IIDD, Chill November: Saturday, November 17th

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. -Nelson Mandela, activist, South African president, Nobel laureate (b. 1918) 

David Kessler

"Thanksgiving Grace 2012 We waited ‘til Election Day to launch our grace, Will we paint a smiley, or draw a long sad face? Give Thanks! Four more years we’re granted, the challenge yet remains To cool our warming planet and undo the heavy chains Of ignorance, intolerance, of blind and selfish greed- To realize Enlightenment’s promise, the human spirit freed! Life may disappoint, but still there’s baseball! The Giants took the prize, (Although our A’s and Tigers won honor in all eyes). This fall’s results, I start to shout, make this year seem Jim-Dandy, When pouring into town floods Hurricane Sandy Reminding us that tragedy lurks within each fragile breath. Our caring hearts mourn each and every sad and needless death. So with sage compassion we offer profound gratitude And dare to maintain that positive attitude That lets us love each other without fear And celebrate together, once again, this year. --David Kessler My annual Thanksgiving grace...Happy Holiday to all...." Transportation of Stanchion Boy and Aerobics Girl Hi Pat,  Just talked with Al. Susan and I will Pick up Al and colleen at home and bring them with us to George and Kerry's. 8^) cheers, Mark Dear Chauffeur Extraordinaire! Thanks you for confirmazzione! I trust you will suffer no collateral damage during your trip to Kilmartin Place/Maddison Mews. I suggest you put a blindfold on Stanchion Boy, (I hinted, in an earlier email, that he wear one when cycling so as not to have his attention diverted, consequently, if he is following my sage advice, he should have one with him at all times!), as he has a "lazy and wandering" eye and may well discombobulate the driver. Unless that happens to be Saucy Susan, in which case The Sisterhood is most capable of entering into their own misadventures without the help of STANCHION BOY! FASTER THEN SUPERMAN HIMSELF, ALTHOUGH HE IS NOT  CAPABLE OF LEAPING OVER TALL BUILDINGS, LET ALONE THE STANCHIONS IN FRONT OF THEIR ENTRANCES!!! Cheers, Il Conduttore!  History of the world in 2 minutes http://marcbrecy.perso.neuf.fr/history.html Hi Big Al! Quite a riveting history lesson! Hope you and Cheryl might be able to join us for a glass of wine and/or a wee dram and a bite on the 2nd! Cheers, Patrizzio!  Wade Davis's Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest has been awarded the $32,000 Samuel Johnson Prize. Women won five of the seven English-language categories of the 2012 Governor General's Literary Awards. These include Linda Spalding's The Purchase, and playwright Catherine Banks's It is Solved by Walking. Poet Julie Bruck's Monkey Ranch won the award for poetry; Susin Nielsen's The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen won the Governor General's Literary Award in children's writing; Isabelle Arsenault won the Children's Illustration Award for her illustration of Kyo Maclear's Virginia Wolf; Nigel Spencer won the translation award for translating Marie-Claire Blais' Mai at the Predators Ball. Ross King's Leonardo and the Last Supper won the non-fiction prize.   Salman Rushdie and John le Carré have ended their fatwa face-off, expressing regret over their 15-year-long war of words, which began when Le Carré criticised The Satanic Verses. Fifteen years after Salman Rushdie called John le Carré a "pompous ass" and Le Carré responded with an accusation of "self-canonisation", one of the most gloriously vituperative literary feuds of recent times has come to an end. Last month, Rushdie told an audience at the Cheltenham literature festival that he "really" admired Le Carré as a writer. "I wish we hadn't done it," he said of the 15-year-old feud which played out in the letters pages of the Guardian in 1997. "I think of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as one of the great novels of postwar Britain." Now Le Carré has also extended an olive branch. "I too regret the dispute," he told the Times. The fight had its roots in Le Carré's criticism of The Satanic Verses: "My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity," said Le Carré. When Le Carré was later accused of antisemitism, Rushdie wrote to the Guardian expressing his lack of sympathy. Le Carré responded, saying Rushdie's "way with the truth is as self-serving as ever"; Rushdie called Le Carré a "pompous ass"; and then Christopher Hitchens waded in, taking Rushdie's side and saying: "John le Carré's conduct in your pages is like nothing so much as that of a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head."  Rushdie was then accused of "self-canonisation" by Le Carré, but the Satanic Verses author had the last word. "I did call him a pompous ass, which I thought pretty mild in the circumstances. 'Ignorant' and 'semi-literate' are dunces' caps he has skilfully fitted on his own head. I wouldn't dream of removing them," he wrote. But following in the footsteps of Paul Theroux and VS Naipaul, who shook hands at last year's Hay festival after a lengthy falling out, Rushdie and Le Carré's wounds appear to have healed today. "I admire Salman for his work and his courage, and I respect his stand. Does that answer the larger debate which continues to this day?" Le Carré told the Times. "Should we be free to burn Korans, mock the passionately held religions of others? Maybe we should – but should we also be surprised when the believers we have offended respond in fury? I couldn't answer that question at the time and, with all good will, I still can't. But I am a little proud, in retrospect, that I spoke against the easy trend, reckoning with the wrath of outraged western intellectuals, and suffering it in all its righteous glory. And if I met Salman tomorrow? I would warmly shake the hand of a brilliant fellow writer." Valerie Eliot, the widow and literary executor of Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot, has died, at 86. Valerie Eliot, the widow and literary executor of poet TS Eliot, has died at the age of 86. The poet's estate said she died on Friday at her London home after a short illness. Valerie Eliot was the second wife of the US-born Nobel laureate in literature, whom she met at London publisher Faber & Faber. He was a director, she a secretary. The couple wed in 1957. Friends said the marriage was a happy one despite the almost 40-year gap in their ages. After TS Eliot's death in 1965, Valerie became his devoted executor, editing his poems and letters for publication and steadfastly refusing to cooperate with would-be biographers, in keeping with the poet's last wishes. A death notice in the Daily Telegraph said her funeral would be private. The Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where China's new leadership will soon be announced, stands opposite Mao's mausoleum. Facing them both is the Forbidden City, where emperors plotted and killed for their own succession. At least the process is less bloody today. Tiananmen Square, in the heart of Beijing, has been abnormally quiet lately, riddled with security men and police; anyone going through has to register their identity, and taxis are ordered not to let passengers roll down their windows. But the large portrait of Mao still looks out benevolently from the Forbidden City podium over this great historic space.The reader of Mao, the Real Story, will receive a clear, rounded account of a tireless revolutionary fighter, and bloody social reformer, writes Shuyun Sun. The Communist Party’s 18th National Congress is now sitting in the Great Hall on the square, finalizing its decisions. The high security is not without reason, given the fierce power struggle: the dramatic downfall of Bo Xilai, a hopeful for high office; the disappearance for several days of Bo’s arch rival, Xi Jinpin, the new top man; and then the recent sensation, no doubt dished out by the Bo faction, about retiring premier Wen Jiabao and his family’s alleged $2.7 billion hoard of assets. We know only a little about the horse-trading behind Xi’s ascent to power, but Mao would think it all trifling compared with his own long struggle. The story of Alexander Pantsov’s new biography is one of a man of ambition, revolutionary zeal and a sense of invincibility, but also, as his stature grew, a paranoid concern about real and imaginary opponents, and total indifference to the fate of the millions of victims of his actions. Underlying all was his extraordinary political skill to divide and rule, knowing when to advance and when to keep silent. Mao is a valuable addition to our knowledge, largely because of its extensive mining of Soviet sources and striking comparisons between Russian Bolshevism and Chinese communism (the Moscow-born Pantsov, author of many books on Russia and China, is now a professor in Ohio). This apart, the book is fairly conventional. But it does give a clear, nuanced and more rounded account of Mao than any of its predecessors. Mao was born in 1893 to a family of well-off landowners in the southern province of Hunan. Pantsov and co-writer Steven I. Levine give a vivid picture of China’s ferment during Mao’s early years. The country had thrown off its imperial rulers and set up a republic, attacked Confucianism, reformed its education and language – but was still humiliated by foreign powers, divided by warlords, and its huge, mostly illiterate population was racked by poverty and hunger. Mao studied avidly for over a decade, reading everything from social Darwinism to anarchism. Eventually he found his guiding lights in Marxism and the Bolshevik Revolution. He helped to found a Communist cell in Hunan and went as a delegate to the first Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai in 1921. The infant Party was totally dependent on Moscow, which funded it to the last penny. In return, Moscow and the Comintern demanded total obedience. Mao and his comrades were told to work with the Kuomintang, the ruling Nationalist party, which almost wiped them out in the White Terror of 1927. The fledgling Red Army was ordered by the Comintern to attack the big cities, as in the Russian revolution; it was crushed. But what Mao hated most were the young Moscow-trained students who knew nothing of the realities of China, answered only to Moscow, but held real power. Mao’s fight back was through the Long March, the Red Army’s retreat, which ended in 1936. Here the book is rather weak, relying excessively on the account of Comintern adviser Otto Braun. Mao gradually wrested power from his opponents, finishing them off one by one, first within his own army, and then against the Fourth Army, headed by the powerful and ambitious Zhang Guotao, who had 40,000 men compared with Mao's 6,000 at the end of the March. The Long March was the defining moment in Mao’s political career, establishing him as the supreme leader, for life. Soon after Mao and his beleaguered army reached Yanan, a small town in northern China, Japan launched a full-scale invasion in 1937. For eight years, while the Nationalist government battled with the enemy, Mao and his troops recovered and expanded rapidly, with the help of Stalin. In this relatively calm haven, and totally in control, Mao was able to indulge his womanizing. He was smitten with Jiang Qing, a beautiful young actress from Shanghai, so he packed He Zizhen, his third wife, off to Moscow with their daughter. He had moved her in while still married to his second wife, Yang Kaihui, by whom he had three sons. (He had long abandoned his first marriage, arranged by his parents.) Pantsov and Levine give you little more than the bare facts about Mao’s private life. One can find juicier revelations in the memoirs of Mao’s doctor, Li Zhisui. Mao’s heartlessness was even clearer in his treatment of his children, in particular his three sons by Kaihui. After their mother was killed by the Nationalist government, the youngest son died and the older two lived like beggars in the streets of Shanghai. They wrote to Mao, who took no notice. They languished until Stalin invited them to Moscow. Mao had a plan for the new China once the Japanese were defeated. He wanted a Bolshevik-style revolution, a monopoly of power by the Communist Party, a proletarian dictatorship. But his Soviet masters intervened. Stalin did not want China to rival the USSR. When Mao came to Moscow in 1950, Stalin made sure he knew his place – Mao was left to his own devices for a month. When he finally had an audience, he was forced to accept everything Stalin wanted. Mao was at last freed to realize his revolutionary vision after Stalin’s death in 1953. But moderates like prime minister Zhou Enlai and president Liu Shaoqi opposed such a “blind rush forward.” So Mao cultivated two powerful radical allies, Gao Gang and Rao Shushi, only to dispose of them when they wanted the top jobs as reward, accusing them of plotting to seize power. Gao committed suicide while Rao died in prison. And the purge began to wipe out all the “followers and conspirators of the Gao and Rao clique and counter-revolutionaries”: 180,000 handed themselves in, 80,000 were arrested, 4,000 committed suicide and the cult of Mao began, fanned by none other than Liu himself. As Pantsov and Levine say, this first purge in the New China “created a very dangerous precedent that doomed a large percentage of the party to defeat in the power struggle with Mao.” Mao's Great Leap saw all the peasants organized into communes and making steel instead of growing food. Tens of millions died of starvation. To excite continuing revolutionary fervour, Mao then unleashed the Cultural Revolution, creating universal chaos, setting all against all, destroying all authority. Liu Shaoqi became the prime target, the biggest “capitalist and revisionist.” Liu died in a cell, far from his family, denied any medical treatment. Mao named as his successor Lin Biao, a brilliant general who fought with him from the beginning, obeyed him in everything and had no political ambition. Mao said, “He worshipped me like the holiest of saints.” It was he who turned Mao’s Little Red Book into the Communist bible. But he incurred the jealousy of Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who schemed for her own people, the Gang of Four, to succeed her ailing husband. Mao, ailing but still powerful and virtually divorced from the world, drove Lin Biao to flee. His plane crashed in Mongolia. With that, Mao’s sense of invincibility was shattered. He was left wavering between his wife and Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping to secure his succession. Zhou died in January, 1976, six months before Mao; Jiang Qing survived Mao, only to be captured and imprisoned three months later, after a coup that handed power to Deng. The reader of Mao will take away book a clear, nuanced and rounded account of a tireless revolutionary fighter, brilliant politician and bloody social reformer. The scale of his achievements and his crimes make him impossible to sum up, though the authors do their best to take a balanced view: “Mao transformed China from a semi-colony into an independent and powerful state. … compelling the entire world to respect the Chinese people. He united mainland China after a long period of disintegration, power struggle, and civil wars.” Though the country remained poor and the economy Third World, there was a new pride in being Chinese. But they’re also fully aware of the totalitarian society Mao imposed and the brutal social experiments that cost the lives of as many as 60-million people and blighted those of hundreds of millions more, a monstrousness never made clearer than in Frank Dikötter’s Samuel Johnson Prize-winning Mao’s Great Famine. So, even as Chinese leaders determine the future of their growing colossus, people still line up to visit Mao’s mausoleum. He haunts them still – and possibly forever. Shuyun Sun is a film-maker and author of The Long March, among other works. She lives in England. Andreas Schroeder's Duped! True Stories of the World's Best Swindlers, and Janet Wilson's Shannen and the Dream for a School are two nonfiction books for young readers that have been nominated for the Ontario Library Association's 2013 Silver Birch Award. Awards will be presented in early 2013. Ian Rankin's wife has confirmed that at times, novelists are more interested in their creations than the people living with them, writes Philip Hensher. For almost every novelist, the relationship between them and their creation is, temporarily, more important than the relationship with real people.  The novelist Ian Rankin’s wife, talking in a television documentary, has revealed some of the working habits of the busy professional novelist, and some of us will have recognised the phenomena she describes. Some of our spouses, too, because these disasters and pieces of bad and neglectful behaviour affect our families indirectly. Mrs Rankin said, very perceptively, that there is a danger of writer’s block hitting Rankin once he has used up all his initial ideas and vision, prepared before the book was started. She says this happens, almost always, on page 65. That’s absolutely true: the map and ideas and scribbled notions, prepared before anything starts, initially look like enough to get you through to the end, or to the halfway stage. And then you’ve run through your stock of imaginative capital like a Lottery winner on a drunken spree, and the blank page stares at you. Still more recognisable is what Mrs Rankin said about the 52-year-old novelist, when in full spate – “he’s like a teenage student”. She knows, since Rankin writes a novel every year, what the rhythm is, and when there is no point talking to him. “The role of his family, chiefly, during this period, is trying to get out from under his feet… it’s sort of staying out of his way while he gets on with it.” Every novelist and every member of a novelist’s family will recognise this period. The only difference, perhaps, is between the sort of writer who is able to pack his family off, and the sort that devotes energy to secreting his work away from them. Jane Austen used to keep the door of the room where she worked unoiled, so as to be able to conceal her work. Others, like Dickens, would retreat to a study where he could not be disturbed. What is apparent is that, for almost every novelist, the relationship between them and their creation is, for the time being, much more important than the relationship with real people. This can lead to some interesting domestic disputes, and some still more interesting unspoken thoughts. Here’s the standard dialogue between novelist and spouse, at the end of a day. Novelist: “How was your day, darling?” “Oh, busy, you know – that report came back from the New York office, and they were saying…” [continues for two minutes]. Novelist: “Oh dear. I am sorry.” (Thinks: I wasn’t listening, but like I give a toss, anyway.) Novelist’s spouse: “And how did it go today?” Novelist: “All right. Wrote fifteen hundred words.” (Thinks: Not going to tell you anything, in case you steal it, or say “That sounds a bit like that story of Michael Chabon’s I read”.) Many of the best writers’ marriages are with people outside the literary profession, and in some cases with people who know not to talk about their spouse’s books at all. It is said that Nora Joyce never actually read any of her husband James’s books. It would work, because, above all, many writers only want to discuss their work at certain stages of development, and if a spouse was interested, the discussion might happen, or the interest might be apparent, every day. It was a sign of distress and despair – an unprecedented call for help – when Iris Murdoch, at work on her last, Alzheimer’s-inflected novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, suddenly remarked to her husband that she could not make out this man Jackson at all. Other strategies for guarding the artistic principle, of holding the work in progress close to the mind, have included the sort of writer who pretends that the act of creation is the dullest sort of administrative task – Trollope, who made a great point of treating writing like an office job, sometimes starting a new novel on the same day he finished the previous one. Plenty of writers work at unearthly hours – Dostoevsky through the night, or Toni Morrison starting at 5am. It’s partly when people feel most creative, but partly, too, so that they won’t have to deal with anyone else, even the polite offer of a cup of tea. Writers have always worked well when staying alone in hotels – Evelyn Waugh had a regular retreat in one in Chagford. Others have, when necessary, gone to stay for weeks on end in neutral airport hotels, to the bemusement of staff. You get service without question; the boy who brings the coffee isn’t going to expect you to be interested in his day; and the outbursts of your personality, foul at periods of high creativity, are not going to lead to any lasting repercussions. All in all, writers, and particularly novelists, are difficult people, with periods of their greatest difficulty tied predictably to their best achievement. Those closest to them will need saintly powers of support, patience and an inability to hold a grudge. It is a mystery to me how marriages consisting of two novelists can possibly function – I suppose they settle into a rhythm of alternating creative periods. Perhaps even more puzzling is how a mind which genuinely rests on the sympathetic observation of human behaviour can have quite long periods when it, just as genuinely, could not really care less if those about them were eaten by wolves. The next time you read a passionately sympathetic study of the emotional life, you might like to reflect that it may have been written by someone utterly ignoring his wife’s daily conversation.

Taken at Whirlygig's. He invited members of the Peleton and significant others! Tuia Maria is the waitress, young woman with Raymondo is Amira, Giorgio's daughter, while profile of woman is Kerry, Whirlygig's amore! Great time was had by all!!!