June 2007 Bibliographies

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Ali Symons
pp. 18-20

If you and your office mates have to settle for a lunch of vending machine pretzels and Coke, and if the only available recreational activity is briskly walking to fetch said pretzels and Coke, then Time magazine’s photo essay “Life in the Googleplex” might be enough to incite a workplace revolution. As the piece suggests, coffee break at the Googleplex would be more aptly named “volleyball break,” “billiard break,” “swim break,” “fine art appreciation break,” or “massage break.” Hmmmph.

For foodies interested in “Foodie” facts, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article on food culture at the Mountain View Google headquarters. Be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page for the Mushroom Cioppino and Tuna Confit recipes provided by renowned Google chefs.

If you, like Symons, have yet to see a server farm, a photo of Google’s first production server, circa 1999, will give you an idea of what you might be missing.


All That Glitters
Adnan Khan
pp. 20-24

Heading to Afghanistan to take advantage of its potentially lucrative (and often illegal) gem trade? Don’t get on the plane without Mining Journal’s authoritative report on the country’s gem industry. Once you’re there, to be sure you know exactly what you’re doing, consult Lapidary Journal’s step-by-step guide to gem cutting. If you find the instructions a little technical, you may prefer to simply shop till you drop, in which case you’ll be grateful if you’ve got access to International Gem Society president Don Clark’s Consumer’s Guide to Gem Grading.

What if nothing strikes your fancy? You can always stop off in the UK on your way home to check out the monarchy’s Imperial State Crown, featuring the Black Prince Ruby and world’s second largest diamond, at 317.4 carats, the Cullinan II of Africa. Or you could avoid the bother of travel altogether and rent the 1965 Jerry Lewis classic The Family Jewels.


Holy Intercourse
Jonathan Link
pp. 24-26

Islamic sexologist Dr. Kotb is not alone in her rejection of homosexuality. In Pakistan, those who have committed acts of “sexual deviance” may be put to death. The Current recently ran a documentary about a young Pakistani woman who struggles with her lesbian identity in a society that forbids it.

Zawaj.com’s Straight Talk about Sex is a gateway to a variety of sources on the subject of sex in Islam—some religious, some clinical, some entertaining. The articles are conveniently arranged in categories, including “The Islamic Perspective on Sexuality,” “Prohibited Sexual Acts,” and “Birth Control and Family Planning.”

Last year, an expert on Islamic law at al-Azhar university in Cairo spurred a peculiar debate when he argued that total nudity during sexual intercourse invalidates marriage. In reporting on the controversy, the Guardian looks at various dictates for proper sexual practices in Islam, which occasionally make for steamy reading.


Permanent Ways
Antonia Malchik
pp. 26-28

Adventurers heading to Russia should visit WayToRussia.net, a comprehensive guide to travel in the motherland. Trains on the St. Petersburg-Moscow route run both ways frequently; for a longer haul, the Trans-Siberian Railway, beginning in Moscow and finishing in Vladistovok, is still the world’s longest.

The Russian soul is a central point of interest in Russia’s modern literary heritage. Among the classics of world literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (New York: Vintage, 2003) and Notes from the Underground (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2004) both explore existential suffering in nineteenth-century Russian life. Similar themes are evoked in epics like War and Peace (New York: Penguin Books, 2006; Anthony Briggs trans.) and Anna Karenina (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), both by Leo Tolstoy, as well as Doctor Zhivago (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998; WM Collins Sons & Co trans.) by Nobel Prize-winner—and renouncer—Boris Pasternak. The dynamic duo of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translated the editions of Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, and Anna Karenina referenced here. Their take on War and Peace comes out in November 2007, published by Knopf.

In the Soviet era, the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have come to typify Russian suffering under the communist-cum-totalitarian Stalinist regime, though Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov, and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others, have also garnered critical acclaim in the West.

Contemporary Russian writers of note include Vassily Aksyonov, whose acclaimed Generations of Winter (New York: Random House, 1995; John Glad and Christopher Morris trans.) documents a Russian-Georgian family through the beginning of Stalin’s era to the end of World War II, and Ludmila Ulitskaya, whose Sonechka: A Novella and Short Stories (New York: Schocken, 2005; Arch Tait trans.) chronicles the lives of women in Soviet Russia. A broader view of modern Russia is offered in Pushkin’s Children: Writing on Russia and Russians (New York: Mariner Books, 2003; Jamey Gambrell trans.), a compilation of essays and book reviews written by Tatyana Tolstaya between 1990 and 2000.


Forgiveness
June Callwood
pp. 36-37

Acclaimed Canadian journalist and social activist June Callwood had a long and remarkable career not only in print but also in television. The CBC has archived multiple video clips of Callwood discussing everything from battling depression to donning false eyelashes. In her final interview, Callwood spoke frankly with The Hour’s George Stroumboulopoulos about her life and preparing for her death.

In The Sunflower (Expanded edition. New York: Shocken, 1998), Simon Wiesenthal explores the “possibilities and limits of forgiveness” in two sections. The first part recounts his imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp and the dilemma he faced when a young SS trooper begged his forgiveness. In the second part, he asks fifty-three prominent intellectuals how they would have responded. Herbert Marcuse is one of the few to flatly refuse forgiveness; read his response online.

A Campaign for Forgiveness Research has funded forty-six research projects on the effects of forgiveness, including the Stanford Forgiveness Study, an exploration of the impact of multiple types of forgiveness training on almost 200 grudge holders. The campaign’s website also features forgiveness videos by co-chairs Bishop Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter.

In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1995), Nelson Mandela recounts how he came to forgive his adversaries. Chapter Ten, “Talking With The Enemy,” is particularly relevant.


“The Society of Difference”
Adrienne Clarkson
pp. 38-40

As one of the world’s most multicultural and pluralistic countries, Canada epitomizes the notion of civic nationalism: a country defined by its many unique and distinct nations, ethnic groups, and individuals. It is therefore unsurprising that Canada’s contribution to the global human rights debate has been significant. John Peters Humphrey, a Canadian legal scholar, was largely responsible for drafting the United Nation’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since then, Canadians have famously formed the vanguard of the debate, focusing on issues such as multiculturalism and civic nationalism as well as passing legislation that aims to protect the rights of ethnic minorities, gays, women, children, minority languages, aboriginals.

Despite great progress made since the end of World War II, however, many key human rights issues remain highly contentious. In Canada, scholars and policy-makers alike have grappled with immigrant integration, competing nationalisms, and group rights versus individual rights. One of Canada’s foremost political thinkers, Charles Taylor, tackles these issues in his Massey Lecture, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1991). Taking a broad, philosophical approach, Taylor argues that group identity is an essential element of contemporary social fabric.

A second Massey Lecture, Michael Ignatieff’s The Rights Revolution (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2000), provides an overview of the development of human rights in modern legal and political practices. Following Taylor’s lead, Ignatieff pays specific attention to the group-versus-individual-rights quandary, particularly as it relates to Canadian multinationalism and Quebec separatism. In Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), political philosopher Will Kymlicka provides a policy-oriented spin on the debate, arguing that Canadian domestic policy should reflect the growing interconnectedness between ethnic, cultural, and sociological groups within Canada.


Verse and Versatility
Stephen Henighan
pp. 42-45

To find out more about the annual Granada Poetry Festival, provided you can read Spanish, check out its website. You won’t really understand the festival’s flavour, however, until you also read up on Granada’s ancient, American foe, William Walker, who ordered the city burned to the ground before his own career as a roving warlord went up in flames. Try this account, excerpted from a history of California filibusterers.

In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas are back in power for the first time since 1990, when they lost national elections. Also making a comeback are their old antagonists from the Reagan era. Find out just how involved the White House was in selling weapons to Iran and diverting the money to the Nicaraguan Contras (who were waging a war against the ruling Sandinistas) in the 1980s, at the National Security Archive’s spotlight on this topic. The review of declassified documents includes the revelation that newly minted US Secretary of State Robert Gates may have played a significant role in the scandal.

Read up on Sandinista poets in their own words. Cosmic Canticle (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1993; Jonathan Lyons, trans.), Ernesto Cardenal’s answer to fellow red-bard Pablo Neruda’s Canto General is one long reflection, in verse, on politics and the universe. And Gioconda Belli has written an acclaimed prose memoir titled The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War (New York: Knopf, 2002).

Up in Guatemala, everyone is still coming to grips with a thirty-six-year civil war in which over 200,000 people were murdered in what has frequently been called an act of genocide. Memory of Silence contains the conclusions and recommendations from the Commission for Historical Clarification on the civil war. You can also access the full report in Spanish. For lighter fare on Guatemala’s indigenous culture, read Nobel winner Rigoberta Menchú’s children’s book, The Girl from Chimel (Toronto: Groundwood Books, 2005).

Meanwhile, if you’re wondering exactly how George W. Bush-worshipping
Central American governments have become, skip the lurid op-eds and read the recently signed Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) to judge for yourself.


Notwithstanding
Michael Healey
pp. 46-53

Passed on April 17, 1982, as Schedule B of the Canada Act, the Canadian Constitution has, for better or worse, permanently reshaped Canada’s political landscape. F. L. Morton’s Law, Politics, and the Judicial Process in Canada (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002) provides an overview of the relationship between judicial review and politics in Canada, beginning with essays by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson and finishing off with discussions of the notwithstanding clause, Canadian federalism, and the Supreme Court.

Readers specifically interested in sections 1 to 34 of the Constitution Act—the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—could start by browsing the February 2007 issue of Policy Options, watching panels from the 25th-anniversary conference at McGill, or reading the Charter text proper. An informative overview of the Charter’s effects on Canadian society can be found at Collections Canada, and the Library of Parliament hosts an excellent (if loquacious) page discussing the notwithstanding clause. For the dogged, the full text of all Supreme Court of Canada decisions are hosted by both Université de Montréal and CanLII; Mapleleaf Web runs a useful database of summaries. Politically noteworthy decisions include R v. Oakes, which produced the Oakes Test and set the template for all future Supreme Court cases; Figueroa v. Canada, which overturned the electoral legislation in the Canada Elections Act that disadvantaged smaller political parties; Harper v. Canada, which set third-party spending limits in elections; and reference cases on same-sex marriage and Quebec secession.

Quebec’s own Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms can be found here.


A Russian Tragedy
Alex Shoumatoff
pp. 54-65

“A Russian Tragedy” is correspondent Alex Shoumatoff’s debut for The Walrus, but he’s been working in the glossy-magazine biz since the 1970s, when he reported for the New Yorker and Rolling Stone. Shoumatoff’s website, Dispatches from the Vanishing World, has an extensive archive of his work, including “Russian Blood,” a family memoir he wrote for the New Yorker in 1982. He’s also published several books, including a now out-of-print extended version of “Russian Blood” (Russian Blood; New York: Vintage, 1990).

As Shoumatoff points out, the current situation in Russia is dire for the free press. The Committee to Protect Journalists has a continually updated section on the Russian press here, and the 2007 report on Russia from Reporters Without Borders can be found here. The Novaya Gazeta writer Anna Politkovskaya, who was assassinated last year, had several of her articles reprinted in English for the Guardian, along with this interview. The Russian daily newspaper Kommersant, whose correspondent Ivan Safronov was murdered in March 2007, has published this account of his death.

Of course, Russia isn’t just a dangerous place for journalists—with the spectres of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and major population decline, the country has become a dangerous place for every one of its inhabitants. New Yorker correspondent Michael Specter wrote an excellent, if harrowing, report about Russia’s AIDS epidemic in October 2004. If you can read Russian, see the government’s official population statistics at this site.

If you want a more whimsical look at Russia’s woes (and we wouldn’t blame you), check out the humourous website for Uncle Pasha’s Little Empire, as written by Shoumatoff’s Russian fixer, Pasha Voytinksy. Although Pasha no longer runs the “Misery Tours” mentioned in the piece, his website still runs a full itinerary for the tour. And while Russia’s press is still having a hard time, the Federation’s blogosphere is flourishing: this anti-Putin site has a particularly comprehensive links section to various blogs, think tanks, and human rights websites.


Oasis of Hope
Layne Coleman
pp. 66-74

Carole Corbeil died of cancer in 2000 but left behind an acclaimed body of writing, including two novels. Voice-Over (Toronto: Stoddart, 1992), her semi-autobiographical debut, won the Toronto Book Award in 1993, while her second novel, In the Wings (Toronto: Stoddart, 1999), was adapted for the Theatre Passe Muraille stage by Layne Coleman.

Cancer treatments that eschew chemotherapy and radiation in favour of an organic diet and detoxification continue to be controversial. Dr. Thomas J. Wheeler, who taught a course on the subject at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in 2004, posted his online reading list here. With titles such as “The Safety and Efficacy of Shark Cartilage in the Treatment of Advanced Cancer” and “Questionable Cancer Therapies,” the list guides readers toward a scientific perspective on the issue.

The San Diego-based Gerson Institute, founded by Charlotte Gerson in 1977, promotes natural (organic), alternative therapies—round-the-clock carrot juice and coffee enemas—for the treatment of a wide range of degenerative diseases, including cancer. Gerson-licenced doctors base their treatment on the findings of Charlotte’s father, Dr. Max Gerson, who appeared before a US Senate subcommittee in 1946 to argue for the importance of diet in cancer treatment. Dr. Gerson’s A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases and the Cure of Advanced Cancer (New York: Whittier Books, 1958) is in its sixth edition and remains a seminal work in the field of alternative cancer therapy. The institute’s website features a short documentary on Dr. Gerson’s discovery and the founding of the organization, as well as the environmental causes of disease and the proposed cure.


Peaking on the Prairies
Jake MacDonald
pp. 76-84

LSD isn’t just for High Times readers, conspiracy-mongers, and celebrity potheads. Lysergic acid diethylamide is also a subject of growing interest to psychiatric researchers and academics. University of Alberta professor Dr. Erika Dyck has written extensively about the clinical use of LSD in Canada; her 2005 article for the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry looks at Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond’s seminal Saskatchewan experiments of the 1950s and 60s, which studied the effects of LSD on patients suffering from schizophrenia and alcoholism.

There are a huge number of websites, articles, and books about the CIA and MKULTRA’s use of LSD in behaviour-modification programs. Most are torridly written and questionably sourced, but three books—Jay Steven’s Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (Boston: Grove/Atlantic, 1998), Jon Ronson’s humourous The Men Who Stare at Goats (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), and Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain’s Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (Boston; Grove/Atlantic, 1991)—stand out among an otherwise dubious pack.

Timothy Leary: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, 2007), Robert Greenfield’s critical look at the life and work of the iconic LSD “guru,” was also recently published in paperback. (You can read Louis Menand’s entertaining review of the book here.) Albert Hofmann, the Swiss biochemist who discovered LSD by accident in 1943, had a rather more ambivalent attitude toward the drug than Leary, as can be surmised by the title of his memoir, LSD: My Problem Child (Boston: MAPS, 2005), the full text of which can be found online. A lively High Times profile of Captain Al Hubbard (“the Johnny Appleseed of LSD”) is posted at the Disinformation website, while Hollywood Hospital clinician Frank Ogden—the self-styled “Dr. Tomorrow”—has his own site.

If you’re interested in LSD science (rather than LSD rumour), check out the MAPS website, run by an American lobbying organization which campaigns for the legalization of psychedelic drugs for medicinal use. MAPS is currently funding a pilot study in Switzerland in which twelve participants with life-threatening illnesses will undergo LSD-assisted psychotherapy.

Of course, for some people—like our writer Jake MacDonald—acid was just a cool drug that got you high and made The Doors sound tolerable. At BlotterArt.com, you can search (and purchase) the internet’s largest archive of acid blotter art—there’s even a special section for Deadheads.


The Mindful Museum
Adam Gopnik
pp. 86-91

Art critic Robert Hughes, whom modern art fans may know from his television series “Shock of the New” (BBC, 1980) and “American Visions” (PBS, 1997), relates his experience as an Australian kid visiting European museums for the first time in Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 2006). However, the memoir doesn’t linger exclusively in the art world; Hughes offers candid thoughts on growing up in Australia, his relationship to his distant father, and, most compellingly, on the 1999 car crash that nearly killed him.

Trust John Updike to bring a touch of eroticism to museums. “Museums and Women,” a short story that first appeared in the New Yorker (Nov. 18, 1967), transforms well-lit institutions resounding with school-tour chatter into intimate and seductively silent spaces where the protagonist courts the various loves of his life. The opening paragraph alone, which describes the near-conjugal fusion of the words “museums” and “women,” is enough to get language lovers’ hearts racing.

Gopnik’s friend and colleague Kirk Varnedoe was curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1988 to 2001. According to Gopnik, Varnedoe’s curatorial style exemplified key qualities of the mindful museum, and though it’s no longer possible to see one of his shows first hand, the lavish catalogues for the two Varnedoe-curated retrospectives mentioned in Gopnik’s article are still available: Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006; Roberta Bernstein co-author) contains 483 illustrations while Cy Twombly: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994) includes 187 images, ninety-four of which are glossy colour plates.

The Royal Ontario Museum will soon open its Michael Lee-Chin Crystal (a.k.a the massive pointy glass extension that juts out onto Bloor Street in Toronto). Will this new ROM be a mindful museum? Check out designer Daniel Libeskind’s thoughts on the project at his website and also Joey Slinger’s column (May 3, 2007) in the Toronto Star, which gives the public permission to think it’s just plain ugly.


The Sounds of Science
Alexander Gelfand
pp. 92-95

R. Luke DuBois, the electronic musician profiled by Alexander Gelfand in “The Sounds of Science,” keeps a well-stocked website that includes several free mp3s. “Billboard,” DuBois’s 37-minute-long condensation of the history of the Billboard Hot 100, is only available in short excerpts, but if you want to hear more, you can purchase and download the whole shebang at Cantaloupe Music.

Incredibly, Lejaren Hiller’s 1957 “ILLIAC Suite,” one of the first pieces of music generated on computer, is not available online, although there are plenty of web pages cataloguing Hiller’s creation of the piece. The All Music Guide, meanwhile, keeps a fairly comprehensive and link-heavy guide to Musique Concrète; and at obsolete.com you can find more than you’ll ever need to know about 120 years of electronic musical instrumentation. (The site also keeps a terrific list of electronic music history.)

Stacks of (often cripplingly academic) books have been written about twentieth- century electronic music, but if you’re looking for a beginner’s introduction Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Simon Reynolds’ Generation Ecstasy (New York: Hachette, 1999) are both accessible and well-written primers. If you want to hear rather than read about the stuff, your best bet is OHM’s 2000 three-CD box set, The Early Gurus of Electronic Music.