A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
Sorry it’s been a quiet week, dear readers. I’ve been busy at work, but I’ve also found myself falling into one of my wheels-within-wheels paranoiac phases. It’s centered on trying to get at an understanding of the power-relations at play in the current Gulf War.
Anyway, I gotta write an article on the benefits of RFID in the pharma supply chain, so I’m gonna get to that.
I leave you with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon / sushi axis.
At the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland has a column on Gunter Grass, while George Will writes about the Japanese shrine to war-dead, which drives China into a tizzy.
It’s interesting, how we can’t bear to forget and we can’t bear to remember.
Here’s Hitchens reviewing a book about the moral issues of firebombing Hamburg, Dresden, Wurzbeg and other German cities during the war.
Meanwhile, I just finished re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow, which is (in part) about the German rocket bombardments of England. And behavioral science, organic chemistry, kaballah, Argentine politics, the afterlife, zoot suits, pinball, cinema, the tarot, Nixon, and the respective extinctions of the dodos and the Hereros. I’m still juggling and re-parsing What Went On.
Everybody lives in a coccoon. If you can laugh at yours, it’s a good sign.
The official VM wife gets the credit for bringing this (non-Onion) story to my attention: “Monks brawl at peace protest”
Dennis Leary goofs on Mel Gibson while he sings the praises of Jewish ballplayers during a Red Sox broadcast.
(Some of you may wonder why, as a Yankees fan, I keep a link to a Red Sox blog in my blogroll. It’s because Mnookin’s an awfully good writer, isn’t prone to flying off the handle, and needs all the pity he can get, since he cheers for a team whose fans I witnessed perform The Wave five times during the June 19 game against the Nationals)
I wanted to write a long piece exploring the tension of Gunter Grass’ novels with his recent admission that he served in the Waffen SS during World War II, but I was stymied by the fact that I’ve never read a word he wrote, probably due to my irrational bias that all Germans from that era were Nazis.
Anyway, Grass’ “frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history,” sez the website for the Nobel Prize, which Grass won in 1999. The site also tells us, “after military service and captivity by American forces 1944-46, he worked as a farm laborer and miner and studied art in Düsseldorf and Berlin.” Which is true-ish. As is Grass’ own comment in his Nobel lecture, “Humans have much of the rat in them and vice versa.” I probably oughtta read that whole lecture sometime.
Now, I’m actually going to cut some slack for the 17-year-old Grass. Given that my dad lied about his age to join the military when he was a 16-year-old in Israel, I can pretty easily imagine a young Grass who wanted to join up, get away from his family and “help the war effort” or something.
I can even imagine a situation where he didn’t really understand that this could lead him into the SS. I don’t know the facts of military allocation during the war, so I can’t say that he’s lying about how he was assigned to the Waffen SS. And it certainly sounds like that unit was more devoted to combat operations than to the running of concentration camps and mass executions that other parts of the SS were engaged in.
War sweeps a lot of people up into decisions that they couldn’t imagine making in other circumstances. For a 17-year-old in a duty-bound society like that . . . well, I’m just saying that I don’t hold that piece of his history against him.
However, I am stuck trying to figure out what’s more unconscionable: not revealing till he was 78 the fact that he was in the Waffen SS, or only revealing it so he could have a sales peg for his new book.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve tried marketing literary books before and “I served in the SS” isn’t much worse than some of the angles I’ve seen.
(Oh, and to that writer at Time who argues that Grass wouldn’t have been such a good/important writer had he not kept this deep, dark secret all along: you’re a moral imbecile.)
Lots of great friends came to our wedding in New Orleans last March. Official VM buddy Jess was among them, and she just posted a series of pix from the city. Only one pic from the wedding itself, but it’s a nice one:
More on that generic drug story I mentioned last week, with a biographical take on the CEO of Apotex, who outmaneuvered a pair of large drug companies really badly.
Here’s a neat article on the finances of Real Madrid ‘football club’, the biggest sports brand in the world. The team is actually a non-profit organization, with 70,000 “club members” and a team president who gets elected by them every four years. It’s a neat take on how to build a brand with global reach, without the deep pockets of a single owner, a la the Yankees.
Making the official VM wife happy, the article is accompanied by a slide show with a nice pic of Beckham. Grr.
Michael Medved discusses why the world hates the Jews. I think it has something to do with this study about how left-handed men earn more than right-handed men.