into the streets of Washington and when many basic elements in the national character seemed to come to the surface. The Negro minstrel was deeply grounded in reality, even through the impersonators were white, even though the figure was a myth." Id. at 85-86.).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #45

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Dead Girl (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Howard Curtis (New York: Penguin, 2017).

Chris Cuomo panel GOES OFF the RAILS after Trump-loving guest calls Apri...

Chris Cuomo panel GOES OFF the RAILS after Trump-loving guest calls Apri...

Shields and Brooks on midterm results and GOP ‘lockstep loyalty’ to Trump

The Entertainer

PROOF White House Doctored Jim Acosta Video

Renowned Historian: Sessions Firing '10 Times Worse Than Nixon' | The Be...

READING LAWRENCE LESSIG IS ALWAYS A GOOD INVESTMENT OF TIME.

Lawrence Lessig, America, Compromised (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

ANATOLE BROYARD

Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (New York: Carol Southern Books, 1993.

     An innocent, a provincial form the French Quarter in New Orleans and from Brooklyn, I moved in with Sheri Donatti, who was a more radical version of Anais Nin, whose protege she was. Sheri embodied all the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis. She was to be my sentimental education, I opened a bookstore, went to the New School under the GI Bill, I began to think about becoming a writer, I thought about the relation between men and women as it was in 1947, when they are still locked in what Aldous Huxley called a hostile symbiosis. In the background, like landscape, like weather, was what we read and talked about. In the foreground were our love affairs and friendships and our immersion, like swimmers or divers, in America life and art. This book is always a narrative, a story that is intimate personal, lived through, a young man excited and perplexed by life in New York City at one of the richest times in its history.

Id. at viii.

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #44

Georges Simenon, Maigret Goes to School (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New York: Penguin, 2018).

Bari Weiss | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

MAX BOOT BOOTS HIMSELF FROM TRUMP'S GOP

Max Boot, The Corrosion of Conservatism: WhyI Left the Right (New York: Liveright, 2018) (see Damon Linker, "Political Convert," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11.4.2018, at 16).

Robert Reich: Trump's 30 Biggest Broken Promises

FICTION FROM THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA

Wendell Berry, Port William Novels and Stories: The Civil War to World War II, edited by Jack Shoemaker (New York: Library of America, 2018).

Peter Taylor, Complete Stories, 1938-1959, with an Introduction by Anne Beattie (New York: Library of America, 2017).

Peter Taylor, Complete Stories, 1960-1992, with an Introduction by Anne Beattie (New York: Library of America, 2017).

Edith Wharton, Four Novels of the 1920s: The Glimpses of the Moon; A Son at the Front; Twilight Sleep; The Children, edited by Hermione Lee (New York: Library of America, 2015).

Steve Schmidt: President Donald Trump Is 'Stoking And Inciting' Worst Am...

Beautiful Young Girl Sings A Wonderful Version of Leonard Cohen's ~ Hall...

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #43

Georges Simenon, Maigret's Mistake (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Howard Curtis (New York: Penguin Books, 2017).

Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn: Clawhammer vs. Three-Finger Banjo Style |...

Three Bluegrass Banjo Styles Explained with Noam Pikelny | Reverb Interview

WOMEN'S POLITICAL ANGER: WILL IT BE CONSTRUCTIVE?

     Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger (New York: Altria Books, 2018).

     Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018).

     Rebeca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

Scrapper Blackwell - Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out

Scrapper Blackwell - Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out

ENLARGE YOUR HEART!

HOW LARGE IS YOUR HEART? The practice of inclusiveness is based on the practice of understanding, compassion, and love. With understanding and love you can embrace and accept everything, and everyone, and you don’t have to suffer, because your heart is large. How can we enlarge our heart? Increasing our understanding and compassion makes our heart grow greater. Each of us has to ask the question: is there anything that we can do to help us open the door of our heart and accept the other person? How large is our heart?

Thich Nhat Hahn, How to Fight (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2017), at 68.

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #42

Georges Simenon, Maigret is Afraid (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (New York: Penguin Books, 2017).

Classic Banjo Fingering Exercises and Chord Shapes Part1

Shields and Brooks on health care, Trump's Khashoggi reaction

Saudi Arabia: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

“Cornerstore Caroline” Falsely Accuses a 9-Year-Old Black Boy of Sexual ...

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #41

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Man on the Bench (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by David Watson (New York: Penguin Books, 2017).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #40

Georges Simenon, Maigret's Revolver (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Sian Reynolds (New York: Penguin Books, 2017) ("'Oh, just a nation. I get the feeling that although you're the famous Maigret, you've go a lot to learn.'" Id. at 42.).

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE GOVERNING ADMINISTRATION HATES AND DOES NOT UNDERSTAND GOVERNMENT?

Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk (New York: Norton, 2018) (early days of the morons who are the Trump administration).

The secret of why Trump won't release his taxes

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #39

Georges Simenon, Maigret, Lognon and the Gangsters (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by William Hobson (New York: Penguin Books, 2017) ("'Do you have  an idea how they found you?' 'I can only think of one explanation, which would prove they're very good, these people, professionals." Id. at 21.).

Will the FBI investigation solve the battle over Kavanaugh’s confirmation?

BUILDING A DEMOCRATIC CONSENSUS IN THE AGE OF POLARIZATION

Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018) ("Many theorists of modern democracy have argued that passive acceptance of a democratic creed is not enough to make such a system work. Democracy requires certain positive virtues on the part of citizens as well. Alexis de Tocqueville in particular warned of the temptation of people in democratic societies to turn inward and preoccupy themselves with their own welfare and that of their families exclusively. Successful democracy, according to him, requires citizens who are patriotic, informed, active, public-spirited, and willing to participate in political matters. In this age of polarization, one might add that they should be open-minded, tolerant of other view points, and ready to compromise their own views for the sake of democratic consensus." Id. at 159-160.).

Shields and Brooks on Brett Kavanaugh and a 'bubble of hysteria' in poli...

Lindsey Graham erupts: Kavanaugh hearing an unethical sham

IN THE END, WHO OWNS ARTISTIC WORKS?

Benjamin Balint, Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy (New York: Norton, 2018)

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #38

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Tall Woman (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by David Watson (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("'I hate it when I have to arrest someone like him and send him down. The last time, when he got five years, I almost felt like giving his lawyer a piece of my mind; he had no idea what to do. He's a waste of space, that one.' It was hard to define quite what Bossier understood by 'waste of space', but you knew exactly what he meant." Id. at 23.).

SUGGESTED READINGS ON CONTEMPORARY ISSUES

Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment (New York: Penguin Press, 2018).

April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Craig Unger, House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia (New York: Dutton, 2018).

Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies:A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever (New York: Free Press, 2018).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #37

Georges Simenon, Maigret Takes a Room (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("All evening, in short, he had had a sense of being in the wrong place and even though he hadn't done anything reprehensible, he felt something like remorse in a cornier of his conscience." Id. at 6.).

CONGRESSIONAL VIOLENCE

Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018). Reading this might cause a few twenty-first-century tribal partisans to pause, reflect, and lower their volume.

Therese Bohman, Drowned: A Novel, translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy (New York: Other Press, 2011).

Therese Bohman, The Other Woman: A Novel, translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy (New York: Other Press, 2015):

[P]eople can become so obsessed with theories and structures that their whole life is nothing more than an attempt to navigate around them, they refuse to take off their blinkers, to understand that theories are _theories_, not truths, you can't just use them randomly in reality, you can't use the same tools in life as you would in [] textual analysis . . . You can't live according to theories. It shows a complete lack of respect for life itself.

_Id_. at 108.

Therese Bohman, Eventide: A Novel, translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy (New York: Other Press, 2018).

Should Beginner Guitar Players use a Pick or Fingerstyle?

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #36

Georges Simenon, Maigret at Picratt's (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by William Hobson (New York: Penguin Books, 2016).

Shields and Brooks on Trump tell-all fallout, Kavanaugh confirmation hea...

CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL! HUMANS ARE THE PRIMARY CAUSE! WE ARE SCREWED!!

William T. Vollmann, Carbon Ideologies, Volume One: No Immediate Danger (New York: Viking, 2018).

William T. Vollmann, Carbon Ideologies, Volume Two: No Good Alternative (New York: Viking, 2018).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #35

Georges Simenon, Maigret's Memoirs (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Howard Curtis (New York: Penguin Books, 2016).

WHAT ARE YOU?

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (New York: Liveright, 2018) (From the book jacket: "Who do you think you are? That's a question bound up in another. What do you think you are? Gender. Religion. Race. Nationality. Class. Culture. Such affiliations give contents to our sense of self, and shape our polarized world. Yet the collective identities they spawn are riddled with contradictions, and cratered with falsehoods.").

Gabrielle Union - All the Reasons Why “We’re Going to Need More Wine” | ...

Aw! George W. Bush sneaks candy to Michelle Obama at John McCain’s memor...

Ex-Budget Director Stockman Says Trump Tax Cuts Will Cause 'All Hell to ...

Upton Bass: The Devil Is In The Details...

WATCH: President George W. Bush pays tribute to John McCain at National ...

Meghan McCain: My Father Was A Warrior | MSNBC

AM JOY /HARDBALL 9 01 2018 Msnbc News Family, political luminaries mourn...

THE FARCE OF WINNERS HELPING THE LOSERS

Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (New York: Knopf, 2018).

Watch President Barack Obama's full tribute to John McCain at National C...

Autumn Leaves - Yenne Lee plays 2004 Pepe Romero Jr.

The Putin Files: John Brennan

"I DON'T WANT TO SET THE WORLD ON FIRE": SPATS LANGHAM, THE INK SPOT (No...

Upton Bass: Spin that Bass!

SOUTH ASIA

According the Wikipedia, "The current territories of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka form South Asia."

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Aranyak (The India List), introduced and translated from the Bengali by Rimi Bhattacharya (New York: Seagull Books, 2017) (From the back cover: "Satyacharan is a graduate in 1920s Calcutta, who, unable to find a job in the city, takes up the post of a 'manage' of a vast tract of forested land in neighboring Bihar. As he is enchanted and hypnotized by the exquisite beauty of nature, he is also burdened with the painful task of clearing this land for cultivation. Ancient trees fall to the cultivator's axe, and indigenous tribes--to whom the forest had been home for millennia--lose their ancient way of life, and the narrator chronicles in visionary prose the tale of destruction and dispossession that is the universal saga of man's struggle to bend nature to his will.").

Sujatha Gilda, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017).

Nayanjot Lahiri, Ashoka in Ancient India (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2015) (From the book jacket: "In the third century BCE, Ashoka ruled an empire encompassing much of modern-day India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. During his reign, Buddhism proliferated across the South Asian subcontinent, and future generations of Asians came to see him as the  ideal Buddhist king. Disentangling the threads of Ashoka's life from the knot of legend that surround it, Nayanjot Lahiri present a vivid biography of this extraordinary Indian emperor and deepens out understanding of a legacy that extends beyond the bounds of Ashoka's lifetime and dominion.").

Sanjay Subramanyam, Europe's India: Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "When the Portuguese explorers first rounded the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in the subcontinent in the late fifteenth century, Europeans had little direct knowledge of India. The maritime passage opened new opportunities for exchange of goods as well as ideas. Traders were joined by ambassadors, missionaries, soldiers, and scholars from Portugal, England, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany, all hoping to learn about India for reasons as varied as their particular nationalities and professions. In the following centuries they produced a body of knowledge about India that significantly shaped European thought." "Europe's India tracks Europeans' changing ideas of India over the entire modern period.").

What Are the Different Types of 4-String Banjos? : Banjo Basics

THE ROAD TO, AND CONSEQUENCE OF, THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRASH

Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018) ("What made the collapse of 2008 so severe was its extraordinary global synchronization. Of the 104 countries for which the World Trade Organization collects data, every single one experienced a fall in both imports and exports between the second half of 2008 and the first half of 2009. Every country and every type of traded goods, without exception, experienced a decline." Id. at 159. "Precisely how many people lost their jobs across the global economy depends snout guess as to joblessness among China's migrant workforce. But reasonable estimates range between 27 million and something closer to 40 million unemployed worldwide." Id. at 160.).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #34

Georges Simenon, Madame Maigret's Friend (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Howard Curtis (New York: Penguin Books, 2016).

Upton Bass: Don't Cook that Bass! A Summer Double Bass Reminder

Beto O'Rourke on NFL Players Kneeling During the National Anthem | NowThis

DYSFUNCTIONING AMERICA

William Egginton, The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today’s College Campuses (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018) (Egginton "argues that we are in danger of losing our civic culture. Instead of a forum for engaging in debate and achieving compromise, our public sphere has devolved into a blood sport in which scoring point for the home team seems preferable to improving the state of the nation. A strong civic culture depends on having a society whose members are not only individuals set on improving their lots, but also citizens who see their political interests as rooted in the commonwealth they share with their fellows. But since the 1970s, Americans have become increasingly isolated from the national community. As the right advanced an agenda of unfettered individualism and the left made crucial gains in defending minority rights, what was lost was the very idea of a commonwealth which individuals and groups can adjudicate their differences. Id. at 12. Such books (and essays) address (and remind me of) one of the saddest aspects of much of higher education in America today: that it, paradoxically, shrinks the mind rather than expands it.).

IS AMERICA A DYING CULTURE?

Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour (New York:Simon & Schuster, 2018) ("Is America in a state or irrevocable decline? In this provocative and disturbing examination of our country . . . Chris Hedges argues that the United States shows unmistakable signs of a dying culture.").

JAMES EARL CARTER, PRESIDENT

Stuart E. Eizenenstat, President Carter: The White House Years,  forward by Madeleine Albright (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2018).

The Most Amazing Billie Jean Cover You'll Ever See - James Hill

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #33

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Old Lady (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ('You see. Now I'm alone. My dragon left ages ago . . . I so enjoy being on my on." Id. at 144.).

Ex-Fox News analyst: Trump is a danger to the US

Preet Bharara: Defending Institutions | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

The Kind of Story We Need Right Now: Waitress Body Slams Groper

Steve Schmidt: Trump's Actions Against John Brennan Are An "Abuse Of Pow...

Ex-Trump executive: He's racist

Former CIA Director John Brennan: This Is An Abuse Of Power | Deadline |...

ON ALAIN LOCKE

Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Eddie Glaude: President Trump Has Given Us License To Be Mean-Spirited |...

Lorraine Campet 1er prix contrebasse Concours International Leopold Bellan

Nicki Minaj Updates 'Barbie Dreams' To Include Stephen

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #32

Georges Simenon, Maigret at the Coroner's (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("Maigret was aware that when traveling, a man is always a little ridiculous, because he would like life to go on just as it does back home." Id. at 72.).

Emma Gonzalez & Matt Deitsch Discuss the Imporatnce of Voting - | The D...

Face the Nation - Tim Kaine, Tim Scott, Nicuyah Walker

DIMINISHING THE ECONOMIC VALUE AND QUALITY OF KNOWLEDGE

Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (New York: Penguin Press, 2017) ("Organizing knowledge is an ancient pursuit. Those who toiled in this field over the centuries--librarians and bookstore owners, scholars and archivists--were trained to go about their work lovingly, almost worshipfully. A professional code implored them to treat their cargo as if the world depended on its safe transit through the generations. Tech companies share none of that concern.They have presided over the collapse of the economic value of knowledge, which has severely weakened newspapers, magazines, and book publishers. By collapsing the value of knowledge, they have diminished the quality of it." Id. at 78.).

Dream On - Postmodern Jukebox ft. Morgan James (Aerosmith Cover)

All About That [Upright] Bass - Meghan Trainor Cover PMJ ft. Kate Davis

FASCISM IS IN OUR FUTURE

Madeline Albright, Fascism: A Warning (New York: Harper, 2018).

BARRACOON

Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", edited by Deborah G. Plant, foreword by Alice Walker (New York: Amistad, 2018) (From the "Foreword": " Reading Barracoon, one understands immediately the problem many black people, years ago, especially black intellectuals and political leaders, had with it. It resolutely records the atrocities African peoples inflicted on each other, long before shackled Africans, traumatized, ill, disoriented starved, arrived in ships as 'black cargo' in the hellish West." Id. at x.).

4-Star General Warns: President Trump Behavior ‘More Alarming And Illogi...

TRUTH, AND THE PROBLEMS THAT RESULT WHEN TRUTH IS UNDERMINED

Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018) ("Madison . . . put it like this: 'A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.'" Id. at 172.).

(Led Zeppelin) Stairway To Heaven - Gabriella Quevedo

(Pink Floyd) Another Brick In The Wall - Gabriella Quevedo

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #31

Georges Simenon, My Friend Maigret (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("Perhaps it was Mr. Pyke's impeccable correctness that made him seem unrefined . . ." Id. at 19.).

GLOBALISM AND THE GENEVA SCHOOL

Quinn Slobodan, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018) (From the book jacket: "Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodan follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulation than to redeploy them at a global level.").

PRIVACY IS AN AMERICAN ILLUSION

Sarah E. Igo, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018).

Introduction to the Bass: Left Hand Technique

Purchasing a double bass

TARGETED ASSASSINATIONS

Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History Israel's Targeted Assassination (New York: Random House, 2018).

FOOD FOR THOUGHT . . OR ACTION

Jennifer Summit & Blakey, Action Versus Contemplation: Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

READING WALTER SCOTT

Scott, Walter, The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. Press, 1993-2012).
Volume One: Waverley  [1814] (edited by P. D. Garside, 2007).
Volume Two: Guy Mannering [1815] (edited by P.D. Garside, 1999).
Volume Three: The Antiquary [1816] (edited by David Hewitt, 1995).
Volume Four [A]: The Black Dwarf [1816] (edited by P. D. Garside, 2007).
Volume Four [B]: The Tale of Old Mortality [1816] (edited by Douglas Mack, 1993).
Volume Five: Rob Roy [1818] (edited by aevid Hewitt).
Volume Six: The Heart of Mid-Lothian [1818] (edited by David Hewitt and Alison Lumsden, 2004).
Volume Seven [A]: The Bride of Lammermoor [1819] (edited by J.H. Alexander, 1995).
Volume Seven [B]: A Legend of the War of Montrose [1819] (edited by J.H. Alexander, 1995).
Volume Eight: Ivanhoe [1820] (edited by Graham Tulloch, 1998).
Volume Nine: The Monastery [1820] (edited by Penny Fielding, 2000).
Volume Ten: The Abbott [1820] (edited by Christopher Johnson (1993).
Volume Eleven: Kenilworth, A Romance [1821] (edited by J.H. Alexander, 1995).
Volume Twelve: The Pirate [1822] (edited by Mark Weinstein with Alison Lumsden, 2001).
Volume Thirteen: The Fortunes of Nigel [1822] (edited by Frank Jordan, 2004).
Volume Fourteen, Peveril of the Peak [1822] (edited by Alison Lumsden, 2007).
Volume Fifteen: Quentin Durward [1823] (edited by J.H. Alexander and G.A.M. Wood, 2001).
Volume Sixteen: Saint Ronan’s Well [1824] (edited by Mark Weinstein, 1995).
Volume Seventeen: Redgauntlet [1824] (edited by G.A.M. Wood with David Hewitt, 1997).
Volume Eighteen [A]: The Betrothedalisman [1825] (edited by J. B. Ellis, with J. H. Alexander & David Hewitt, 2009).
Volume Eighteen [B]: The Talisman [1825] (edited by J. B. Ellis, with J. H. Alexander, P. D. Garside & David Hewitt, 2009). From the book jacket:

The Talisman is set in Palestine during the Third Crusade (1189-92). Scott constructs a story of chivalric action, apparently adopting a view of the similarities in the values of both sides that is to be found in medieval romance. But disguise is the leading theme of the tale: characters frequently wear clothing that conceals their identity and professions and cultures hide their true nature. In this novel the Christian leaders are divided by a factious criminality and are contrasted to the magnanimity and decisiveness of Saladin, the leader of the Islamic armies. In a period when the west was fascinated with the exotic east, Scott represents the Muslim other as more humane than the Christian west.

   The Talisman is one of Scott's great novels. It is a superb tale. It is also a bold departure as, for the first time, Scott explores cultural conflict in the opposition of two world religions.

Volume Nineteen: Woodstock [1826] (edited by Tony Inglis, with J. H. Alexander, David Hewitt & Alison Lumsden, 2009).
Volume Twenty: Chronicles of The Canongate [1928](edited Claire Lamont, 2000).
Volume Twenty-One: The Fair Maid of Perth [1928](edited by A.D. Hook and Donald Mackenzie, 1999).
Volume Twenty-Two: Anne of Geierstein [1820] (edited by J.H. Alexander, 2000).
Volume Twenty-Three [A]: Count Robert of Paris [1831] (edited by J.H. Alexander, 2006).
Volume Twenty-Three [B]: Castle Dangerous [1831] (edited by J.H. Alexander, 2006).
Volume Twenty-Four The Shorter Fiction [1811-1831] (edited by Graham Tulloch and Judy King, 2009).
Volume Twenty-Five [A]: Introductions and Notes from the Magnum Opus: Waverley to A Legend of the Wars of Montrose [1829-1833] (edited by J. H. Alexander with P. D. Garside & Claire Lamont, 2012).
Volume Twenty-Five [B]: Introductions and Notes from the Magnum Opus: Ivanhoe to Castle Dangerous [1829-1833] (edited by J. H. Alexander with P. D. Garside & Claire Lamont, 2012).
Scott, Walter, Reliquae Trotcosienses or The Gabions of The Late Jonathan Oldbuck Esq. of Monkbarns, edited by Gerald Carruthers and Alison Lumsden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. Press, 2004).
Scott, Walter, The Siege of Malta and Bizarro, edited by J. H. Alexander, Judy King, and Graham Tulloch (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. Press, 2009).

SUGGESTED FICTION

Carlos Rojas, The Valley of the Fallen, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (New Haven & London: A Margellos World Republic of Letters Book/Yale University Press, 2018).

Cillizza fact-checks Trump's Mueller claims

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #30

Georges Simenon, Maigret's First Case (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("Poor Le Bret! He could not get used to Maigret's transformation. He was like those parents who treat their child like a baby and then suddenly see before them a man reasoning like an adult." Id. at 129.).

READING URSULA LE GUIN

Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One: Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions; The Left Hand of Darkness; The Disposed; Stories, edited by Brian Attebery (New York: Library of America, 2017).

Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two: The Word for World Is Forest; Stories; Fives Ways to Forgiveness; The Telling, edited by Brian Attebery (New York: Library of America, 2017).

INEQUALITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2018).  From the book jacket:

     In a pioneering history of rights stretching back to the Bible, Not Enough charts how twentieth-century welfare states, concerned about both abject poverty and soaring health, resolved to fulfill their citizens' most basic needs without forgetting to contain hoe much the rich could tower over the rest. In the wake of two world wars and the collapse o empires, new states tried to take welfare beyond its original European and American homelands and went so far as to challenge inequality on a global scan;e. But their plans were foiled as a neoliberal faith in markets triumphed instead.
     Moyn places the career of the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift from the egalitarian politics of yesterday to the neoliberal globalization of today. Exploring why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside enduring and exploding inequality, and why activists came to seek remedies for indigence without challenging wealth, Not Enough calls for more ambitious ideals and movements to achieve a humane and equitable world.

WHEN THE RULE OF LAW IS FARCE

Michael Sfard, The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine, and the Legal Battle for Human Rights, translated from the Hebrew by Maya Johnston (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2018) (From the book jacket: "Written with emotional force, vivid storytelling, and penetrating analysis, The Wall and the Gate offers a radically new perspective on a much-covered conflict and a subtle. painful reckoning with the moral ambiguities in the in the pursuit of justice.").

ARE YOU LESS THAN ETHICAL FOR FAILING TO ME (YOUR?) STANDARDS OF BODILY PERFECTION?

Heather Widdow, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018). 

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #29

Georges Simenon, Maigret's Dead Man (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by David Coward (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("'. . . Well, he discovered that the dead man walked like a duck.'" Id. at 57.).

SUGGESTED READ

William R. Polk, Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2018).

Malcolm Nance: President Trump Did Not Speak For Americans In Helsinki |...

REVISITING "TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD"

Joseph Crispino, Atticus Finch: The Biography: Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of An American Icon (New York: Basic Books, 2018) ("With the publication of [Comes a] Watchman, however, we know now not only that the Atticus of Mockingbird was always too good to be true, but that Harper Lee knew it as well. She knew all the things that Jean Louise discovers in Watchman: that Atticus's' kindly paternalism covered ugly beliefs about racial difference; that his willingness to represent black clients was in service to the racial status quo; that Calpurnia and all of Maycomb's black population lived behind a veil; that what as a child she had assumed was genuine, reciprocal love and devotion across the color line was more like an elaborate act intended to ease, for whites, the guilt and, for blacks, the burden of racial injustice." Id. at 173.).

Tom Santopietro, Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters: What Harper Lee's Book and the Iconic American Means to Us Today (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018) (From the book jacket: "As Americans yearns for a end to divisiveness, there is no better time to look at the significance of Harper Lee's book, the film, and all that came after.").

Trevor Responds to Criticism from the French Ambassador - Between The Sc...

Cuomo: Trump betrayed country as exercise in vanity

Erin Burnett: How stupid does Trump think we Americans are?

Maddow: Time For Americans To Face 'Worst Case Scenario' On Donald Trump...

Shep Smith Fox News calls Trump Shameful Disgraceful and a Traitor #MAGA

John King on Trump: Never seen president surrender to Russia

Vladimir Putin denies interfering in 2016 US election

Trump on election hacking: Don't see why it would be Russia

A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS!

Trump’s UK visit ends in controversy ahead of Putin meeting

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #28

Georges Simenon, Maigret's Holiday (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("'It wasn't mercy that stopped you.' 'No. I have no mercy.'" Id. at 193.).

Instrument: Banjo

WILLIAM WALKER IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America  (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018).

THE BATTLE WORTH HAVING, AND THE HILL DEMOCRATS SHOULD FIND WORTHY OF DYING ON IF NECESSARY.

[T]he great challenge and promise of more radical and liberal visions of the nexus of cultural pluralism and democracy is to create societies, polities, and norms that allow all members of a given society to participate equally as members of the polity, to strip away barriers imposed by distinctions of gender, social class, religion, ethnicity, origin, and presumed racial distinction. Both Western and non-Western societies continue to struggle with the conflict between relatively recent egalitarian ideals and inegalitarian social and political orders designed by prior generations of government and leadership to maintain dominance of a particular ethno-national group, religion, or presumed race.
     The most durable and enduring democratic polities have nurtured an ethnos within them, often at the expense of minoritized and racialized groups. The United States, France, and Britain--but also contemporary Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Scandinavian nations, Ghana, South Africa, Indonesia, and many other countries classified as democratic--have exhibited this tendency. The larger number of studies of these countries and he likelihood of particular groups or subgroups attaining the most preferable positions in the economy, polity, and society attest to this bias in the most democratic and societies in the contemporary world. How to make societies less ethnocentric, and more ethos-centric, is one of the great challenges of balancing cultural difference and democracy in contemporary nation-states.

Michael G. Hanchard, The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018), at 17-18.

     W. E. B Du Bois wrote about the problem of the twentieth century being that of the color line. It remains so today, both here in America and around the globe. In the United States, Trump and his supporters did not create the color line. He and they just exploited it, made it darker and deeper.

     The United facing numerous problems and challenges, from health care, to failing schools, forever wars, failing domestic and international institutions, gender issues, violence, drugs, guns, and on and on. However, when it comes down to it, there is one overarching problem or challenge that brings them all together: Racial Inequality. Not simply along black-white lines, but across the spectrum. And the question is whether America is going to be a country that truly believes in and, then  acts meaningfully to create true equality in a pluralistic society? Or whether America is going to continue to be, or revert to being, a White-Christian-Male Privileged Society (with a dash of model women and minorities tossed in here or there). Those who argue, for example, for universal health care are not going to achieve it as long as some members of society are deemed less than human, as less worthy of health services. Those who want gender equality are not going to get it as long as some women, mainly women of color and poor women, are viewed as less deserving of being treated both as women and equal. One is not going to get equal access to education if some children are not deemed worthy of the investment.

      So, the Democratic Party needs to be what the Republican Party has abandoned when it cease to be the--yes,  flawed--Party of Lincoln and became the moral corrupt Party of Trump. The Democratic Party has to get radical, not merely progressive but radical, and embrace and fight for equality across the board. If that means offending Establishment democrats, so be it. If it mean not winning over some independents, so be it. This is the battle to be fought. This is the hill democrats need to see as worth dying on. Are we to be a free and equal people? Or, are we to remain a people where some are more equal than others, where some are more free than others?

Again, THIS IS THE BATTLE WORTH HAVING. AND IT IS THE HILL DEMOCRATS SHOULD FIND WORTHY OF DYING ON IF NECESSARY.

Police called on boy delivering newspapers

Panelist cries discussing racism, republican party

'This Felt Like A Repeat Of Benghazi' | Morning Joe | MSNBC

Shep Smith Fox News explains NATO — is he ‘berating Trump? #MAGA

Red Hot Congressional Strzok Fest 2018

Trump Baby Blimp Organizer: Moral Outrage Doesn’t Work On Trump | The Be...

ADRIENNE RICH

Adrienne Rich, Collected Poems, 1950-2012, introduction by Claudia Rankine (New York: Norton, 2012).  The following two poems, though written in the early1990s, reflect our troubled times in the late 2010s.

WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled,

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light--

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know exactly already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in timess like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

1991

IN THOSE YEARS

In those years, people will say, we lost track

of the meaning of we, of you

we found ourselves reduced to I

and the whole thing became

silly, ironic, terrible:

we were trying to live a personal life and, yes, that was the only life

we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged

into our personal weather

They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove

along the shore, through the rags of fog

where we stood, saying I.

1991

Lawmaker yells at Gowdy: This is not Benghazi!

Strzok hearing erupts: You need your medication!

HATE in AMERICA: Attacks on Minorities

Former Defense Secretary Expresses Concerns For Vladimir Putin Meeting |...

President Donald Trump Creates His Own Narrative At Press Conference | M...

Violin vs. Fiddle

What's the difference between a violin and a fiddle?

CNN TONIGHT WITH DON LEMON 7/10/2018

CNN ANDERSON COOPER 360 7/10/2018

MORNING JOE 7/11/18 TRUMP CONTINUES CRITICISM OF ALLIES AHEAD OF NATO SU...

BLUEGRASS AND BEYOND

Craig Harris, Bluegrass, Newgrass, Old-Time, and Americana Music (Gretna, La: Pelican, 2018).

Senate Rebukes President Donald Trump With Vote On NATO | The Last Word ...

Doc Watson performs "Deep River Blues" in the DVD "Doc's Guitar: Fingerp...

John McWhorter: Trump First President To Give Statements He Hasn’t Thoug...

SUGGESTED READ ON AMERICA'S ANTI-CHINESE IMMIGRANT HISTORY

Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018) (From the book jacket: "The American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communicates throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. Beth Lew-Williams shows how American immigrants policies incited this violence, in turn, provoked new exclusionary policies. Ultimately, Lew-Williams argues, Chinese explosion and exclusion produced the concept of the 'alien' in modern America.").

Charles Pierce: President Trump SCOTUS Pick Puts Voting Rights Act On Th...

Joe: Rudy Giuliani Made President Donald Trump Look Foolish | Morning Jo...

Raw Craft with Anthony Bourdain - Episode Nine: Rachel Rosenkrantz

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #27

Georges Simenon, Maigret in New York (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("They had stopped automatically on the front step, and were both looking at the shop across the street--and at the tailor, old Angelino's son, working at his steam press, because the poor do not have time to dwell on their grief." Id. at 87.).

THE ROTS OF TURKEY'S TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY DESCENT INTO SICK POLITICS

Hans-Lukas Kieser, Talk Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018) ("In the 2010s, Turkey has become post-Kemalist. It is a risk of losing not only its post-World War II orientation but also its new, more incisive, fundamental compass from the beginning of the twenty-first century: accession to the European Union and implementation of the EU standards, allowing democratic ideals of the 1908 Ottoman spring to resume. In the aftermath of recent loss, Turkey is again, and perhaps more than ever, haunted by fatal departures of a hundred years ago. [] A combination of power, corruption, and imperially biased national-religious appeal ('neo-Ottomanism") has presently--in the late 2010s--made politics sick again." Id. at 426-427.).

Ana Navarro ANGRY DESTROYS Trump On His Immigrant Policy & Comments On S...

Brooks and Klein on Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist, Scott Pruitt’s scan...

READING TACITUS

Tacitus, Volume I: Agricola, translated by M. Hutton, revised by R.M.Ogilvie; Germania, translate by M. Hutton, revised by E. H. Warmington; Dialogus, translated by W. Peterson, revised by M. Winterbotton (Loeb Classical Library, 35) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1914, 1970).

Tacitus, Volume II: Histories, Books 1-3 (Loeb Classical Library, 111), translated by Clifford H. Moore (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1925).

Tacitus, Volume III: Histories, Books 4-5, translated by Clifford H. Moore; The Annals, Books 1-3, translated by John Jackson (Loeb Classical Library, 249) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1931).

Tacitus, Volume IV: The Annals, Books 4-6, 11-12 ( Loeb Classical Library, 312), translated by John Jackson (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1937).

Tacitus, Volume V: The Annals, Books 13-16 ( Loeb Classical Library, 322), translated by John Jackson (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1937).