Edmund Pickett

Author

edmund pickett

Swimming the Rio Grande

By Edmund Pickett

Almost Sundown – Three Miles to Gringo Land

I didn’t actually have to swim across the Rio Grande. I stepped off the bank into the shallow water and started to walk toward the US side. Of course I was ready to swim. Everything in my backpack was placed inside tightly closed plastic bags. As the water rose slowly up my thighs, I scanned the gringo bank, looking for any movement, but there was no moon and the starlight only gave me shadows. I expected at any minute to be stabbed by flashlight beams, to hear Border Patrol agents shouting at me in Spanish, but I only heard the water rippling over a gravel bank.

[Read more…] about Swimming the Rio Grande

My Library

By Edmund Pickett

In Czarist Russia there were officially only three classes of people: nobility, clergy, and peasants. By the end of the 19th century though, there were coming to be more and more individuals who didn’t fit into the recognized categories. The children of merchants for example, or Jews, those with some university education, or ethnic minorities… Quite a few people were falling between the cracks and they became known as razochinetski, meaning those of no clearly defined social class. The label could be derogatory. Sometimes the word just meant “middle-class intellectual.” The czarist officials didn’t trust these people because knowing their background didn’t tell you much about them. They might be either communists or nationalists. In an unsettling way, each razochinetz seemed to be self-defined.

Osip Mandelstam, the poet, proudly accepted the label and said that the biography of a razochinetz was his bookshelf. In other words, he was what he had read. In the United States, social classes are said to be fluid, but we still have razochinetski and a library can still serve as a biography of sorts, especially for self-educated people, who have complete freedom to choose what they read.

Nobody made me read any of the following books. It’s not a list of every book I’ve ever read, just those I still have copies of. Actually I don’t have them because they’re in storage in two different countries.
The first book I ever read was called “The Cozy Little Farm,” and I have a picture of myself holding it. The first adult book I read was “Edison” by Josephson. It was a bit over my head at age ten, but Edison was my hero and I still recall many scenes. One of the illustrations is a reproduction of a letter, showing Edison’s unique calligraphy, which he developed when he was a telegrapher. It was designed to be clear, beautiful and fast. I retrained myself to write in that style, and still do, more or less.

MY LIBRARY (What’s Left of It)

HISTORY

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
The Peninsular War, Jac Weller
Ivan’s War, Catherine Merridale
A Nation Made by War, Geoffrey Perret
Eisenhower, Geoffrey Perret
The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer
The Second World War, John Keegan
The Boer War, Thomas Pakenham
The Age of Jackson, Arthur M. Schlesinger
Stalin, The Court of the Red Czar, Simon S. Montefiore
Lincoln, Redeemer President, Alan Guelzo
The Impending Crisis, David M. Potter
A Narrative History of the Civil War, Shelby Foote
Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward S. Gibbon
Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose
The Reformation, Diarmuid MacCulloch
A Short History of the Argentines, Felix Luna
At Home Among the Patagonians, George Musters
The Thirty Years War, C.V. Wedgwood
Anabasis (The Upcountry March), Xenophon
The Conquest of Mexico, Bernal Diaz
The Conquest of Mexico, W.S. Prescott
Emperor of China, Jonathan Spence
The Command of the Ocean, N.A.M. Rodger
The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
The Face of Battle, John Keegan
Maus I & II, Art Spiegelman
Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest
Treason By The Book, Jonathan Spence
Annals of Imperial Rome, Tacitus trans. Grant
Army of the Caesars, Michael Grant
Adventures of Capt. Alonso Contreras, trans. Dallas
Memoirs, vol. I, George Kennan
The Pacific War—1931-1945, Saburo Ienaga
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence
Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose

FICTION, (novels, stories, drama)

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
The Riverside Shakespeare (1 vol.)
A Dance to the Music of Time (12 vols.), Anthony Powell
Sixteen Plays, Henrik Ibsen trans. Michael Meyer
Plays of Moliere, trans. Richard Wilbur
Midaq Alley, Naguib Mahfouz
Palace Walk, Naguib Mahfouz
The Master & Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa
Walls Rise Up, George Sessions Perry
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Darkness At Noon, Arthur Koestler
The Third Bank of the River, Joao Guimaraes Rosa
Maiden, Cynthia Buchanan
Stories, Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
The Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. By Constance Garnett
The Plays of Chekhov, trans. by C. Garnett
New Grub Street, George Gissing
The Odd Women, George Gissing
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
Ashenden Stories, W. Somerset Maugham
Moon & Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham
Child 44, Tom Rob Smith
The Secret Speech, Tom Rob Smith
Old Goriot, Balzac
Cousin Bette, Balzac
The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is The Night, F.Scott Fitzgerald
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
Sword of Honor, Evelyn Waugh
The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad
The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen
Emma, Jane Austen
Animal Farm, George Orwell
1984, George Orwell
The Sorrows of Young Werther, J.W. von Goethe
Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford

BIOGRAPHY, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIR

The Shorter Pepys, ed. Robert Latham
Pepys,The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin
Mr. Pepys, Samuel Ollard
Goethe, 2 vols. (so far) by Nicholas Boyle
Orwell, Jeffrey Meyers
Edmund Wilson, Jeffrey Meyers
Ibsen, Michael Meyer
Edison, Matthew Josephson
Alexander Pope, Maynard Mack
Chekhov, Donald Rayfield
Chekhov, Henri Troyat
Letters of Chekhov, ed. by Simon Karlinsky & M.H. Heim
Wellington, The Years of the Sword, Antonia Fraser
Witness, Sam Tannenhaus
Eugene O’Neill (2 vols.), Louis Schaeffer
Hindo Holiday, J.R.Ackerly
Henry James, (1 vol.) Leon Edel
W.Somerset Maugham, Ted Morgan
Italian Journey, J.W. von Goethe
A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor
Between the Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor
Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor
Mani, Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis
Daedalus Returned, Baron von der Heydte
Oscar, Peter J. Wilson
The Lives of Talleyrand, Crane Brinton
Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi
The Reawakening, Primo Levi
The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey
The Double Life of Stephen Crane, Christopher Benfey
Isaiah Berlin, David Ignatieff
Spinoza, Nadler
Chaucer, John Gardner
Chaucer, Donald Howard
Whittaker Chambers, Sam Tannenhaus
The Baburnama, Sultan Muhammad Babur, ed. Thackston
The Quest for Corvo, A.J.A. Symons
Parallel Lives, Plutarch
Emperor of China, Jonathan Spence
The Long Walk, Slawomir Rawicz
Comrade Valentine, Richard E. Rubenstein
Lords of the Sea, John R. Hale
Coyotes, Ted Conover

POETRY

The Odes of Horace, ed. by McClatchy
The Odes of Horace, trans. James Michie
Horace in English, ed. D.S. Carne Ross
The Complete Odes & Epodes of Horace, trans. W.G. Shepherd
Complete Odes & Satires of Horace, trans. Sidney Alexander
Sonnets of Shakespeare, ed. Helen Vendler
Collected Poems of Richard Wilbur
Collected Poems of W.H. Auden
Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats
Poems, Robert Frost
A Net of Fireflies, trans. Harold Stewart
Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Poems of George Gordon, Lord Byron
Norton Anthology of Classical Literature, ed. Bernard Knox
Collected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz
Collected Poems of Houseman
Piers Plowman, Norton Edition
Poems of F.G. Tuckerman
Poems of Thomas Hardy
Poems of John Gay, 2 vols., ed. Dearing
Psalms of Sidney & Pembroke, ed. Rathnell
The Aeneid, Vergil trans. P.Dickinson
Complete Poetry of Mandelstam, trans. Raffel & Burago
Iliad, Homer trans. Fagles
The Divine Comedy, Dante trans. Ciardi
Complete Poems, Andrew Marvell
Duino Elegies & Sonnets to Orpheus, R.M. Rilke trans. Poulin
Faust, Goethe trans. Kaufman
Complete Poetry, Alexander Pope

ESSAYS, CRITICISM

The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz
Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, Paul Fussel
Cultural Amnesia, Clive James
Forwords and Afterwords, W.H. Auden
Essays Ancient and Modern, Bernard Knox
Essays, Letters, Journalism (4 vols.), George Orwell
Less Than One, Joseph Brodsky
Intellectuals, Paul Johnson
The Sense of Reality, Isaiah Berlin
The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Isaiah Berlin
Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson
Axel’s Castle, Edmund Wilson
To The Finland Station, Edmund Wilson
Essays, Montaigne trans. Frame
The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, Lionel Trilling
Distant Neighbors, Alan Riding
Mexican Etiquette & Ethics, Boye de la Mente
Narcocorrido, Elijah Wald
To Keep The Ball Rolling, Anthony Powell
Miscellaneous Verdicts, Anthony Powell
Under Review, Anthony Powell
True Tales From Another Mexico, Sam Quinones

RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY

Jews, God & History, Max Dimont
Judaism, Roy Rosenberg
This Is My God, Wouk
Jews, Arthur Hertzberg
The Sabbath, A.J. Heschel
Farewell, España, Howard M. Sachar
The Essential Talmud, Adin Steinsaltz
A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson
The Gospel According to Jesus, Stephen Mitchell
The Book of Job, Stephen Mitchell
Jesus of Nazareth, J. Bornkamm

HISTORICAL FICTION

Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
I, Claudius, Robert Graves
The Mask of Apollo, Mary Renault
The King Must Die, Mary Renault
Captain From Castille, Samuel Shellabarger

ENTERTAINMENTS (thrillers, mysteries, romances, adventure tales, etc.)

The Flashman series, George M. Fraser
The Travis McGee series, John D. McDonald
The Hornblower series, C.S. Forester
The Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O’Brian
The Bernie Rhodenbarr series, Lawrence Block
The Masters of Rome series, Colleen McCullough
The Sharpe series, Bernard Cornwell
87th Precinct series, Ed McBain
Arkady Renko series, Martin Cruz Smith
Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household
Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini
Captain Blood, Rafael Sabatini
Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
The Big Clock, Kenneth Fearing
Treasure Island, R.L. Stevenson
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
Outsourced, R.J.Hillhouse
Con Ed, Mathew Klein
Citizen Vince, Jess Walter
The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers
The Faithful Spy, Alex Berenson
Six Suspects, Vikas Swarup
The Alibi, Joseph Kanon
The Club Dumas, Arturo Perez-Reverte
Captain Alatrice, Arturo Perez-Reverte

ISLAM

The Closed Circle, David Pryce-Jones
The Arab Mind, Raphael Patai
Why I Am Not A Muslim, Ibn Warraq
The Media Relations Dept. of Hizbollah
Wishes You A Happy Birthday, Neil MacFarquhar
The Rise, Coming Fall and Corruption
of Saudi Arabia, Said K. Aburish
The Two Faces of Islam, Stephen Schwartz
The Siege of Mecca, Yaroslav Trofimov
Islam, Robert Spencer
Terror’s Source, Vincenzo Olivetti
Hatred’s Kingdom, Dore Gold
The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
The 9/11 Commission Report
Understanding Arabs, Margaret Nydell
Princess, Jean Sasson
Sultana’s Daughters, Jean Sasson
Sultana’s Circle, Jean Sasson
Now They Call Me Infidel, Nonie Darwish
Perfect Soldiers, Terry McDermott
Islam and Terrorism, Mark Gabriel
Wahabism, A Critical Essay, Hamid Algar
Islam, A Short History, Karen Armstrong
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
The Blood of Lambs, Kamal Saleem
Nadia’s Song, Soheir Kashoggi

Books on Islam, pt. 1

By Edmund Pickett

For those who know very little about Islam, two authors offer very different introductions. One author bends over backward to give Islam and Mohammed the greatest benefit of any possible doubt, while the other contains every argument ever made against Islam.

The apology (or defense) is Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong, a former nun, who previously wrote a best selling biography of God. In her telling, Mohammed is the very soul of compassion, who brought enlightenment to the pagans of Arabia and improved the status of women.


In this book and also in Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time, Armstrong’s general thesis is that Mohammed never did anything wrong, and if he did, everyone else was doing it too, and in Europe at that time they were even worse. Seriously, this is the level of her analysis.


In her spiritual autobiography, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness she describes her seven years as a nun, an experience which she says left her scarred emotionally. It is difficult to summarize her current religious beliefs, but basically she thinks all the great religious traditions are trying to approach the same God, and if you don’t take what they say literally, they are equally valid. She says that compassion is the supreme virtue and the one we must honor when speaking of anyone else’s religion. She believes this requires her to accept at face value everything Muslims say about Muhammad and Islam, so she accepts without question every dodgy excuse Muslims have ever made to excuse the barbarous cruelties of their prophet. For instance, Muhammad had two concubines, more correctly known as sex slaves, one of whom he enslaved after defeating her tribe in battle, and then executing her husband and father. Armstrong says, “The emancipation of women was a project dear to the prophet’s heart.” And on the same page she adds, “…Muhammad was one of those rare men who truly enjoy the company of women.” (Islam: A Short History, pg. 67) In short, Karen Armstrong might as well be a muslim missionary.
However, if you can’t bear to think ill of anyone and sincerely want to believe that the billion muslims of the world follow a religion of love, then Karen Armstrong should be your guide. While she doesn’t admit to being a convert to Islam (and I doubt that she is) she is careful to say nothing that could possibly offend even the most moderate muslim. Miracles and legends that would strain the credibility of a gullible ten-year old are related by Armstrong as obvious truth. This kind of self-censorship is common among some writers on Islam. It is often presented as compassion towards the sensitivities of others, but in reality is nothing but hypocrisy. A real scholar of Islam, Maxime Rodinson, explains what seems to me a more honest position as follows,

“May any muslims who happen to read these lines forgive my plain speaking. For them the Koran is the book of Allah and I respect their faith. But I do not share it and I do not wish to fall back, as many orientalists have done, on equivocal phrases to disguise my real meaning. This may perhaps be of assistance in remaining on good terms with individuals and governments professing Islam; but I have no wish to deceive anyone. Muslims have every right not to read my book or to acquaint themselves with the ideas of a non-muslim, but if they do so, they must expect to find things put forward there which are blasphemous to them. It is evident that I do not believe that the Koran is the book of Allah.”

It is worth mentioning that many violent jihadist websites recommend Karen Armstrong’s books. I can’t help but wonder if she has ever stopped to think how miserable her life would have been if she had been born in any muslim country.

The contrary view on Islam is given in Why I Am Not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq, a readable guide to every argument ever made against Islam. The author was raised as a muslim, then became an atheist. He attacks every claim made by muslims about their faith and leaves not one stone standing on another. The Koran is not infallible, not the word of God, it is not even good Arabic. Mohammed was a mass murderer, a pedophile and a fraud. Islam despises women and hates science. If this sounds harsh, you should be aware that all the facts presented by Ibn Warraq come from canonical Muslim sources. I believe his arguments are irrefutable and that they should be read by anyone who wants to discuss Islam in public. Aside from the fraudulent nature of the Koran and the reprehensible character of Mohammed, Ibn Warraq discusses two important areas which are commonly shrouded in myths: Science and Women.
It is widely believed that there was a period of time lasting several centuries when Islamic civilization was exceptionally tolerant of other religions and that there was a great flourishing of science and art. Ibn Warraq debunks this myth completely. Of course there are some grains of truth around which the myth is built. There were some great scholars in Muslim countries who preserved manuscripts of classic Greek philosophers and mathematicians, manuscripts which would otherwise have been lost to humanity. However, most of these men were not muslims. They were Christians or Jews who lived in Muslim countries. Their names are Arabic, because they were born in Arab countries and Arabic was their native tongue, but they were not muslim. They and the few muslims who shared their interests were not actually tolerated, in the usual meaning of that word. Almost every one of them was persecuted, some were executed, some were exiled. Others had to write in allegorical language or leave their works to be published posthumously. If these men survived unscathed, it was by accident, or because they lived in seclusion. In every case, their accusers were the leading Islamic scholars of the day, who denounced them for the simple crime of reading non-Islamic books. It has long been a fundamental belief in the muslim world that all books written by non-muslims are useless and probably dangerous. The argument given is that if by chance the book contains material that agrees with Islam it is redundant and therefore superfluous. If it contains material contrary to Islam then it is evil. This single idea is responsible for the cultural egotism and widespread ignorance in the muslim world. A few years ago a United Nations study counted all the books translated into Arabic in one year. It was equal to the number of books translated into modern Greek. Since the Arab countries have 30 times the population of Greece, these majority muslim countries clearly suffer from a profound lack of curiosity about the rest of the world. This, as much as anything, explains the widespread ignorance, lack of development, and intolerance among muslims. Simply put, Islam is hostile to all education except the study of the Koran and other Islamic texts. There never was and never will be a great age of science in the muslim world until this self-imposed narrow mindedness disappears.
As Ernest Renan observed, we do not give the Catholic Inquisition the credit for the works of Galileo, so why should we give Islam the credit for the achievements of a few scholars whose lives were lived in constant fear of Islamic persecution?
Ibn Warraq also gives a full account of the status of women in Islam, throughout history and throughout the Muslim world today. I thought I knew most of the indictment here, but I was wrong. The truth is much more horrible. Reading the catalog of horrors against women committed in the name of Islam is very much like reading about the Nazi death camps, and it must be emphasized again and again, the misogyny starts with Mohammed. It’s there in the Koran. It’s in the hadith, the biographical sketches of the prophet’s life, where it is obvious that to Mohammed, women were not fully human in the same way that men are. For Mohammed, women were nothing but sex toys. Hatred of women is not a perversion of Islam, it is Islam. For example, Al-Ghazali, an Islamic scholar sometimes called the second greatest muslim after the prophet, was a sick misogynist. Ibn Warraq provides a short summary of Al-Ghazali’s pronouncements on women, and reading it, I hope, will make you throw up. And the story never gets better. In every century and in every Islamic country, women have been treated like livestock.
For additional current information on the lives of women in Islamic countries, see my next post, “Books on Islam, pt. 2” which contains reviews of “Infidel” by Ayan Hirsi Ali, “Now They Call Me Infidel” by Nonie Darwish and the books by Jean Sasson, “Princess,” “Sultana’s Circle,” and “Sultana’s Children,” and others.

The Birth of Laughter

By Edmund Pickett

.
Jumbling down the street beneath
umbrellas of colored cellophane,
these turned-up crescents full of teeth
are children, blooming in the rain.

Like stained glass mushrooms come alive,
whose powers at last are unconfined,
this motley squad of four or five
is death on sight to a gloomy mind.

Squealing, splashing, wet as snails–
their mothers dressed them warm today
and now they all drag furry tails–
the coats that Spring should pack away.

Sunshine erupts, with rare bad taste,
baking the splash right out of those
in whom a sudden hope was placed.
Betrayed, they drip, and pout and pose.

Their shelters folded turn to swords,
with all hands now repelling boarders.
Past squealing quickly, they now use words,
and some now give, and some take, orders.

Old Gloomy would lose heart at this,
but sees a dark cloud on the way
and stands his ground, afraid to miss
the birth of laughter twice in a day.

I wait. Quite soon that shriveled plume
wrapped round each fighting stick will bloom.
They’ll play. Old me will stand in thrall,
and water will fall and fall and fall.

© 2009 Edmund Pickett

(This poem may be copied or forwarded, as long as you retain the copyright notice and author’s name.)

As If Led

By Edmund Pickett

–
I

Spilled blood dies
long before it dries.
With no breath
to flow toward it’s death
comes on fast.
Each cell breathes its’ last
and all stop
as life leaves each drop.
I forget
that what’s now just wet
was once warm;
this splat had a form–
a branched view
of all it flowed through,
blue then red,
circling as if led
by a song
’til something all wrong
slacks the stream.
What leaves then like steam
is all one:
heat, shape, direction.

II

Split in three,
blood’s integrity
eludes us.
More is dangerous
to our lives
than glass shards or knives,
but damage
is harder to gauge.
Shapeless form,
heat that doesn’t warm,
red and blue
circles are a few
of what we
bleed through quietly,
wondering at
the simple fact that
lives are spilled
long before they’re killed.
© 2009  Edmund Pickett

(This poem may be copied or forwarded, as long as you retain the copyright notice and author’s name.)