Mary Callahan on Myanmar

Mary Callahan, author of Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma, is quoted in the following AP story on the current conflagration:

Cell Phones, Web Spread News of Myanmar

This article, of course, predates the government’s decision to essentially turn off the Internet in that country in an effort to prevent such a real-time flow of information.

New York Times: Myanmar Monks’ Protest Contained by Junta Forces

Boing Boing: Burma: ‘net cut as brutal crackdown worsens

Kerouac, Nabokov, and Alma Mahler walk into a bar . . .

Yr. humble correspondent had a good chuckle over the following passage in Louis Menand’s tour of On the Road, “Drive, He Wrote,” in the New Yorker:

“The Beat Movement had a male muse. This was, of course, Neal Cassady, the protagonist of both ‘On the Road,’ where he is Dean Moriarty, and ‘Howl.’ . . . Cassady also figures in several of Kerouac’s other books . . . and his iconic presence went beyond the Beats. He became a friend of Ken Kesey, and he was the driver on the Merry Pranksters’ famous bus trip, the subject of Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.’ The Grateful Dead wrote a song about him. He is the Lou Andreas-Salomé, the Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, of postwar American culture.”

If you’d like to know why exactly that is so funny, you must read Alma Mahler-Werfel’s Diaries, 1898–1902. Now, Alma might never have juggled sledgehammers—as Cassady is described as doing in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—but it’s a pretty good bet that, if placed in proximity to the requisite hardware, she’d have found a way.

In “Drive, He Wrote,” Menand also says:

“’Lolita’ is in the canon; ‘On the Road’ is somewhat sub-canonical—also a tour de force, like Nabokov’s book, but considered more a literary phenomenon than a work of literature. On the other hand, it has had an equivalent influence. Nabokov showed writers how to squeeze a morality tale inside a Fabergé egg; Kerouac showed how to stretch a canvas across an entire continent.”

If you are interested in this notion of Nabokov as moralist, please have a look at Leland de la Durantaye’s new Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov, which may well become the definitive word on the subject. Clarence Brown says of de la Durantaye’s book:

“Hitler’s mass murderer, Eichmann, when awaiting trial in Jerusalem, read Nabokov’s Lolita. He pronounced it an immoral book. Readers less famous but equally perceptive have agreed. The editor of the Scottish Sunday Express found Lolita, ‘the filthiest book I have ever read.’ The author of Style is Matter does not, of course, spend much time refuting the absurdity of these views. His splendidly insightful, readable book deals not only with the moral nature of Nabokov’s novels but also with the ethical dimension of great fiction, and of all great art. Readers need not be troubled by the expectation of seeing what I suppose will be their own point of view argued, however ably, for this book is a constantly surprising and delightful work of criticism.”

Eva Crane

Eva Crane, the author of the classic Bees and Beekeeping, died on September 6, at the age of 95. You can read about her fascinating life and career in these obituaries:

The Telegraph (UK): Eva Crane

The New York Times: Eva Crane, English Expert on World’s Bees, Dies at 95

Stephen W. Kress in the Boston Globe

Stephen W. Kress, the author of The Audubon Society Guide to Attracting Birds: Creating Natural Habitats for Properties Large and Small, Second Edition, was recently featured in the Boston Globe:

Pay Dirt for Project Puffin

Publicity Roundup

Some links from the Press’s publicists:

Marginal Revolution on Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life by Mark Francis:
What I’ve Been Reading

Richard Samuels, author of Securing Japan: Tokyo’s Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia in the New York Times:
Bomb by Bomb, Japan Sheds Military Restraints
and in the Boston Globe:
The More Muscular Japan

An op-ed by Paul Dutton, author of Differential Diagnoses: A Comparative History of Health Care Problems and Solutions in the United States and France in the Boston Globe:
France’s Model Healthcare System

Terry Leap, author of Dishonest Dollars: The Dynamics of White-Collar Crime serves as an expert in a Times of London piece:
America’s Enforcer Listens Out for Insider Pillow Talk

The Birds of Costa Rica in Science News

The Clements Checklist of Birds of the World and Tropical Plants of Costa Rica in Science News

The Clements Checklist of Birds of the World in the Times of London:
Feather Report

International Appeal of Michael Zweig’s Work

Conor McCabe at an Irish blog—Dublin Opinion—has an interesting series of posts about the applicability of Michael Zweig’s The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret to the Irish case: “The American economist, Professor Michael Zweig, has written extensively, and with much clarity, on the issue of class and power. Zweig challenges the view that ‘consumer sovereignty’—the idea that ‘consumers rule the economy by expressing their desires for goods and services, which producers scramble to satisfy’—is somehow the great leveler in society; that consumption equals societal power.”

Class in Ireland: An Immodest Proposal
Michael Zweig, Class, Consumerism, and Ireland
Occupations in Ireland: A Class Analysis
Why Bother with Class Analysis?

If this discussion interests you, you may also wish to look at Michael Zweig’s edited collection What’s Class Got to Do with It?: American Society in the Twenty-first Century and New Working-Class Studies, edited by John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon.

White-Collar Crime: Worse than it Looks

The Chronicle of Higher Education features a short Q & A with Terry Leap, the author of Dishonest Dollars: The Dynamics of White-Collar Crime:

The White-Collar Criminal as Thug

About Myanmar

Antigovernment protests are under way in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. (See “Witnesses: Monks Protest Near Suu Kyi House” on CNN, for example.) For some background on the making of that nation’s military government, see Mary P. Callahan’s Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma.

NYT Potlatch, part 1

As you are certainly aware, in doing away with Times Select, the New York Times has thrown the door open on their online archive. In a series of posts over the next little while, we will be rummaging through the archive in search of Cornell University Press–related articles. Here are five to get started with:

Nursing in America: A Portrait of a Profession in Critical Condition [on Nursing Against the Odds by Suzanne Gordon]

Rivers Run Black, and Chinese Die of Cancer [on The River Runs Black by Elizabeth C. Economy]

Better Homes Than Guardians [on Building Diplomacy by Elizabeth Gill Lui]

The New College Mixer [on My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student by Rebekah Nathan]

Hold the Weed Whacker [on Weeds of the Northeast by Richard H. Uva, Joseph C. Neal, and Joseph M. DiTomaso

Typing, out loud

Listen to an NPR interview with Darren Wershler-Henry, author of The Iron Whim, here:

Click, Clack, Ding! A Look Back at the Typewriter