Shitao/books

The online price war that broke out last month between heavyweight retailers Wal-Mart, Amazon and Target took a new turn on Tuesday when Amazon chose to extend its $9 price tag on three hardcover books that were officially released Nov. 3. Originally, the price war extended only to certain books that had to be purchased online before their official release date. Now, it's continuing -- on Amazon, at least -- after the books are published.

It began when Wal-Mart said it would sell advance copies of 10 coming books for $10 on its Web site. Amazon matched the offer. So Wal-Mart dropped to $9. Amazon matched it again. So Wal-Mart dropped to $8.99. Target came along and also offered the books for $8.99. So Wal-Mart dropped to $8.98. And there it rested until Tuesday, when three of the books -- "Ford County" by John Grisham, "The Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver and "Kindred in Death" by J.D. Robb -- actually went on sale.

Claude L��,©vi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called "primitive man" and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and '70s, has died at 100.
His son Laurent said Mr. L��,©vi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the C��,´te-d'Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

"He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house," his son said. "He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest."
With the fading of mythâ�,�s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on mythâ�,�s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.

With the fading of myth�s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth�s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau�s idea that humankind�s problems derive from society�s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss�s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature�s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.
This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity�s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture�s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing �oebinary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.
This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss�s �oestructural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society�s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began �oeTristes Tropiques” with the statement �oeI hate traveling and explorers.”)
To his mind, as he wrote in �oeThe Raw and the Cooked,” translated from �oeLe Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken �oeethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”
In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published as �oeMyth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?

Wide Sargasso Sea is an unnerving read. Most readers are familiar with the book that inspired it, Jane Eyre, and many of us (well, at least some) swooned over the smouldering hero Mr Rochester. But what is so unsettling about this book is that Jean Rhys suggests that Bertha Mason, aka mad wife in the attic, is not just Rochester's skeleton in the closet; she is ours as well. Wide Sargasso Sea, published 120 years after Charlotte Brontë's classic, tells the story of Rochester's first wife, who appears in Jane Eyre as a slavering lunatic, and who lacks any voice to put us right.

Honey baby, won't you cuddle near,
just sweet mama whisper in your ear
I'm wild about that thing, it makes me laugh and sing,
give it to me papa, I'm wild about that thing

youtube.com/watch [youtube.com/watch]

Do it easy, honey, don't get rough,
from you, papa, I can't get enough
I'm wild about that thing, I'm wild about that thing,
everybody knows it, I'm wild about that thing

Please don't hold it, baby, when I cry,
give me every bit of it or else I'll die
I'm wild about that thing, ja da ging ging ging,
all the time I'm cryin', I'm wild about that thing

What's the matter, papa, please don't stop,
don't you know I love it and I want it all?
I'm wild about that thing, just give my bell a ring,
you touched my button, I'm wild about that thing

If you want so satisfy my soul,
come on and rock me with a steady roll
I'm wild about that thing, gee I like your ting-a-ling,
kiss me like you mean it, I'm wild about that thing

Come on turn the lights down low,
say you're ready, just say let's go
I'm wild about that thing, I'm wild about that thing,
come on and make me feel it, I'm wild about that thing

I'm wild about it when you hold me tight,
let me linger in your arms all night
I'm wild about that thing, my passions got the fling,
come on, hear me cryin', I'm wild about that thing

--Bessie Smith

The Hispanic Society of America, the lonely gem of a museum in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, is usually visited -- when visited at all -- for the collection of world-class Goya, El Greco and Vel�zquez paintings amassed there by its founder, the railroad heir and scholar Archer Milton Huntington.
But the society also boasts one of the world's best libraries of material relating to Spain, Portugal and the Americas, a collection accessed through an unassuming side door, which opens onto a small reading room presided over by portraits of great thinkers like the philosopher Jos� Ortega y Gasset and scattered with heavy oak table placards commanding "Silence."

"And so," the lady continued, "I spared nothing to catch him in the glistening nets of love; taking only sour and contemptuous glances in return. And at last in an incredible shape I won the victory, and then, having gained a green crown, fighting in agony against his green and crude immaturity, I devoted him to the theatre, where he amused the people by the splendour of his death." (The Hill of Dreams)



"So I went on and on till I came to the secret wood which must not be described, and I crept into it by the way I had found." ('The White People')