Mind and Memory: Downsizing A Book Collection After a Death

 

I have in my house anywhere from 400-500 books, roughly calculated. These books range from poetry to histories of people and civilizations to political screeds to science fiction and literary novels to books on the natural world and our place in it. In my widowhood, I am trying to downsize in many ways. The first was moving to a much smaller house on a small urban lot. The second was placing in a storage unit all that I could not fit into my house until my adult children could decide what they want of the family furniture, their childhood toys and books, and their father's tools. Now I am trying to downsize the number of books I own, and I find the process difficult.

Books are more than an accumulation of words. They represent our interests, our hobbies, our obsessions. They evoke memories: This book I read to Tom when we were traveling to Houston, Texas, for his cancer treatment. I collected these books when I was directing a program for Japanese students at a university in Georgia. Here is a book by an author whom Tom admired. (Should I read it as homage to him?) These are books given as gifts to us by our children. Those books are all by a British novelist whose writing I loved so much I collected over the years as many of her books as I could find online or on dusty shelves of second-hand bookstores. This stack of books on a shelf represent a time and place: Arizona, when I was living there and reading about Native Americans in the West; Texas, when I first began gardening with herbs; Minnesota, when I was learning to identify the native flora there. And so on.

And though I have read many of these books, many others have not been opened as the life of the mind gave way to the incessant call of daily tasks and diversions. So as I take this book from the shelf, I determine its fate with a bit of guilt. Should I give it another try? Or has my interest in that subject now been replaced by other interests?

I also have discovered that online reading--whether news reports, magazine articles, or Twitter--have affected my attention span. A book has to be really engaging for me to stay interested. I have also recently subscribed to Audible and have discovered that listening to someone read while I crochet or do some other craft is more efficient than trying to watch on Netflix those dark and cold Scandinavian mystery series I like so much. No losing a stitch while reading subtitles!

I want to cull this book collection with emotionless precision, identifying and rejecting every book I know that I will never read or turn to for reference. But that means being honest with myself and recognizing that so many obsessions and interests faded quickly as more mundane tasks took precedence. That means letting go of some dreams and aspirations. And these books are a kind of map to my and Tom's shared intellectual life, its incompleteness, its abrupt and much-too-soon disruption by Tom's death, leaving me adrift in a sea of sorrow in which nothing seems quite as important as it once did. All those books I bought to inform me of the world lose their charm in the swells of grief. And yet, it's hard to let go as they anchor me to a life I once led.

The Hellscape

Yesterday I did a bad thing and a good thing. The bad thing I did was to withdraw the money from my defined contribution plan that covered the last three years I worked part-time in Georgia. No, it wasn't that much money, but the advice my husband had given me was to roll it over into an IRA. Instead, I withdrew the money, deposited most of it in a newly-opened savings account and some of it in a newly-opened checking account in a bank near my new home. Then I went shopping. 

I really don't like to shop, especially in the kind of shopping centers that plaster the area where I have moved and that plaster most of America's cities and suburban areas, what my husband calls "The Hellscape," acres of parking lot in front of big-box buildings. 

What I loved about the place from which we moved is that the local community (one of the densest populated in Georgia) had made a conscious effort to recreate a real downtown, with businesses lined up along sidewalks and parking available in designated areas behind businesses or in parking garages.  Trees lined the streets. Tables were set out in front of restaurants.  An art gallery was located next to an import shop which was located next to a coffee shop where local kids read their poetry on Friday nights. Several good restaurants were within walking distance of my house, a mile from downtown. I could walk the shady sidewalks of my neighborhood and within fifteen minutes arrive at a bookstore or at my hairdresser's or at a restaurant where I could order an excellent margarita.

Not so in The Hellscape. You are damned to arrive only by car--everyone in his or her own car, all the cars stacked up at the three-eyed (or four-eyed if there's a left-turn lane) traffic light that guards the way into The Hellscape. And once you've arrived, and parked, and walked the steaming hot pavement (for this IS south Louisiana) to the somewhat shady portico of the building you're headed for, there are few surprises left to anticipate. All the stores are all the stores you will find in any other Hellscape, and the products sold are products you would find in any other Hellscape store. Maybe you'll find something on sale. 

To shop, I drove to a larger Hellscape from a smaller, labyrinthine Hellscape. The labyrinth had been designed, evidently, to test the orienting skills of the newly-damned. I failed--even with a printed Google map and a satellite photo of the shopping center where the Louisiana Division of Motor Vehicles was located. I had to make a phone call to my husband, who had earlier navigated this labyrinth of Chinese restaurants, pawn shops, and car title stores. 

Once I escaped the Division of Motor Vehicles (where I had to pay a very hefty amount of money to make my car Hellscape legal), I headed to the Big Box Hellscape. Here, at least, there was a bookstore, a Big Box bookstore, but one where I was able to find the books on my reading list even though I had forgotten the titles of those books and the names of the authors. I remembered enough to be able to scan the shelves to find what I needed--and even to pick up a book that was not on my list but which captured my attention as one I might like to read.

And that was the good thing I did: I went shopping for books. Well, I think, probably, the better thing I could have done was to go to a library and check out those books, but I can't be TOO good.

 

(Click on the photo above to see the books I'm anticipating reading. My son immediately snatched up David Eagleman's Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain and is almost midway through it.)

Pruning

As I try to shelve my books here in our 120-year old cottage, with its sloping wooden floors and lack of storage, I discover that I still have way too many books for the available space.  It's time once again to prune back the overabundance of reading material that still remains from previous thinning. I did some serious pruning in 2007, when my family and I moved from Texas to Georgia, then again before packing up for another move to Louisiana, and now, soon after, another attempt to corral my books to fit the available space.

It's a difficult task, for even the books that I know I will probably never read again provide a service for me: they remind me of the different interests I cultivated during certain times of my life--hence the volumes of Walker Percy non-fiction. Some remind me of particular people, for there are inscriptions inside that reveal relationships, expectations, promises. On the inside cover of a slim volume of Nikki Giovanni's poems--Happy birthday, Anita. I love you. Always, Marie, written by a once-close college friend from whom I am now separated by years of sporadic--and then failing-- communication. On the inside cover of Michael Shaara's novel of the civil war, Killer Angels, a student from my first years of teaching at Louisiana State University thanks me for providing him with a better insight into reading. He tells me that he enjoyed the class very much. How unappreciative I am in not having yet read this novel. I'm putting it on my bedside table right now. (I've done this before, but because this yellowing paperback novel has survived several "thinnings," it seems that I continue to believe that someday I will follow through with my resolution.)

Then there are the necessary kind words of the poetry workshop leader. To Anita, Margaret Gibson salutes me on the title page of Earth Elegy: New and Selected Poems; with warm wishes and respect for your work. On the title page of Recovered Body, my poems go from achieving "respect" to "beauty." For Anita, Scott Cairns has written, well-met at the Glen. Here's wishing you the best as you continue with your beautiful poems. Barbara Crooker's volume of poetry, Radiance, reminds me of a workshop I had attended the year previous to the date of this note: For Anita, In the pleasure of your company (missed you this year) & in the great pleasure of your work. Well, I must keep these books to cheer me in the dark hours of the night when the muse is MIA, and I am afraid I'll never write another poem again.

Other books recall the ghosts of emotions I felt when I first read them, like the recollection of passion long past spent. This morning as I was sitting in the old recliner in my study, looking at the piles of books on the floor, I spied the tattered cover of John Graves' narrative of his canoe trip down the Brazos River in Texas, Goodbye to a River. For a fleeting moment, I was in my mid-twenties once again, newly aroused to the fecundity of meaning in the natural world that a poet could delve and develop. That much younger me bracketed the first sentences of chapter seven with these words: read in English 103 class. I suspect I was teaching descriptive writing to English freshmen at Texas A&M University at the time and thought of using Graves' words to coax my students toward specificity. And an asterisk beside the following words suggest that I identified with the author's sentiments:

Origin being as it is an accident outside the scope of one's will, I tend not to seek much credit for being a Texan. Often (breathes there a man/) I can work up some proud warmth about the fact that I indubitably am one. A lot of the time, though, I'd as soon be forty other kinds of men I've known....If a man couldn't escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But, if, having escaped or not, he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink in his pen. The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man.

In these books I see the roots of what I once was, the evidence of how and why I have become who I am. To subvert a line from Tennyson, "I am a part of all that I have read." But there is just not enough room in this house for all our stuff and the stuff we've been dragging around from previous generations of my husband's family. Time again to prune. Maybe someday soon I'll get the courage to do the same with my journals and letters--only instead of pruning, I'll build a bonfire to my vanity.

Decatur Book Festival 2009, Second Day

On the second day of the Decatur Book Festival, I got a late start. My husband left home earlier in order to meet one of his favorite cartoonists, Keith Knight, at a noon venue. He bought two or three of Keith's books, too. Tom has purchased more books than I at this festival. With just a part-time job, I'm really aware of where every penny of that paycheck goes. I bought a volume of the journal Five Points, a publication of Georgia State University edited by David Bottoms, because the young woman at the booth looked so bored and because she was handing out free copies of older journal issues: a two for one. I purchased a couple of copies of the Wren's Nest latest publication because my daughter's artwork appears in this year's volume and because I like to support youthful writing endeavors. And on the second day of the book festival, I purchased a slim volume of poetry from a young woman standing on the sidewalk near the outside food court.

"Would you like to buy my book?" the poet asked.

"Not really," I replied, but then I softened my refusal by asking her a few questions before moving on. When I came back by a few minutes later and saw the woman still standing there, I thought, what the heck. What's five dollars? I'll buy one of her slim little books. I can always use the book for art projects later if I'm not moved by the poetry.

She said she was from California and that she had attended the book festival in previous years. Later I saw another middle-aged woman like me holding the poet's books while the poet bought some food from a vendor. What easy marks we are, I thought, for the young and hopeful.

Authors were everywhere hawking their books in many imaginative ways. I saw an alien right after I arrived, standing behind a board advertising Drake Highlander's book, What Not to Do When You Find a Spaceship. Drake Highlander himself was rather nondescript, a young man in his mid-thirties, I would guess, dressed in shorts and short-sleeved polo shirt. He handed me a brochure about the book and a bookmark with more information. The alien posed for me.

Although I didn't plan it, the venues I attended turned out to be focused mostly on Southern writers. I found Tom at the Decatur Conference Center where John Yow was promoting his book The Armchair Birder in his good-humored Southern drawl. Yow first read a passage from the book where he describes his inability to catch a glimpse of a wood thrush. It's a funny passage because everyone he asks has seen a wood thrush but himself even though his own yard, he claims, is good habitat for one. After the reading, Yow led a bird-calling contest, with help from two of his friends sitting at the conference table with I-pods and recordings of bird calls. He solicited members of the audience to perform bird calls and then to compare those calls with the recordings. This was a lot of fun, and the person who won the contest, hands down, was a young woman (teens? early twenties? it was hard to tell from the back of the room where I was sitting) who did a loud, convincing, and energetic call of a sandhill crane.

Tom and I then went to hear Sonny Brewer and Rick Bragg, both from Alabama, though Bragg is the most well-known of the two as a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing that he did for The New York Times and for the well-received books based on his experiences growing up in Possum Trot, Alabama. Although I haven't read any of Bragg's books, I have run across his writing elsewhere and remembered the trouble he got in at The New York Times for using a stringer's reporting to write a story in the first-person as if he had done all the interviewing himself. But the big guy (almost 6-foot, 3-inches and quite a bit over 200 pounds) is funny, thoughtful, self-deprecating, and profane--as many good Southern story tellers are. He blamed his weight on the M&Ms that hotels stock in their mini-bars. "I don't drink," he said, "but those fancy hotels that I stayed in on book tours always had three-pound bags of M&Ms in their mini-bars. Now these are hotels that wouldn't have me if I weren't a well-known author on a book tour. I'd have a pound of M&Ms in the evening while watching pay-for-view and another pre-breakfast pound the next morning. Now this is true. I gained thirty-five pounds eating M&Ms."

The final event I attended was in the Decatur Courthouse and was titled "Women & The New South," featuring Janis Owens, Masha Hamilton (the only non-Southerner of the three), and Cassandra King. On her blog, Janis Owens wrote that "The title of the panel should be: Running Our Mouths, because that’s what we do." And she certainly did a lot of the talking. Raised in the Florida panhandle in what she calls the "cracker culture," Owens told one funny story after another about her life, her culture, and her family, without skipping a beat between each story. For instance, she told the story of a grandmother who was so large that the mortician had to break her legs to fit her in the coffin. When the three women opened up the discussion to questions from the audience, however, the other two authors got a chance to talk. Some of the audience members were very familiar with King's and Hamilton's books and had very specific questions. One person asked what inspired Cassandra King to write The Sunday Wife. "I made it up completely," she said. Then she paused and told the real story, that she was once the unhappily circumscribed Sunday wife who eventually left the pastor. The novel wasn't published, she said, until after her mother died, for her mother always held her accountable for leaving the pastor. Now King is married to well-known author, Pat Conroy.

Masha Hamilton, who has worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent, is also a novelist. She went to Afghanistan in 2004 and returned in 2008, and has begun the Afghan Women's Writing Project as a way to give voice to Afghan women. The website for the project describes the efforts:

The Afghan Women’s Writing Project is aimed at allowing Afghan women to have a direct voice in the world, not filtered through male relatives or members of the media. Many of these Afghan women have to make extreme efforts to gain computer access in order to submit their writings, in English, to the project.

As Hamilton was preparing to leave New York and her three children to visit Afghanistan, she thought long and hard about how her traveling to such a dangerous country might impact her children. But she also wanted her children to know that some actions are worth the risk. Just before she left for Afghanistan, she said that her teenage daughter went out one night to Central Park with some friends. When her daughter returned home, Hamilton told her that she should never go to Central Park at night, that she was very worried about her. Her daughter looked at her and said, emphasizing every word with a pointing finger, "You are going to Afghanistan and you're worried about me being in Central Park at night with friends?"

I left this session very glad that I had attended it on the spur of the moment, for these are authors whose writings I will look for in the future. One of the great things about the Decatur Book Festival is that it brings in lots of well-known authors along with a little less well-known authors and even obscure authors. There is a venue for almost every interest. What a great event!

Decatur Book Festival 2009, First Day

Yesterday we attended several afternoon events of the Decatur Book Festival, sponsored by, among others, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Dekalb Medical Center. The day was overcast, and when my husband and I set off on the mile-long walk to downtown Decatur, a few stray drops of water fell from the sky. However, there was no significant rainfall to dampen the spirits of the crowd in downtown Decatur. Our daughter attended some events at the teen gathering in a dance studio near the downtown square, and then she and friends went to lunch together.

Tom and I first went to the Decatur Public Library Stage to hear Niall Stanage, an Irish journalist who covered Barack Obama's election. Stanage first gave us the international perspective on Barack Obama, nothing new, of course, to those of us who keep up with the news, but it was good to be reminded that Obama's election "really redeemed an old idea for America" that had been eroded over the years by the Bush administration. Stanage said that while there is a small margin, a fringe on the left, that has an "implacable" resistance and dislike of America and its power, most Europeans have a fondness for America. The Bush administration policies, however, had seriously eroded that goodwill (for example, in 2000, Germans had a 70% favorable attitude toward the U.S.; by 2007, that goodwill had dropped to 30%). Barack Obama re-invigorated the fondness Europeans had for America.

What was really interesting to me, however, was the audience's response to the clips of Obama's speeches that Stanage showed to illustrate his points. The first clip was the very hopeful speech Obama gave at the 2000 Democratic Convention, the one where he says these rousing lines: "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America." I could feel the energy in the room as these words echoed in the small auditorium. People clapped after every speech with the kind of enthusiasm I remembered from the election. I swear, the middle-aged guy next to me was crying, removing his glasses and wiping his eyes. Now, cynical far-right Republicans would call this Obama-awe. I think it's something way more important: it's hope. There still remains among us liberals the hope that the country can be re-united; that we are the United States of America. But the radicals on the right, what Kevin Drum and others call the "fever swamp crowd," have just about eroded that hope in their terrorist takeover of the national dialogue.

After Stanage's speech, Tom and I parted ways to attend different events; he attended an environmentalist presentation, and I walked to the First Baptist Church of Decatur to hear Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. Blackmon has written an exhaustively researched book titled Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. The title pretty much summarizes the point of the book, and that's how Blackmon began his presentation, with a summary of his book, a summary of the re-enslavement of African-Americans in the South in a kind of neo-slavery, involuntary servitude. He reminded us that many of the early fortunes of the "fathers of Atlanta" were built on this practice of servitude and that many Atlanta-based companies we know today tie back to the brutal practices of another time.

There is an American mythology that "Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves" that Americans cling to, totally removing from memory the brutality of the early twentieth-century. Thousands of African-Americans, Blackmon said, are alive today who were born into defacto slavery in the 1920s and 1930s. Georgia and Alabama particularly supported this practice, for their economies depended upon free or cheap labor: agriculture, mining. These southern states "used the criminal justice system to create a new slavery and the fear of this system to intimidate African-Americans." As just one example, Blackmon described how a black man who wanted to leave one farmer and work for another had to get permission from his original boss. If he did not, he would be charged and slapped with a fine. This is just a small example of the ways that African-Americans were intimidated. Of course, we all know about the Jim Crow laws. Right? I left this presentation determined to buy Blackmon's book, but all the venues were out of their supply; I'll have to order it later.

Tom and I later met up for a poetry reading that ended with two very moving poems by Patricia Smith. The last one, written for the 34 victims left behind in a nursing home during Hurricane Katrina, brought tears to my eyes.

Quotations, Part II: Incompetency and ineptitude

From Patrick Cockburn's editorial, "Iraq is a Country No More," The Independent, 16 March 2008:

In those first months after the fall of Baghdad it was extraordinary, and at times amusing, to watch the American victors behave exactly like the British at the height of their power in 19th-century India. The ways of the Raj were reborn. A friend who had a brokerage in the Baghdad stock market told me how a 24-year-old American, whose family were donors to the Republican Party, had been put in charge of the market and had lectured the highly irritated brokers, most of whom spoke several languages and had PhDs, about the virtues of democracy.

In Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon (2008), A. J. Rossmiller (former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst) writes:

In my office [Office of Iraq Analysis] where we constantly read reports straight from the ground, the general consensus--despite being overwhelmingly populated by conservatives--was that the Iraq project was a debacle, mainly due to incompetent leadership in the Pentagon and the White House. We joked that President Bush had finally set up the conservative religious government he dreamed of. . . only it was an Islamist one in Iraq rather than a Christian one at home. (215)

From The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq (2005), by George Packer, on the looting that occurred in Iraq immediately after the U. S. forces won Baghdad:

"We're incompetent, as far as [the Iraqis] are concerned," said Noah Feldman, the New York University law professor who went to Baghdad as a constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority. "The key to it all was the looting. That was when it was clear that there was no order. There's an Arab proverb: Better forty years of dictatorship than one day of anarchy." He added, "That also told them they could fight against us and we were not a serious force." (138)

"Our people don't understand what's going on, so they think the Americans are deliberately creating this chaos," Dr. Butti told me. The conspiracy theories were an attempt to make sense of the absurd. . . The notion that bad planning, halfhearted commitment, ignorance, and incompetence accounted for the anarchy simply wasn't believable. How were Iraqis to grasp that the same Washington think tank where Bush offered Iraq as a model for the region had contributed to the postwar collapse by shooting down any talk of nation building? Deliberate sabotage made more sense. (166)

From A. J. Rossmiller's Still Broken:

To be viewed as legitimate by its people, a government must generally be competent in two areas: security and basic services. Iraqis view the United States as the government as much as they view their own elected officials as the government (after all, they reason, an occupying military must control the state, right?), and failure to meet those basic requirements offers insurgents an opportunity to present themselves as able to govern effectively, or at least better. Further, because Iraqis see the U.S. as overwhelmingly powerful and advanced, they think we must be able to provide security and economic opportunity--so if these things do not exist, many believe, it must be because we purposefully fail to provide them. A frequent reference among Iraqis is that the U.S. put people on the moon; how could a nation that can land on the moon not provide electricity? (52-53)

From Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006), by Thomas E. Ricks, on the Coalitional Provision Authority (CPA)--or, less honorably known as Can't Do Anything:

The U.S. civilian occupation organization was a house built on sand and inhabited by the wrong sort of people, according to many who worked there. "No clear strategy, very little detailed planning, poor communications, high personnel turnover, lots of young and inexperienced political appointees, no well-established business processes," concluded retired Army Col. Ralph Hallenbeck, who worked at the CPA as a civilian contractor dealing with the Iraqi communications infrastructure. Personnel was an especially nettlesome issue. Hallenbeck said that in addition to being young and inexperienced, most of the young CPA people he met during his work as a contractor were ideologically minded Republicans whose only professional experience was working on election campaigns back in the United States. It was, as Zinni later commented, "a pickup team." Scott Erwin, a former intern for Vice President Cheney who worked on the budget for security forces, reported that his favorite job before that was "my time as an ice cream truck driver." (203)

From Packer's The Assassin's Gate, on the young members of the CPA:

Most of them [young members of the Coalition Provisional Authority] seemed to be Republicans, and more than a few were party loyalists who had come to Iraq as political appointees on ninety-day tours. They were astonishingly young. Many had never worked abroad, few knew anything about the Middle East, and that first summer only three or four of the Americans spoke Arabic. Some were simply unqualified for their responsibilities. A twenty-five-year-old oversaw the creation of the Baghdad stock market, and another twenty-five-year-old, from the Office of Special Plans, helped write the interim constitution while filling out his law school application.(184)

Almost all of [head of the CPA, Paul Bremer] Bremer's confidants were Americans. The Arabic-speaking ambassadors with years of experience in the Middle East had less access to the administrator and less work to do than his small coterie of trusted aides from Washington. An Iraqi who was close to the CPA told me that, in general, the less one knew about Iraq, the more influence one had. (198)

Why should we still care about the incompetent leadership of the Bush administration in the Iraq war? Because those leaders are still in power and because the Republican Party's nominee for president, John McCain, shows no indication of making any changes in leadership. The same people who advised George Bush are advising John McCain.

A Few Quotations: No Justice

Some of my reading recently has rather serendipitously connected with current events, particularly the war in Iraq. I've been thinking of how to write about what I've read. Until then, here are some quotations from that reading.

From Greg Mortenson's and David Oliver Resin's Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace. . . One School at a Time (2006), in a conversation with Pakistani Brigadier General Bashir Baz, who was reacting to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan:

As he studied the [television] screen, Bashir's bullish shoulders slumped. "People like me are America's best friends in the region," Bashir said at last, shaking his head ruefully. "I'm a moderate Muslim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer?" Bashir asked, struggling not to direct his anger toward the large American target on the other side of his desk. "Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years."

From Andrew Eames's The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie (2004), in a conversation with Alp Aslan, a Turkish man in Konya, Turkey, who answers the author's question about regional responses to the war in Iraq, which at that point hadn't yet started:

"Iraq will probably be a better place without Saddam Hussein, but the war must not go on for too long. Might is only right for a limited time, look at Genghis Khan. Justice, that is the important thing. If the US treats Iraq with justice, then I don't think there'll be any backlash from here...."

From A. J. Rossmiller's Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, From Baghdad to the Pentagon (2008):

In America's Iraq, the burden of proof is on the suspect. Guilty until proven innocent. The action units place the responsibility on the intel crew to sort out the guys they grab, and the intel guys figure that the action units will bring in only legitimate targets. In that space an innocent individual becomes a prisoner."

From Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas E. Ricks:

[Nir] Rosen, an Arabic speaker who had spent time in Egypt, Qatar, and Jordan, was stunned at how little the American soldiers understood of their environment. On another raid he witnessed, soldiers burst into a house, shot a man named Ayoub in the hand with nonlethal pellets, and arrested him. They seized two compact discs with images of Saddam Hussein on them--not knowing that the titles on the discs, in Arabic, were The Crimes of Saddam Hussein. "The soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and assumed they were proof of guilt," Rosen wrote. Several hours later intelligence operatives intercepted a telephone call by another man. "Oh, shit," said Army Capt. Bill Ray, an intelligence officer; the man they had detained "was the wrong Ayoub." (275)

What Others Say

I've not been posting much this year mainly because the new year began with my being ill, and it took a while for me to recover. A visit to the otolaryngologist today brought welcome relief. Now I won't have to lean in quite so closely to my friends and colleagues to hear conversation, and I might feel well enough to begin my garden planting and landscaping.

Offline, I've been reading a lot of poetry lately--Margaret Gibson, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Elizabeth Bishop (the new Library of America collection of her poems, prose, and letters)--some nonfiction (began Derrick Jensen's A Language Older than Words, a Christmas gift from a friend; have almost finished reading Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time, a Christmas gift from Mary-Margaret) and some fiction (reread Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac and am a chapter and a half from finishing A Friend from England; am about 100 pages into Marcel Proust's Swann's Way).

Meanwhile, here are some links to what others are saying online:

James Fallows on the charges of plagiarism against Barrack Obama

Jack Shafer on charges of plagiarism against Obama

Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo's military commissions, on trials at Guantanamo (in an interview with The Nation--and hat tip to Kevin Drum)

Nicholas Kristof on torture and Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman held for more than six years at Guantanamo Bay

Paul Kramer on earlier American use of the "water cure"--and an earlier Atlantic article on torture and rendition by Jane Mayer

The BBC on learning English