Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals--who unceasingly claim to support human rights--have become obstacles to reforming Islam.
Well now you're making another argument. I think this thread has demonstrated that some on the left are sympathetic towards Islam - for reasons that utterly baffle me - but I find it VERY unlikely that this has any effect on the dialog within Islamic countries.
Take Saudi Arabia - hardly any Saudis speak English, they don't have the internet and it's almost impossible to get any non-religious material broadcast. Virtually all western media is banned. Jjust how much of an effect do you think Sean Penn and Michael Moore (or whoever) have on the debate about the role of Islamic reform?
If you ask yourself how much impact Islamic clerics like Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais or Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy - currently the two most famous and influential Imams in Sunni Islam - have on religious debate in the west then that's approximately how much influence western liberals carry within the Islamic world.
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More books and drugs and books on drugs.
One thing that bugs me are books about drugs that contain dramatic descriptions of their effects ('take your best orgasm and multiply it by a million . . .') that prompt me to protest 'but it's nothing like that!'
A lot of modern drug books - Trainspotting, Million Little Pieces, Contortionists Handbook - seem to have been written by people who don't have the faintest idea what they're writing about (although in the case of Trainspotting it's still beautifully written).
Well William S Burroughs knew . . .
Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyong the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous; I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed, like watching a movie: A huge neon-lighted cocktail bar that got larger and larger until streets, traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress carrying a skull on a tray; stars in the clear sky. The physical impact of the fear of death; the shutting off of breath; the stopping of blood.
So did the freaks who wrote the Illuminatus Trilogy
My nomination for best druggy dialogue goes to Phillip K Dicks 'A Scanner Darkly.'
"Well, see, you take a huge block of hash and carve it in the shape of a man. Then you hollow out a section and put a wind-up motor like a clockworks in it, and a little cassette tape, and you stand in line with it, and then just before it goes through customs you wind up the key and it walks up to the customs man, who says to it, 'Do you have anything to declare?' and the block of hash says, 'No, I don't,' and keeps on walking. Until it runs down on the other side of the border."
"You could put a solar-type battery in it instead of a spring and it could keep walking for years. Forever."
"What's the use of that? It'd finally reach either the Pacific or the Atlantic. In fact, it'd walk off the edge of the Earth, like--"
"Imagine an Eskimo village, and a six-foot-high block of hash worth about--how much would that be worth?"
"About a billion dollars."
"More. Two billion."
"These Eskimos are chewing hides and carving bone spears, and this block of hash worth two billion dollars comes walking through the snow saying over and over, 'No, I don't.'"
"They'd wonder what it meant by that."
"They'd be puzzled forever. There'd be legends."
"Can you imagine telling your grandkids, 'I saw with my own eyes the six-foot-high block of hash appear out of the blinding fog and walk past, that way, worth two billion do!lars, saying, "No, I don't." 'His grandchildren would have him committed."
"No, see, legends build. After a few centuries they'd be saying, 'In my forefathers' time one day a ninety-foot-high block of extremely good quality Afghanistan hash worth eight trillion dollars came at us dripping fire and screaming, "Die, Eskimo dogs!" and we fought and fought with it, using our spears, and finally killed it.'
"The kids wouldn't believe that either."
"Kids never believe anything any more."And you'd be hard pressed to find better contemporary drug literature than Alan Moores 'Promethea'. (Let's see Hollywood turn that into a bad movie.)
I was amused to see reviewers clucking over how bleak and violent Cormac McCarthys latest book 'The Road' was. They've forgotten about 'Blood Meridian', which is another of my favourite books even if I don't have the faintest idea what it's about. Here's his description of a Comanche attack:
A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets … and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
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If Hitler had bothered to read War and Peace, he would surely have realised the folly of invading Russia.
I don't really blame Hitler for that. The Soviets had just had their asses kicked by the tiny Finnish militia and Stalin had recently executed his entire officer corps (about 100,000 men) for no apparent reason. It must have looked like a slam dunk. Besides, he needed the oil.
You'll have to forgive my hyperbole Deborah - War and Peace is pretty amazing - it's just frustrating to wade through 1000+ pages to find the story has no end except for a diatribe about the individuals relation to history.
You might enjoy Orlando Figes book on Russian culture. It's called 'Natasha's Dance'.
The Time Passes passage of To the Lighthouse still haunts me.
Virginia Woolf is one of those superstars of literature that leaves me cold. Henry James is another ('why use one word when fifty will do?')
I was thinking about this thread on my way home - another of my favorite writers is Jorge Luis Borges - you can read his classic story 'The Library of Babel' here.
If you enjoy that then 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' is here -
Thoughts on other books . . .
Lolita by Vladamir Nabakov. I first read this when I was about sixteen. My motives were pornographic and I was soundly disappointed. I only read the first third and then furtively flipped through the rest.
Some time in my early twenties I watched the Kubrick adaptation and this led me back to the book. My second reading convinced me that it's probably the greatest novel ever written - I still think this is true. It's certainly much more accessible than Ulysses and it's significantly shorter and racier than Anna Karenina. Pale Fire is also worth reading if you like your books playful and opaque.Franny and Zooey: After he wrote 'Catcher in the Rye' and before he disappeared up his own asshole with stuff like 'Seymour: An Introduction' Jerry Salinger wrote a bunch of wonderful novellas and short stories. 'Franny and Zooey' is the best but 'For Esme with Love and Squalor' and 'Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters' are also really good.
Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson. You can read the introduction here
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: I read the first two thirds of this book at least half a dozen times but just couldn't make it to the end. I completed it last year only to discover that the ending is rubbish. Tolstoy just abandons all of his characters and rants about history and time for several hundred pages. I guess what I'm saying is that War and Peace isn't so special.
Damascus Gate by Robert Stone. I read this when I was backpacking around the Middle East and thought this was simply one of the best books ever. I gave it to a couple of the stoners I was backpacking with and they loved it too.
But no one else I've recommended it to has been impressed. Maybe the subject matter - a rabble of stoners hanging around the Middle East, mostly in Jerusalem - was context specific.The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Neil has already mentioned it but it's one of the few books that is still capable of changing your life - or at least the way you think - after your 25th birthday. (The back of a cereal packet can be capable of 'blowing your mind' and changing your life when you're seventeen.)
The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Isn't terribly profound or serious but she is an amazing writer. And she made it seem cool to be an introverted classics student at exactly the same time I was an introverted classics student which counts for a lot in my book.
'A Million Little Pieces' by James Frey. I knew he was a fraud and a liar and a talentless dick long before the Smoking Gun website exposed him and I've got the amazon.com review to prove it.
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I reckon people illegally download music they're curious about
It's also a good way to scratch a musical itch. If you've got 'Life in a Northern Town' stuck in your brain then I don't see anything wrong with downloading it since I'm highly unlikely to shell out $30 for a best of Dream Academy compilation album.
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Beatrix Potter didn't pull any punches. By comparison, Ayn Rand's a wuss.
I don't remember where I read this, but it was a 'Kafka writes Potter' parody and began:
'Someone must have been telling lies about Peter Rabbit . . .'
Maybe Beatrix Potter would have had more political impact if she'd thrown in a couple of 300 page rants on the virtues of selfishness.
I'm moved by your story. But at least you got over it.
Isn't it ironic that most frequent response to Ayn Rands objectivism is pity . . .
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Did you read a special book at a special time? A book that changed everything?
Atlas Shrugged when I was fifteen. I instantly concluded that I was a superman, albeit a superman with low grades, weight problems, acne and an inability to cook my own food or wash my own clothes. This phase lasted until university and made me distinctly unpopular with my teachers - since they were employed at a state school I was always patiently explaining to them that they were socialist sub-human parasites. I told my class-mates the same thing. I did not have a girlfriend.
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Turkey is probably the most liberal and tolerant of muslim-majority countries
Lebanon is pretty damn loose. At least it was a couple of years ago - I hear things are pretty uptight since Israels latest invasion and Hezbollahs 'divine victory'.
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otherwise, all the bits of information you've strung together in the pretence of an argument are just that, "bits of information". it is neither a compelling narrative of islamic extremism, or a realistic one. you are cherry picking googled information to justify your neocon distaste for islam.
I gotta say I'm with James for once. It seems obvious to anyone who's paying attention that there's something horribly wrong with Islam - even more so that there is with Christianity. Adherants to other faiths do commit crazy, evil acts but not with the sickening regularity that Islamic fundamentalists do. Che's argument that the recent history of Islamic terrorism is 'just bits of information'' is pretty banal sophistry. If someone tried to prove John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer by listing his victims would you dismiss the argument by pointing out that the names of the dead were 'just bits of information'?
Russell's original thesis for this thread was that 'the left' are not apologists for Islamic fundamentalism. It seems to me that many of the posters here have gone some way towards disproving that.
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[Leo]showed off his stuff in Gary's Mod.
Has he seen this?