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http://MrBojangles.stumbleupon.com/review/5391467/

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 21:02:28 -0700

"Journalists came to believe in objectivity, to the extent that they did, because they wanted to, needed to, were forced by ordinary human aspiration to seek escape from their own deep convictions of doubt and drift. Ours is an age, Thomas Mann wrote, which affords no satisfying answer to the question of 'why?' or 'to what end?' ...

"Surely, objectivity as an ideal has been used and is still used, even disingenuously, as a camouflage for power. But its source lies deeper, in a need to cover over neither authority nor privilege, but the disappointment in the modern gaze."

--Michael Schudson, explaining in his book the "just the facts" approach American newspapers are now known for.

http://MrBojangles.stumbleupon.com/review/4622135/

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 04:14:44 -0700

...One of the most impressive discoveries was the origin of the energy of the stars, that makes them continue to burn. One of the men who discovered this was out with his girlfriend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be going on in the stars in order to make them shine.

She said, "Look at how pretty the stars shine!"

He said, "Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world who knows why they shine."

She merely laughed at him. She was not impressed with being out with the only man who, at that moment, knew why stars shine. Well, it is sad to be alone, but that is the way it is in this world. --Richard Feynman

http://MrBojangles.stumbleupon.com/review/4465415/

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:29:04 -0700

From JM Coatzee's Elizabeth Costello, in turn quoted on Dave Pollard's terrific site:

Sultan [a chimpanzee] is alone in his pen. He is hungry: the food that used to arrive regularly has unaccountably ceased coming.

The man who used to feed him and has now stopped feeding him stretches a wire over the pen three metres above ground level, and hangs a bunch of bananas from it. Into the pen he drags three wooden crates. Then he disappears, closing the gate behind him, though he is still somewhere in the vicinity, since one can smell him.

Sultan knows: Now one is supposed to think. That is what the bananas up there are about. The bananas are there to make one think, to spur one to the limits of one's thinking. But what must one think? One thinks: Why is he starving me? One thinks: What have I done? Why has he stopped liking me? One thinks: Why does he not want these crates any more? But none of these is the right thought. Even a more complicated thought--for instance: What is wrong with him, what misconception does he have of me, that leads him to believe it is easier for me to reach a banana hanging from a wire than to pick up a banana from the floor?--is wrong. The right thought to think is: How does one use the crates to reach the bananas?

Sultan drags the crates under the bananas, piles them one on top of the other, climbs the tower he has built, and pulls down the bananas. He thinks: Now will he stop punishing me?

The answer is: No. The next day the man hangs a fresh bunch of bananas from the wire but also fills the crates with stones so that they are too heavy to be dragged. One is not supposed to think: Why has he filled the crates with stones? One is supposed to think: How does one use the crates to get the bananas despite the fact that they are filled with stones?

One is beginning to see how the man's mind works. . . .

At every turn Sultan is driven to think the less interesting thought. From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?) he is relentlessly propelled towards lower, practical, instrumental reason (How does one use this to get that?) and thus towards acceptance of himself as primarily an organism with an appetite that needs to be satisfied. Although his entire history, from the time his mother was shot and he was captured, through his voyage in a cage to imprisonment on this island camp and the sadistic games that are played around food here, leads him to ask questions about the justice of the universe and the place of this penal colony in it, a carefully plotted psychological regimen conducts him away from ethics and metaphysics towards the humbler reaches of practical reason. And somehow, as he inches through this labyrinth of constraint, manipulation and duplicity, he must realize that on no account dare he give up, for on his shoulders rests the responsibility of representing apedom. The fate of his brothers and sisters may be determined by how well he performs.

http://MrBojangles.stumbleupon.com/review/3258329/

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:53:24 -0800

"I believe you have to reach a certain age before you understand how much life really is like a novel, with patterns and leitmotifs and turning points, and guns that must go off and people who must return before the ending."

--Sigrid Nunez in "The Last of Her Kind" (although Nunez's words are attributed to a character within the book, which might explain the narrative symmetry that character sees in the events of her life. Shit, whatever.)