Flaubert's Trois Contes, Lefebvre's Production de l'espace

I read Henri Lefebvre's Production de l'espace because an article in New Scientist mentioned it as a classic. I didn't think much of it, at least in part because I don't think I understood it. I may have read it without concentrating, but on the other hand I did teach myself rudimentary quantum physics and I did read Sartre's dissertation Being and Nothingness (in the original French) when I was sixteen...so I am fairly confident about my intellectual capacity. I was on page thirty when I noticed we hadn't gotten out of the great philosophers yet. There isn't a footnote or an index in the damn book -- wish my own editors were that indulgent. Also I disagree that gender relations and relations of production produce space: I think at most they allocate or divide it. So there. Well, I give myself A for effort.

I was primarily interested in Flaubert's short stories because they were written in the period where he became neurotically fixated on creating perfection: apparently he wrote and rewrote the most minute detail in order to achieve harmony in his words. I admire that, although it does lead to a career like Harper Lee's, or a workday like James Joyce. I admire balance between melos and opsis, between the ear and the eye, and even the greatest authors only achieve it some of the time: Francois Mauriac and Therese Desqueyroux, Pearl Buck and The Good Earth. But I'm even less convinced that this is the province of anyone else but the poet, or that it can be achieved by effort. I think it is like being in the zone: it just happens, and it's wonderful and ephemeral and rare.

Readings on Special Operations

For professional reasons, I decided to read a bunch of books on special operations that happened to be on my bookshelves at home. I read Joes' Resisting Rebellion / The history and Politics of Counterinsurgency -- I had already read a good many case studies of counterinsurgencies, so I didn't learn that much. But there is a great quote int here about the strategy of the weak being guerrilla war. That's going to get quoted more than once. Dick Couch's Finishing School and Leroy Thompson's Secret Techniques of Elite Forces both served an important purpose: to tell me how small a place my own contributions, should they even be accepted, will play in the training of US special forces. I had read Dave Grossman's On Killing, and On Combat was not nearly as good. However, it did introduce to me to Maslow's levels of competence and the author's own principles of training, and that's going to help me teach.

Efraim Karsh's Islamic Imperialism

Prof. Karsh's account disappointed me. Instead of setting out a thesis about how Islam is imperialistic, he gave me the impression he cherry-picks stories of Muslim imperialists. One could do the same for Christianity's Catholic Crusaders or, later on, Protestants. I didn't find it persuasive, and I regretted that my copy of the book was being distributed free of charge by the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

Zola, Travail and Verite

I finished the last two books in Zola's series, and it was a hard slog even compared to his previous books. The last three books were written when Zola was in England after losing his case about the Dreyfus affair, and he must have written these books to make money. They are lifeless. Travail should have been called Infidelity, since it is not about work but about people not keeping faith with each other. For his valedictory, Zola chose in Verite to retell his version of the Dreyfus case, by telling the story of a Jew falsely accused of sexually assaulting and murdering a little boy. The Church stands in for the army and government establishment, and there is also the issue of intermarriage. The novel isn't any more lively, but it is interesting to see how Zola sums up the whole legal and controversial experience. It was no pleasure.