Facebook, the asocial drug

The Autocracy App

Jacob Weisberg, NYRB, October 25, 2018

A review of two books on FACEBOOK and its criminal background:

Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Oxford University Press, 276 pp., $24.95

 

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier
Henry Holt, 146 pp., $18.00

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Many years ago I subscribed "Driesch" to facebook. After a very short time I encountered the bad business policies, the fraud, the misuse of data, the destruction of discourse, the wrong appeals to "selfism" (self -expression as extrem self-manifestation as beginning of the cult of the shown self), so that I cancelled very soon membership, which, by the way, was pretty difficult. In our facebook account we didn't share private issues, only items concerning our publishing program or questions of literatur. But the environment does effect every item which is displaced and shown, and one becomes a collaborator with the ugly power, if one cooperates.

Today, many so called quality papers and magazines or corporate media recommend the viewer, listener or reader, to follow on facebook. I do not follow. It's the mind of the fellow traveller, the uncritical consumer and collaborator. Persons as well as institutions who observe the values of a free, emancipated society, shouldn't invite to participate in the destructive asocial media. It is a contradiction to their position and shows only that their goal to reach more people and to increase profit.

We have a well sorted library with books mainly in philosophy, literary criticism, social scienes and so on. Stuff, which the average reader doesn't read. We often hear, we should utilize facebook to gain more attention, to catch some readers. I decline. The pure orientation on masses according the general orientation on quantities doesn't satisfy our expectations concerning quality.

 

The Russian Revolution

Bolshevism’s New Believers

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

by Yuri Slezkine

Princeton University Press, 1,104 pp., $39.95

Over the past one hundred years, some 20,000 books on the Russian Revolution have been published, roughly six thousand of them in English. It’s as if, starting on October 25, 1917—or November 7, according to the Western calendar the Bolsheviks adopted soon after seizing power—a new book on that topic appeared without fail every weekday (with summers off). It could be worse: there are now over 70,000 books on the French Revolution. Which one are you going to read?

Benjamin Nathans, November 23, 2017 Issue

Read m,ore at the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

Literature Accross Frontiers

A remarkable site, an important and interesting organisation, founded 2001:

Quoted from the page:
Literature Across Frontiers (LAF) is a platform for organisations and individuals working together across Europe and beyond to develop intercultural dialogue through literature and translation.
We run a series of activities and projects that create opportunities for new literary connections and collaborations, bring to light lesser-translated literatures, as well as monitoring translation activities and debating policy in the field of literature and translation.

We are based at the Mercator Institute for Media, Languages and Culture, at Aberystwyth University in Wales, United Kingdom, and are part of the newly established Institute for Literature and Creative Arts, which will start operating from the next academic year. Outside our headquarters office in Aberystwyth, our staff  and co-workers are based in several locations in the UK, France and Germany.

Literature Across Frontiers has been supported since 2001 by the Culture programme of the European Commission.


They also offer a trilingual online literary review:

Transcript

Transcript is an online review of books and writing from around the world with a focus on European literature and its relationship with other literary scenes. Its aim is to promote quality literature in translation and to give wider circulation to material from literary publications in other languages through the medium of English, French and German.
Transcript was first published in 2002 with support from the Culture Programme of the European Union and is being re-launched as part of  Literature Across Frontiers’s new website.

Als Nora Joyce masturbierte

Nachtrag zum Eintrag "Bloomsday":

Perlentaucher Magazinrundschau vom 26.6.2012 meldet:

Louis Menand hat die neue Joyce-Biografie (Leseprobe) von Gordon Bowker gelesen - nicht sehr inspiriert, aber sie enthält ein paar Informationen, die Joyce-Biograf Robert Ellmann in seiner 1959 erschienenen Biografie weggelassen hatte: Etwa über den Tag, an dem Joyce sich zum zweiten Mal mit seiner Beatrice, dem Zimmermädchen Nora verabredete hatte. Beim ersten Mal hatte sie ihn versetzt, "aber diesmal trafen sie sich. Sie spazierten nach Ringsend, dem Südufer des Liffey, wo (und hier können wir die Dante-Analogie fallenlassen) sie ihre Hand in seine Hose schob und ihn masturbierte. Es war der 16. Juni 1904, der Tag, an dem Joyce 'Ulysses' spielen lässt. Das ist es, was die Leute feiern, wenn sie Bloomsday feiern."

A Critic at Large
Silence, Exile, Punning
James Joyce’s chance encounters.
by Louis Menand, July 2, 2012, New Yorker

How a biography shouldn't be

The Inner Man: the Life of J G Ballard

Published 12 September 2011

A model for missing the point of biography.

Crash test dummy

John Gray about the unauthorised biography by John Baxter, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 400pp, £20

Framing Innocence

A mother's photographs, a prosecutor's zeal, and a small town's response

The New Press, New York London, 2010

Book Review by Hans Durrer

Driesch #6 / 2011

In 1999, amateur photographer and school bus driver Cynthia Stewart dropped off eleven rolls of film at the local drugstore near her home in Oberlin, Ohio. The rolls contained photographs of her eight-year-old daughter Nora, including two that showed the girl in the shower. Some time later, two policemen came to see Cynthia at the farmhouse where she lived with her partner David and Nora. Cynthia was informed that "they had some of her photographs down at the station" and that "there are serious questions about those pictures, ma'am."

Cynthia was flabbergasted, she hadn't the foggiest idea what was going on. She later learned that the  police and the county prosecutor judged the shower-photos pornographic. Cynthia was arrested, taken away in handcuffs, threatened to have her daughter removed from her home, and charged with crimes that carried the possibility of sixteen years in prison. Only in America, the land of hypocrites, I briefly thought (in any case, hypocrites can be found everywhere) but this misses the point completely because not only her friends but most of the community defended Cynthia and fought for her.

Lynn Powell, a poet and neighbour of Cynthia Stewart, put on paper „this riveting and beautifully told story“, as the publisher appropriatly informs us, and „brilliantly probes the many questions raised“, prominently among them: „When does a photograph of a naked child 'cross the line' from innocent snapshot to child porn?“

This is of course largely a question of context for as we all know: „... a snapshot stripped of its context can be made to lie“, as photographer Sally Mann says. But there is also the law and with it the difficutly of defining what exactly constitutes pornography. Since to turn to the legal profession ("I know it when I see it", "the average person with average sex instincts") is not much of help, we need to look for other avenues and one of the most sensible is provided by The Talmud: „We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.“ 

Framing Innocence is a fascinating read, not least because it, in part, challenged, and altered, my preconceived notions, namely this one: Children Services had appointed a guardian ad litem (for the lawsuit), a Christian fundamentalist whose ideology and lifestyle was fundamentally different from Cynthia's and who had dedicated herself to combating child pornography. Of course, I thought to myself, she will see pornography where others will see only harmless nudity. This is after all typical of fundamentalists.Well, I was wrong, for „she looked at those photographs and she said, 'Wait a minute. That's not child pornography, that's a little girl taking a bath.' She did a 180-degree turnaround and became that family's strongest advocate."

I read books because because I need to be taught. Framing Innocence did an excellent job in this regard.