The three Bs of summer | LitBash 32

Summertime means rivers of cold beer. You're spending dearly to quench your thirst. But summer also means plenty of good reads. Yet, as John Lubbock observed: "How little our libraries cost us as compared with our liquor cellars." You can balance out your summer spending budget with the three Bs: a beach, a beer, and a book. Start with authors who were:

Born this week:

Elias Canetti, Austria
"The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well."

Ambroise-Marie Robert Carré, France

Andre Maurois, France
"Revolt against a tyrant is legitimate; it can succeed. Revolt against human nature is doomed to failure."

Aldous Huxley, UK
"Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead."

Vladimir Korolenko, Russia

Guido Piovene, Italy

Alexandre Dumas, France
"Sleeping on a plank has one advantage - it encourages early rising."

Malcolm Lowry, UK
"What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?"

Eyvind Johnson, Sweden
"One should think that you're someone living in the future and that you have to judge - approve or disapprove - the I that acts today, the I that keeps up or fails."

Ernst Glaeser, Germany

Emily Bronte, UK
"I'm now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself."

Aasmund Vinje, Norway

Primo Levi, Italy
"A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful."

Walter Vogt, Switzerland

Died this week:

Mikhail Lermontov, Russia
"Many a calm river begins as a turbulent waterfall, yet none hurtles and foams all the way to the sea."

Gertrude Stein, USA
"Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume."

Cyrano de Bergerac, France
"You are now bearing the punishment for the shortcomings of your world. Here, as in your world, there are benighted people who cannot tolerate thinking about things they are not accustomed to."

Erich Kastner, Germany

Helge Krog, Norway

Denis Diderot, France
"From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, France
"Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; What is essential is invisible to the eye."

Death of book publishing conglomerates must not mean the end copyright

"Digitization has transformed both the work of the writer and the distribution of the book. Technological changes have called into question the principle of copyright: digital content is expected to be free for all, without compensation or remuneration. In the world of printed books and printed information, few would expect to obtain a work for free. In the information society, however, access to information, the arts and culture is sometimes referred to as the citizen's fundamental right, the right to get this information for free. It would seem that a new technological imperative has emerged: if it is possible to copy files for one¹s personal use and to distribute them, it must also be permissible and legal – and without charge. 

Even though digitization does transform the world there are still various reasons for the maintenance of copyright:"

Continue: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-07-26-hiidenmaa-en.html

Invisible ink formula

How the French cracked the secret of German invisible ink formula:

The healing power of literature

"Dr. Barager is a champion of the healing power of literature who from time to time “prescribes” specific novels to patients to help them cope with their burden of illness. He has engaged the medical community at large in this endeavor via The Literary Doctor, a blog devoted to the use of literary fiction to help patients and physicians alike explore the meaning of human illness in a way scientific method cannot. He has long believed the two finest callings in life are doctor and writer, the one ministering to the human condition, the other illuminating it, both—when performed with compassion and knowledge—capable of transforming it."

More: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/25/altamont-augie-2/

Civil War Espionage: Spies & Codes

“Both sides in the Civil War set up espionage systems and both sides thought theirs was the best ... Both used codes to encrypt messages, and today we will be breaking some original coded messages from the Civil War.”

Who made the best spies during the Civil War?

"Women and black servants were at the top of the list."

This and more: http://arnold.patch.com/articles/civil-war-espionage-spies-codes

Corporate Intelligence Manipulation

"Concerned members of the intelligence community have told me that if a corporation wanted to insert items favorable to itself or its clients into the PDB to influence the US national security agenda, at this time it would be virtually undetectable. These companies have analysts and often intelligence collectors spread throughout the system and have the access to introduce intelligence into the system.

To take an extreme example, a company frustrated with a government that's hampering its business or the business of one of its clients could introduce or spin intelligence on that government's suspected collaboration with terrorists in order to get the White House's attention and potentially shape national policy. Or, more subtly, a private firm could introduce concerns about a particular government to put heat on that government to shape its energy policy in a favorable direction.

To get us into the Iraq War, intelligence regarding alleged weapons of mass destruction had to be very artfully manipulated to short-circuit a formidable bureaucracy designed to prevent just such warping of intelligence. Due to the shift toward wide-scale industrial outsourcing in the intelligence community, even that fallible safeguard has been eroded. Sources like "Curveball," the Iraqi informant who wrongly asserted the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and upon whom the CIA relied, are no longer needed. This is particularly frightening when one considers that the "war on terror" is fought by a $100 billion-plus industry that has a vested interest in its continuation. "

Source: Outsourcing Intelligence, The Nation, July 24, 2007

Government can cause you to disappear without a trace | LitBash 31

"Governments can cause you to disappear without a trace." It will be lonely out there, so be sure to prepare yourself - collect books to help pass the time. Start with authors who were...

Born this week:

William Makepeace Thackeray, UK
"Dare, and the world always yields: or, if it beat you sometimes, dare again, and it will succumb."

Ramon de Mesonero Romanos, Spain

Ferenc Mora, Hungary

Archibald Cronin, UK

Claude Aveline, France

Robert Pinget, France

Leonid Sobolev, Russia

Ernest Hemingway, USA
"God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature."

John Gardner, USA

Sandor Brody, Hungary

Raymond Chandler, USA
"Don’t ever write anything you don’t like yourself and if you do like it, don’t take anyone’s advice about changing it. They just don’t know."

Alexandre Dumas, France
"It is sometimes essential to government to cause a man’s disappearance without leaving any traces, so that no written forms or documents may defeat their wishes. It has always been so and always will be. Governments change yet they remain all alike."

Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Russia

Henrik Pontoppidan, Denmark

Edward Dunsany, Ireland
"I hope that when London is clean passed away and the defeated fields come back again, like an exiled people returning after a war, they may find some beautiful thing to remind them of it all; because we have loved a little that swart old city."

Died this week:

Jane Austen, UK
"Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted."

Gilberto de Melo Freyre, Brasil

Curzio Malaparte, Italy

Rene Bazin, France

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Italy
"If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

Witold Gombrowicz, Poland
"I thought that this auction with other nations for geniuses and heroes, for merits and cultural achievement, was really quite awkward from the point of view of propaganda tactics because with our half-French Chopin and not quite native Copernicus, we cannot compete with the Italians, French, Germans, English, or Russians. Therefore, it is exactly this approach that condemns us to inferiority."

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Poland / USA

"A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise… Because that is how life is — full of surprises."