ON UNIVERSITY. I FEEL THE UGH!

Elliot Perlman, The Street Sweeper: A Novel (New York: Riverhead, 2012) (Dad, what can I say' 'I don't know, Charlie, what can you say?' 'The university's a microcosm of society.' 'Is that what you can say? Is that all you can say?" 'Well now, what exactly are you saying? How exactly is all or even any of this my fault?' 'Charlie, I don't mean you personally. I mean you academics. You all sit there watching the flames as the barn burns down crying, "How's this our fault? We didn't do it!"' 'What exactly would you have us do, me or any of us?' 'Charlie, how did you get to be this age, sitting in this office with your name and title on the door, chair of the History Department, and you're not ashamed to be asking me for that?' 'Dad, leaving the question of my shame to one side, what the hell would you have me do?' 'You should be speaking out publicly about these things. You guys should be writing letters. You should be organizing like-minded people to do these things. You should be giving encouragement, comfort and support to those people, students, faculty, people around the city who don't have the chance to be heard like you do but who fear this institution is going to hell in a handbasket instead of . . .' 'Instead of what?' 'Instead of staying back late in this office leaving your wife and daughter at home so you can write narrowly focused arcane academic articles to be read by a handful of people just to keep your quota up and all of it merely in the service of your own aggrandizement.'" Id. at 412-413.).

Elliot Perlman, Three Dollars Street Sweeper: A Novel (New York: Riverhead, 1998).

ON LIBRARIES

Niall Williams, History of the Rain: A Novel (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) ("What none of us realized and what at first of course Virgil didn't realize either was that the library he was building would in fact become a working tool, a consultancy, and that it was leading somewhere. He had no intention of writing. He loved reading, that was all.  And he read books that he thought so far beyond anything that he himself could dream of achieving that any thought of writing instantly evaporated into the certainty of failure. How could you even start? Read Dickens,read Dostoevsky. Read Thomas Hardy. Read any pages in any story of Chekhov, and any reasonable person would go ah lads, put down their pencil and walk away." Id. at 260-261. From the "Acknowledgements": "My father believed in education, at a time when education meant books. Twice a month he took us to the library, and those visits remain among the most cherished memories of my growing up. Apart for the browsing and the borrowing, just to be for an hour in the physical company of so many books was inspiring and moving in a way that is perhaps ha4d to explain day, but which for which I will always be grateful" Id. at 357.).

LIFE GOES ON

Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (New York: Grove Press, 2001).

Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist: A Novel (New York: Grove Press, 2006) ("The idea that love is not enough is a particularly painful one. In the face of its truth, humanity has for centuries tried to discover in itself evidence that love is the greatest force on earth." Id. at 1. "Everything takes its accustomed course even when life is at its most terrible, and people know, they always know, but life goes on and the excuses for doing nothing other than going on with it are made." Id. at 319.).

Richard Flanagan, Wanting: A Novel (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008).

TO MAN'S GREAT DETRIMENT

David Duchovny, Holy Cow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015) ("We are all animals and we have our place in the womb of Mother Nature. Only man has separated himself form the great chain o being and from all the other animals, and I think that has been to his great detriment, and sadness, and to ours." Id. at 203-204.).

APRIL IS NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

Amiri Baraka, S O S: Poems 1961-2013, selected by Paul Vangelisti (New York; Grove Press, 2014) (See Claudia Rankine, "Truth to Power," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/15/2015.).

Mark Strand, Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2014).

WHITE PRIVILEGE, PHOENIX-STYLE

Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) ("As in cities nationwide, New Deal housing policies made it virtually impossible for nonwhites to participate in the new, federally underwritten markets in residential property. Believing that integration represented a risk to stable property values, FHA official had, at the agency's inception, instituted policies that prevented the agency from insuring mortgages in neighborhoods with any significant nonwhite population while rejecting nonwhite applicants for homes in newly built subdivisions. These policies shaped the practices of the real estate industry in general. Real estate agents pledged to maintain the racial character of neighborhoods as a condition of licensing. 'That the entry of Non-Caucasian[s] into districts where distinctly Caucasian residents live tends to depress real estate values,' wrote realtor Stanly McMichaels in Real Estate Subdivisions, an industry textbook, 'is agreed to by practically all real estate subdividers and students of city life and growth.' Such agreements held firm in Phoenix. As local civil rights activist Lincoln Ragsdale testified at a hearing of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held in Phoenix in 1962, out of 31,000 homes built by three builders in northeastern Phoenix, homes all 'built directly or indirectly, through FHA commitments,' not a single home, 'not one,' Ragsdale testified, 'has been sold to a Negro.'" Id. at 83-84. From the bookjacket: "In 1940, Phoenix was a small, agricultural city of sixty-five thousand, and the Navajo Reservation was an open landscape of scattered sheepherders. Forty years later, Phoenix had blossomed into a metropolis of 1.5 million people, and the territory of the Navajo Nation was home to two of the largest strip mines in the world. Five coal-burning power plants surrounded the reservation, generating electricity for export to Phoenix, Los Angles, and other cities. Exploring the postwar developments of these two very different landscapes, Power Lines tells the story of the far-reaching environmental and social inequalities of metropolitan growth, and the roots of the contemporary coal-fueled climate change crisis." "Andrew Needham explains how inexpensive electricity became a requirement for modern life in Phoenix--driving assembly lines and cooling the oppressive heat. Navajo officials initially hoped energy development would improve their lands too, but as ash piles marked their landscapes, air pollution filled the skies, and almost half of Navajo households remained without electricity, many Navajos came to view power lines as a sign of their subordination in the Southwest, Drawing together urban, environmental, and American Indian history, Needham demonstrates how power limes created unequal connections between distant landscapes and how environmental change associated with suburbanization reached far beyond the metropolitan frontier, Needham also offers a new account of postwar inequality, arguing that residents of the metropolitan periphery suffered similar patterns of marginalization as those faced in America's inner cities." "Telling how coal from Indian lands became the fuel of modernity in the Southwest, Power Lines explores the dramatic effects that this energy system has had on the people and environment of the region."). 

CULTURAL MINORITY RIGHTS?

Alan Patten, Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Rights (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) ("The United States has always been a culturally diverse society, and new wave so of immigration add to this diversity every day. To mention just one measure, a startling one out of five Americans reports using a language other than English at home. To most Americans, however, the country's cultural diversity is not deeply consequential for its political morality. Cultural diversity is is one more source of the differences that are pursued and expressed in the private realms of family, neighborhood, market, and civil society. The enjoyment of these differences is appropriately safeguarded by the liberties entrenched in the American constitutional tradition. But many believe that these generic protections of private life are all that is called for in the way of respect or accommodation of cultural diversity. Most Americans would have little sympathy for the idea that public institutions ought officially to protect or accommodate the cultural differences that exist in their country." Id. at vii. "The core case I develop in favor of strong cultural rights revolves around two main claims. The first holds that the liberal state has a responsibility to be neutral toward the various conceptions of the good that its citizens affirm. The second claims that, in certain domains, the only way for the state to discharge its responsibility for neutrality is by extending and protecting specific minority cultural rights. Although various qualifications and provisos are introduced along the way, and the rights that are justified must defeat countervailing considerations, the argument demonstrates why in some contexts, specific strong cultural rights are indeed a requirement of liberal justice." Id. at 27.).

William H. Frey, Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2015) ("The diversity explosion that the United States is now experiencing is ushering in the most demographically turbulent period in the country's recent history. By 'turbulent' I do not mean that the nation is about to experience sharp conflicts over its growing diversity. In fact, I believe just the opposite. As the United States comes to understand the magnitude and significance of this new diversity for its demographic and economic future and for its interconnectedness in an increasingly global village, it will seek to find ways to both embrace and nurture its diversity. This demographic turbulence, rather, offers the vibrancy, hope, and promise associated with young generations of new minorities from a variety of backgrounds interacting with older minorities and white Americans in their pursuit of opportunities in a country that is in dire need of more youth. [T]he growth of young, new minority populations from recent immigration and somewhat higher fertility is providing the country with a 'just in time' infusion of growth as the largely white U.S. popiuation continues to age." Id. at 239.).