democratic revolutions?

Bad Elements

Ian Buruma’s Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing explores the views of Chinese dissidents through interviews in the US, Singapore, Taiwan, Hongkong, Shenzen and Beijing through interviews conducted in 1999 around ten years after the 4 June massacre in Tiananmen Square.

In the US he speaks with student leaders of the 1989 protests, the authors of the influential TV series River Elegy shown the previous year, and participants in the Democracy Wall movement of 1978 after the downfall of the Gang of Four*. Many have moved on, to become successful business, or the academy. Others monitor human rights in China, yet others crusade, impotently, for the conversion of the Chinese nation to Christianity. Buruma paints them as fractured and largely dismissive of each other.

In Taiwan (this part of the book a revelation to me) and Singapore he speaks to much less well known activists who opposed the freedom denying

Republican Roosevelt’s justification for regulation of corporations

From President Theodore Roosevelt’s State of the Union address Decmber 1901.

It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form, which frees them from individual responsibility, and enables them to call into their enterprises the capital of the public, they shall do so upon absolutely truthful representations as to the value of the property in which the capital is to be invested. Corporations engaged in interstate commerce should be regulated if they are found to exercise a license working to the public injury. It should be as much the aim of those who seek for social betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence. Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions. The first essential in determining how to deal with the great industrial combinations is knowledge of the facts-publicity. In the interest of the public, the government should have the right to inspect and examine the workings of the great corporations engaged in interstate business. Publicity is the only sure remedy which we can now invoke. What further remedies are needed in the way of governmental regulation, or taxation, can only be determined after publicity has been obtained, by process of law, and in the course of administration. The first requisite is knowledge, full and complete-knowledge which may be made public to the world.

grotesque

My preferred cover

With two matter-of-fact murders of prostitutes  and a mother’s suicide Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque is sold as a crime novel, at least in English, but she’s much more interested in crimes committed by families, and the Japanese education and class systems, as the more visceral attacks on human bodies.

The narrator – unrelentingly bitter, and unrelentingly unreliable – recalls only a few moments in her 40 odd years where she was happy for even an instant, and all but one of those celebrate nothing more than the cultivation of her single special skill, to manipulate.

She, and it seems most of Japan, is obsessed by the unfair power of beauty, realised for the purpose of the novel in the form of her sister, Yukiro, half Swiss, half Japanese. Our narrator shares these genes, perhaps, but not the resulting astonishing outward appearance. At around 11 years old she is forced to accept the power and disconcert of this creepy, awe-inspiring beauty. She decides her sister is a monster to be shunned, fled from, locked out of her life.

But slowly the reader is lead to suspect that the narrator is good at seeing monsters.

The cover blurb suggests that Yukiro and a high school classmate of the narrator later choose prostitution as a form of power. If so their choice – if ever that – is given declining rewards in a beauty-obsessed society.

[This is a post that ran out of puff .. there's a good review here]

sorrowful quotes

[an unfinished thought from some time ago]

Siri Hustvedt is one of those writers who sprinkle challenging aphorisms through her novels, rather like Shirley Hazzard, although Hustvedt’s prose is less intensely crafted than Hazzard’s, and she seems to have more trouble avoiding the trite (perhaps at times this triteness is her characters?)

‘People like me don’t go in for salvation. Crippled and crazy we hobble towards the finish line, pen in hand.’ 45

‘.. the way we organized perceptions into stories with beginnings, middles and ends, how our memory fragments don’t have any coherence until they’re reimagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense,’ 47

the prime of life – the first 100 pages

Its not hard, after the first 100 pages of the Prime of Life, to see reasons why Simone de Beauvoir’s  autobiographical writing might be so well regarded. We witness the personal and intellectual development of a woman with a finely tuned self-awareness, a development marked by an inclination both to question and to oppose (the latter sometimes at odds with the former, as the older and wiser author implies from time to time about her younger self) and with a roughly focussed, and optimistic,  appetite for knowledge and experience. Places, people, books and films are celebrated for themselves but also for their impact on her seriously undertaken mission to think out her considered understanding of the world.

One dynamic is of her and Sartre developing their ideas, their persona and their personalities, and their being as a couple. She has strong sympathy, but not full agreement, with his unfolding project to

the arc of China

[unfinished post - so be it]

Beginning – business : today in the SMH John Garnaut throws together a few ideas on China, in particular to what extent should Australia be worried that a cashed up China buying ‘Australian’ assets at the bottom of the market will hand increased power over Australia’s future to China.  He says:

The Limits of Control

Limits of control poster

I loved it. But I’m in a small group.

The NYT points out that a shot of Paz de la Huerta’s buttock’s is framed to evoke Brigitte Bardot in Le Mepris (Contempt; JL Goddard).

The SMH reckons it’s ultimately pointless.

And this Cineopinion blog pans it rather more viciously. Here’s what I was provoked to reply:

Most enjoyable film I’ve seen in years. Went back the next night to see it again.
I think the problem for

Sydney E Ulysses

Just some notes on a film long in gestation ..

Soros Gray Krygier – economic funamentalism as threat to open society

Discussion from Background briefing 10 years ago – good to remember in these supposedly post fundamentalist times.

Krygier excerpt: “I think if that’s what Soros believes out of Popper, he’s right to think that the enthusiasts for laissez faire capitalism who came to advise in post-Communist countries, and who seem to be in very prominent roles as advisors in Western countries, though their values are radically different and they don’t come with guns, nevertheless the certainty with which they espouse those values is similar [to totalitarian social engineering], and similarly flawed.”

choice has value only where there are choice-worthy options

Autonomous choice has value, however, only in an environment that is rich in choice worthy options. John Gray Enlightenment’s Wake p 12 summarising argument of Joseph Raz’s Morality and Freedom.

And more: from Berlin: incommensurabilities among ultimate values set a limit to the ambitions of theory in both ethics and politics. .. political life as being permanently intractable to rational reconstruction.

Idea then: forms of communal action under different types of states/ traditions. eActivism as an archetypal instance of liberal rights based ‘communal’ activism? vs types of activism in China and other authoritarian states vs secessionist activism?