Odds and Ends

Since last writing, I read a issue of OK Magazine, one of the New Yorker, and one of the New Scientist. I have also read some fascinating books. One, Nightwork by Anne Allison, explores ethnographically the hostess bars of Tokyo. I also read an excellent book by a moderate Arab, , called The Arab Center, by Marwan Muasher. I also read Murray Bail's Longhand. I didn't think much of it, although it's fine as a notebook goes, but because it didn't need to be published. It is an approriately private document. I read a novel translated from the Urdu, The Shore and the Wave, by Aziz Ahmad, which I also liked. Best of all, I read Abe's Inter Ice Age 4, one of the most imaginative novels I've ever read. It is the story of a Japanese researcher who discovers a time machine, and then goes on to discover a secret government initiative to turn human beings into water-breathers by genetic engineering, because the sea level is rising and Japan will be submerged. He discovers that his wife's aborted fetus has been sold to this organization, the water-breathers come into being and then conflict with the land people, elderly Japanese spend their life savings on cameras to watch their water grandchildren, and the novel ends with the submersion of Tokyo. It was a masterpice. Unsettling and unpredictable at every turn. I can't recommend it enough.

I also read Kevin Swint's Political Campaigning and Negative Advertising, which was a quick read and very interesting. It appears that negative advertising about the candidate's person is the most likely to backfire. I also read Trevor-Roper's posthumous Invention of Scotland. The front of the book studies the creation of the idea of nationhood through Robbie Burns and Buchanan and the like, but the back two chapters are fascinating. It appears the kilt originated as the clothing of the poor, but was in its present form invented by an English Quaker industrialist. The tartan was created in its clan-belonging incarnation by two Polish tailors, who published the fraudulent Scotia Antiquarum, which was taken for cash by everyone since. Originally, different members of the same family would wear different patterns, for example. I laughed my head off.

I have now undertaken the 3000 page Chinese classic, Dream of the Red Chamber, which is primarily about women. I am reading it translated into French.