David's updates http://www.goodreads.com/user/updates_rss/613845 en-US Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:44:44 -0700 60 David's updates http://www.goodreads.com/ 200 41 http://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/gr_logo.gif 31769502 Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:44:44 -0700 Review27599587 <![CDATA[David added 'Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/27599587 Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (Everyman's Library) by Samuel Beckett
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]> 31769457 Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:43:44 -0700 Review27599550 <![CDATA[David added 'Animal Liberation']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/27599550 Animal Liberation (Paperback) by Peter Singer
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]> 31644028 Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:04:21 -0700 Review22397541 <![CDATA[David added 'Nazi Literature in the Americas']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/22397541 4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars to: Nazi Literature in the Americas (Hardcover) by Roberto Bolaño
An odd book. A series of short profiles of fictional right wing Latin American writers. A kind of Borgesian literary joke.

Bolano is without question a man of the left, and one doesn't get the sense (thank God) that he's one of those lefties who underwent a right-wing political conversion late in life. But despite the title of his fictional appendix and bibliography, Epilogue For Monsters, the characters, with one exception (The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman), are almost all written as likable sorts. Or, rather, the tone of the entries is light, philosophical, there's little moralizing. And even in the chapter on Ramirez Hoffman--a short story version of the novella Distant Star-- the Bolano character helps a presumed assassin track down the mass murderer Hoffman, only to balk at actually killing him.

These are characters who are swept up by the tides of history. Often their political trajectories are defined as much by chance as by burning conviction. Or, rather, chance occurrences give rise to burning conviction. And even though each entry is very economical, Bolano sketches out a full set of biographical details for many, so that they aren't strictly defined by their politics. Politics for right wingers, he seems to say, is like politics for left wingers--to the extent that they are trying to live a full life, just one part of the mix.

So what's right wing about these characters? Many hate the standard scapegoats of the 20th century: blacks and Jews. Many are Nazi symps. There's a romanticization of agrarian life in many, an embrace of the myth of blood and soil. In others there's a Futurist enthusiasm for the ultra modern, for the spiritual life of destructive machines. Many are cultural outsiders, rejected by the literary establishment. They are obsessed with purity. They romanticize death. Etc.

Maybe there's a sense in Bolano, having come of age in Chile under the Allende and Pinochet regimes, and having experienced the rise and dashing of revolutionary hopes, and having seen left wing saviors like the Sandinistas and Castro either fail or become authoritarians, that in such an environment you were going to become political whether you liked it or not. And that the choice of which side to take was not always determined by things you could control, or that the same root impulse could lead in either direction.

Some might complain that this book is really just a sketch for a novel, or multiple novels, or an exercise designed to generate plots and characters to be used in more substantial works. One thing is certainly true: while the book as a whole doesn't tell any one story, there are multiple stories in the book, way too many to keep track of--there are the stories of each character's life and career, and there are all the stories suggested by all the novels and poems that Bolano attributes to all the writers he invents. Maybe this is the kind of book you'd expect from a man with a death sentence hanging over his head, as Bolano was for the last decade of his life (he died at age 50, in 2003, while waiting for a liver transplant). Perhaps it was in part a way for Bolano to get all this stuff out of his head and on paper before leaving this world for good. ]]> 29575247 Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:08:18 -0700 Review25893746 <![CDATA[David added 'Ill Nature']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/25893746 4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars to: Ill Nature (Paperback) by Joy Williams
]]> 28939241 Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:15:56 -0700 Review8956074 <![CDATA[David added 'The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8956074 3 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars to: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (Paperback) by Sam Harris
In The End of Faith, Harris does what any number of enlightenment rationalists before him have done: attempt to undermine the authority of religion by showing how scientific rationality discredits the notion of a supernatural being, and using the incredible claims made in the bible to discredit the notion that the bible is the inerrant word of a transcendent and infallible being. Like any number of critics of religion before him, Harris seizes on the inherent contradictions that arise when a document composed of ancient texts and shaped by historical, political and institutional forces is said to be the inerrant word of a transcendent being. A number of lines of attack open up as a result:
-God is kind of a jerk, at least in the Old Testament. He is capricious, cruel, vindictive, even murderous. Where does a God like this get any kind of moral authority and who would want to worship him anyway?
-Believers claim the bible to be the word of God, and hence a form of absolute truth, yet almost all are incredibly selective about what they choose to emphasize. The bible is an extremely contradictory book open to multiple interpretations, and in almost any situation the things determining the emphasis are historical and cultural, rather than textual. So believers are, on the one hand, claiming supernatural authority for their moral and ethical principles, when in fact what they are really doing is using the bible to rationalize and justify beliefs that they hold for other reasons. The bible is so ambiguous and self contradictory that it can’t be said to serve as a reliable guide to how to live, because justification can be found in it for almost any course of action one might want to take. A literal reading of the bible is impossible, because such a reading would be completely incoherent. Surely an infallible being could have done a better job of telling us his intentions.
-The various explanations of human existence in the bible are plainly contradicted by modern science. So it’s clear that the bible, in and of itself, is little more than a historical curiosity. The only reason it bulks so large in contemporary life and contemporary debate is because of the institutions that have grown up around it, and the political and cultural utility of reference to it.

Maybe it’s the ex-history grad student in me, but I do think there’s something problematic about the kind of critique waged by Harris/Dawkins/Hitchens et al. As Terry Eagleton argued in The London Review of Books, they make no attempt to uncover and examine “the structure of feeling” of religious belief. An historian writing a history of a church or denomination or community in which religion played a large part would have to write a thick description of the way in which religious belief functions in the community of believers etc. The same thing would apply if he were writing a biography of an historical figure. He’d certainly need to stand outside that figure or community, and could not take every (or any) religion-inspired claim or belief at face value. But he would have to describe, neutrally and empathetically, the functional role religion played in a given society or community, or the psychological role it played in the lives of believers.

Now I’m not against New Atheist polemics. I found Harris’ book quite cathartic, and heard myself saying “Right On!” far more than “now hold on…” but I couldn’t shake the nagging suspicion that there was something wrong with his approach. Despite all the historical references in the book it seemed far too driven by current social and political anxieties to stand as a fair account of religion (as if such a vast subject could be dispensed with in 300 pages anyway).

But of course the book is not a work of history, it’s a polemic, an attempt to refute a specific opinion or doctrine. Being a polemic, it’s not bound by the rules and norms of academic historical inquiry. And in fact, Harris’ goal is not to reconstruct the past, but to convince readers that religious belief and religious faith should not be living options for people in the twenty-first century. The ahistorical quality of his argument is almost necessary, given his aim. In fact his presentist, ahistorical approach to religion is probably closer to how people actually live religious faith (or aspire to live it) than the textual, historical approach of biblical scholars. Most believers don’t approach the bible the way scholars do. They see it as a living thing, a guide to how to live in the here and now.

Most believers don’t believe every word in the bible. Most use it selectively, emphasizing passages that coincide with the more modern moral outlook that they’ve acquired through socialization (of which the historical/cultural weight of Christianity or Islam or whatever is a part). And for the vast majority of believers in the liberal democratic West, I’m guessing, religious faith poses not the slightest obstacle to life in the modern world. Most are functional secularists. Harris doesn’t ignore this fact—he seizes on it and gives it a darker emphasis. Moderate religiosity, he argues, is dangerous because it aids and abets the more fundamentalist and radical tendencies in the world today. And this is especially dangerous given the rise of right-wing fundamentalist Christianity in the US, and radical Islam in the Muslim world. If it were just a question of religious moderates living with (or ignoring) certain fundamental contradictions, there would be no cause for alarm. The problem, according to Harris, is that religious moderates aid and abet religious extremists by insulating them from criticism. They enforce the idea that it’s impolite to question the fundamental assumptions behind religious faith. They help keep these issues out of public discourse. And this might not be such a big deal if fundamentalists in the US respected the separation of church and state, or if Islamic radicals in the Muslim world weren’t so busy blowing up their perceived opponents. But when conservative Christians in the US threaten the teaching of evolution in the schools, and when Islamic radicalism threatens the political stability of the middle east (as does, I should add, the US response to Islamic radicalism), and the physical existence of people everywhere, this becomes cause for alarm.

Here's an attempt sketch a less condescending model of the psychology of religious moderation: a) The idea of God is the idea that there are forces beyond the self that rule and determine human existence. While these forces may, in principle, be knowable, for most human beings alive on the planet at any given moment they are effectively inscrutable. We can never know the truth of our existence in any ultimate or absolute sense. Nor, for that matter, do the truths of science offer us much insight into how we should treat our fellow human beings. b) Church and religion is a place where the ethical implications of this insight are worked through, codified, and put into practice—it’s where we learn how to act toward our fellow man c) The Bible is obviously an historical text, written and assembled by fallible human beings but it is useful for the following pragmatic reasons 1) the weight of tradition behind it gives it an authority that other, more straightforward, contemporary, intellectually rigorous and logically consistent books don’t possess—its useful in building and sustaining a community of the faithful, which is crucial to establishing a church and practicing a religion 2) It’s distance from the contemporary world is one of it’s virtues—its anachronistic nature means that its inherently critical of contemporary norms and values (often in reactionary ways) 3) While the book is riddled with incredible claims about the world, anachronistic values, and injunctions to outright despicable behavior, there are plenty of worthwhile passages in it as well. e) Church is also a place where the mysteries of human existence, and human subjectivity are explored, through prayer, meditation and other forms of spiritual discipline. These are techniques for cultivating inwardness and building a soul. f) Religion also offers solace from the harsher aspects of human existence—the anxiety and insecurity we experience while alive, and the finality of death. g) Finally, it is possible to belong to a church, practice a religion, be a “believer”, and still live in the modern world. This may involve living with a number of logical contradictions, but people do that all the time.

So the upshot, I guess, is that New Atheist polemics like Harris' are good as far as they go, but they only go so far. They help you understand certain things about religious belief—mainly the logical and moral problems that arise when one tries to take an ancient text that’s origins are largely political and historical and treat it as a source of transcendent and inerrant wisdom. But they don't provide a fair description of contemporary religious belief, or provide an adequate description of how contemporary believers, especially religious moderates, live their faith. ]]> 28817993 Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:24:01 -0700 Review8957978 <![CDATA[David added 'Rip It Up and Start Again']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8957978 4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars to: Rip It Up and Start Again (Paperback) by Simon Reynolds
The standard narrative of the pop music history of the late 70’s and early 80’s has the bracing musical revolution of punk quickly degenerating into the more commercial and co-optable form of New Wave. Punk is the honest, authentic voice of political and aesthetic revolution, while New Wave is the watered down, corrupted, commercialized version of that impulse. Now there’s a grain of truth to this interpretation, but it misses a few things about punk that were quickly to drive it into an aesthetic dead-end, and it downplays the real virtues of much of the music that followed in its wake. Musically, punk wasn’t anything other than good old guitar-driven rock and roll played louder and faster and with a more aggressive, anti-social, overtly political attitude. Basically it layered a new set of attitudes and fashion statements over an already well-established musical form. Not only that, in a lot of ways it was simply updating and recycling traditional rock poses—macho cock rockers, the rock musician as revolutionary, with the model for revolution being the armed guerilla or street fighter. And punk’s politics—its populism and fetishization of authenticity—worked against musical innovation. One aspect of the founding myth of punk was that it was a cleansing force, washing away the excesses of the bloated, decadent, self-important pop music establishment of the 70’s. Consequently musical innovation and experimentation were suspect.

Reynolds takes postpunk out of the shadow of punk rock and presents it as a genre in its own right, distinct it from both punk and New Wave. He shows how little postpunk owed to punk, and how much it owed to other genres (the art rock and experimental music of the 70’s, Reggae and dub, funk) and other cultural and intellectual influences (post-60’s collectivist and communal values, postmodern social and aesthetic theory of the late 70’s and early 80’s). Postpunk was a much less ideologically hidebound, much more sonically adventurous musical form than the punk rock that preceded it. About all it inherited from punk was attitude and energy.

Reynolds dates postpunk from 1978-1984, and the book is divided into two parts. The first part, from roughly 78-80ish, recounts the emergence of postpunk, and focuses on the dour, arty, experimental, socially conscious bands that most music nerds associate with postpunk—Gang of Four, The Fall, early Scritti Politti, PIL, Cabaret Voltaire, Pere Ubu etc. The second half, on new pop and new rock, follows the evolution of postpunk into the mid-eighties and focuses on the more accessible, commercial, radio-and-dancefloor-friendly turn the genre took in the early 80’s. Some bands make appearances in both sections, most notably Scritti Politti, who were one of the more uncompromising bands of postpunk’s early years, but who later made a conscious decision to record more listener-friendly stuff in order to infiltrate the mainstream. Other bands covered in the second half include: the Specials and other two-tone and ska revival bands, Malcolm McLaren projects like Bow Wow Wow and Adam and the Antz, arty synthpoppers like Gary Numan and Ultravox, NYC Mutant Disco groups, Progressive Punk bands like Black Flag, The Minutemen, and Mission of Burma etc.

Reynolds does a fine job of connecting the music to the larger cultural, intellectual and political contexts from which it emerged. Postpunk was born along with Thatcherism in the UK. It also coincided with the rise of postmodernism and critical theory in the universities. It likewise coexisted, in the UK, with a strong tradition of communist and socialist-friendly left-wing politics. There was a bit of this in the US as well, especially in the Reagan 80’s, with bands like The Minutemen proselytizing for the Central American solidarity movement (D. Boon often worked the crowd for CISPES after many Minutemen shows). And, there were certainly strong residues of 60’s and 70’s collectivist, counter-culture politics within postpunk—Factory Records and Rough Trade most notably. And while most pop artists certainly try to manage their careers, and think hard about their self-presentation, the art school refugees and brainy autodidacts who made up the first wave of postpunk were a particularly self-reflective bunch. It would be wrong to describe the music as un-commercial, or to portray the musicians and artists as completely unconcerned with popularity or commercial success, but there was a definite sense of existing to negate the corporate hit-making machinery and the ideology of 70’s corporate rock and pop, at least until New Pop came along and rebelled against postpunk rebellion by emulating the most listener-friendly, anti-rockist pop forms.

There’s always a danger in any social-intellectual history of the pop arts of inflating the art form’s significance simply by virtue of placing it within a well-developed reconstruction of the cultural milieu in which it emerged (on the other hand, the mistake many highbrow critics make—are there any of them left?—is to avoid looking beyond the shiny surfaces to the more serious elements embedded in pop art forms). There may be some pop songs, genres, movements about which there really isn’t much of interest to say—bands and scenes that don’t merit more than a glib one-paragraph squib in a music magazine, and that don’t connect to larger trends and issues or ideas in any kind of interesting way. But as Reynolds shows this is certainly not the case with postpunk. One could argue that Reynolds is too much of a fan, and that he overpraises much of the music—as the Vanity Fair critic tapped to review the book for the New York Times did, though it’s hard to take such criticism seriously from someone who writes for what’s essentially a middlebrow version of People—but to me he gets it absolutely right 95% of the time. He convincingly makes the case that, despite the preeminent place punk has occupied in rock-crit mythology, postpunk was by far a more interesting and influential movement—sonically, intellectually and politically.

Reynolds comes to praise, rather than bury, postpunk, but his fanboy’s enthusiasm is balanced by a 40-year-old’s sense of how sophomoric much of the politics were and how crappy, ultimately, a lot of the music was, in traditional musical terms. But this is balanced by an admiration for the creativity and idealism of the various scenes, the sense of mission, willingness to experiment, and to bend musical tastes to the bands‘ will rather than simply playing what was popular in order to be rock stars, that characterized much of postpunk. And while he spends almost 600 pages lovingly reconstructing the scene and it’s influences and musical products, he doesn’t make much of an argument for its larger significance outside of the world of pop music. He never loses sight of the fact that the end product, even of the more uncompromising or abrasive variants—like Gang of Four, Throbbing Gristle, Crass, The Minutemen etc.—was one form or another of pop music. I’m not sure how to say this exactly, but the idea, the concept of pop—as something youth-oriented, playful, ephemeral, disposable, commercial, popular, relatively undemanding, not meant to last—is the reality check that keeps Reynolds from overpraising the music. Reynolds, shows how the world shaped the music, but thankfully stops short of arguing that the music changed the world. ]]> 28818942 Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:16:29 -0700 Rating553206 <![CDATA[David Winn voted on a review]]> http://www.goodreads.com/ Nophoto-u-50x66 David read and liked Andrew's review of Rip It Up and Start Again:

"A thorough and intellectual (sometimes a little too thorough and intellectual) overview of British and American post-punk art rock and pop. The first half of the book explains the lofty intellectual and musical ideals the drove bands such as Public ...more "
]]> 28609016 Sun, 22 Jun 2008 12:53:31 -0700 Review25131782 <![CDATA[David added 'Honored Guest']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/25131782 4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars to: Honored Guest (Paperback) by Joy Williams
]]> 28400232 Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:11:36 -0700 Review8955885 <![CDATA[David added 'Fatelessness']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8955885 4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars to: Fatelessness (Paperback) by Imre Kertesz
Fatelessness tells the story of 15-year-old Georg Koves, a highly assimilated Hungarian Jew, who one day finds himself on a train to Auschwitz. He is only in Auschwitz for three days before being transferred to Buchenwald, and finally to a labor camp in Zeitz. The novel narrates his experiences in all three places. While he may have been whisked off to Auschwitz, as the book jacket puts it, “without any special malice,” he encounters plenty of cruelty along the way. But what’s weird and striking about the novel is the dispassionate, almost clinical way he narrates events, and the lack of malice he seems to hold for the individuals most directly responsible for his ill-treatment (at least while he’s under confinement).

This sentence from Kertez's Nobel Prize acceptance speech is probably the master key to the novel: “I understood that hope is an instrument of evil, and the Kantian categorical imperative—ethics in general—is but the pliable handmaiden of self-preservation.”

Hope as an instrument of evil. What does Kertesz mean by this? Possibly the way the sequencing of events in time makes Auschwitz possible, makes it possible for people living through unspeakable horrors to bear them. One thing to keep in mind is that people who are living through such events are not living them in their totality. They are living them piecemeal. This is especially true of the experience of concentration camp victims. Some, it’s true, experience the totality of the horror, have “the entire knowledge crash in upon” them “at one fell swoop.” But those are the ones who are herded into the gas chambers, so for them it’s too late. Others, like Koves, ultimately come to “understand everything,” but “while one is coming to understand everything, a person does not remain idle: he is already attending to his new business living, acting, moving, carrying out each new demand at each new stage. Were it not for that sequencing in time, and were the entire knowledge to crash in upon a person on the spot, at one fell swoop, it might be that neither one’s brain or one’s heart would cope with it…” Instead, one’s desire to stay alive, combined with the orderliness and regimentation of camp life, creates and sustains the hope that one will stay alive, and the routine, the assignment of tasks, the parceling out of chores, of business to attend to (show up for roll call, go to work, line up for supper, barter for food) makes it possible to psychologically bear something that should by all rights be unbearable.

Appallingly, the social conventions that operate in normal civil society keep operating even in the concentration camp. One hesitates to imagine the worst, even though the evidence is all around you. Citizens' tendency to defer to authority figures leads to little objection in being drafted for labor service (as happens to Koves’ father), or even kidnapped, which is essentially what happens to Koves. Then there is the orderliness, the lack of real protest, as new arrivals at Auschwitz proceed through the screening process, some to be converted into prisoners, others to be converted into corpses. Georg strives to be a model prisoner, to follow the rules of the camp, and he feels conflicted when he breaks them. The more religious Jews in the camps believe that their lot is to suffer. But, more to the point, is the subtle and nuanced way Kertesz describes the means by which these things are internalized, and the way they are exploited in order to carry out the larger plan—depopulate Europe of Jews and other undesirables by either working them to death or exterminating them outright.

One certainly gets a vivid sense, in Kertesz, of people swept along by larger forces, of the way people’s very selves are shaped by the histories they are thrown into. Everyone in the novel is a cog in a machine, to some degree, but if everyone is simply playing out his or her socially/historically assigned role, how does one apportion guilt for one of the greatest crimes of the century? ]]> 28399460 Fri, 20 Jun 2008 04:41:33 -0700 Review8955894 <![CDATA[David added 'Liquidation']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8955894 4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars to: Liquidation (Paperback) by Imre Kertesz
The characters in Liquidation all suffer from a form of spiritual dislocation resulting from the demise of communism in Eastern Europe. All of them were dissidents of a sort under communism, and their identities were necessarily shaped by their opposition to the old regime, however subtle that resistance might have been—often little more than spiritual and cultural. The demise of communism means the demise of their reason for being alive, and Liquidation is an attempt to dramatize this existential predicament.

The shadow of the Holocaust also hangs over the characters, and in fact the meaning of the experience of Auschwitz is one of the central preoccupations of the novel. The title, Liquidation, has multiple meanings: The liquidation of Jews at Auschwitz; the liquidation of the publishing company the main character, Kingbitter, works for in post-communist Hungary; the liquidation of communism in Eastern Europe; Sarah’s liquidation (burning) of B.’s novel, Kingbitter’s quest for which is the central force driving the “action” of the novel. The book begins with Kingbitter, reading a play by his deceased friend B., a writer and Auschwitz survivor, that narrates events that have occurred after his suicide, events he could not possibly have witnessed. Liquidation is an experimental novel that deliberately confuses the issue of where the “reality” of the story lies. Also, there’s a theme of peoples lives as stories, stories that they tell themselves and stories that are spun by larger historical forces, and that are told through them.

One train of thought the novel sets in motion is the question of what it means to be a dissident. I suppose one can argue that, in one sense, it was easy to be a dissident in communist Eastern Europe, as it is in, say, Iran today. Of course it was hard in the sense that the penalties for thought-crime could be severe--duh, the sense that matters most--but it was easy in the sense that the thoughts you had to think to cross the line into thought crime were not particularly radical, at least from the point of view of western liberal democrats. AND, in an environment that punishes thought crime, especially in so crude and obvious a manner, just thinking heretical thoughts qualifies you for a dissident status of a sort. In a place like communist Eastern Europe, or contemporary Iran, it was/is possible to be a dissident intellectual in a way that it is difficult to do in the liberal democratic West, since you can be punished simply for thinking the wrong thoughts—and I mean really punished, not just not asked to be on Nightline. It’s enough to think and write and publish them to be considered a political dissident.

In the liberal democratic West, on the other hand, and especially in the US, the right to free speech and the right to dissent is such a fundamental part of the national self-image that it’s possible to say and publish just about anything without much in the way of consequences (although this needs to be qualified somewhat post-9/11). Also, the commodification and co-optation of the idea of rebellion is so far advanced that even genuinely subversive notions simply dissolve into the official marketplace of ideas, or get converted into some kind of marketing effort. There’s so much pseudo-rebellion around that it’s hard to know real dissent when you see it.

One thing people in the US have a hard time imagining, I guess, is what it’s like to have your world turned upside down the way it was in Eastern Europe in the late 80’s or in Iraq since 2003 (Katrina nudged some of us closer to this). Sure 9/11 was a shock to the system, but it’s nothing like the kind of complete psychological and spiritual overhaul that Eastern Europe went through, and that Iraq is going through now.

The shift in worldview resulting from the demise of communism is illustrated by passages that frame the novel. At the beginning and the end we find Kingbitter standing at his window observing an encampment of homeless people. He speculates at the end of the novel about what this says about his changed relation to politics in post-communist Hungary, and consequently his changed spiritual/existential state. Under communism he used to see them as evidence of the corruption and failure of the governing regime, and as a problem that demanded amelioration. Now he’s, on the one hand, more detached. He aestheticizes them. Sees them as part of an ongoing human comedy. And also has the sneaking suspicion that, if circumstances were to alter slightly, he could find himself out there with them... ]]>