Feminist lie?
True history, or weaponized?
Thursday, September 3, 2015
The Guardian hearts Kanye West
Why Kanye West would be the best president in US history (seriously)
A much tougher sell than Jesse Jackson.
Well, maybe not so seriously.
Syrian refugee crisis
Merkel says it's a German and EU problem, as does The Guardian, staunchly pro-immigration.
Having noted the filthy rich Arabs refuse to accept Syrians it only remains to point out they refuse immigration from North Africa, too.
The blinding stupidly of it all
Of the greed-driven foreign policy of the American plutocracy.
We have made rich and powerful both China and the states that produce and export Sunni Islamofundamentalism.
The world's top four defense budgets for 2014 were, in descending order, the USA, China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.
Party propagandists spun the event – put on to remember the second world war – as a parade for peace.
Posters and banners featuring the event’s official logo, a white dove, had been plastered all across Beijing in recent weeks.
“Prejudice, discrimination, hatred and war can only cause disaster and suffering, while mutual respect, equality, peaceful development and common prosperity represent the right path to take,” Xi said in a 10-minute opening speech that featured the word “peace” 17 times.
But Thursday’s spectacle was about power, not peace.
Almost three years after he became China’s leader, in November 2012, Xi wants to show the region and the world that his country is a major political and military force as well as an economic one.
More importantly, he needs to bolster his domestic position as top dog amid growing hints that a bitter and potentially destabilising split is opening up at the top of the 85 million-member Communist party.
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Why the Soviets rejected Zhivago
Reading The Zhivago Affair.
Novy Mir's letter of rejection of the novel for publication said in part,
"The spirit of your novel is one of non-acceptance of the socialist revolution.
"The general tenor of your novel is that the October Revolution, the Civil War and the social transformation involved did not give the people anything but suffering, and destroyed the Russian intelligentsia, either physically or morally."
The authors relate one of Pasternak's biographers wrote that the novel's "most heretical insinuation," many years before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, was that the tyranny of the years of Stalin was "a direct outcome of Bolshevism" - that Stalinism and its horrors were not a terrible aberration, the accepted view under Khrushchev, "but a natural outgrowth of the system created by Lenin."
This assessment of the book seems entirely accurate - and entirely compatible with Nabokov's.
See the previous post.
The jealousy of those who live for fame
Reading The Zhivago Affair, Finn and Couvee, 2014, Vintage Books paper 2015.
As early as 1927, Nabokov had expressed his deep irritation with Pasternak's style.
"His style is convex, goitrous, and goggle-eyed, as though his muse suffered from Basedow's disease.
"He is crazy about clumsy imagery, sonorous but literal rhymes, and clattering metre."
When he finally read Doctor Zhivago, Nabokov was no less derisive, not least because Pasternak's novel would knock Lolita off the top of the best-seller list -
"Doctor Zhivago is a sorry thing, clumsy, trite and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, romantic robbers and trite coincidences."
Nabokov said Pasternak's mistress must have written it.
Well, I never thought much of it, either.
And the movie often seemed far too long.
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
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