The Myths We Live By
John Gray
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths. John Gray. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, 225 pp.
Leslie Evans
John Gray, 66, emeritus professor of philosophy at Oxford, is the great pessimist of Western intellectuals, the self-conscious inheritor of Schopenhauer. He has been all over the political map, from youthful leftism to Thatcherism in middle age, to New Labour and a current commitment to environmentalism. He is also a principal interpreter of British Jewish social theorist Isaiah Berlin, who was a staunch defender of liberal values against authoritarian currents, and, in consequence, a critic of the negative side of the Enlightenment, its spawning of schemes of generic social engineering to improve humanity by imposing Reason on the world, usually at terrible human cost.
This little book is unusual in Gray’s oeuvre. It is not a linear exposition but a series of comments on brief excerpts from novels and poems; works of nonfiction such as The Peregrine, an account of a year in the life of a Peregrine falcon; interspersed with an essay on Freud containing a sidebar on Jung. If there is a common theme it is that despite our technological prowess we humans are animals like all the others, not some special creation, with our animal nature unchanged since it evolved 50,000 years ago, all attempts to improve it to the contrary notwithstanding.
The myth that we are perfecting ourselves, central to the liberal ethos since the French Revolution, and which was in turn inherited from the Christianity of St. Paul, is Gray’s target:
“History may be a succession of absurdities, tragedies and crimes; but – everyone insists -the future can still be better than anything in the past. To give up this hope would induce a state of despair.” Read more
Les Zador Crunches Some Numbers
By LES ZADOR
I did some numbers.
There are 60 seconds in a minute;
There are 3,600 (60 x 60) seconds in an hour;
and 86,400 (60 x 60 x 24) seconds in a day;
and 31,536,000 (60 x 60 x 24 x 365) seconds in a year; and
and 2,832,240,000 seconds (60 x 60 x 24 x 365 x 90) in a 90-year life span (a long life-time).
If there are 400,000,000,000 stars in the Milky Way, you would divide the 400 billion by 2,832,240,000 to get the number of people it would take to count all of those stars if they began their count from the instant of birth and continued without interruption (for sleep, eating, going to the bathroom, or observing religious holidays) to the instant of death (all on their 90th birthdays) while counting at the rate of one star per second. It comes out to 141.23 persons.
With the Milky Way being an average-sized galaxy and with an estimated 100 billion (100,000,000,000) galaxies in the universe, it would take 14,123,000,000,000 (141.23 x 100,000,000,000) persons–that’s over 14 trillion human beings–90 years while counting at the rate of one star per second and going at it 24 hours per day (with no time off for weekends, legal holidays, fornication, or anything else) for the entire 90 year duration to count every star in every galaxy in the universe. That’s more people who have ever lived on earth since humankind first came into existence and in all likelihood more people than ever will haved lived on earth before the species says its final “adios, amigos.”
Ours is a minor planet orbiting around a slightly smaller than average star located in an average-size galaxy. With 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, and 100 billion galaxies, the total number of stars in the universe could reasonably be estimated as: 100 billion x 400 billion . . . or . . . 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, of which one of them is our own sun. The sun has eight planets orbiting around it. Assuming that eight planets is the norm–a not unreasonably assumption–then the total number of planets could be estimated at 320,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
All of which explains one of the reasons why some have questioned the existence of an interventionist God who, having singled out this planet and our species for some unfathonable reason, holds the doings of humankind on our world of paramount concern.
*
Les Zador is an attorney in Encino, among other things.
Mary Reinholz’ “Exit From Eden” Returns After Too Long A Lull
CHAPTER 14
Doria Nune was somebody I wanted to know better even before my interview with her began for the New York Daily Bugle. The girl intrigued me–and not just because she was about to publish an avant garde women’s magazine called Pink that would debut as an erotic art book with male centerfolds looking like Renaissance nudes. She seemed to embody the eternal gamine, an elfin and androgynous presence.
Decked out in form fitting suede pants and a cream colored silk blouse that showed only a hint of cleavage, she greeted me at the door of her Chelsea Hotel suite with an enigmatic smile. “So we’re neighbors and also in a similar racket,” she said. “It’s nice to know there’s another feminist I can talk to in this dump.”
Doria couldn’t have been more than five feet two inches tall. She had cut her dark brown hair short since we last spoke at a meeting of Media Women Ink, the feminist writers group on the Upper East Side, and the new style became her. It was a pixie cut which brought out her delicate cheek bones and hazel eyes.
Her space also impressed me. She had so much more of it than my cramped Chelsea quarters that waning year of 1970. She had painted most of it a dusky rose, presumably the same color that would seep into the pages of Pink when it appeared on newsstands in February.
“This is really nice,” I said. “Elegant. How did you get so much room?
“I had a wall knocked out and liberated the room next door,” Doria said briskly. “The hotel manager didn’t seem to mind—I paid him enough. But I had a ceiling collapse recently. The transsexual musician above me keeps letting his bathwater flood over and down to my place. It’s a pain in the tush.” Read more
Lionel Rolfe’s Literary LA Back in Print at Amazon.com
We are pleased to announce that Boryanabooks has brought back the expanded paperback edition of Lionel Rolfe’s Literary LA,
Now available in paperback from Amazon.com
Los Angeles as a hotbed of writers, bohemians, mad poets, exiles and refugees from every form of political and emotional oppression surfaces again with the third edition of Literary LA. There has always been another side to the self-promotional glitter the city is best known for, and this book tells that story. Literary LA was originally published in 1981 by Chronicle Books in San Francisco. A revised edition, In Search of Literary LA, appeared ten years later. To mark the millennium, California Classics expanded the study, with new emphasis on the bohemian and apocalyptic streams in Los Angeles writing, and including additional chapters by John Ahouse and Julia Stein. This is the full text of that expanded edition, released under the imprint of Boryanabooks. Those who helped to weave this literary tapestry were, like many who take hold in Los Angeles, often transients, literary gypsies, bohemians and writers in imposed or self-imposed exile. Among the authors and book people discussed, frequently through the haze of one of the city’s coffeehouses, are Oscar Zeta Acosta, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, Ken Kesey, Carey McWilliams, Charles Lummis, Jacob Zeitlin, Louis Adamic, Nathanael West, Robinson Jeffers, Malcolm Lowry, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and many others. Journalist and author Lionel Rolfe grew up in European-influenced surroundings in Los Angeles. Through the early postwar years, his mother, the late pianist Yaltah Menuhin, hosted an at-home salon that offered a solace for musicians and other creative artists-in-exile. Much of what Rolfe writes has its roots in his own childhood impressions or the recollections of family members and visitors to his boyhood home.
Iraq on Its Own Terms
Leslie Evans
The dominant American liberal narrative about Iraq is that George Bush lied to drag America into a pointless war that destroyed a stable, secular, if dictatorial, country at the cost of the lives of 4,486 U.S. military personnel and at least 120,000 Iraqis, possibly many more, costing a trillion dollars, and leaving behind a chaotic ruin riven by bloody sectarian rivalries headed into civil war. Marxists would add that the war was a predatory attempt by American imperialism to create a client state and take control of Iraq’s oil.
There is a certain amount of truth to these narratives but they are more about America than Iraq. Counting up the dead doesn’t tell you what the Iraqis in their various ethnic and religious groupings were themselves fighting for, whether they believe they were better off under Saddam Hussein or not, and tends to treat them as undifferentiated and passive pawns or victims of the United States and its coalition partners. Just maybe most of them don’t see it that way. Hate George Bush and Dick Cheney all you like. More power to you. The war was a disaster for America, and the Iraq that exists today is a far cry from the shining pro-West democracy that Bush and the neocons promised. But don’t lie to yourselves about the people of Iraq, either out of ignorance or out of hatred for the Bush administration. In any case, maybe the fact that Barack Obama was the Commander in Chief of the U.S. forces in Iraq for more than a third of the time they were there may lead you to consider that the war, ill considered or not, was not simply an attack on Iraq’s peoples. (Marxists excepted here.) Read more
ARTFULLY NEGOTIATING THE MARITAL TURF WARS
My friend Carla has a theory about long marriages. She claims that the relative success of a marriage is directly proportional to the square footage of the house in which the couple lives.
She maintains that her marriage to husband Don has lasted more than thirty years only because their house is big enough to accommodate separate spaces for portions of their days together. She tells him, “You stay on your side and I’ll stay on mine, and I’ll meet you in the kitchen for dinner at seven o’clock.”
Those of us who have known this couple for many years know that Carla possesses a rather wry and deadpan sense of humor. On their 30th anniversary, Don proposed a dinner toast to her, and said, “It doesn’t seem possible that thirty years could have passed so quickly.” She responded dryly, “Well honey, it doesn’t seem that long because you’ve been on the phone for most of that time.” Read more
Night Train To Shanghai
By LIONEL ROLFE
Night Train To Shanghai And Other Memories Of China
Gerald Nicosia
Grizzly Peak Press
Gerald Nicosia is probably better known for his non-fiction–Memory Babe is still the major work on Jack Kerouac and his Home To War is a major opus on the Vietnam War–but he also is a real poet, very much in the San Francisco tradition of Ferlinghetti, Patchen, Rexroth and Ginsberg–except those guys are now mostly gone.
I was amazed at how viscerally I reacted to the cover of Night Train to Shanghai And Other Memories of China, showing a train track running within inches of worker’s hovels, in a place that looked like all the other dreary places on earth from Camden, New Jersey to Downey, California.
Of course looking to the east was the hallmark of the Beats in the ’50s, who thought the wisdom from the other side of the globe much surpassed our own. For many of us children from that era, China was the land at the other end of the hole we sometimes tried to dig in our suburban front yards. Nicosia looks at China through those eyes he might have had climbing out the other end of the tunnel for the first time This slim book of poems is better than a thousand long-winded pieces of journalism–he makes the east scrutable and real, with all its anomalies. Read more
TALES FROM THE GREEN ROOM: AN EVENING WITH BRITT, RINGO, AND ROYALTY
Sir John Mills, wife Mary, & daughter Hayley Mills
By Bob Vickrey
I was there accompanying British actor Sir John Mills, and his wife Mary, who were in town promoting his recent memoir, “Up in the Clouds, Gentlemen Please.” That evening’s show had a distinctive international flavor that featured appearances by Starr, Mills, and Swedish-born actress Britt Ekland.
Visiting a television waiting room while accompanying a touring author wasn’t entirely new to me, but this occasion was considerably more extravagant, and quite unlike most of my escort duties of the past. As a publisher’s representative, part of my job was to shepherd our company’s touring authors about town to bookstore signings and media appearances. I normally spent more time in green rooms of local morning or mid-day talk shows than national nighttime venues. Read more
Postcards From Gaza
Photo by Mohammad Arafat
By Mohammad Arafat
Gaza is a place of many scenes that would create many postcards with vivid images. It also is a place of many tragedies, mixed with many happy and even magical moments as well. Our tragedies are Shakespearian in depth—yes, there is torture and killing and bombs and being besieged. But even all those things can’t take the beauty from the place we live in.
Now when we’re talking politics, that’s almost always bad. But if I speak about the beauty of this place, that’s another matter. I flipped through the many pictures in my mind—the sad, the happy, the good and the bad. Finally I settled on that picture of this place which shows that the atmosphere of this Holy City is based on a beautiful simple life. I want to share the fabulously sweet side of Gaza. Read more
A Most Unpleasant Apparition In The Desert
By LIONEL ROLFE
The other night on MSNBC Rachael Maddow talked about Col.William P. Gale, the man who created the Posse Comitatus, Christian Identity and Aryan Nation movements. She pointed out that the Nevada rancher who thinks he should not have to pay federal grazing fees was espousing a particular ideology which had been Gale’s creation.
It turns out Maddow was talking about a rather arcane theory Gale proposed rejecting the legitimacy of the federal government because the 14th Amendment was passed in the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. The former Confederacy hated the 14th Amendment because it essentially was designed to protect the rights of the freed slaves. Gale’s answer was to insist the only legitimate authority in each county was the sheriff.
Maddow’s piece on Gale quickly reminded me of an encounter of another kind I had had with Gale. In 1969, New Orleans District Attorney James Garrison tried Clay Shaw for what he believed was his involvement in the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. I had never believed the shots that killed Kennedy came from the Book Depository Building, not after hearing a reporter on the crime scene, an ABC radio broadcaster, proclaim the “shots are coming from the grassy knoll!” Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
