Notes; Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Days of Paranoia by Francis Wheen

 'The only thing Capote and I have in common was Howard Hunt beat us out for a Guggenheim'

- Gore Vidal

p.13

'All my life I have been fighting in defence of the Left and of sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology. Now I see elements of the Left using these same tactics'

- I.F. Stone, Oct.1964

p.15

'just let the students go on a tear for a couple of weeks, then move in and clobber them'

- Kissinger to Nixon

p.25

'many White House correspondents felt that he might go bats in front of them any time'

- John Osborne of the New Republic

p.29

'none of the Jews in Congress had supported his invasion of Cambodia'

so Nixon railed against them

p.30

Warner and Zanuck donated to Nixon in his early election campaigns in California

p.31

Enoch Powell's monetarist theories were at first not adapted by The TImes, The Economist and the Conservative Party

p.46

Front de Liberation du Quebec kidnapped the province's labour minister, and when PM Pierre Trudeau rebuffed the ransom demand, they strangled him

p.71

'Theatre is defined by its limits'

- Paul Berman, 'A Tale of Two Utopias: The political journey of the generation of 1968'

'Since paranoids always attribute their own characteristics to their enemis, Nixon and his accomplices..'

p.110

'As Garry Wills noted, many of Nixon's rat-fuckers were devout Christians' ; "This was an administration with an equal fondness for Billy Graham and for break-ins"

Nixon also complained about IRS investigation of his friend, Graham

p.111-2

'There has always been a war between the generations. It is the one war in which, as I think Cyril Connolly said, everyone changes sides'

- Tom Dribreg, British politician

p.131

Roe vs Wade was decided by the issue on women's right to privacy, not her right to choose.

NYT's premature verdict; on the decision;  'As with the division over Vietnam, the country will be healthier with that division ended'

p.135

'During the supposedly swinging Sixties the marriage rate in America actually rose; after 1972 it plummeted. Divorce rose.

'Interviewing returnees for his study Voices of the VIetnam POWs, Craig Howes, found that many regarded failure in Vietnam, social unrest and their own family upheaval as "related symptoms of a moral collapse represented by..woman." '

'Many, like Travis Bickle in the movie Taxi Driver, trasmuted their  personal incompetence or misfortune into a universal malaise'

p.137

'Whereas the resentment of women against men for the most part has solid roots in the discrimination and danger to which women are constantly exposed, the resentment of men against women, when men still control most of the power and wealth in society yet feel themselves threatened on every had appears deeply irrational, and for that reason not likely to be appeased by changes in feminist tactics designed to reassure men that liberated women threaten no one'

- Christopher Lach, 'The Culture of Narcissism(1979)'

In December 1973 the American Psychiatric Association striked homosexuality from the examples of mental illness.

..'but social control was just what some people wanted'. Examples; Rev. Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland, Anita Bryant..

Reagan was the 1st divorcee to become a President.

Ex cop Dan White killed Harvey Milk, fellow SF supervisor, and the mayor, George Moscone.

'Like Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Nixon, Macias of Equatorial Guinea(who killed 50,000 out of population of 300,000, including 18 of his Cabinet ministers) had a pathological mistrust of "intellectuals" '

p.144

Frederick Forsyth practically financed a coup in Africa.

'By the end of 1970s only 3 of the 34 independent African states- Gambia, Ivory Coast and Guinea-Bissau had yet to experience a coup or an attempted coup'

p.150

Seems like it was a favorite pastime of France in this area.

Tom Hayden, who later married Jane Fonda, once worshipped Kim Il Sung at a Berkeley commune.

Warhol taped all his conversations, and on Watergate;

'Everyone should be bugged all the time'

Mao on Watergate;

'What's wrong with having a tape recorder? Do rulers not have the right to rule?'

p.163-4

'Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies, and too much information has been collected'

- Frank Church, Apr. 1976

Norman Mailer was spied by FBI since 1962 on Hoover's orders.

p.169

USA is said to be the only country that combines law enforcement and counter espionage in a single agency.

'During the long reign of Hoover the distinction between crime and political dissent was blurred to invisibility. He believed that both crime and Communism had the same source-overindulgent parents.'

p.171

Hoover had 200 files on Leftists. On the far Right, 2.

Notes; Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization by Immanuel Wallerstein

 'That the emergence of such ethnicity also played a politically divisive role for the working classes has been a political bonus for the employers' 

p.28

'They tried using political influence to create a new monopolistic advantage for themselves..thus monopolistic practice and competitive motivation have been a paired reality of historical capitalism'

p.33

'without the short term concern for the global impact of such behavior..' he questions Adam Smith's assumption of harmony as a result of capitalism

p.34

'This phenomenon of relocation has been part and parcel of historical capitalism from the outset'

p.35

'Each major technological change has been less the motor than the consequence of historical capitalism'

p.37

He argues Capitalism was the method of the elites to maintain the status quo, their social/economical hierarchy.

Thus, 'the trend towards egalitarianization  of reward had been drastically reversed. The upper strata were once again in firm control politically and ideologically'

p.42

He also argues that State power and capitalism came together

p.51-

'the states have regularly spent considerable energy in enforcing their regulation against recalcitrant groups, most particularly work-forces. Worker rebellion has usually brought forth a ready repressive response from the state machineries.

p.52

'redistribution has in fact been more widely used as a mechanism to polarize distribution than to make real income converge'

p.53

then discusses how the state rewards capital; official subsidies, bearing the cost of product development,

'such theft of public revenues as well as correlate corrupt private taxation procedures have been a major source of private accumulation of capital throughout historical capitalism'

'Finally, government have redistributed to the wealthy by utilizing the principle of the individualization of profit but the socialization of risk'

p.54

-

not convinced;

'the vast majority of the populations of the world are objectively and subjectively less well off materially than in previous historical systems, politically as well'

p.40

'it is only in the 20th century that a sign that the historical system of capitalism finally come into structural crisis'

p.43

'construction of state structures was itself one of the central institutional achievements of historical capitalism'

p.48

'All these state decisions were taken with direct reference to the economic implications for the accumulation of capital;

p.52

'taxation has been a steadily expanding phenomenon over the historical development of the capitalist world economy as a percentage of total value created or accumulated..power to tax was one of the most immediate ways in which the state directly assisted the process of accumulation of capital in favor of some groups rather than others'

p.53

finished reading

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by Benjamin M. Friedman  | Jan 26, 2021

Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties / Mike Davis & Jon Wiener

should resume reading Montaigne, Prescott and Historia Augusta

probably should resume reading Proust, too

affection trumps force

 et errat longe, mea quidem sententia,

 Qui imperium credat esse gravius aut stabilius

Vi quod fit, quam ilhud quod amicitia adjungitur.

if you ask my opinion, it is quite untrue that authority is firmer or more stable when it relies on force than when it is associated with affection.

- Terrence, Adelphi, I. i, 40-3

Now reading

 

• The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s / Richard Wolin
• Essays / Michel de Montaigne bk 2, finished bk 1 ages ago
• History of the Conquest of Mexico / William H. Prescott
• The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry Wallace's Anti-Fascist, Anti-Racist Politics / John Nichols
• Lives of the Later Caesars(Augustae Historiae)

Books to read this year

My goal basically is to read all the books I've bought, a herculean task in itself(bought SO MANY all those years).

First priority should be;

BN edition of William Prescott, Mexico and Peru

Cohen-Solal's bio of Sartre

Maxime Godinson's bio of Muhammad(Eaton Press) 

So many novels by USA/UK writers; 

Samuel Johnson & James Boswell(not novels here), Sterne, Dickens, Anthony Powell, Ford Maddox Ford, Waugh, Saki(Munro), Paul Scott, Burgess, C.P. Snow, Fowles, Derek Mahon(Singapore Grip)..

James, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Bellow, Gaddis, Wouk..

 

I'm going to keep reading French lit, should try to finish Montaigne, & Proust(from Captive), also should tackle

The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France 

French Decadent Tales 

Henry James's criticism of French writers is really whetting my appetite, wonder if I should actually learn French to read in the original(so many untranslatable authors, according to James). 

 

Read bio of Goethe, so should actually read Faust and Erotic Poems..

How about Arabian Nights, tr. by Burton.

Bought plenty of non-fictions too; Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Robert Burton, Henry Adams, Burke, Mill, Nietzsche, Bagehot, William James, Freud, Veblen, Sorel, Orwell..

Poetry; Virgil, Dante, Milton, Pope, Coleridge..

Will I actually be able to finish reading all those during a decade lol.

And of course should keep reading Latin and Ancient Greek, for example Tacitus and I have tons of Loeb editions..

Books I've read last year

2020 as yr of the French; Read Proust, Flaubert, Zola, Balzac, de Beauvoir, Camus.. Criticism of Sartre/de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Aron, Camus, etc. by Kolakowski & Judt. Bio of Marc Bloch.  Reading Henry James's criticisms of French writers(LOA)

Of UK/USA writers, finished Joyce's Ulysses, also read Robert Byron, Paul Fussell, Trollope, Compton-Burnett, Gaskell, Allingham(diary), George Eliot, Greene, C. V. Wedgwood, Tuchman, Hobsbawm, Vidal..finished Gibbon's vol.6, Steven Runciman, Mencken's 'Prejudices' 4-6th series, Gerard Brenan's 'Spanish Labyrinth', Mervyn Peake..

Of Big Tomes, read Murasaki Shikibu's 'Tale of Genji', Royall Tyler version

Of bios; Gibbon(only vol. 2 by Craddock), Goethe(vol. 2 by Boyle, read vol. 1 ages ago), Marc Bloch(Fink), Hobsbawm(Evans), Joseph Stilwell(Tuchman), John Ford(McBride), Jed Harris, Robert Evans(autobio)..

 

Books to read this Winter

Already 1 month into it, so gotta hurry up.

Should read Russian lit. during cold Winter, no? So

'Demons' by Dostoyevsky, but I have also Gogol Collected Tales

Also should read 'Middlemarch' by George Eliot(read her 'Adam Bede' this Summer/Fall)

Reading now

Going to record what I'm reading from now on. Can't borrow from the library due to COVID, but have TONS of books I bought before, but lazily didn't even read it lol.

Right now;

 

The Lady In the Lake / Raymond Chandler 

The Gallery / John Horne Burns 

Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson 

Literary Criticism; French Writers / Henry James 

Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668 (Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History) / Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla 

Also have tons of reading material saved on Kindle, the last one being one of them(Iberian...) 

 

Moderate's Fear of the Left

'Moderate opposition of the 1840s..were much more worried by the danger from their left than by the old regimes. From the moment the barricades went up in Paris, all moderate liberals(and, as Cavour observed, a fair proportion of radicals) were potential conservatives'

Eric Hobsbawm, p. 17