several years late, but I loved reading http://contemporarylit.about.com/b/2...sun-shuyun.htm
As someone who read (and completely believed) Edgar Snow's Red Star over China in high school, this was an education.
several years late, but I loved reading http://contemporarylit.about.com/b/2...sun-shuyun.htm
As someone who read (and completely believed) Edgar Snow's Red Star over China in high school, this was an education.
Wild beasts and their ways : reminiscences of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America (1890) by Samuel White Baker.
Some great hunting stories and tales written with keen observation by a man who had time and money to travel in an age when the world was a different place. Sometimes his opinion is a bit off but he certainly shows that you can observe a lot by just looking - especially when you gralloch and skin an animal.
Parts of his study on wildlife are first-class. The simple yet effective way he comes to the conclusion how (old world) vultures find their game with their sight and the sight of other birds is just one of many. It is needless to say that this book does often not reflect always the PC of our age .
His discussion about guns and bullets are of course old-fashioned but the principles are still relevant:
1) You have to place your bullet into the right way (anatomy!)
2) It has to penetrate into the right area to do it's job (He prefered heavy solid harderd or heavy solid soft spherical lead for the most dangerous game)
3) There the bullet should wreak havoc.
4) It should be matched to the animal while erring on the right side. (He mentions a lot of cases, some witnessed when the rifle and it's bullet just didn't the job. Sometimes with deadly results ...)
I only differ about the exit wound. Having one just helps to track it in the worst case, but of course it is much easier today. His attacks on 'Express' rifles with fragile hollow bullets are very understandable. Still today, with all our technology some hunters I know use have made a mess by hitting the shoulder of animal like a red deer with too soft of a bullet for the velocity . (Bad shooting is of course a vastly bigger problem. It can happen to everybody it just happens much more to some ...)
All in all a great read for the hunting-less season.
Last edited by Firn; 01-03-2013 at 05:57 PM.
... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"
General Ludwig Beck (1880-1944);
Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935
It is not for everyone. John Gray's Straw Dogs.
The prevailing secular worldview is a pastiche of current scientific orthodoxy and pious hopes. Darwin has shown that we are animals; but - as humanists never tire of preaching - how we live is ‘up to us’. Unlike any other animal, we are told, we are free to live as we choose. Yet the idea of free will does not come from science. Its origins are in religion - not just any religion - but the Christian faith against which humanists rail so obsessively.
[...]
Some readers have seen Straw Dogs as an attempt to apply Darwinism to ethics and politics, but nowhere does it suggest that neo-Darwinian orthodoxy contains the final account of the human animal. Instead Darwinism is deployed strategically in order to break up the prevailing humanist worldview. Humanists turn to Darwin to support their shaky faith in progress; but there is no progress in the world he revealed. A truly naturalistic view of the world leaves no room for secular hope.
[...]
The Buddhist ideal of awakening implies that we can sever our links with our evolutionary past. We can raise ourselves from the sleep in which other animals pass their lives. Our illusions dissolved, we need no longer suffer. This is only another doctrine of salvation, subtler than that of the Christians, but no different from Christianity in its goal of leaving our animal inheritance behind.
[...]
Having lost the skills of sewing, fishing and making fire, the indigenous people of Tasmania lived more simply than even Aboriginals on the Australian mainland from whom they had been isolated by rising sea levels around ten thousand years ago. When the ships bearing European settlers arrived in Tasmania in 1772, the indigenous people seem not to have noticed them. Unable to process a sight for which nothing had prepared them, they returned to their ways.
They had no defences against the settlers. By 1830, their numbers had been reduced from around five thousand to seventy-two. In the intervening years they had been used for slave labour and sexual pleasure, tortured and mutilated. They had been hunted like vermin and their skins had been sold for government bounty. When the males were killed, female survivors were turned loose with the heads of their husbands tied around their necks. Males who were not killed were usually castrated. Children were clubbed to death. When the last indigenous Tasmanian male, William Lanner, died in 1869, his grave was opened by a member of the Royal Society of Tasmania, Dr George Stokell, who made a tobacco pouch from his skin. When the last ‘fullblood’ indigenous woman died a few years later, the genocide was complete.
Genocide is as human as art or prayer. This is not because humans are a uniquely aggressive species. The rate of violent death among some monkeys exceeds that among humans - if wars are excluded from the calculation; but as E.O. Wilson observes, ‘if hamdryas baboons had nuclear weapons, they would destroy the world in a week’. Mass murder is a side effect of progress in technology. From the stone axe onwards, humans have used their tools to slaughter one another. Humans are weapon-making animals with an unquenchable fondness for killing. (from Straw Dogs by John Gray)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals - Amazon
John N. Gray - Wikipedia
***
Straw Dogs review by Terry Eagleton:
Guardian review of Straw Dogs by Terry Eagleton - Guardian - 7.11.2002John Gray's political vision has been steadily darkening. Once a swashbuckling free-marketeer, he has, in his recent studies, become increasingly despondent about the state of the world. With the crankish, unbalanced Straw Dogs, he emerges as a full-blooded apocalyptic nihilist. He has passed from Thatcherite zest to virulent misanthropy.
Not that nihilism is a term he would endorse. His book is so remorselessly, monotonously negative that even nihilism implies too much hope. Nihilism for Gray suggests the world needs to be redeemed from meaninglessness, a claim he regards as meaningless. Instead, we must just accept that progress is a myth, freedom a fantasy, selfhood a delusion, morality a kind of sickness, justice a mere matter of custom and illusion our natural condition. Technology cannot be controlled, and human beings are entirely helpless. Political tyrannies will be the norm for the future, if we have any future at all. It isn't the best motivation for getting out of bed.
Terry Eagleton - Wikipedia
***
The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma Translated by Red Pine.
The Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma - AmazonMany roads lead to the Path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice.
***
Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse.
Magic Theater - american-buddha.com online libraryI was amazed to see a small and pretty doorway with a Gothic arch in the middle of the wall ... Probably I had seen it a hundred times and simply not noticed it. Perhaps it had been painted afresh ... it seemed to me in the dim light that a garland, or something gaily colored, was festooned round the doorway, and ... over the door I saw ... bright letters dancing and then disappearing, returning and vanishing once more.
MAGIC THEATER
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY (from Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse)
Steppenwolf - Amazon
Steppenwolf (novel) - Wikipedia
Steppenwolf (Hawkind) youtube
Last edited by Backwards Observer; 02-01-2013 at 07:46 AM.
The Silence of Animals, the new offering by international man of misery, John Gray.
The Silence of Animals - John Gray - AmazonWhen Conrad used his experiences of the Congo in Heart of Darkness (1899), he was not telling a story of barbarism in faraway places. The narrator tells the tale on a yacht moored in the Thames estuary: barbarism is not a primitive form of life, Conrad is intimating, but a pathological development of civilization. The same thought recurs in The Secret Agent (1907), Conrad’s novel of terrorism and conspiracy, which is set in London. The anarchist Professor, who travels everywhere with a bomb in his coat that he intends to detonate if arrested, wants to believe that humanity has been corrupted by government, an essentially criminal institution. But, as Conrad understood, it is not only government that is tainted by criminality. All human institutions - families and churches, police forces and anarchists - are stained by crime. Explaining human nastiness by reference to corrupt institutions leaves a question: why are humans so attached to corruption? Clearly, the answer is the human animal itself. (from The Silence of Animals by John Gray)
Interview with a writer: John Gray - spectator - 2.22.2013
The Silence of Animals - review - guardian - 2.15.2013
The Silence of Animals - review - telegraph - 2.19.2013
***
Also,
Conrad in the Nineteenth Century by Ian Watt - amazon
Ian Watt (Literary Critic) - wikipediaBorn March 9, 1917, in Windermere, Westmorland in England, Watt was educated at the Dover County School for Boys and at St John's College, Cambridge, where he earned first-class honors in English.
Watt joined the British Army at the age of 22 and served with distinction in World War II as an infantry lieutenant from 1939 to 1946. He was wounded in the Battle of Singapore in February 1942 and listed as "missing, presumed killed in action."
In fact, he had been taken prisoner by the Japanese and remained a prisoner of war at the Changi Prison until 1945, working on the construction of the Burma Railway which crossed Thailand, a feat that inspired the Pierre Boulle book 'Bridge Over the River Kwai', and the film adaptation by David Lean. He criticized both the book and the film for the liberties they took with the historical details of his imprisonment and, more subtly, their refusal to acknowledge the moral complexities of the situation.
More than 12,000 prisoners died during the building of the railroad, most of them from disease, and Watt was critically ill from malnutrition for several years.
"There was a period when I expected to die," Watt told the San Francisco Examiner in a 1979 interview. "But I didn't know how sick I was until they gave me some of the vitamin pills that had just come into the camp. I remember being very surprised that I was considered sick enough to receive vitamins."
Professor Watt died in Menlo Park, California, USA. (from wikipedia)
***
Gratuitous film clip:
Lord Jim (1965) - youtube
Lord Jim - wikipedia
Kattekoppen, a piece in the latest number of The New Yorker set in Logar Province and narrated by a DEVGRU member. I really admire how the author has managed to create a narrator who is detached and incredibly observant at the same time. And there is a great bit about sleep deprivation and fingernails.
If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. – Mark Twain (attributed)
Ganulv:
The most interesting part of that New Yorker story were these lines spoken by the narrator:To me that sort of encapsulates in two sentences the supreme and invincible arrogance of the big military, a supreme confidence even though what is being done hasn't worked and isn't working. The stats are good though.As SEAL Team Six, we were at the top of that scheme. Our ideas about the war were the war.
Last edited by davidbfpo; 03-07-2013 at 12:19 AM. Reason: citation in quotes
"We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene
The Signal and the Noise.
A great book. The Baseball chapter was a bit long for my European taste, the poker one maybe too and I have some slight ceveats in other areas. However the positives dominate. Coming from a somewhat different angle it gels well with Kahnemans studies and surprisingly enough with aspects of the works of Ben Graham and Buffet. He ends with the words:Should work well most of the time for investors...The more eagerly we commit to scrutinising and testing our theories, the more readily we accept that our knowledge of the world is uncertain, the more willingly we acknowledge that perfect prediction is impossible, the less we will live in fear of our failures, and the more freedom we will have to let our minds flow freely. By knowing more about what we don't know, we may get a few more predictions right
Last edited by davidbfpo; 03-07-2013 at 12:19 AM. Reason: Citation in quotes
... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"
General Ludwig Beck (1880-1944);
Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935
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