Reviewed Elsewhere [Vol. 1, #46]
Interview with Matt Bonzo about his book
WENDELL BERRY AND THE CULTIVATION OF LIFE
http://cpyubookshelf.blogspot.com/2008/11/matt-bonzo-on-wendell-berry-and.html
CPYU: What first drew you to Wendell Berry’s writing? How has he influenced your work as a philosopher and college professor?
MB: I found my way into Berry’s work through his short stories where his concern for community and his emphasis on a sense of place resonate. As a professor I work hard to craft a classroom as a place where students belong. Learning is a project that we engage in together. And we work hard towards the making of a good life that we share by asking hard questions about how we understand and what we desire. Beyond the walls of education, my family and I run a small C.S.A. (Community Supported Agriculture) farm the shape of which has been influenced by Berry’s vision.
Read the full interview:
http://cpyubookshelf.blogspot.com/2008/11/matt-bonzo-on-wendell-berry-and.html
WENDELL BERRY AND THE CULTIVATION OF LIFE.
Matthew Bonzo and Michael Stevens.
Paperback: Brazos Press, Dec 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $18 ] [ Amazon ]
“The Imagination of Man’s Heart”
BOOKS AND CULTURE reviews Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/bookwk/081124b.html
For fifteen years, young women have been disappearing in Juarez. They share a phenotype (petite), an economic status (marginal), and a fate: their bodies turn up weeks after their disappearances, usually raped, often mutilated. The confirmed death toll numbers in the hundreds. Journalists who investigate the killings receive death threats and find themselves tailed by well-dressed men; women who try to report their daughters’ disappearances find themselves laughed out of the police station. Few arrests have been made, and the resulting trials, even rarer, are rife with evidence tampering. In 2006, as the body count reached a statistical peak, the Mexican government announced that its investigation was concluded.
Theories abound, the most persuasive of which (to my mind) comes from gutsy El Paso journalist Diana Valdez Washington: she argues that Juarez law enforcement has more or less ceded the area to Mexican drug cartels, whose operatives are now free to thrill-kill ad libet. But there are more sensational explanations on offer, and one of the most persistent is this: that the women are victims of a well-connected snuff filmmaking ring. This theory, though it lacks much in the way of support—Amnesty International has condemned it as sensationalist and distracting—is one of several entertained by Roberto Bolaño in his massive novel about the killings, 2666 (first published in Spanish in 2004, and just released in English translation). Why are these women disappearing? Bolaño answers: they are the victims of a genre. As with the racial-hygiene fantasies of the fascists, or the absurd geometries of Borges’ Tlon, the snuff film takes a bad, impossible story—in this case, the Sadean melodrama of total dominance over others—and imposes it on reality.
The human imagination is a grave problem. Animals in a so-called state of nature may kill each other for food, but they won’t, like the Nazis, wipe out six million of their own for the sake of a fairytale. Only creatures with the power to tell stories can work destruction like that. Perhaps that’s why Bolaño entire novelistic output—written mostly in a ten-year spasm of activity before his early death from liver failure—seems to revolve around artists, and, crucially, why his own imaginary products resist closure so successfully.
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Read the full review:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/bookwk/081124b.html
2666.
A novel by Roberto Bolaño.
Hardcover. FSG, 2008
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $24 ] [ Amazon ]
John Cacioppo, author of
Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection
on Whether Technology is Making Us Lonely?Video ( Running time: 5:11)
http://www.bigthink.com/features/924
Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection.
John Cacioppo.
Hardcover. Norton, 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon ]
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