From A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway


I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Parids belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

The say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and a higher grade of manure.

Lolita

Ahhh, Lolita. By Nabokov, of course. I am reading a series of essays by Stephen Jay Gould and one essay was about Nabokov. Gould talked up Nabokov's style of writing so much that I just had to grab it off the shelf. I read it in about a day. It wasn't exactly what I expected, but I must admit that is writing style is quite good. I must also admit I had to go get my dictionary of the shelf (for both Gould and Nabokov) but after a while, I just gave up and read through the words I didn't know. Nabokov also has a lot of French in the novel, too. And not the type that is commonly known or easily guessed at. I found that frustrating. As a global person, I got the big picture, and I love his quirky, sarcastic way of saying things, but meaning the opposite. Sorry, no passages to quote; the reader will just have to read on their own and either enjoy it or not. Quite the racy subject matter.

Lord of the Flies

by William Golding. Of course, I read this in high school, but just like 1984 I probably had no appreciation for it. I read it in an afternoon. I've been in a dystopian mood lately, so this goes along with that. I marked just a few passages:

The first time they go hunting: "He raised his arm in the air. There came a pause...The pause was only long enough for them to understand what an enormity the downward stroke would be...[he paused] because the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood."

Roger sneaks up on Henry and starts to throw stones: "The stone bounced five yards to Henry's right and fell in the water. roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them. Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible, yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child  was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger's arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins."

In the afterward, Golding discusses his novel: "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back  to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable."

I agree with Golding's views. The young boys follow Jack, even when he resorts to theft and murder. Just a few of them hold out and fight what they know is wrong. I see this in real life - people blindly follow religious and political ideologies, finding comfort in their numbers, and are unwilling to fight when their group does things that as individuals they would not do.


I also read a fiction book called "While England Sleeps" by David Leavitt. Interesting book, written as a memoir of someone looking back on a time years later. It is about class and sexuality issues in the years leading up to WWII in England.

Henry VIII

by Alison Weir. An amazing book - not romantacized, but packed full of facts - a little tedious at times even. But what I got from it was that Henry the VIII was an amazing king - he encouraged arts and learning, and raised people by merit. The story of his six wives, his court and the politics of the European world of the time is amazing. For an accurate historical account, this is a good book.

Another book I recently read was Global Climate Change: The Book of Essential Knowledge by Ernest Zebrowski Ph.D. I got this book as an 'Early Reviewer' on Librarything.com. Every month we can put in to request books, most are just coming out and you get a free copy if you win the request lottery. Anyway. This was my first book through that. Here is a copy of the review I posted on Librarything:
'I was discussing some scientific fact I learned from this book with someone and they asked me, "how do they know?" That is exactly what this book is so great at explaining. In an easy to understand (my science ed. consists of one biology and one geology class in college) and non-partisan (he keeps politics confined to the last chapter) way, Zebrowski helped me to understand the science behind what scientists already know about global climate change and why they have such a hard time predicting the exact future. Are you a citizen of planet earth? Then you should read this book'

Fahrenheit 451

by Ray Bradbury. An excellent classic that I finally read after it kept coming up in conversations. It's been a dystopian year for me since I have read 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, The Giver, and a few others that shout out warnings of how things might be if we're not careful.

I did mark a few passages, mostly for his unique descriptive metaphors and twisted logic.

Clarisse - on why she doesn't go to school - "I'm antisocial they say...I'm very social indeed, it all depends on what you mean by social. Social to me means...talking about how strange the world is...but I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk."

One night at work Montag is horrified when the owner of the books they are meant to burn is still at the residence and refuses to leave. "Always before it had been like snuffing a candle. The police went first and adhesive taped the victim's mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars, so when you arrived you found an empty house. You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since things couldn't really be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don't scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially. Eveything to its proper place. Quick with the kerosene! Who's got a match!"

Later, discussing the incident with his wife, Millie, she says, "She's nothing to me; she shouldn't have had books. It was her responsibility, she should've thought of that. I hate her. She's got you going and next thing you know we'll be out, no house, no job, nothing." "You weren't there, you didn't see," He said. "There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."

"Let me alone,"said Mildred. "I didn't do anything."
"Let you alone!...we need not be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while."

"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, like the constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy." (Beatty)

"Heredity and Environment are funny things. You can't rid yourself of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot of what you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle." (Beatty)

"If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such as thing as war...Give the people contests they win by remembering words to popular songs or the names of state capitals...cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damn full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. then they'll feel they're thinking." (Beatty)

"I don't talk things, sir, " said Faber. "I talk the meanings of things. I sit here and know I'm alive."

"He could hear Beatty's voice. 'Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second, and so on, chain smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and timeworn philosophies."

"The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great tonload of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass. The people were pounded into submission; they did not run, there was no place to run."

"Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself." (Faber)

"Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us." (Faber)

"[Books] have quality...texture, pores...telling detail, fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre one run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies...People need leisure time to think...You can't argue with a four wall tv. Why? The tv is 'real.' It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and it blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest."
"My wife says books aren't 'real.'"
"Thank God for that. You can shut them out, say 'hold on a moment.' You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a tv parlor?. It grows you any shape it wishes!"

"Those who don't build, must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents." (Faber)

"Well," said Beatty, "the crisis is past and all is well, the sheep returns to the fold. We're all sheep who have strayed at times."

"But remember, the captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all ahve our harps to play. It's up to you to know with which ear you'll listen."

"All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there."

"You can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened, and why the world blew up under them."

"'I hate a Roman named Status Quo!' he said to me. 'Stuff your eye with wonder, ' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in 10 seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping it's life away"

The Wal-Mart Effect

by Charles Fishman. This was a very interesting read. One of those books that should be required reading for every American, whether they shop at Wal-mart or not, because it really lays out how Walmart's business practices affect us all. I marked quite a few passages, but the whole story is really only understood in the book with examples and in the order he constructs things.

'At the end of 1990, WM hadjust nine supercenters (where they sell groceries). Ten years later, at the end of 2000, they had 888 supercenters - an average of 7 supercenters a month for 120 months in a row - and WM was the number-one food retailer in the US...In that same decade, 31 supermarket chains have sought bankruptcy protection; 27 of them site competition from WM as a factor.'

'WM isn't just a store, it shapes where we shop, the products we buy, and the prices we pay - even for people who never shop there. It reaches deep inside the operations of the companies that supply it and changes not only what they sell, but also changes how those products are packaged and presented, what the lives of the factory workers who make the products are like- it even sometimes changes the country where the factories are located.'

'WM has changed the way we think about ourselves as shoppers and consumers. It has changed our sense of quality, our sense of what a good deal is. WM's low prices routinely reset our expectations about what things should cost. WM has changed the lens through which we see the world.'

'"The Wal-Mart economy" describes the nagging sense that there might be some unseen but terrible cost to be paid for "always low prices." The WM economy is a place where the jobs are traps: low wages, miserly benefits, stultifying work, no respect, no future. In the WM economy, we as consumers often buy too much because it's cheap. We are slaves to our impulse for a bargain.'

'The most potent, least public least well-understood power of the WM effect: the impact WM has in shaping the operations, the choices, the product mix of it's suppliers. Many suppliers hesitate to talk to WM about price increases, even when completely justified.'

'"Every time you see the WM smiley-face, whistling and knocking down the prices, somewhere there's a factory worker being kicked in the stomach."'

'WM's focus on pricing and it's ability to hold a supplier's business hostage to its own agenda, distorts markets in ways that consumers don't see, and ways that suppliers can't effectively counter. WM is so large that it can often defy the laws of supply, demand, and competition... The market didn't create the $2.97 gallon of pickles, nor did waning customer demand or a wild abundance of cucumbers. WM created the $2.97 gallon jar of pickles. The price - the number that is a critical piece of information to buyers, sellers, and competitors about the state of the pickle market - the price was a lie. It was unrelated either to the supply of cucumbers or the demand for pickles.  The price was a fiction imposed on the pickle market in Bentonville.'

'There's the yellow smiley face price slasher bouncing through TV commercials, slashing prices with a rapier. Sometimes the price slasher is dressed like Robin Hood - an audacious costume for the world's most powerful company.'

'What almost no one outside the world of WM and its suppliers sees and understands is the high cost of those low prices. WM has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from suppliers, many of whom are willing to do almost anything to keep the retailer happy, in part because WM now dominates consumer markets so thoroughly that they have no choice. The results can be dramatic or subtle, immediate or insidiously corrosive. Decisions made in Bentonville routinely close factories as well as open them. WM's way of doing business can hollow out companies, gradually transforming full-fledged consumer products companies who design and manufacture their own products into little more than importers. WM's price pressure can leave so little profit that there is little left for innovation.'

'They've lowered the price of TVs to the point where they can't afford to pay $1 or $2 an hour that they have to pay in Mexico. The production isn't poor quality, the products are. they are reducing the costs of the products by compromising the designs. They are designing the costs out by making poorer designs.'

'How can it be bad to have a bargain at WM? You can't buy anything if you're not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs. The manufactured goods coming to the United States so cheaply are made under factory conditions that would not only not be tolerated in the US, they likely wouldn't even be legal. We want clean air, clear water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world, yet we aren't willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions.'

'While WM added 480,000 new jobs between 1997 and 2004, US manufacturing jobs fell by 3.1 million, a loss of 37,000 jobs a month, on average, for 84 straight months. We find the abandonment of US manufacturing jobs unnerving, we find cheaper stuff on more shelves addictive. We don't connect the two.

The Anglo Files

By Sarah Lyall. This was a funny and insightful book written by an American journalist who married a Brit and moved there. Each chapter has a theme about different aspects of British life. I didn't highlight any bits from it, just an overall entertaining book, and I learned a lot about life in the UK. Could be useful someday, you never know...
She ends with a section called "further reading." I'm just going to list some books here for future reference.
G Orwell essay England, Your England from The Lion and the Unicorn
Jeremy Paxman, The English: Portrait of a People.
A. A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the British
Julian Barnes, England, England
Kate Fox, Watching the English
Roger Scruton, England: an Elegy
Marion Mainwaring, The Buccaneers
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop


I also finished reading the first Percy Jackson and the Olympians book (with Max, before bed each night) and a A&E Biography of J.K. Rowling I picked up at the library. Very interesting to read about authors and how the work.