Sunday, November 23, 2014

Review: The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent by Piya Chatterjee and Sunain Maira (eds)

Bill V. Mullen reviewed The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, edited by Piya Chatterjee and Sunain Maira, and published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2014.
[T]his is, far and away, the most affecting, comprehensive, and visionary collection of essays published to date on the politics of contemporary higher education. The book memorably sketches out what Raymond Williams called the “structure of feeling” in today’s university: the lived experience of ideological contestation, economic restructuring, professional vulnerability, political imagining, and political foreclosure. In this achievement, The Imperial University is sui generis: it should be bookmarked by historians of neoliberal higher education and used as a brick by those seeking to build an invigorated academic Left. ... read more ...
One of the essays in this volume is by Steven Salaita. Bill Mullen has written in defense of Steven Salaita.
I have not read the book.

Saturday, November 15, 2014

Review: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

Julie Kearney wrote a review of An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

Rosecrans Baldwin also did a review for NPR.
I have not yet read the book.

Free (English) eBooks from Yatakhayyaloon - Arabic Language Science Fiction - Nov 15 & 16 Only

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Review: Aisha: The Wife, the Companion, the Scholar by Reşit Haylamaz

Amanda Quraishi reviewed Aisha: The Wife, the Companion, the Scholar by Reşit Haylamaz. It's not clear to me if the author wrote the book in English or Turkish, his native tongue, and then somebody translated it.

I have not read the book.

The publisher is Tughra Books.

Updated December 4, 2014:

Thursday, November 06, 2014

Quote: Chris Hedges on Friendship and Comradeship in "War is Force that Gives Us Meaning"

In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges (Twitter) explains why the bonds among soldiers are likely comradeship, not friendship.

There are few individual relationships – the only possible way to form friendships – in war. There are not the demands on us that there are in friendships. Veterans try to regain such feelings, but they fall short. Gray wrote that the “essential difference between comradeship and friendship consists, it seems to me, in a heightened awareness of the self in friendship and in the suppression of self-awareness in comradeship.”
Comrades seek to lose their identities in the relationship. Friends do not. “On the contrary, “Gray wrote, “friends find themselves in each other and thereby gain greater self-knowledge and self-possession. They discover in their own breasts, as a consequence of their friendship, hitherto unknown potentialities for joy and understanding.”
The struggle to remain friends, the struggle to explore the often painful recess of two hearts, to reach the deepest parts of another’s being, to integrate our own emotions and desires with the needs of the friend, are challenged by the collective rush of war. There are fewer demands if we join the crowd and give our emotions over to the communal crusade.
The only solace comes from simple acts of kindness. They are the tiny, flickering candles in a cavern of darkness that sustain our common humanity.
Find the book in your local library.

Monday, November 03, 2014

Documentary Film "American Promise" Free Online Thru Nov 8, 2014


The United States Public Broadcasting Service's POV series is streaming American Promise online through November 8, 2014. A February 2014 interview with the film's producer and director, Michèle Stephenson (Twitter) updates the 2004 film. A companion book to the film is Promises Kept: Raising Black Boys to Succeed in School and in Life by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson with Hilary Beard. The film has an official website.
I haven't yet watched the movie or read the book.

Saturday, November 01, 2014

Quotes from Dune by Frank Herbert

United States National Public Radio's Science Friday Book Club in 2014 read Dune by Frank Herbert.

Readers were asked to record their favorite quotes and submit it to the show. The whole series is incredible. Here are a few quotes I recorded. You can listen to the ones NPR selected from all listeners.

The text is available on line at archive.org. But buy the book. Also, check out the Calvin and Mu'addib Tumblr.





Prescience
The prescience, he realized, was an illumination that incorporated the limits of what it revealed — at once a source of accuracy and meaningful error. A kind of Heisenberg indeterminacy intervened: the expenditure of energy that revealed what he saw, changed what he saw. And what he saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action — the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand — moved a gigantic lever across the known universe. He saw violence with the outcome subject to so many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the pattern. The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too, was action with its consequences . The countless consequences — lines fanned out from this cave, and along most of these consequence-lines he saw his own dead body with blood flowing from a gaping knife wound.
 Kynes's Father on the Masses and the Leavings
"Arrakis is a one-crop planet," his father said. "One crop. It supports a ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings. It's the masses and the leavings that occupy our attention. These are far more valuable than has ever been suspected."
Keynes's Last Thought
Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error . Even the hawks could appreciate these facts.