A boulevard of books for sale

Cali left a comment on my previous post, a book meme, that led to this set of photographs from where my travels have taken me today:

Remember to support your local independent book store...if you still have one.

A walk on Broadway in New York City between W. 72nd and the upper 80s blows away any notion that books only come from Amazon.


There's quite a selection.






So many books, so little time. So good to see that someone still recycles books.


Some have more value than others -- at least so the sellers believe.


Of course the retailing monster has moved in on this market.


On this stretch of street, this the honorary street designation seems just right.

A book meme

Some of the books currently on my "to be read" shelf. Some have been there far too long.

LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. Why anyone would want to catalog their books online I'm not sure. But like many voluntarily adopted online social networking sites, LibraryThing comes up with interesting information about our habits. One of its databits has led to a meme that is floating around the net. (My partner who haunts the community of knitting blogs passed it to me from And she knits too.)

What we have below is a list of the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing users. They took the trouble to catalog them -- but their owners admit to not reading them. They sit on the shelf though, perhaps to make their owner feel smart or well-rounded.

The meme comes with these instructions: Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

So what did I learn about myself when I did this? Once upon a time I was pretty widely read. Nowadays I mostly read blogs, audiobooks (including one of those below), and improving, if sometimes depressing, non-fiction. I almost always finish books I get around to starting.

How about you?

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations

American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

A stalled U.S. peace movement? Antiwar activity since 2001

Part Five of a chronological look at the phases the contemporary U.S. peace movement, originally developed for the Historians against the War conference held in Atlanta in April. Part One. Part Two. Part Three. Part Four.

Lessons: 2001-2008
So here we are: on the one hand, we, the peace movement, have won. Majorities of us clearly have had it with imperial wars. Young people are especially clear:

Five years into the Iraq war, only 11 percent said terrorism and war would be the biggest problem the younger generation will need to address over the next 20 years, coming in fourth place behind economic problems (34 percent), environmental problems (18 percent) and the education system (13 percent).

MTV polling

And nevertheless, our rulers are determined to go on.

[Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates describes our war-fighting future in this way: "What has been called the 'Long War' [i.e. Bush's War on Terror, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq] is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies."

Tom Englehart

What does looking back over what has happened since 2001 tell us?

Making peace is long, hard work. The attacks of 9/11 gave our rulers an excuse to run with their wildest imperial ambitions. As my WarTimes/Tiempo de Guerras coworker Max Elbaum always reminds groups, stopping a empire in full charge is hard. Lyndon Johnson knew that Vietnam was not a war the U.S. could win before he made a major troop commitment. Yet that war dragged on another eight years. We shouldn't be kicking ourselves that we haven't stopped this one.

We need to build a movement based on what people really care about, not what we think they should care about. Sounds simple, but it isn't. There's a reason corporations and politicians do market research before they launch their campaigns. A peace movement doesn't do that; we seek to inject a value into public discourse, not ride existing values.

But we can look at what has really moved people to action and build from there. To that end, here's a short list of people who I've met in the course of my work and peace activities since 2001 who stand out for me as exemplifying activism that comes from deeply internalized values.

• A couple of weeks after 9/11, I stopped by a free concert. The culture was hiphop anti-violence activism, a long planned festival turned to a new purpose. In attendance was a Japanese-American for whom the internment of his parents by U.S. authorities during World War II was a burning memory. Though engaged in a tough election campaign for local office, he chose to be there to witness against suspicion and fear that leads to racist stereotyping. (By the way, Jeff Adachi won!)
  

• In 2005, I saw Nadia McCaffrey speak out about the death of her soldier son at a showing of the AFSC project, the traveling, growing, array of empty boots representing killed U.S. soldiers. The families of the relatively small number of folks who have had to fight these wars, along with vets themselves, have carried a disproportionate share of effective peace organizing.

• In the same category, I think of a Code Pink activist who just won't stop. Her nephew followed his testosterone into the service and she marches, rallies and gets arrested because she loves him.

• Just recently, I met a single mother in Kansas City who drives a barely functioning car and struggles to keep body and soul together. But she gave up a full weekend day to attend a workshop on how to stop military recruiting in her daughter's high school. She is determined that neither her daughter nor any of the young woman's friends should serve as cannon fodder for these wars.

• In 2006, while volunteering for a (more or les) antiwar Democrat trying to win a Republican held Congressional seat, I met a grandmother who found herself running a local campaign center out of her basement, helped by hundreds of volunteers including a local Pakistani-American Muslim who aimed to protect his community by working inside the U.S. process. Both felt they needed to change what the country had become since 9/11.

All these individuals have created the ethos of the antiwar movement -- and been changed themselves by working within it. The peace movement may be stuck -- but these people are not stuck.

Our stumbling peace movement has tried to form itself alongside, but not so much inside, momentous changes in the generational/technological environment. And the peace movement has in some ways been more a spectator to these changes than a catalyst.

The open internet has created a vast arena in which a counterculture, mostly inhabited by people who don't remember 1968, thrive amid oppositional attitudes. And this population is far larger than the peace movement. Here's a description from within:

... I think what's happening is that [cultural norms he has outlined] are using a different narrative about the world than the one coming from elites and the media filter in general. That narrative is one where Bush is hated, people are basically the same in our instincts and desires, and the world is playful, messy, funny, and tragic all at once.

Narratives are incredibly powerful; they dominate our thinking and our culture. For instance, the metaphor of the war on terror is threatening our country's continued existence with its wrong-headed framing of all problems as requiring low trust centrally managed security theater. The production of a strong and consistent counter-narrative is the key to any revolutionary movement. Without a central story, a movement cannot grow and cannot wrap new people into it. ...

It seems like the internet's current form is dominated by liberals because it is liberals who acknowledge the basic messiness of the world around them and the lunacy of the establishment that runs it. The Iraq war didn't go as planned, the Clinton impeachment was crazy, and, oh yeah, peak oil is serious but why not use the phrase 'I drink your milkshake' to describe it.

That story wasn't being told anywhere, but it's the story of our time.

Matt Stoller,
Open Left

This can be read as more than a little fuzzy-wuzzy, and obviously there are millions who have no part of this cultural shift. But there are also millions who do and they are very much influencing adaptations in the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign that may determine who'll occupy the ruling seats next November. ***

In conclusion, I want to repeat something I brought up in Part One that Bill Quigley wrote in 2001.

"If our only response to the events of September 11 is to do what we did before that, but only harder, I think we will waste a lot of energy. We have to thoughtfully and humbly reconsider our strategies and develop some new ones. Otherwise we will just remain stuck."

Repeating what we have always done has not been ALL the peace movement has done, but it has been a great deal our activity. Meanwhile, mostly outside the peace movement, others have taken a stab at that necessity I quoted Bob Wing naming on Sept. 14.

I believe our main message should be that U.S. life will become increasingly insecure and dangerous unless this country improves its international behavior. In the era of globalization, peace at home is linked to peace abroad.

A more effective peace movement needs to be offering a vision of a plausible, sustainable global community that doesn't hinge on U.S. use of force to maintain empire. Elements of that vision clearly need to include challenges related to technology, climate change, and how to rein in cancerous capitalism. We really haven't known how to put out such a vision yet.

That's not surprising -- it is hard and perhaps, also, the struggle against empire may not have changed us enough so that we could see it. But the group(s) that find elements of that vision will discover that millions are already with them, looking for something similar, ready to elaborate something as yet unknown. They just don't currently identify with the peace movement.

Friday Cat Blogging

Why a cat would respond in this way to a heat wave, I don't know. She's burrowed under the covers and won't come out. Never try to understand a cat... It is over 90 today, almost unheard of for San Francisco.

Marriage available to all in California

Phyllis Lyons and Del Martin in 2004.

Hot damn! The Supreme Court of the State of California says the state must allow us -- queers, lesbians, gay men -- to get married. Separate but equal doesn't work under our state constitution, apparently. They are not about to opine on whether same-sex marriage is a good thing, but it is unequivocally a legal imperative if the state is going to be in the marriage business.

My ex and her partner were among the plantiffs. She writes:

Who would've thought that it would take the Supreme Court to "rule" that we're human beings? Who would've thought that I would be supporting a "patriarchal" institution? But I think Kate Kendall [of the National Center for Lesbian Rights] is right -- "there is no lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender person in this country that is not better off because we won." The Court's language is very strong and the attorneys say that it is groundbreaking. I firmly believe that protecting one group's fundamental human rights protects everyone.

What a day. What a day to remember that we are all connected and all deserving of love and dignity.

I agree heartily. I'm not a big fan of state marriage. In the too recent past marriage was a set of rules to ensure orderly ownership of women and children; in the present it is too often simply an imperative for keeping health insurance.

But I sure do want a society that practices community recognition and affirmation of all people's chosen, responsible relationships. I work for that affirmation within the Episcopal Church -- that is, within a voluntary institution suited to blessing partnerships.

Marriage, the thing the state licenses, still needs some reworking -- let's start with getting national health insurance. But this is a good day and a good decision for the dignity and equality of all people.

A deadly game of chicken?

If Todd Gitlin (with whom I expect to disagree) is this freaked, perhaps we all should be:

I've been wondering all day whether what's going on between the US and Israel on the one hand, and Iran on the other, is a game of chicken--the drag-strip game where two drivers race toward each other and the first one to turn away loses--or something worse. This wondering comes from Jerusalem, where I'm attending Shimon Peres' President's Conference on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel.

...The sense of threat here is vivid, it is deeply felt ...

...the session moderator, Israel's former ambassador to the US, Itamar Rabinovitch, somehow intimated--I'm sorry I didn't take down his exact words--that Israel's government would put it to Bush that if he didn't take action, Israel would. ...

Who's well informed enough to know what's up? Are we crying wolf again? No one knows. Possibly not even Bush knows what he will do during the seven months that remain in his White House stay. ... possibly this is not just a game of chicken, and Bush's finger is getting itchy--Iraq having gone so well. Then what's the lame duck got to lose in his unending, unreasoning fight against tyranny?

TPM Cafe

Go read it all.

The limits of a victim narrative

Bush is in Israel today, celebrating that country's 60 years. Soft spoken Tony Judt asks, how long will U.S. support for Israel last? Loads slowly, but worth viewing.

Costly listening

Living in San Francisco, it is hard to remember that there are still places where sticking up for the humanity of gays and lesbians can get you in big trouble. But there are.

The experience of the Rt. Rev. Christopher Senyonjo, former Anglican bishop of Western Buganda in Uganda, proves it. After retirement he counseled troubled Ugandans and found that some who came to him were homosexuals. He listened -- and he urged his church to listen.

The Church should listen to the silenced, perplexed, intimidated, abused and marginalised homosexuals in our midst. They are not only in institutions of learning but are everywhere (though in minority) rubbing shoulders with the heterosexuals.

Thinking Anglicans, U.K.

Doesn't sound very radical, does it? The 76-year-old father of seven also agreed to be chaplain to Ugandan gays organized as Integrity Uganda. The Ugandan church responded by not allowing him to conduct services, cutting off his pension, and urging the Ugandan government to arrest him.

That was in 2001. After services at the Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist on Sunday, Bishop Christopher talked with a small group about gays in Uganda. He's still repeating the same message he offered in an interview seven years ago:

What is really needed is education. I find that there is a lot of misunderstanding about human sexuality. And I've started writing about it -- because many people regard human sexuality as for procreation and if you think of why we have so much opposition against homosexuality, it is because it is not regarded as productive. The idea of love didn't come out very easily -- whereas when you read the very beginning in Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 18 the reason why Adam -- to me, I don't say it was a male, but it was Adam, a being -- the reason why God made a helpmate fit for that being was to heal a loneliness. It does not say, "to have children." Children are okay, but really healing loneliness or aloneness was so important. I think this is the major point. There is a need for education. ...

I would say that the church generally has not dealt with human sexuality. People have been afraid of human sexuality as such, so there's a lot of taboo connected with it. There's a verse which really helps me a lot, in the Gospel of St. John, Chapter 16, Verse 12 -- "And our Lord said, 'There are still many, many things I would like to tell you but you cannot bear them now." The only problem is if you're not willing to listen to what the spirit is saying now.

Grace Cathedral interview

Bishop Christopher will be at the international meeting of bishops at Lambeth in England this summer, still trying to get his Church to listen.

Quite a guy.

People in the U.S. can help support Integrity Uganda through Integrity USA. Not surprisingly, the need is great.

Clinton supporters get the bad news

Over last weekend, I spent a good stretch of time among people who had been Hillary Clinton supporters in the Presidential primary. These are good, progressive people. They'll be on board with the Democratic nominee in the fall. But this week, they were in pain about how the campaign has gone. You see, they had just learned that Clinton was not going to win. This was new news to them -- they didn't know until the media told them after North Carolina and Indiana. And they have grief and confusion still to process.

These folks voted for Clinton in their primaries and it made them feel wonderful. They are feminists of a particular, honorable sort; many have broken ground and held places in male-dominated institutions themselves. It's been a tough road. Many seem to me to hold on to a belief that I can't share, that women in positions of power will do things differently (and better, more fairly, more lovingly even) than men. And they didn't learn that Clinton had lost for a very long time.

They aren't political junkies. They didn't see that winning the nomination was about amassing delegates. They had no idea that the Clinton campaign had dug itself into a hopeless hole by failing to contest the caucus states. They had heard rumors that the campaign was running through its money -- but the scale of money raised and spent in the entire campaign mostly just horrified them. The fact that Obama has raised so much actually weighed against him with them. "What a waste..."

Their champion, candidate Clinton, had no incentive to teach them the truth about what was happening. So until recently, they've been living inside a different reality, a false picture of the campaign in which Clinton could somehow earn the nomination.

But these are good, progressive people. They'll be on board with Obama in the fall, if not among his core cheerleaders. ***

Another of these people's leaders did them a disservice in the Washington Post over the weekend. Feminist political fundraiser Ellen Malcolm offered a Clinton-boosting column entitled "Quitters Never Win." It included this barb:

"The first woman ever to win a presidential primary is supposed to stop competing, to curtsy and exit stage right."

Hey, wait a minute. The first African-American and the first woman to win a presidential primary was Representative Shirley Chisholm in 1972. Chisholm took 66 percent of the vote in New Jersey. Talk about erasing a champion of women ...

H/t to hilzoy at Obsidian Wings for pointing to the Malcolm column.

Taking advantage of the surveillance society

Click on the image above. Go ahead, do it.

According to the Telegraph (U.K.):

Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets.

With an estimated 13 million CCTV cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by....

Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.

... Only a quarter of the organisations contacted fulfilled their obligation to hand over the footage -- perhaps predictably, bigger firms were reluctant, while smaller companies were more helpful -- but that still provided enough for a video with 20 locations.

You gotta love the ingenuity.

H/t Cogitamus.

Of storms and science

People line up to receive water in a village affected by Cyclone Nargis located near Yangon.
May 11, 2008. REUTERS/Strinnger (MYANMAR)

I sent my contribution to help the people in the path of the cyclone via Avaaz.org. These excellent international activists have been supporting the democracy movement in Burma for some time and are currently helping to coordinate a fund-raising drive in support of the International Burmese Monks Organization's on-the-ground relief efforts. I'm sure that Doctors without Borders is also making a serious effort to get aid to those who need it most.
***

The horror of Cyclone Nargis formed the background to my reading on a five-hour airplane flight last night. To distract myself from my captivity inside a CO2 spewing cattle car, I wolfed down Chris Mooney's Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming. If you want to think about how science works, it's a great read. And you will also learn a lot about the great storms that can wash away cities and thousands of living beings, as well as about our species' developing understanding of how we've changed the planet. As for the relationship between the storms and the climate change ... as Mooney shows, hard conclusions about that are not currently available.

Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions formed most of what I understand about inertia and change in human knowledge. Because I am not a scientist, I'll restate what I internalized from Kuhn in my own language: most of the time, what we know is "normal science" -- serviceable, replicable conventional wisdom about how the world works. But sometimes, the serviceable wisdom begins to develop problems, perhaps first on the periphery of notice, apparent wrinkles in how the fabric of reality exists. When enough these develop, someone, usually an outsider, not an established expert, will propose a new way of seeing reality that shifts perspective, simplifies what had become complex, and, eventually, makes sense. This new way then becomes the conventional way of knowing -- and the process begins again.

Kuhn calls this process a "paradigm shift." Chris Mooney's Storm World is a kind of case study shaped by Kuhn's paradigm. He investigates whether our understanding of extreme weather is undergoing a paradigm shift

as a bunch of climate scientists stampeded into a field like hurricane research.

Scientists have largely developed a consensus that human activity is causing global warming -- they are not even close to agreeing how or whether that is effecting the behavior of hurricanes.

Roughly speaking, the debates can be described as between empiricists (scientists whose knowledge of hurricanes comes from collection of thousands of data points often from flights through the storms) and theorists (whose understanding derives from computer modeling based on accepted physical theories). Mooney points out the similarities between current debates and 19th century controversies between storm observers and theoretical physicists.

Current controversies are much exacerbated by the politics of global warming. Climate science is deeply dependent on government funding; as Mooney has shown elsewhere, the Republican administration has been extremely hostile to science whose policy implications might lead to regulation of their buddies in the coal and oil industries. Climate and weather scientists nonetheless have to earn their living in these hostile government settings. Moreover, the shape of "knowledge" that satisfies the criteria of science doesn't translate well into citizen discussion of policy needs.

It often seems as if the only way journalists and advocates can draw attention to climate change is in the context of individual disasters and weather events, such as very intense hurricanes. Yet specific weather events can never be "caused" by a statistically averaged change in global climate over time, even if they're precisely the kind of events that should grow more common as global warming sets in.

Mooney's not particularly thrilled about the efforts of environmental activists to insert themselves in these debates either; he takes a particular whack at my friends at Resource Media who work with enviros to get their message out. I'm enough of an outsider myself to wonder whether he properly appreciates the value of outside irritants in creating room for creative (possibly paradigm shifting) insiders.

All in all, this is a fascinating, not at all polemical, study of how science "knows." Few topics could be more important to our future as we all live through the grand human experiment with global warming human ingenuity has set in motion.

Beach exclusions

The authority controlling the beach is clear about who is allowed to use it. One has to assume the users who are allowed can read the rules for their mutts. (I wasn't one of those allowed users, but in early spring there was no one around to object to my passing through.)


The dogs' people must be the kind that always ask "why?" So here are the "whys." But I do have to wonder whether, in addition to these concerns, there might not also be the usual objections to stepping in shit.

Views from my window:Classic skyline

It looked a lot nicer before it started really raining, as it has now. I'll be at meetings later today in that white building in the foreground which was built to face the other way. It has a rather nice pseudo-Gothic stonework front -- now facing a parking lot.