Category: Book Reviews
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Debt.2
“We’re used to assuming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but as the great French historian Fernand Braudel (at left in this post) pointed out, in many ways they could equally be conceived as opposites. While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money…capitalism is first and foremost the art…
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Debt.1
Last week I finished a book I really liked called Debt by David Graeber, (Melville Press.) The author is an anthropologist and an activist who has been involved with the “anti-globalization” movement in general, and the Industrial Workers of the World and Occupy Wall Street in particular. He used to teach at Yale but moved…
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MLK Day: What I Didn’t Learn About Jim Crow in School
Today on the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., I would like to recommend two books that helped me view his work in a larger context. The first is Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon, and the second is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. The former taught me a lot about the…
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He’s got 48 pages
I recently finished reading Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which features the longest run-on sentence I’ve ever read. It takes up the entire final chapter of the novel. It is 48 pages long. In Lorrie Moore’s novel A Gate at the Stairs, a student at the University of Wisconsin is smitten by…
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It’s Only Right and Natural
Following up on the last post about Han Bennik and Peter Brötzmann: I mentioned that most animal sounds that appear on records are samples. We used multiple tracks from this disk on the Folk Implosion song Serge – they all have different characteristics. Both the tracks, and the frogs, I mean. They remind me of…
johnhdavis / inundation records 