Palestinian 'unpeople'

Letter to Evening Standard, 19oct2011 - Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who has just been released from detention by Hamas, merits a front-page photo and ten mentions of his name in yesterday’s Standard. Yet not a single Palestinian, among the hundreds released by the Israelis, seems to deserve a mention by name. Your lopsided reporting reminds me how, as Noam Chomsky puts it, the Palestinians are treated in the papers as “unpeople”.

booksellers favourite 'asked-fors'

All booksellers and librarians have their favourite 'asked-fors' — requests from members of the public for a particular book. See if you can guess the proper titles of these literary classics. Scroll down for the answers.

Dining out in Paris and London

1. The Odd Sea

2. Oranges and Peaches

3. 100 Years of Playing Solitaire

4. The Brothers Carry Them Off

5. Ann in Spectacles

6. Sergeant Bilko’s Banjo

7. Honour Road

8. The Great Gas Bill

9. Dr Wells Fargo

10. Anna, Karen and Edna

11. Donkey Oats

12. James Joyce is Useless

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Down and out in Paris and London (Orwell)

1. The Odyssey (Homer)

2. The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)

3. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

4. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

5. An Inspector Calls (J B Priestley)

6. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Louis de Bernières)

7. On the Road (Jack Kerouac)

8. The Great Gatsby  (F Scott Fitzgerald)

9. Dr Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)

10. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)

11. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)

12. James Joyce’s Ulysses

Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers

"When I find a short-seller, I want to tear his heart out and eat it before his eyes while he's still alive." Richard S. Fuld, Jr (1946–), US CEO and chairman of the collapsed Lehman Brothers investment house. Quoted in the Financial Times (London) (December 30, 2008)

Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech 2005

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile.

Dope – a poem by Amiri Baraka

See Dope – Amiri Baraka at http://poem.oftheweek.org/

The Media sell audiences, not papers or programmes

“The papers sold on their contents and derived their profits from the pennies or halfpennies paid by the readers. Gradually there came a change, almost without the proprietors noticing it. The papers came to depend increasingly on the money they received for advertisements. Larger circulation meant higher advertising rates. Hence circulation mattered in itself, even when each additional copy sold involved a slight additional loss. The reader no longer bought newspapers. Newspapers bought readers.”  The newspaper war of the 1930s, described by AJP Taylor, English History 1914-1945, p387, Penguin

“All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.” England your England, George Orwell, 1941

Chomsky: transformational grammar and Cartesian linguistics

In psycholinguistics ‘a specific event, Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s book on ‘Verbal Behavior’, was decisive. In the late 1950s, Chomsky, a young professor at MIT, shredded behavourist pretenstons to give an adequate account of language and thus ended their pretensons to explain human beings.'

Psycholinguistics embraced the structuralism of Saussure and an assumption that communication is possible ‘even between people who do not share each other’s language because there are certain formal similarities in all languages. Psycholinguistics sought to relate these formal similarities in languages to the structure of mind and brain.'

Chomsky elaborated ‘a Cartesian theory of language, a theory that presupposes the existence of universal, innate grammatical structures. The result was a concrete research programme for lingutistics, to search out the grammatical universals and to trace how they underlie actual languages  ... Chomsky’s programme - Cartesian linguistics - traced all language to a few innate mental principles which were thought to be in effect a priori in the activity of reason but it faced rival programmes based on research on how children do in fact develop their use of language in different cultures.'

(Roger Smith, the fontana history of the Human Sciences, 1997 p835-6)