The May B-List

Your monthly media supplement of seven recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch.

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1. Iraq: Send in the Clown
by Emine Saner
The Guardian
May 17, 2007

“It is hard to imagine how Jo Wilding’s kidnappers reacted when she told them what she was doing in Iraq. They were in Fallujah, a city under siege in 2003 - and this British woman was claiming to be a clown, in a circus she had brought to a country in the middle of a war.”

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/17/1274/

2. The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?
by Seymour Hersh
The New Yorker
March 5, 2007

“In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The ‘redirection,’ as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh

3. Baghdad Burns, Calgary Booms
Naomi Klein
The Nation
May 31, 2007

“It has become fashionable to predict that high oil prices will spark a free-market response to climate change, setting off an ‘explosion of innovation in alternatives,’ as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote recently. Alberta puts the lie to that claim. High prices have indeed led to an R&D extravaganza, but it is squarely focused on figuring out how to get the dirtiest possible oil out of the hardest-to-reach places.”

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070618/klein

4. Dear Potential Employer…
James M.
Feral Scholar
May 2, 2007

“I am a perfect model of what The System is designed to produce, and as such, my obsequiousness knows no bounds.”

http://stangoff.com/?p=497

5. Hipsters and post-feminism
Subject and Object
April 4, 2007

Hipster-ism. n. 1. A largely generational and metropolitan-centered identity-set whose discourse is typified by irony and fixation with the superficial (clothes, music, hairstyle of an “indie / alternative” variety,) which is awash in self-serving cynicism (e.g. we can’t change anything, so we might as well just get drunk and mock those why try to) and which defensively shrinks from all expressions which could be characterized as “sincere.”

http://subjectandobject.wordpress.com/2007/04/04/hipsters-and-post-feminism/#more-4

6. Hugo Chavez vs. the private media
Bart Jones
Los Angeles Times
May 30, 2007

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been getting a lot of flak in the North American press for refusing to renew the license of a major private broadcaster, but there’s much more to the story than meets the eye.

http://briarpatchmagazine.com/news/?p=450

7. Summer reading recommendation #1: Gate of the Sun
by Elias Khoury
Archipelago Books, 2006

From the dust jacket:

“Gate of the Sun is the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga. After their country is torn apart in 1948, two men remain alone in a deserted makeshift hospital in the Shatila camp on the outskirts of Beirut. We enter a vast world of displacement, fear, and tenuous hope. Khalil holds vigil at the bedside of his patient and spiritual father, a storied leader of the Palestinian resistance who has slipped into a coma. As Khalil attempts to revive Yunes, he begins a story, which branches into many. Stories of the people expelled from their villages in Galilee, of the massacres that followed, of the extraordinary inner strength of those who survived, and of love. Khalil — like Elias Khoury — is a truth collector, trying to make sense of the fragments and various versions of stories that have been told to him. His voice is intimate and direct, his memories are vivid, his humanity radiates from every page. Khalil lets his mind wander through time, from village to village, from one astonishing soul to another, and takes us with him. Gate of the Sun is a Palestinian Odyssey. Beautifully weaving together haunting stories of survival and loss, love and devastation, memory and dream, Khoury humanizes the complex Palestinian struggle as he brings to life the story of an entire people.”

http://www.amazon.ca/Gate-Sun-Elias-Khoury/dp/0976395029

Compiled by Dave Oswald Mitchell

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