Marx and the Bible. These two marked me for ever.
They are my two fingerprints.

The interview is conducted by Columbia University journalism professor John Dinges on the C-Span Video Library.

Galeano talks about his book Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, in which he tells a history of the world through 600 brief stories of human adversity, focusing on people often ignored by history.

Galeano reads several passages from the book.

They also discuss Galeano’s 1971 book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave to President Obama during the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April 2009.

Other subjects covered include Galeano’s life and career, including military regimes, book bans, and repression.

The interview is one hour long; but it goes fast.

Last week we learned that Amazon.co.uk has bowed to pressure to stop selling a book by a former senior Irish Scientologist. The Complex: An Insider Exposes the Covert World of the Church of Scientology (Merlin Publishing, Dublin) describes John Duignan’s 21 years in the religion, not all of it a happy tale. According to Amazon, “Unfortunately, we have had to withdraw The Complex by John Duignan in the UK because we received a specific allegation that a passage in the book is defamatory regarding an individual named in the book”. Other bookshops are also thought to have been warned not to stock the book. And everyone who has ever encountered the Church of Scientology sighs and says, “Here we go again.”

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America – Bush ushers in Midnight Regulations:

Dozens of new rules have already been introduced which critics say will diminish worker safety, pollute the environment, promote gun use and curtail abortion rights. Many rules promote the interests of large industries, such as coal mining or energy, which have energetically supported Bush during his two terms as president. More are expected this week.

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SFGate reports on the 20 most trusted companies:
A report which is bizarre to say the least, being sad and funny at the same time. Neither Google or Microsoft are on the list while other omissions include Countrywide Financial, Bank of America and Weight Watchers.
The top ten, however, include American Express, IBM, eBay, Amazon and Apple, most of which I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. (TimesOnline today report on Amazon, Britain’s most popular website for Christmas shopping, which is making its staff work seven days a week and threatening them with the sack if they take time off sick.)
Can’t understand why McDonalds and Starbucks didn’t make the list. Must be a mistake.

With thanks to A Little Red Blog

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The Guardian has a piece from Richard Price on his old tutor, Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road:

We were in our early 20s, and most of us had neither read nor even heard of him. In class he called you by your last name, no title: a brusque, slightly boarding-schoolish and utterly seductive form of address. He regularly and passionately savaged those writers whom he perceived to be his more validated (“lucky”, he called them) peers, but he treated a student’s work, no matter how hapless, with shocking earnestness.

He was a nurturer of grudges; an incubator of slights.

His personal gods were Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

He was bitter.

He had every right to be bitter.

He was really bitter.

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Chris Bowers at Undernews doesn’t see much hope or change on the horizon:

Even after two landslide elections in a row, are our only governing options as a nation either all right-wing Republicans, or a centrist mixture of Democrats and Republicans? Isn’t there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration? Also, why isn’t there a single member of Obama’s cabinet who will be advising him from the left? It seems to me as though there is a team of rivals, except for the left, which is left off the team entirely. Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration.

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Jonathan Dozier-Ezell speculates on writing and publishing:

It’s now easier than ever to get your ideas and content out to readers with or without help from publishing channels. Now there are writers who only write to see their names on a pulpy spine (and they will be disappointed), but on the whole, writers, authors, poets, etc. simply want to be heard. Being paid is nice, but it really isn’t the priority.

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Robert Fisk in the UK’s Independent:

General Roberts of Kandahar (told) the British in 1880 that “we have nothing to fear from Afghanistan, and the best thing to do is to leave it as much as possible to itself. . . I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us, the less they will dislike us”.

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Love Thy Belly:

The record label Roadrunner has been getting some serious online bellyache from fans of one of its artists, Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls, after she reported on her blog that she had been asked to cut shots from the video for her solo song Leeds United because “they thought I looked fat”.

a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,

an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd

dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,

parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked

cotton . . . (continue reading)

Derek Walcott’s poem was written exclusively for The Times to mark the election of Barack Obama as President of the USA.

Thanks to Rethabile Masilo for the lead to this one.

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“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

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Gaële Chojnowicz writes about Carson McCullers:

Walter Allen said of Carson McCullers; “Faulkner apart, the most remarkable novelist the South has produced seems to me Carson McCullers.”

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The optimist says, This is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist says, You’re right. Anon.

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Yes we can. Yes we can elect another Republican president. Un.fortun.ately.

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