[Books and Beans in Brisbane on 6/25/24] Today, I woke to sounds of crickets. Leaving my room, I heard a street sweeper working in the semi dark. Two minutes later, I saw five dogs playing or flirting with each other in the middle of a traffic free street. Trotting closer, one half recognized me so didn’t bark. Where have you been, his eyes asked.
It is apparently now "de rigueur" to solemnly pronounce one's acknowledgement of the previous native inhabitants on all possible occasions. Recently, here in our humble coastal town of 10,000, a new "affordable housing" 4-story apartment building was dedicated with just such a speech intoned by one of the presenters. Such virtue signaling has gotten beyond tiresome. What exactly is the intended message?
Your difficulty in finding a "legitimate" bookstore is not unique to Brisbane. The death of the good bookstore is a recurring phenomenon all over the US. Where there used to be an embarrassment of riches decades ago, there is now very little. The local Barnes & Noble is now full of coffee table books. The place that has the good stuff here is called Phoenix Books, a huge used bookstore that is a true delight to explore, with new inventory arriving regularly. The real finds are in the stacks they haven't had time to sort and shelve yet, and these stacks are now growing faster than they can keep up with. Lots of old people dying, and their collections end up here because their heirs have no interest in sorting through them to find the "keepers." Some of these can also be found at local "Estate Sales", where people are invited in to paw through the dearly departed's belongings.
If the public library is supposed to be a “curated hall of learning”, we are in trouble here. Our local public library is full of mostly dreck. A tiny corner contains what would be considered classics or serious literature; most of the rest is totally forgettable. Paradoxically, the one good place at our local libraries where the good stuff can be most easily found is in the piles they get rid of at their periodic “Friends of the Library” sales. I've come upon some real finds for just a buck or two.
For an excellent, excellent book on the decline of literacy in America one can not do better than to read Chris Hedges' book: "Empire of Illusion; the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle."
As well as the works of the late Canadian Sociologist Marshal McLuhan who analyzed how certain types of genres of media e.g. the printed word vs. television, would shape a society. Dr. McLuhan believe the rational type of linear thinking that came out of the Italian Renaissance c. 1490-1520 and the invention of the printing press in the West was a temporary aberration (lasting a few hundred years, perhaps 1550 to about 2000 or so) and would be replaced by a return to "primitive" collage thinking in which ideas would become an incoherent jumble of magic, superstition and illogic.
Whenever I get all hot, bothered and flustery, I try to remember Tom Wolfe's wonderful tribute to Marshall McLuhan concerning indignation and idiocy:
"It is a rule, to which there has never been an exception, that when an actor or a television performer rises up to the microphone at one of these awards ceremonies and expresses moral indignation over something, he illustrates Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that 'moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity." -Tom Wolfe
Post college my first idol was Marshall McLuhan. The profs never mentioned him. Ever since I've spent years trying to illustrate and reconcile the dialectic Tom exposes in his pithy summation of McLuhan's work: "the rational type of linear thinking that came out of the Italian Renaissance... and the invention of the printing press would be replaced by a return to "primitive" collage thinking in which ideas would become an incoherent jumble of magic, superstition and illogic."
Juxtaposing pop imagery (60%) and printed word titles (40%) embedded in collage narratives, I try to create an aesthetic distance which allows the spectator to alter his usual passive reading of pop culture and permits different insights and feelings to emerge. Anyway, that's the hope of a Post Pop Nostic. Probably when the work doesn't succeed, it simply looks like "an incoherent jumble" or Much Ado about Nothing.
The intended message is I think just as you say: It is to "virtue signal" that you and your usually privileged group "care" when in fact the caring is all just a show. Instead of making any real, positive improvement one just "virtue signals" to improve one's image in the eyes of others, which ultimately amounts to nothing.
Discarded and donated books were sent by the boxload to the various USO's, bunches of them, at military outposts. One of my hobbies while deployed was scanning the USO bookshelves for gems among the pulp. I remember sending back a footlocker full of stuff, most of which I've failed to read.
A little red 1953 copy of Arnold Toynbee's "The World And The West" for fifty cents from a local Goodwill was a happy find. Worth scanning a few dozen or more titles of nonsense.
I had to look up Saddam's final moments. Yes, he didn't go silently or mince words. I thought that his hanging was barbaric at the time. Retribution as opposed to justice. If faced with the noose, I wonder how America's "strong" class of leaders would react?
My subjective impression (and I may be wrong here, this is just my opinion) is that Bush Jr.'s administration was particularly crude in their sadism. What they did to Hussein as well as Qaddafi in Libya were crude messages to the leaders of the world that, "if you defy or fail to obey us, this is what you get."
Prior to Bush Jr. the Wall St. bankers who really own and run the country wouldn't have been so crass. A coup here and a coup there; here a coup there a coup every where a coup, coup... (sung to the tune of old McDonald had a farm) but no crude hangings or bayonets up the anus with Hilary Clinton gloating, "We came, we saw, we shoved knives up their *ss"; or something to that effect. Parodying Julius Caesar's "Vida, vidi, vinci" (I came, I saw, I conquered) Which reminds me for some strange reason of the last woman I met in a dive bar here in Bridgeport. But I won't go into that now...
Tom, this is one of the funniest descriptions of those sickos that I could never think of.
Off topic, I'm almost glad that we can't have long threads on Mr. Dinh's Blogspot album because the one liners are hilarious, but your comment about obtaining the components for dynamite from a "chemist" made me laugh my ass off! Much appreciated.
I was reminded of Shakespeare in Love (with Gwynth Paltrow) by Linh's musing on the parlous state of bookstores and Prof Shapiro's speculations on what "the Stratford Candidate" must have done to accumulate his vast knowledge of different subjects. In that Hollywood movie, Shaksper (verbatim signature) hangs out in taverns w/ a notebook jotting down snippets of overheard conversations which he subsequently transforms into history's iconic gems. Countering both of these plausible conjectures about how Everyman acquired bootstrapping erudition are the inconvenient facts that the non-noble Bard never went beyond a grammar school education, produced no extant mss that could be attributed to him and died w/o owning any books to will his heirs. Neither Mark Twain nor Sigmund Freud thought this likely, but English depts across the world remain heavily invested in promoting this imposture.
Dear Linh, Sorry to see you go so soon but totally understandable. I also find the severe genuflections to country quite perplexing. We are constantly paying homage to a people and way of life which, at least down here in Victoria, disappeared long ago. Its a bit late, but perhaps it makes you feel good. We recently had a referendum (an odd twist in the Australian governmental system in which we were asked to allow for a special addendum to the constitution in which Aboiriginal people could have a special Voice to Parliament. This was not spelled out and as I think the Australian public is a little short of trust in it pollies, it was soundly defeated. Some of the Aboriginal leaders I most dislike espoused it, and the ones I most admired advised against it, so I went with them. Simple minded I know.
As to bookstores, you would probably have seen a few more had you been able to travel south - but they certainly have been falling off a lot lately. I get a great number of odd and good books at my local Opportunity shops (Goodwill) but of course, there are a great deal of books which never appear there. The lady who sorts the books in my shop, which raises money for our nearby women's refuge, thoughtfully separates them into Classics or Others. The Classics are books she thinks are good and timeless and I have found quite a number there. But this all depends on the goodwill of others, or their good taste. You would probably have found a nice shirt at one of them as well! Anyway, happy trails!
If not for Mark's free room, Oz would have been out of the question. Everything is expensive.
Soon after moving to Philly in 1982, I discovered South Street Books then Factotum, both marvelous stores independently owned. They carried not just used but out of print books. I also had access to my college's library, of course. My real education could begin. In suburban Virginia where I went to high school, the strip mall bookstores were near useless.
Mark and I did go to a charity shop in Brisbane. There were only a few books, none interesting.
Speaking of Captain Cook, I am reminded of the Spaniard Cortes in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) c.1510. Cortes had sailed from the viceroyality of Cuba to Veracruz, Mexico with an army of Spaniards with the intent to conquer the mighty Aztec empire ruled by Moctuzuma at that time. Upon landing in Mexico Cortes had his ships burned behind him to dissuade any thought of sedition among his crew. He marched his men into the highlands of Mexico making alliances with the local tribes who hated the Aztecs for their cruel, authoritarian dominance. Upon arriving in Tenochitlan (at that time the most populace city in the world; larger than any European city) Moctuzuma greeted the relatively fair skinned Spaniard as the long prophesied return of the Aztec god Quetzicotl who, legend said was fair haired and fair complexioned and would return from the east.
Cortes repayed the Aztec emperor by razing and burning the city to the ground overnight (called to this day by Mexicans "Noche Triste" sad night).
The Aztecs, as powerful as they were in the Americas, were impotent against the three weapons the Spaniards brought to the New World. The Spaniards had guns while the Aztecs had bows and arrows; the Spaniard had steel with which to armor themselves against arrows; and the Spaniards had lethal germs such as small pox which Eurasians had adopted to over eons while, Native Americans having never been exposed to this plague quickly succumbed. Between 1492 and 1892 the indigenous population of the Americans is estimated to have been reduced from about 150 million to less than 5 million. Genocide in Gaza is nothing new.
It is a banal cliche to speak of "white settler colonialism" limited to "woke" half-wits. But there you have it.
(For further information about European colonization and conquest see Dr. Jared Diamond's book"Guns, Germs and Steel." Dr. Diamond, last I heard is still teaching Anthropology at UCLA. Several years ago when I was still working at Sacramento City College in Sacramento, California I had a young friend who was fortunate in being accepted to enroll in UCLA. The last conversation we had before he left for L.A. was talking about trying to get into one of Dr. Diamond's classes.)
Dr. Diamond has been widely criticized as a sort of politically correct revisionist of history; but the intellectual service he seems to have done, at least to my understanding, is to show that Europeans didn't conquer the world because they had some sort of superior culture; on the contrary they often showed themselves to be savage, brutal and mercenary. It is becoming increasingly well known that the Spanish "Conquistadors" were not some benevolent group of Christians seeking to enlighten savages but rather were dirt poor Spaniards from the "Extremedora" seeking to enrich themselves by any means necessary including the perpetration of genocide. Which facilitated in their theft of vast quantities of gold and silver (oro y plata) from the mines of Petosi, Bolivia, which upon being brought back to Spain temporarily made the Kingdom of Spain the richest, most powerful empire in the world until they were superseded by the Low Countries of The Netherlands and Brussels with the invention of capitalism. But that's (as they say) another story.
I wonder if anyone else enjoys the Martyr Made substack by Darryl Cooper. He does a vast amount of reading and condenses it for us. The series The Peculiar Institution - Slavery brings a well-rounded and long view of some of these issues.
As Australia becomes less British and European derived why would one expect new Asian and African migrants to honor the British and European founders, heroes, and settlers who built White Australia. Demography is always destiny.
It's not the Asians and Africans who are upset about Captain Cook and other founding heroes, but woke white Australians. The same is occurring in the US. Jews shape this trend.
Yes, but my point about demographics remains. If Germany becomes something other than German through mass immigration and eventual radical demographic change the newcomers aren’t going to care about historical or cultural figures in German history they have no connection with. This is true in all societies undergoing such radical cultural and demographic changes.
P.S. Vietnam's demographics aren't diluted or subverted by Jews, so this nation is more stable than all European ones outside Serbia, Hungary and Russia.
That, sir, may indeed be true. I am told that I am looking more and more like a cigar store Indian (or "injun") every day. As the embalming fluid takes effect.
That beefy guy with the overflowing hairy chest and the authoritarian admiral cap with his subordinate enlisted or conscripted punk sailor; how can I get in on that? And are Don (Donny Boy) Rumsfeld and George Jr. in on that too? Just assin'. (Jus' tryin' to get in on a little of the act-she-own-nay; as they say.)
It is apparently now "de rigueur" to solemnly pronounce one's acknowledgement of the previous native inhabitants on all possible occasions. Recently, here in our humble coastal town of 10,000, a new "affordable housing" 4-story apartment building was dedicated with just such a speech intoned by one of the presenters. Such virtue signaling has gotten beyond tiresome. What exactly is the intended message?
Your difficulty in finding a "legitimate" bookstore is not unique to Brisbane. The death of the good bookstore is a recurring phenomenon all over the US. Where there used to be an embarrassment of riches decades ago, there is now very little. The local Barnes & Noble is now full of coffee table books. The place that has the good stuff here is called Phoenix Books, a huge used bookstore that is a true delight to explore, with new inventory arriving regularly. The real finds are in the stacks they haven't had time to sort and shelve yet, and these stacks are now growing faster than they can keep up with. Lots of old people dying, and their collections end up here because their heirs have no interest in sorting through them to find the "keepers." Some of these can also be found at local "Estate Sales", where people are invited in to paw through the dearly departed's belongings.
If the public library is supposed to be a “curated hall of learning”, we are in trouble here. Our local public library is full of mostly dreck. A tiny corner contains what would be considered classics or serious literature; most of the rest is totally forgettable. Paradoxically, the one good place at our local libraries where the good stuff can be most easily found is in the piles they get rid of at their periodic “Friends of the Library” sales. I've come upon some real finds for just a buck or two.
For an excellent, excellent book on the decline of literacy in America one can not do better than to read Chris Hedges' book: "Empire of Illusion; the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle."
As well as the works of the late Canadian Sociologist Marshal McLuhan who analyzed how certain types of genres of media e.g. the printed word vs. television, would shape a society. Dr. McLuhan believe the rational type of linear thinking that came out of the Italian Renaissance c. 1490-1520 and the invention of the printing press in the West was a temporary aberration (lasting a few hundred years, perhaps 1550 to about 2000 or so) and would be replaced by a return to "primitive" collage thinking in which ideas would become an incoherent jumble of magic, superstition and illogic.
Whenever I get all hot, bothered and flustery, I try to remember Tom Wolfe's wonderful tribute to Marshall McLuhan concerning indignation and idiocy:
"It is a rule, to which there has never been an exception, that when an actor or a television performer rises up to the microphone at one of these awards ceremonies and expresses moral indignation over something, he illustrates Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that 'moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity." -Tom Wolfe
I agree that this is an excellent read--I just read it myself earlier this year.
Post college my first idol was Marshall McLuhan. The profs never mentioned him. Ever since I've spent years trying to illustrate and reconcile the dialectic Tom exposes in his pithy summation of McLuhan's work: "the rational type of linear thinking that came out of the Italian Renaissance... and the invention of the printing press would be replaced by a return to "primitive" collage thinking in which ideas would become an incoherent jumble of magic, superstition and illogic."
Juxtaposing pop imagery (60%) and printed word titles (40%) embedded in collage narratives, I try to create an aesthetic distance which allows the spectator to alter his usual passive reading of pop culture and permits different insights and feelings to emerge. Anyway, that's the hope of a Post Pop Nostic. Probably when the work doesn't succeed, it simply looks like "an incoherent jumble" or Much Ado about Nothing.
The intended message is I think just as you say: It is to "virtue signal" that you and your usually privileged group "care" when in fact the caring is all just a show. Instead of making any real, positive improvement one just "virtue signals" to improve one's image in the eyes of others, which ultimately amounts to nothing.
Discarded and donated books were sent by the boxload to the various USO's, bunches of them, at military outposts. One of my hobbies while deployed was scanning the USO bookshelves for gems among the pulp. I remember sending back a footlocker full of stuff, most of which I've failed to read.
A little red 1953 copy of Arnold Toynbee's "The World And The West" for fifty cents from a local Goodwill was a happy find. Worth scanning a few dozen or more titles of nonsense.
I had to look up Saddam's final moments. Yes, he didn't go silently or mince words. I thought that his hanging was barbaric at the time. Retribution as opposed to justice. If faced with the noose, I wonder how America's "strong" class of leaders would react?
My subjective impression (and I may be wrong here, this is just my opinion) is that Bush Jr.'s administration was particularly crude in their sadism. What they did to Hussein as well as Qaddafi in Libya were crude messages to the leaders of the world that, "if you defy or fail to obey us, this is what you get."
Prior to Bush Jr. the Wall St. bankers who really own and run the country wouldn't have been so crass. A coup here and a coup there; here a coup there a coup every where a coup, coup... (sung to the tune of old McDonald had a farm) but no crude hangings or bayonets up the anus with Hilary Clinton gloating, "We came, we saw, we shoved knives up their *ss"; or something to that effect. Parodying Julius Caesar's "Vida, vidi, vinci" (I came, I saw, I conquered) Which reminds me for some strange reason of the last woman I met in a dive bar here in Bridgeport. But I won't go into that now...
Tom, this is one of the funniest descriptions of those sickos that I could never think of.
Off topic, I'm almost glad that we can't have long threads on Mr. Dinh's Blogspot album because the one liners are hilarious, but your comment about obtaining the components for dynamite from a "chemist" made me laugh my ass off! Much appreciated.
I was reminded of Shakespeare in Love (with Gwynth Paltrow) by Linh's musing on the parlous state of bookstores and Prof Shapiro's speculations on what "the Stratford Candidate" must have done to accumulate his vast knowledge of different subjects. In that Hollywood movie, Shaksper (verbatim signature) hangs out in taverns w/ a notebook jotting down snippets of overheard conversations which he subsequently transforms into history's iconic gems. Countering both of these plausible conjectures about how Everyman acquired bootstrapping erudition are the inconvenient facts that the non-noble Bard never went beyond a grammar school education, produced no extant mss that could be attributed to him and died w/o owning any books to will his heirs. Neither Mark Twain nor Sigmund Freud thought this likely, but English depts across the world remain heavily invested in promoting this imposture.
Beautiful young people are coincidences of nature,but beautiful old people are works of art.
-Heinrich Heine.
Dear Linh, Sorry to see you go so soon but totally understandable. I also find the severe genuflections to country quite perplexing. We are constantly paying homage to a people and way of life which, at least down here in Victoria, disappeared long ago. Its a bit late, but perhaps it makes you feel good. We recently had a referendum (an odd twist in the Australian governmental system in which we were asked to allow for a special addendum to the constitution in which Aboiriginal people could have a special Voice to Parliament. This was not spelled out and as I think the Australian public is a little short of trust in it pollies, it was soundly defeated. Some of the Aboriginal leaders I most dislike espoused it, and the ones I most admired advised against it, so I went with them. Simple minded I know.
As to bookstores, you would probably have seen a few more had you been able to travel south - but they certainly have been falling off a lot lately. I get a great number of odd and good books at my local Opportunity shops (Goodwill) but of course, there are a great deal of books which never appear there. The lady who sorts the books in my shop, which raises money for our nearby women's refuge, thoughtfully separates them into Classics or Others. The Classics are books she thinks are good and timeless and I have found quite a number there. But this all depends on the goodwill of others, or their good taste. You would probably have found a nice shirt at one of them as well! Anyway, happy trails!
Hi Isha,
If not for Mark's free room, Oz would have been out of the question. Everything is expensive.
Soon after moving to Philly in 1982, I discovered South Street Books then Factotum, both marvelous stores independently owned. They carried not just used but out of print books. I also had access to my college's library, of course. My real education could begin. In suburban Virginia where I went to high school, the strip mall bookstores were near useless.
Mark and I did go to a charity shop in Brisbane. There were only a few books, none interesting.
Linh
Don't be too disappointed in the charity shop. It often takes several visits to such places to finally stumble on something worth taking home.
You were in Queensland!
Speaking of Captain Cook, I am reminded of the Spaniard Cortes in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) c.1510. Cortes had sailed from the viceroyality of Cuba to Veracruz, Mexico with an army of Spaniards with the intent to conquer the mighty Aztec empire ruled by Moctuzuma at that time. Upon landing in Mexico Cortes had his ships burned behind him to dissuade any thought of sedition among his crew. He marched his men into the highlands of Mexico making alliances with the local tribes who hated the Aztecs for their cruel, authoritarian dominance. Upon arriving in Tenochitlan (at that time the most populace city in the world; larger than any European city) Moctuzuma greeted the relatively fair skinned Spaniard as the long prophesied return of the Aztec god Quetzicotl who, legend said was fair haired and fair complexioned and would return from the east.
Cortes repayed the Aztec emperor by razing and burning the city to the ground overnight (called to this day by Mexicans "Noche Triste" sad night).
The Aztecs, as powerful as they were in the Americas, were impotent against the three weapons the Spaniards brought to the New World. The Spaniards had guns while the Aztecs had bows and arrows; the Spaniard had steel with which to armor themselves against arrows; and the Spaniards had lethal germs such as small pox which Eurasians had adopted to over eons while, Native Americans having never been exposed to this plague quickly succumbed. Between 1492 and 1892 the indigenous population of the Americans is estimated to have been reduced from about 150 million to less than 5 million. Genocide in Gaza is nothing new.
It is a banal cliche to speak of "white settler colonialism" limited to "woke" half-wits. But there you have it.
(For further information about European colonization and conquest see Dr. Jared Diamond's book"Guns, Germs and Steel." Dr. Diamond, last I heard is still teaching Anthropology at UCLA. Several years ago when I was still working at Sacramento City College in Sacramento, California I had a young friend who was fortunate in being accepted to enroll in UCLA. The last conversation we had before he left for L.A. was talking about trying to get into one of Dr. Diamond's classes.)
Dr. Diamond has been widely criticized as a sort of politically correct revisionist of history; but the intellectual service he seems to have done, at least to my understanding, is to show that Europeans didn't conquer the world because they had some sort of superior culture; on the contrary they often showed themselves to be savage, brutal and mercenary. It is becoming increasingly well known that the Spanish "Conquistadors" were not some benevolent group of Christians seeking to enlighten savages but rather were dirt poor Spaniards from the "Extremedora" seeking to enrich themselves by any means necessary including the perpetration of genocide. Which facilitated in their theft of vast quantities of gold and silver (oro y plata) from the mines of Petosi, Bolivia, which upon being brought back to Spain temporarily made the Kingdom of Spain the richest, most powerful empire in the world until they were superseded by the Low Countries of The Netherlands and Brussels with the invention of capitalism. But that's (as they say) another story.
I wonder if anyone else enjoys the Martyr Made substack by Darryl Cooper. He does a vast amount of reading and condenses it for us. The series The Peculiar Institution - Slavery brings a well-rounded and long view of some of these issues.
So glad you are back in Viet Nam! I don't trust those Aussie bureaucrats!
As Australia becomes less British and European derived why would one expect new Asian and African migrants to honor the British and European founders, heroes, and settlers who built White Australia. Demography is always destiny.
Hi Sean,
It's not the Asians and Africans who are upset about Captain Cook and other founding heroes, but woke white Australians. The same is occurring in the US. Jews shape this trend.
Linh
Yes, but my point about demographics remains. If Germany becomes something other than German through mass immigration and eventual radical demographic change the newcomers aren’t going to care about historical or cultural figures in German history they have no connection with. This is true in all societies undergoing such radical cultural and demographic changes.
Hi Sean,
Jews push mass immigration to achieve this end. Oriental nations with few Jews don't have open borders or have statues of their heroes torn down.
Linh
P.S. Vietnam's demographics aren't diluted or subverted by Jews, so this nation is more stable than all European ones outside Serbia, Hungary and Russia.
I found Darryl Cooper's Martyr Made article Anti-Semitism Part 1 illuminated this complex suhject somewhat.
That, sir, may indeed be true. I am told that I am looking more and more like a cigar store Indian (or "injun") every day. As the embalming fluid takes effect.
That beefy guy with the overflowing hairy chest and the authoritarian admiral cap with his subordinate enlisted or conscripted punk sailor; how can I get in on that? And are Don (Donny Boy) Rumsfeld and George Jr. in on that too? Just assin'. (Jus' tryin' to get in on a little of the act-she-own-nay; as they say.)
Pretty sure that "nutcase" is actually a ninja. Be careful you don't provoke them.
Hi Linh,
Have you seen the film The Taste Of Things (French, Vietnamese director)?
If yes, what do you think of it?
Hi Istvan,
I was impressed by Trần Anh Hùng's first three movies but have not followed his career since. I have not sat in a movie theater in perhaps 20 years.
Linh
P.S. When I was sick with likely Covid in Tirana three years ago, I rewatched films directed by John Cassavetes. They helped me heal.