Recent Reading

I'm trying in my mind to "see" Miriam, but can only summon her outline. Toby is tall and broad, Miriam is tiny beside him. I can see hair but no details. Her face is a blank. She and Toby are at a party--Joan Mellon's penthouse in Philadelphia? It is the early '90s. Toby is my teacher in the Temple University Graduate English Department. He smokes in his non-smoking office, sitting with the window cracked in the bitterest cold.

Toby tries to fill out Miriam's outline in this rich memoir, but she has declined and dissipated and become another woman who is at once still Miriam and at once not her at all.






Three schoolgirls from rural Kansas enter their local National History Day contest with research about a forgotten hero of the Warsaw Ghetto. Their simple play about Irena Sendler--"Life in a Jar"--leads them on an incredible voyage. Makes me want to tackle NHD with my students!



Isha was married to R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, who taught Fulcanelli, among others. He had made a study of the statuary and reliefs on medieval cathedrals, and had learned anew the secret of the blue glass at Chartres. He realized the great Gothic cathedrals encoded an ancient knowledge also visible in the monuments of Egypt. Isha and Schwaller worked for more than a decade at Karnak, attempting to re-construct the ancient ritual practices of Earth's most enduring and successful civilization. Here she uses a novel to demonstrate the initiation of modern men into these ancient mysteries--"when the student is ready, the teacher will appear."

Unforeseen Prescience

The current issue of Foreign Policy has a timely article on Hosni Mubarak and Egyptian discontent. Money quote: "Yet an increasing number of Egyptians no longer think their country's situation is all that funny, and they are turning the national talent for wit into a more aggressive weapon of political dissidence."

I'm growing weary of the worry amongst the punditry and policy wonks about post-Mubarak Egypt: either you're for democracy or you're not. Whether or not the Egyptians elect people who maintain our 'interests' is not the point. We'll work with the government the governed choose. It's time we stop basing the "national interest" soley on protecting resources for ourselves and maintaining security at the cost of others' freedoms.