Saturday, October 31, 2009

100 most banned books invited reviews or make your own

These are purportedly 100 of the most banned books.What should be on there is one title,The Irregulars appearing as an audio book in 2 parts, and which I would like to review at length as given in my notes and observations below. The Irregulars by Jennet Conant appeared as an unabridged audio book on 9-9-08 and consists of 6 hours of narration especially as a narration of the history of British espionage and covert activities originating in Washington DC. A small coterie of British spies were formed in the US when it was critical to obtain US support then in an isolationist frame of mind. England was in a dire state and would not have survived had we not entered on her side during the war and Churchill knew this and sent William Stephenson in advance to Washington to man an army of spies and covert agents to turn the US from her isolationist ways then predominant and join the war and hence in the process save Britain from a Nazi invasion and encroachment/destruction. The bombing of London was but a prelude to this impending intention of Hitler. Western civilization was possible by their victories due to their espionage and covert activities.Notables of this coterie were: Roald Dahl , the later fabulist known world wide; Ian Fleming the creator of the James Bond series; Noel Coward and others yet to be mentioned and later known more definitively as MI6 . Unrevealed letters and dairies and reminiscences comprise the core of the book .These were Churchill's underground fortress in America and helped turned the tide away from Nazi barbarism to the Allied cause. The story is detailed and picaresque . More in another post. It was not exclusively troops and air power that won the allied cause , but superb and clandestine intelligence activity always, of course laced with dirty tricks and moral ambivalence in a good cause. They were the right arm of our then fledgling OSS.





http://needmoreshelves.blogspot.com/2009/10/unlock-worlds-banned-books-challenge.html

EZRA Pound The Spirit of Romance Unprecented Definition of Poetry

I have never seen such a definition and it strikes me as being truthful and instantaneously clicked with me and appeared in Pound's book. Pound is the most underrated of scholars and also one of the very intuitive scholars with an intuitive sense of the mystical and a detailed knowledge of the literature of the Middle Ages . He eschews conventional and pigeon holed labels such as "classical" and "romantic" as meaningless and gauges poetry by other than conventional measurements..
He describes poetry as inspired mathematics with the emphasis on inspired. They are equations for human emotions. To those inclined to magic or incantations, rather than science,this definition sounds more arcane and recondite, and does not fit neatly into "classical" or "romantic" in pigeon hole fashion/format.
The character of the spells experienced by the great poets , more often in past ages than this present. more inebriated with the arcane, with visions of other worlds in the guise of their poetic works, and geared to their peculiar characters. These poetic works were couched artificially as either "classical" or "romantic" by later critics apparently and accurately so. Classic applied to beauty of the normal, and romantic applied to beauty of the unusual. The unusual are momentary glimpses ,apparently, of other worlds and slivers thereof, imported into the poet's vision, and transcribed by him or her and imported with meaning . Many more glimpses appeared in ages past than in this present.

Noir city symptom of the sickness of modern civilization

























My comment on this blog underscores the possibly harmful effects of the foisted doctrine of diversity in our schools, and public forums as a factor in alientaion. Note commentrs 3 and 4.


















The book The Cinematic City edited by David B Clarke (Routledge 1997) was cited in particular the essay by Krutnik cited in this excellent post.





F Krutnik page 89

Saturday, October 24, 2009

The Ecological Indian by Shepherd Krech

http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Environment/ecological_indian.htm

I thought this review intriguing debunking the myth of the American Indian as conservator of nature living in harmony with nature. I do not vouch for its accuracy however due to the disclaimers at the end of the article. I have noted Prof Krech's background which augments his credibility and research The more accurate context to gauge the Native response to environment is last paragraph enveloped in green.


The Ecological Indian: Myth and History
by Terry L. Anderson(from the
Detroit News, reviewing a book of the same name by Shepard Krech III)
October
4, 1999
One of my favorite places in Montana is the Madison Buffalo Jump
state park near the Three Forks of the Missouri River. Standing in front of this
cliff over which Indians drove buffalo for hundreds of years, one can only
imagine the sound and sight of a thundering herd of the half-ton animals
plunging to their death. Signs at the jump describe how the drive to push the
buffalo over the cliff was organized and explain how each part of the animal
from head to foot was used. Modern-day solitude at the site contributes to the
romantic scene.
But reading Shepard Krech's chapter on buffalo from his
book, The Ecological Indian, produces a very different image. The Blackfeet word
for such a site was "piskun" meaning "deep blood kettle." Imagine 30, 60, 100,
or even 600, 800, or 1000 dead or maimed beasts piled at the bottom of the
cliff, blood flowing, hooves kicking, and meat rotting in the hot sun, and you
have a clearer picture of what the site would have looked like 250 years ago.
To get a clear picture of camp life near a piskun, realize that 200 to 300
people would be living near the stench of rotting meat without toilet
facilities. Not surprisingly disease, especially dysentery, were common. Grass
would be trampled under foot and dust would arise, firewood would quickly be
depleted and water polluted.
Continue imagining the difficulty of butchering
and preserving the meat which Krech estimates could amount to as much as 240,000 pounds if 600 buffalo were killed. Krech describes what the scene at the
Olsen-Chubbuck in Colorado eight millennia ago might have looked like: "As
people butchered the animals, they ate the tongues, scattering the bones
throughout the site. When it was over they had completely butchered the
buffaloes on top, but they cut the ones beneath them less thoroughly, and hardly
(if at all) touched the ones on the bottom, especially in the deepest parts of
the arroyo" (144).
Krech's well-researched and documented descriptions of
Indian use of fire, land, buffalo, deer, and beaver stand in stark contrast to
the romantic view of Native Americans living in harmony with nature, taking only
what they needed. Page 14 reproduces the 1971 Keep American Beautiful, Inc.
poster showing Iron Eyes Cody as the Crying Indian with the caption "Pollution:
it's a crying shame." Following on the heels of the first Earth Day in 1970,
this picture became an icon of the environmental movement
. From it, mostly
non-Indians developed a romantic and noble image of "fundamental differences
between the way Americans of European descent and Indians think about and relate
to land and resources" (16).
The Ecological Indian is a book that debunks
myths and brings reality to the environmental history of American Indians.
Professor Krech, a Brown University anthropologist, systematically examines
issues ranging from the possible role of Indians in Pleistocene extinctions of
large mammals to the burning of ancient forests. In each case he carefully
separates romance from data and draws his conclusions carefully.
In

referring to accounts that Indians used every part of the buffalo, Krech states
that "These accounts might not be `wrong' -- in some instances people did indeed
use thoroughly the animals they killed -- only ungeneralizable" (145). In
describing Indian use of fire, he concludes, "Despite European images of an
untouched Eden, this nature was cultural not virgin, anthropogenic not primeval,
and nowhere is this more evident than in the Indian use of fire." This book is
what good science should be. It puts forth hypotheses, tests them with data, and
only draws conclusions supported by those data.
The major fault with Krech's
research and presentation is that he almost totally ignores the role of
institutions in determining how Indians interfaced with nature. In the case of
beaver, he does note that some tribes, such as the Cree, "restricted hunting in
one another's areas as far back as the mid-eighteenth century" (190) and that
this encouraged conservation. But Krech fails to carry this theme through the
book.
My own research shows that southeastern and southwestern Indians had
property rights in land that encouraged agricultural productivity, Great Lakes
Indians had property rights to wild rice areas that encouraged cultivation, and
California Indians had property rights to pinon forests that encouraged
stewardship. Recent research by Professor Bruce Johnsen of George Mason
University shows that clan fishing rights to salmon streams in the Pacific
Northwest encouraged the owners to let larger fish pass upstream to spawn. This
property rights system best explains systematic differences in salmon sizes that
persist to this day.
In debunking the myth of the ecological Indian, Shepard
Krech builds a foundation upon which we can better understand not only the
relationship of Indians with nature, but more generally all humans with nature.
In times of abundance, we are all likely to waste resources; but in times of
greater scarcity, we are more likely to conserve. Even then, conservation
requires a system of property rights that gives individuals the incentive to
husband their resources. The ecological Indian was no romantic; he was a
pragmatist who survived when he got the incentives right.
* * *

Pioaresque side by side with Providential purpose

http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/almost-bankers.html#

Fascist demagogues did have mass appeal during the financial collapse in the 30's in the US. A tremendous appeal . I believe there was a film in this regard . I am rummagiong for a titlle to a popularizinmg film . Oh yes ,The House on 92nd Street a 45 Noir classic with Lloyd Nolan depicting the Nazi spy ring and secrets of the A bomb as looming themes. My posted comment on the above URL suggest that the collapse in the 30's provided a very attractive backdrop for Fascist demagoguery.
Also The 39 Steps by Buchanan a novel has the same themes and was "reinvented in film mode by Hitchcock's film of the same title.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Film Noir and Reference to the 39 steps

http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/almost-bankers.html#
Here the 39 steps novel by Buchanan is the use of a picaresque plot to juxtapose side by side in showing a providential ending keeping the British secrets of war silenced and not stolen for a successful issue of their cause at the end of WWI.