Wie eine Woge im Meer

Wenn jemand mit dem Trinken aufgehört hat, besteht die Gefahr, dass er rückfällig wird, klar. Im Entzug lernt man, mit dieser Gefahr umzugehen. Sie ist im ersten Jahr nach der Entwöhnung am höchsten, aber auch danach keineswegs aus der Welt. Die Leute in der Klinik haben uns von früh bis spät eingebläut. Es wird Krisen geben, Momente, in denen ihr traurig seid, euch nach der Vergangenheit zurücksehnt und Angst vor der Zukunft habt. In diesen Momenten werdet ihr Lust haben zu trinken, und diese Lust wird euch unwiderstehlich erscheinen, sie wird euch überrollen wie eine Woge. Aber sie ist nicht unwiderstehlich, das kommt euch nur so vor, weil ihr euch schwach fühlt. In Wirklichkeit kommt und geht sie, genau wie eine Woge im Meer. Ihr kennt das doch: Wenn euch beim Baden eine Welle überspült, taucht ihr für ein paar Sekunden unter, aber ihr seid gleich wieder oben, auch wenn es euch wie eine Ewigkeit vorkommt - vorausgesetzt, ihr bleibt ruhig und geratet nicht in Panik. Und genau das müsst ihr auch in diesen kritischen Momenten tun: Ruhe bewahren und nicht in Panik beraten. Denkt daran, dass die Welle vorübergeht und ihr den Kopf gleich wieder über Wasser habt. Wenn ihr den unwiderstehlichen Drang verspürt, zu trinken, tut etwas, um die Sekunden oder Minuten zu überbrücken, die dieser Drang andauert. Macht Kniebeugen, lauft zwei Kilometer querfeldein, esst einen Apfel, ruft einen Freund an. Irgendetwas, das euch hilft, an nichts zu denken.
Gianrico Carofiglio: Reise in die Nacht

In Brazil

When, a few days ago, I arrived at São Paulo's Guarulhos Airport, I had about 90 minutes to go through passport control, clear customs, and catch my flight to Porto Alegre. I looked at the long queues and thought: no way. Yet when an hour later I had passed through passport control and been waved through customs I became hopeful again. This hope however vanished a few minutes later when I realised that there was another queue at the transit check-in counter. I'm Swiss and so I usually do not jump the queue but this time I did. I went directly to the counter, waved my ticket, said Porto Alegre and sort of expected (by this time I had only physically but not mentally arrived in Brazil) to be told to go and stand in line. But no, the lady at the counter (who was busy putting tags on what looked like the entire household of a very large family) smiled, looked at the ticket and said I should get my luggage and come right here. Five minutes later I was on my way to my Porto Alegre flight.

Rising Sun

Michael Crichton's books come with a bibliography, and I love that - I find it an excellent way to make it easy for the reader to become more knowledgeable. The bibliography of Rising Sun (1992, Ballantine Books, New York) is introduced with these words:

“This novel questions the conventional premise that direct foreign investment in American high technology is by definition good, and therefore should be allowed to continue without restraint or limitation. I suggest things are not so simple.
Although this book is fiction, my approach to Japan’s economic behavior, and America’s inadequate response to it, follows a well-established body of expert opinion, much of it listed in the bibliography. Indeed, in preparing this novel, I have drawn heavily from a number of the sources below.
I hope readers will be provoked to read farther from more knowledgeable authors. I have listed the principal texts in rough order of readability and pertinence to the issues raised in the novel.”

I enjoyed Rising Sun immensely for it not only entertained but taught me quite a bit – which is precisely why I read: to be entertained and to be taught. Here are some quotes:

“In Japan”, Connor said, “if a company is doing poorly, the first thing that happens is the executives cut their own salaries. They feel responsible for the success of the company, and they expect their own fortunes to rise and fall as the company succeeds or fails.”Connor sighed “It took me a long time to understand,” he said, “that Japanese behaviour is based on the values of a farm village. You hear a lot about samurai and feudalism, but deep down, the Japanese are farmers. And if you lived in a farm village and you displeased the other villagers, you were banished. And that meant you died, because no other village would take in a troublemaker. So. Displease the group and you die. That’s the way they see it. It means the Japanese are exquisitely sensitive to the group. More than anything, they are attuned to getting along with the group. It means not standing out, not taking a chance, not being too individualistic. It also means not necessarily insisting on the truth. The Japanese have very little faith in truth. It strikes them as cold and abstract. It’s like a mother who’s son is accused of a crime. She doesn’t care much about the truth. She cares more about her son. The same with the Japanese. To the Japanese, the important thing is relationships between people. That’s the real truth. The factual truth is unimportant.”

This is the twentieth century. Leadership is the quality of telling people what they want to hear.

I found myself thinking of Lauren. When I knew her, she was bright and ambitious, but she really didn’t understand very much. She had grown up privileged, she had gone to Ivy League schools, and had the privileged person’s deep belief that whatever she happened to think was probably true. Certainly good enough to live by. Nothing needed to be checked against reality.

Cell phones

What surprised me most my first few days walking around the city? The most obvious thing - the cell phones. We had no reception as yet up on my mountain, and down in Athena, where they do have it, I'd rarely see people striding the streets talking uninhibitedly into their phones. I remembered a New York when the only people walking up Broadway seemingly talking to themselves were crazy. What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say - so much so pressing that it couldn't wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers were on the phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone. For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time, I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the streets through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of the city inspire. For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must inevitably have a dramatic effect. What will the consequence be? You know you can reach the other person anytime, and if you can't, you get impatient - impatient and angry like a stupid little god. I understood that background silence had long been abolished from restaurants, elevators, and ballparks, but that the immense loneliness of human beings should produce this boundless longing to be heard, and the accompanying disregard for being overheard - well, having lived largely in the era of the telephone booth whose substantial folding doors could be tightly pulled shut, I was impressed by the conspicuousness of it all and found myself entertaining the idea for a story in which Manhattan has turned into a sinister collectivity where everyone is spying on everyone else, everyone being tracked by the person at the other end of his or her phone, even though, incessantly dialing one another from wherever they like in the great out of doors, the telephoners believe themselves to be experiencing the maximum freedom. I knew that merely by thinking up such a scenario I was at one with all the cranks who imagined, from the beginnings of industrialization, that the machine was the enemy of life. Still, I could not help it: I did not see how anyone could believe he was continuing to live a human existence by walking about talking into a phone for half his waking life. No, those gadgets did not promise to be a boon to promoting reflection among the general public.
Philip Roth: Exit Ghost

The stories that pictures do not tell

A few days ago, Soundscapes, the Online Journal on Media Culture from Groningen, The Netherlands, published my piece on "The stories that pictures do not tell" in which I argued that:

There is no such thing as a right or a wrong reading of a photograph, there is however a more or less informed, and a more or less biased one. A photograph cannot show what was going on at the moment it was taken, it can only depict what the camera was then able to capture and record — everthing else is simply not there, it is brought to, and read into, the picture.

And, ... contrary to widely held convictions, the photograph cannot tell the story of what happened. It is the words that accompany the photo that tell the story, or the stories (usually there are more than one) — and occasionally the wrong ones for what we are reading into pictures often can't be found there, it exists only in our imaginative minds.

For the full text, go here

Bill Maher

A few days ago, I came across a refreshingly unorthodox piece by Bill Maher that reminded me of Churchill's remark that the best argument against democracy is a ten minute conversation with an average voter. Here's an excerpt:

... did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That's right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which one came first.

And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy? Please, this country is like a college chick after two Long Island Iced Teas: we can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget town halls, and replace them with study halls. There's a lot of populist anger directed towards Washington, but you know who concerned citizens should be most angry at? Their fellow citizens. "Inside the beltway" thinking may be wrong, but at least it's thinking, which is more than you can say for what's going on outside the beltway.

And if you want to call me an elitist for this, I say thank you. Yes, I want decisions made by an elite group of people who know what they're talking about. That means Obama budget director Peter Orszag, not Sarah Palin.

The full text you'll find here

Lisbeth Salander

Ich bewundere Lisbeth Salander. Sie ist tougher als ich. Hätte mich jemand als 13-Jährige ein Jahr lang an ein Bett gefesselt, wäre ich völlig zusammengebrochen. Sie hat jedoch mit der einzigen Waffe zurückgeschlagen, die sie hatte. Nämlich ihrer Verachtung für Sie. Sie weigert sich, mit Ihnen zu sprechen.
Stieg Larsson: Vergebung