White on Black by Ruben Gallego
white on black
Adam Mars-Jones Guardian review
Complete Review's review plus other review summaries (and links)Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International literatureRobert Skidelsky in NewstatesmanWhite on Black belongs to a distinctively Russian genre, with no exact equivalent in the west. It is not reportage, but neither is it fiction. Perhaps the best word for it would be "witness". It is divided up into a series of short stories, each recounting a single incident. These stories make no claim to historical truth. Their target is essential truth - pravda. They are icons of suffering and resilience, cruelty and kindness. This has nothing to do with "literature" in the western sense, with its omnivorous curiosity and surface polish, but it has a beauty of its own. Lovers of the later Tolstoy and of Solzhenitsyn will appreciate its value.
Weblog
The Middle Stage review
Willing and Disabled Moscow Times
Book cover photo of young and further down adult
profile of Ruben Gallego by
Kate kellaway
profile
In searching for these reviews came across these two chess games:
Joan Fluvia-Poyatos vs. Ruben Gallego
Ruben Gallego vs Gerard Welling
...In the middle of the night I listened to one episode and was drawn back to "Cancer Ward". This hits the button for me and is a great help as I read the Marxist stuff.
Rejecting the ideology of his youth, Solzhenitsyn came to believe that the struggle between good and evil cannot be resolved among parties, classes or doctrines, but is waged within the individual human heart. This Tolstoian view and search for Christian morality was considered radical in the ideological atmosphere of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s. Solzhenitsyn assumed the role of an observer as the great 19th-century Russian writers who prided themselves on their truthful depiction of the society. He became a chronicler, witness whose own experiences are part of the way to approach truth and judge. Thus he could shift from a "neutral" third-person narrative to a direct transcription of the unuttered thoughts of his protagonists, use kaleidoscopic sequences of events and numerous personal testimonies, and extrapolate from individual case histories. "Where can I read about us? Will that be only in a hundred years?" says a woman in Cancer Ward.
Also reminds me something Leonard Cheshire said : '..the little things...not the big', though what the exact words were I can't remember.This on Cancer Ward from a medical perspective
12 Books Which Changed The World
Melvyn Bragg 's soon-to-be-aired ITV programme will include
• The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin, 1859)
• The first rule book of the Football Association (1863)
• William Shakespeare's First Folio (1623)
• Principia Mathematica (Isaac Newton, 1687)
• The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith, 1776)
• William Wilberforce's Commons speech, 12 May, 1789
• King James Bible (1611)
• Patent specification for Arkwright's spinning machine (1769)
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792)
• Experimental Research in Electricity (Michael Faraday, 1855)
• Married Love (Marie Stopes, 1918)
• Magna Carta (1215)
To which I as an Englishman of a certain age am bound to parrot like an imbecile:
Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain? Brave Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and close the boozers at half past ten! Is all this to be forgotton? My friends, it is not John Harrison Peabody who is on trial here today but the fair name of British justice, and I ask you to send that poor boy back to the loving arms of his poor white-haired old mother a free man! I thank you!
Anthony Aloysius St. John Handcock
Hancock's Half Hour No. 41 “twelve Angry Men”
Bless! This person has transcribed the whole C[h]arter but clearly been effected by listening to H-ancock :
I confess to not having read Magna Carta until just now. If indeed that was what I was reading and not something else.
Any mention of its name would probably pass by the minds of the more senior members of the current American Administration, as would the name Thomas Paine, who must be a contender for the 12. I like this Vindication of Thomas Paine by Robert G Ingersoll written in 1877.
One or two, at the mention of angry men in the Galton and Simpson script, might twig the great American film starring Henry Fonda.
Magna Carta probably has had a big effect on people, the world, since its writing, but few realise it.
A commenter in Samizdata, quotes 1066 and All That:
Magna Charter...was invented by the Barons on a desert island in the Thames called Ganymede. By congregating there, armed to the teeth, the Barons compelled John to sign the Magna Charter, which said:
1. That no one should be put to death, save for some reason - (except the Common People).
2. That everyone should be free - (except the Common People).
3. That everything should be of the same weight and measure throughout the realm - (except the Common People).
4. That the Courts should be stationary, instead of following a very tiresome medieval official known as the King's Person all over the country.
5. That 'no person should be fined to his utter ruin' - (except the King's Person).
6. That the Barons should not be tried except by a special jury of other Barons who would understand.
Magna Charter was therefore the chief cause of Democracy in England and was therefore a Good Thing for everyone (except the Common People).
to which - in rebutal of all those who say the interweb is worthless - comes a reproachful comment further down about it being Rumymede not Ganymede ! At least with the telephone there is a chance of sensing a touch of irony. Happily, the mishmash of irreconcilable agendas, incommensurability of values, (i), half-truths, misunderstood jokes and simple confusion which are part of normal life are echoed on the interweb.
If you follow the comment stream to the end there, in essence, it is, I suppose.
...
Is there no work which was originally written in a language other than English which could be included in this list? Or is it to be English books which changed the world? Fair enough.
...
Kins Collins has made what would seem to be an irrefutable point about mathematics :
I consider mathematics to have a unique and superior place among the sciences, it being the sole human intellectual endevor [sic.], whether art, science, or religion, that is truly cumulative, in the sense that what the ancient Greeks discovered is till valid today.
Occulted etymology
In the summer of 1993 a very impressive manoeuvre was put in place to occult the documents.....
SFO report on David MillsHaving never heard this use of the word before it was interesting to etymologise a tad:occultedNota bene:
Latin occultus, secret and past participle of occulere, to cover overv.intr.To become concealed or extinguished at regular intervals: a lighthouse beacon that occults every 45 seconds. Makes the use of the word even more interesting in the current financial/political embroglio
Running with this a little: there are words which, despite their various meanings, hold the reader on the page momentarily. No matter how many times meaning is checked, one seems to override others. As I re-read this phrase I get a faint whiff of Aleister Crowley. Images of documents laid out on ground being circled by naked forms in the dead of night.
Now I've come across it in text I will make a small survey to see if occulted pops up anywhere else. I am expecting to find it in academic texts, but this usage smacks of doctors notes. In fact the medical definitions are:
1. Hidden; concealed
2. Detectable only by microscopic examination or chemical analysis
3. Not accompanied by readily detectable signs or symptoms
Not surprising to find it in a SFO report, then, what with all the Latin jargon of ages in law. Expecting a simple 'hide' would be too much. Here hiding a simpler meaning behind a more obscure word is the norm.
Later:
The first two or three pages of occluded in Google were astronomy and science related:
The Astronomy of occultations, etc.
The first ordinary headline with occluded:
The 90th Commemoration of a Denied and Occulted Genocide!
The 'occluded character' pops up once. This is much better than hidden. This word is growing on me.
Occulted power transforms and deconstructs the violent heterosexual yoking comprising patriarchal dominance.
Shakespeare's Celtic Imaginary
And:
http://www.brynmawr.edu/visualculture/journal/p_derrida.shtml
which is a completely shut door to me, but the paragraph:
The trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility in the entire field of the entity, which metaphysics has defined as the being-present starting from the occulted movement of the trace. The trace must be thought before the entity. But the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted, it produces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces itself as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself.
makes me suspect this is the sort of source for the spread of the use outside technical writing.
The Seventeenth Century of Occultation & Surface(1) .....belonging to an occulted time.
(2) As such there are no signifiers in circulation, as in the familiar Freudian theory of the unconscious, in which connections are made in the hidden or occulted psychical paths of the unconscious.
