Synergy Schools

PM Abiy, with his wife First Lady Zinash, holds a check of over 110 million Ethiopian Birr, which he is donating to build schools.

PM Abiy obtained over 110 million Ethiopian Birr from the sales of his book Medemer (Synergy).

In Medemer

...the prime minister advocates for a fresh, Ethiopian-centric approach to the country's politics, citing the past

From PM Abiy's Facebook page:

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed handed over a cheque in the amount of one hundred and ten million, six hundred and seventy-one thousand, twenty-five Ethiopian Birr to First Lady Zinash Tayachew, who received the money on behalf of her office for the construction of schools in parts of the country where communities are experiencing a challenge in access to education.

The money is a a first installment amount collected from the book sale of the Amharic and Afaan Oromo versions of Medemer.

Making remarks during the handover ceremony, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed shared, “we not only make promises but we also execute accordingly and thus feel extremely happy."

The World According to Ilana Mercer: Part Deux

Ilana Mercer, in her biography on her website, writes:

Ilana is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank).

She is listed at the JIMS website "team" as a "Media Fellow."

The JIMS states its mission as:

...promot[ing] social progress in Israel through economic freedom and individual liberty.

What is Mercer doing writing for an organization with political roots in Israel?

Which leads me to the following biographical information (on her website):

Ilana was born in South Africa, which her father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, decided to leave pursuant to harassment by the South African security police on account of his anti-apartheid preaching and activism. (Ilana herself, on return, decades later, fought petty apartheid tirelessly.) The family departed in the 1960s for Israel, where Ilana spent her formative years. She returned to South-Africa in the 1980s, married and had a daughter. The family emigrated to Canada in 1995, and then went on to settle in the US.

And who is Rabbi Ben Isaccson?

Another courageous fighter [against Apartheid] was Rabbi Ben Isaacson. A graduate of Bnei Akiva and some of the finest yeshivot, he understood that the oppressive apartheid regime ran counter to Jewish values. As a rabbi, he felt compelled to condemn such injustices from his pulpit and he did so with gusto. Not all his congregants were sympathetic to these fiery sermons. As he berated successive communities for their compliance with apartheid, they responded by firing him. [Source]

Perhaps Mercer's conflicted cannibal imagery stems from her background as a fighter against Apartheid, which led to her post-Apartheid Apocalypse exposition. Perhaps what Mercer needed was a psychoanalyst!

The South African situation is tragic, and difficult to wrap around. The Boers/Dutch built that beautiful country, which is now reviving somewhat. But they did make an expeditionary risk, traveling hundreds of thousands of miles to find their Jerusalem on a Hill. The American nation is built on such adventurers. At some point, the natives might rebel.

Mercer, adamantly, writes "Yes I am a Jew" and continues on to vilify the author who questioned her, among other things, on the image she chose for her book cover Into the Cannibal's Pot.

Incidentally, double-barreled surnames are largely a feminist affection. “Mathis-Lilley” happens to be male. Or, rather, an excuse for a man. Real men don’t bully, berate and bitch baselessly.

(I forgot Mercer's knack for alliterations!)

Again, sloppy journalism and a little insight into Mercer's unremarkableness. She's not the world connoisseur she purports to be

In British tradition, a double surname is heritable, and mostly taken in order to preserve a family name which would have become extinct due to the absence of male descendants bearing the name, connected to the inheritance of a family estate. Examples include Harding-Rolls and Stopford Sackville.

There you have it, masculine and traditional.



Above: "Yes, I'm a Jew" Ilana Mercer with her Irish Catholic-South African husband Sean Mercer.

How will "Yes, I'm a Jew" Mercer bring up her mixed-marriage Irish-Catholic/Jewish daughter?



And below is Ms. Mercer with VDare's Peter Brimelow, at a Mencken Club conference, which hosted the "usual suspects." Brimelow and Mercer have likely met on many other occasions.

VDare has reviewed her cannibal's pot:

Not surprisingly, no mainstream publisher would have anything to do with this a stunning indictment of the state of affairs in Bantu-ruled South Africa...

There is a wiki-link for "Bantu," in case erudite VDare readers don't know that we're still in the same continent.

Glib Stuff: The World According to Ilana Mercer

One commentor makes a (clever) observation on Ilana Mercer's article Coronavirus and Conspiracy: Don’t be A ‘Covidiot’ [KPA: Why in scare quotes? Is Merecer trying to soften her blow?] posted on April 16, 2020, at the UNZ Review:

Ilana Mercer is a little too glib here … stylish see-thru top in the video, tho

The image is a screenshot from her video discussing the ways to be or not to be a covidiot.

And how about the stylish background now that "everyone" is "working" from home? I especially like the ethnic throw pillow effect.

The article and the video are also cross-posted at her website.

Mercer writes in her usual condescending, journalistic attack-dog "style," with her clever "Who's the covidiot?" But who needs clever when your bank account is zero?

The article not being enough, Mercer launches into a 2 1/2 minute Youtube video, just in case you are the usual covidiot suspect who doesn't understand written script.

Please read the piece and try and decipher: Is Mercer pro or con - any of it? Mercer has a knack for luminous muddiness.

Here is her book The Cannibal's Pot. I presume the cannibals are the black south Africans who killed, boiled and ate, the whites during those terrible post-Apartheid years.

It must have been a difficult, and exhausting, book to write. None dare to write a "con" for this book. I may do so one day.

Below is the image for the book cover she decided (accepted, Mercer states that she wasn't involved in the choice of image, but she could have refused the editors such a choice).

The cover art, of course, is the publisher’s purview, not that of the author.
Mercer

I guess all those hands are those of the black men who raped that white woman - metaphorically.

She should have called her book, more honestly perhaps, The Rape of South Africa.

But then, Cannibals, Savages, and sub-par black Africans make for a better title with their grubby gorilla hands plastered on a crouching white lady victim.



Writing with style is a talent. Which (style) Mercer doesn't have.

Germans and Civilization

Photo of sleeping quarters
in the palace Residenz Platz in Wurzburg, Bavaria
[Photo By: KPA, ca 1980]

The Ernst Zundel event was seven years before I was to become a "Landed Immigrant" in Canada. I acquired this status based on the high points I obtained through my educational merits: BS, MS, and ABD - All But the Dissertation - in the sciences, and my language proficiency in both French and English, although I had Spanish and Amharic on my list too.

I read Ernst Zundel years later, and sad to say I went wth the MSM reports of "anti-semite, who deserves his prison term."

Now, of course as I write to advance the Western Civilization's contributions to beauty, and especially the German civilization's (how about Mozart), I begin to understand the truth.

The record of the persecution of German-Canadian heretic Ernst Zundel by a de facto Sanhedrin, for publishing the book, 'Did Six Million Really Die?' is almost too fantastic to countenance. Zundel was prosecuted in Toronto under an archaic False News provision of an old Edwardian legal code. He faced two years in prison if convicted. In response, he put the so-called Holocaust' itself on trial. Zundel's defense was initially regarded by the press and public as preposterous. How can anyone 'deny the Holocaust?' was the incredulous response to the news that Zundel would vigorously defend himself and the free speech rights of all Canadians. The trial was expected to be a quick and ignominious rout of Zundel and his supporters. But in a startling reversal, the 'survivors' who had appeared in court in order to send him to jail, had to submit their testimony to scrutiny, the rules of evidence and cross-examination, something that had never happened before and has never happened since. Canadians grew ever more surprised and shocked at the amazing admissions which the defense team elicited from the supposed eyewitnesses to the homicidal gas chambers. As a result, television reporters and print journalists who covered the 1985 trial produced broadcasts and news reports that turned Canada upside down. Zundel was tried again in 1988. The Great Holocaust Trial reports on both thought crime trials. Softcover, 182 pages. Illustrated. Large format.

The above text is from:
The Great Holocaust Trial: The Landmark Battle for the Right to Doubt the West’s Most Sacred Relic
By Michael Hoffman

Diversity in Writers: Will the Real Jeeves Please Stand?

The article below is from my Camera Lucida blog posted on December 7, 2005 (twelve years ago).

Then, I started to examine what multiculturalism meant to non-White Canadians (Americans, British etc.) and my views have remained exactly the same today as shows my article a couple of days ago Thanksgiving.

Note: The links to the Amazon.com book lists are not current. Ishiguro, Smith and Rushdie are prolific and have produced books through 2018, and they continue to write in the dystopian style they adopted early in their careers. I recommend changing the Amazon.com search by "publication date" to see their current activities, and the rave reviews all round, including:

- Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, published in 2015:

Ishiguro has created a fantastical alternate reality in which, in spite of the extremity of its setting and because of its integrity and emotional truth, you believe unhesitatingly. - The Financial Times, February 2015

- Salman Rushdie's 2017 The Golden House, published in 2017:

The Golden House” has been billed by its publisher as Rushdie’s return to realism. Yet the New York City on offer is so gilded and remote that the novel reads like what one’s impressions would be if all one knew of it came from back issues of Vanity Fair magazine. - The New York Times, September 2017

- Zadie Smith's Feel Free:

“…You will have to take liberties, you will have to feel free to write as you like…even if it is irresponsible. - Zadiesmith.com

(Note: Rather than use "truth" as the target, Smith, like all dislocated people, who gravitate towards dystopia - and violence - choses "irresponsible" instead. She knows words and her word choice is not an error.)

All have won various prizes and perhaps the most prestigious is Ishiguro's Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017:

Kazuo Ishiguro
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017
[...]
Prize motivation: "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." - The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017

Jeeves of course died in 1975 (born in 1881), and his ghost did not write the 2018 listed books. Rather, they are contemporary reprints which probably do not do the aesthetic credit that the older versions did to his craft.

First edition
Author: P. G. Wodehouse
Publisher: George Newnes
Publication date: May 1919 [Source]

---

Diversity in Writers: Will the Real Jeeves Please Stand?

England has witnessed several years of non-English authors who keep winning literary prizes, or just literary acclaim. Zadie Smith was recently in the headlines, Salman Rushdie has managed to outlive his fatwa, and another less famous but prolific writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, has written yet another book from those fair British Isles.
I’ve read books by all three, even tried more than one of each. And all leave me less than enthralled, slightly confused, and struck by a lack of authenticity. I find their characters to be caricatures. Both Rushdie and Smith go for hyperbole, while Ishiguro goes for exactly the opposite.

I’m beginning to wonder if non-British writers, however much they were born on the Island, can really capture the spirit of the land.

“Remains of the Day” by Ishiguro has a gloomy, undecipherable, remorseful butler try to recapture something of what he’s lost during all those years of selfless service. Actually, I recant my observation about Ishiguro’s understatement. What could be more of a hyperbole than this?

Then there is P.G. Wodehouse, with the inimitable Jeeves. His adroit butler who really always does save the day, after a lot of scampers and near-disasters along the way. And he does get to have his day at the sea-side also, and quite frequently.

I think Wodehouse captured his character with affection as a butler who certainly is not going to be bossed around by any Lord! No remains for him to collect.

Sometimes I wonder; if you don’t have your full emotions invested in a place, how can you write positive things about it? Like Rushdie, Smith and Ishiguro, who seem to deny a possibility for a future in their books, and press on with their circular exaggerations trying to find meanings for themselves.

Ishiguro’s 2001 book “When we were orphans” is about an Englishman who mysteriously lost his parents as a young boy in Shanghai. He returns as a professional detective to solve that ultimate mystery. It reminds me of these writers, trying to find clues about their past by digging into words.

Ishiguro’s latest book forfeited the unapproachable Far East, and his ancestral home, for something even more alien. It seems like he’s completely given up on ‘his’ England. “Never let me go” is about a Utopia (or a dystopia) on cloning. No more real people, real places or real stories for Ishiguro in the advent of the 21st century.

Why doesn’t this progression of his thoughts and stories not surprise me?

Quote from an interview with Ishiguro on "When we were Orphans":

There's a certain kind of branded, packaged atmosphere of Shanghai: this exotic, mysterious, decadent place. The same in Remains of the Day. It was a case of manipulating certain stereotypical images of a certain kind of classical England. Butlers and tea and scones: it's not really about describing a world that you know well and firsthand. It's about describing stereotypes that exist in people's heads all around the world and manipulating them engagingly.

Democracy Destroys

From Our Borders, Our Selves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism, by Lawrence Auster (forthcoming from VDare Books):
(Via: The Thinking Housewife)

What must be understood and resisted is the Secular‑Democratic Consciousness in all its forms, whether they be called leftist, liberal, conservative, or even Christian. Whatever its particular ideological object, the Secular‑Democratic Consciousness believes not in God but in man and the perfectibility of human values.

In pursuit of that perfection, it reduces the whole of reality with its hierarchy of spiritual and temporal goods to one part of that reality, and treats that one part as the whole, while seeking to eliminate whatever stands in its way. The various secular “gods” resulting from this ideological operation go by many names — global democracy, humanity, unlimited personal freedom, economic equality, racial equality, gender equality, compassion, sexual liberation, economic growth, population control, immigration, race blindness, racial diversity, racial amalgamation. America itself is regarded as possessing godlike qualities, as we see in the idea of America as a “redeemer nation” or “universal nation.”

To the Secular‑Democratic Consciousness, America is not a nation under God, America (or rather the ideology they call “America”) is God. The core of the Secular‑Democratic Consciousness in all its forms is the deformation of the Christian religion into the Religion of Man.

But that is only the beginning of the disaster. With the advent of multiculturalism and anti‑racism, the Religion of Man has been further perverted into the Religion of Other Men and hatred of ourselves. The secularization of the Christian West has thus ultimately led to radical alienation and race suicide.

Therefore, while there may be other, non‑Christian ways of rebuilding a normal sense of peoplehood and racial identity among whites, I believe that the only way it can happen in the context of Western civilization is through the rediscovery of the classical and Christian understanding that we Westerners have lost.

It is this consciousness — the active force in Western civilization from the ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages to the American Founding — which sees reality whole. Seeing reality whole, it places all values, spiritual and secular, in their natural rank and order, accepting and negotiating the unavoidable tensions between them, rather than trying to escape the tension by making human values into gods. At bottom, this consciousness of wholeness can only arise from love of God and truth. It is through communion with God, and through living in a society consecrated to God, that we as individuals and as a society properly order ourselves, not only toward the perfect good of heaven, but toward the partial but indispensable goods of this temporal life, including the goods of family, nation, and race. It is only a godly people, living day by day in love of God, who can truly love existence as such and who are therefore able to preserve their particular existence as a people under God, while also recognizing the respective rights of other peoples.

Via J. S. Smith
From The Orthospehre

“The primary ground of Faith is a normal and ineradicable feeling . . . that behind the world of phenomenon there is a world of eternal values, attracting us towards itself. These values are manifested . . . through phenomena, through the section of the world which we know, [and they] have been classified as the ideas of Truth, Beauty and Goodness” (2).
From
Faith
By William Ralph Inge
Full text here

The Well Dressed Lady: Part II

I returned to the store yesterday afternoon to pick up Moonlight in Paris along with some other book that would make my total purchase $5 (or more...).

I looked and looked. I searched via the store's computer catalogue. I went into sections where I knew the book shouldn't be but tried anyway.

Finally, I asked one of the store assistants to help me, but to no avail.

I was very disappointed. This, according to my email notification, was the last day to redeem my "free" dollars.

I took a couple of breaths, and looked again at the $2-5 stacks.
Then I found this!
The Well-Dressed Lady's Pocket Guide
By Karen Homer

Wow!

It is a tiny book, 4x6.5", hardback, and with a creative illustration, a wispy ink drawing on the cover. (The lady's earring and the book title are in a metallic silver, which looks grey when I use photoshop.)



I skimmed through it and I liked the chapters (a good start):
- Shapes and Silhouettes
- Dresses
- Skirts

The final one being: "Your Wardrobe."

But you can't have it all; there is a section on jeans. How can you be a "lady" in jeans? Maybe they got that song title wrong: Lady in Blue and thought it meant "blue jeans."

Anyway so far so good despite glitches.

The introduction ends like this:

With the disappearance of universal fashion etiquette and previously unimaginable social mobility of the last 50 years, it might seem the wish to be well-dressed, with its connotations of snobbery and elitism, has fallen out of favour. But many women realize they want a style that endures - essentially classic, yet still individual, giving a nod to fashion but always appropriate. And while good clothes can be more expensive when compared to the disposable attitude to fashion - buy it cheap then throw it away - compiling a well-thought-out wardrobe that wll cover any occasions more economical in the long run. And that's exactly what this pocket book for the well-dressed woman will teach you how to do.

The Well Dressed Lady: Part I

Since when have women been called "ladies?"

I went to my local Chapters Indigo (mega) bookstore to redeem a $5 "top-up" they emailed me (I've been a pretty good customer averaging about 5 books/year). Actually I went yesterday to search through the choices and was delighted to find that they are doing their periodic sale of unsold books and putting them up for $2 $3 $5 $7, the highest for $10. They have put them is semi-subject classifications. But all that really amounts to is "fiction vs. nonfiction."

I found what looked like a nice story called Moonlight in Paris for $2 and went to buy it.

The lovely lady (yes a lady) at the cash said that I would have to find a book $5 or more to redeem my points, otherwise I would have to pay outright.

"That defeats the whole purpose!" I said. "I think I will just go back and look for some more."

At this point I usually take the book in hand and put it back where I found it so that I can locate it easily next time around, but I forgot to do so.

"Your hair looks lovely!" I said to her. She usually has it up in a bun and now it is a low cut bob. It is grey (white). I thought it made her look younger and her light blue eyes were more prominent. I didn't say all this though!

"Yes it is a summer cut. It used to be really long. I had it wrapped up in a bun."

I said my goodbyes and resigned to come back the next day after I looked up books on the store's online catalogue.

"Meritocracy, Diversity: Pick One"

Photo from the Washington Post article:
The White House releases a photo of its interns,
and the Internet asks: Why so few people of color?
(See larger photo here)

The Vdare blog has this fascinating post up: Meritocracy And Diversitocracy Incompatible.

Derbyshire, the author of the article via his radio show, expands on an article: Analysis: The White House releases a photo of its interns, and the Internet asks: Why so few people of color? by Eugene Scott, published on the Washington Post on March 31, 2018.

Besides the usual "blacks are less intelligent than whites" meme that Vdare endlessly announces, what I found so very interesting was that Derbyshire, who is married to an Asian woman and with two Happa children, should have missed this one: The statistically insignificant presence of Asians in the photo of the White House interns on the Whashington Post article. That is, statistically, zero. In actuality, I counted:
- One South Asian woman (no men)
- Two East Asian men (no women)

Asians have continuously been touted as smarter than whites (they get the highest scores in various standardized tests) the most diligent, and the most successful academically. But something strange happens when they hit the "real world."

I've written about it here regarding music and general academics, and here on the (in)famous "Tiger Mom" who was a subject of my two or three posts, and who has a new book out championing "tribal" connections - in America no less!

Amy Chua's (the Tiger Mom's) two daughters show similar traits. Despite a rigorous childhood of homework and volin practice neither has turned out to be the genius she (we) expected.

Well Chua's latest book is a little more complicated than that, but no less self-serving than her memoir and her American life. But more on that later.

"A Wrinkle in Time" and Universal Salvation

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

I wrote about the movie A Wrinkle in Time here and here, but prior to going through the copious notes I took while rewatching the movie (using my hand-held "book-reading" miniature lamp) for an upcoming "movie critique" post, I bought the book on which the film is based. That too deserves a review, although a parallel critique (with the movie) might be a better approach.

Madeleine L'Engle the author of the book is described thus:

L'Engle was an Episcopalian and believed in universal salvation, writing that "All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones." As a result of her promotion of Christian universalism, many Christian bookstores refused to carry her books, which were also frequently banned from Christian schools and libraries. At the same time, some of her most secular critics attacked her work for being too religious.

Her views on divine punishment were similar to those of George MacDonald, who also had a large influence on her fictional work. She said "I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love."

In 1982, L'Engle reflected on how suffering had taught her. She told how suffering a "lonely solitude" as a child taught her about the "world of the imagination" that enabled her to write for children. Later she suffered a "decade of failure" after her first books were published. It was a "bitter" experience, yet she wrote that she had "learned a lot of valuable lessons" that enabled her to persevere as a writer.

I thought the book would have the same allegorical character of C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia books (also later made into films). But no. It's closer to the Harry Potter series.

I should have known better.

I asked my local bookstore cashier whether she had read the book. "Yes when I was a girl. I don't remember much about it except that I found it scary."

Me: "Well the film isn't a lightweight fairy tale either. I thought it was scary for an adult!"

I continued:

"At the very end, two little girls with their parents walked toward the exit. The parents were still focused on the screen. I guess to read the huge scroll of credentials. But the little girls - sisters, one was maybe three the other five - just stood there. Not talking, not moving. One looked back and saw me in the very back row. Who sits in the front row in an IMAX movie theatre! I was the only one up there by then. I could see a desperate look in her eyes. As though she wanted comforting. Then her sister followed her movement and also looked back and she had the exact same expression. Finally the parents moved on to the exit and left."

I bought the book anyway.

Oprah decided to join this project in the guise of a children's movie. She has allowed these evil forces to be unleashed. And to lay claim to the innocents.

The Lesbian Vs. God and Other Stories

Hernandez (middle) performing Future Folk with her
Sulong Theatre Collective, which is a play based on:
"The experiences of Filipino women who come to Canada to work as nannies.
They send their wages back home, and hope after 24 months of employment
to become citizens and bring their own families to Canada."[Source]

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Our Neighborhood Filipina Story Teller portrayed in my recent post Catch Them When They're Young has quite a resume writing for "minors":

Kilt Pins

In a Catholic high school in Scarborough, Ontario, amidst low-income housing, difficult race relations, and poverty, a young woman struggles to find her sexual identity. In this sincere portrayal of high-school kids pitting the voice of God and thousands of years of scripture against the voice of their own bodies, Kilt Pins cheekily asks “Is your kilt pin up or down?”

Scarborough

Scarborough is a low-income, culturally diverse neighbourhood east of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America; like many inner-city communities, it suffers under the weight of poverty, drugs, crime, and urban blight. Scarborough the novel employs a multitude of voices to tell the story of a tight-knit neighbourhood under fire: among them, Victor, a black artist harassed by the police; Winsum, a West Indian restaurant owner struggling to keep it together; and Hina, a Muslim school worker who witnesses first-hand the impact of poverty on education.

And then there are the three kids who work to rise above a system that consistently fails them: Bing, a gay Filipino boy who lives under the shadow of his father’s mental illness; Sylvie, Bing’s best friend, a Native girl whose family struggles to find a permanent home to live in; and Laura, whose history of neglect by her mother is destined to repeat itself with her father.

And more on Arsenal Press

Arsenal Pulp Press is a book publisher in Vancouver, Canada with over 300 titles currently in print, which include literary fiction and nonfiction; cultural and gender studies; LGBT and multicultural literature; cookbooks, including vegan; alternative crafts; graphic novels; visual arts; and books in translation. We are interested in literature that engages and challenges readers, and which asks probing questions about the world around us.

Of course these welfare artists insist that they get their financial sources from tax payers money courtesy of the Canadian Government (don't let the meek word "suggests" deceive you):

Catherine Hernandez suggests several strategies to redress...deep-seated inequities: hiring more diverse teaching staff; educating teaching staff in anti-oppressive values; implementing a “much more aggressive diverse application process to ensure the student body is multicultural”; and diversifying the curriculum beyond the canonical (white) narratives that dominate it [Source].

Here is one such publisher which has produced Hernandez's children's book, that petitioned successfully to get LGBQT children's books into the school curriculum through the Toronto District School Board:

"Flamingo Rampant is a micro-press with a mission – to produce feminist, racially-diverse, LGBTQ positive children’s books. This is an effort to bring visibility and positivity to the reading landscape of children everywhere. We make books kids love that love them right back, bedtime stories for beautiful dreams, and books that make kids of all kinds say with pride : that kid’s just like me!" tells us the publisher

Hernandez has had a lot of practice with her own daughter who is now around thirteen years old. Hernandez appears to have been married to a male from whom she separated soon after her daughter's birth. She writes: "I parented Arden with little to no help from friends, family and my spouse at the time." She says that her children's book M is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book was inspired by her daughter.

"Based on my many marches with my own child during what she called “Rainbow Time”, the book will follow in an ABC format, a small child as she gets ready to march alongside her mama at Pride.“

Previously-married-to-a-male Hernandez has a daughter now thirteen

Just shy of Arden’s 12th birthday, she approaches my partner, Nazbah, in the kitchen. “I’m so glad you’re my stepparent,” she says. Nazbah considers spearing a fork into their own heart in order to stop the tears of joy.[Source]

Brief Book Review: Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It

Below is a brief book review I wrote on James Kalb's Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It.

He mentioned my contribution here on his website.
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Brief Book Review: Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It
July 30, 2013

I hate to copy full texts from any book, especially one newly published, but sometimes that is the best way to make a point.

I've got Jim Kalb's new book Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It. It arrived at the bookstore where I placed the order far quicker than I expected (about four days). I think that is faster than Amazon.com's delivery time, unless one pays extra for overnight shipment.

In any case, I went to the table of contents first, and found in Chapter 10:

Making it Real
Difficulty of the Struggle - Towards an Anti-Inclusivist Right - Fundamental Needs: Ideals (The True, The Beautiful, The Just and Good, Religion); A Favorable Setting - Making the Case - Limits

I went to the "The Beautiful" section on pages 170-171, and below is what I read:

For modernity, beauty is no less a problem than truth. Since it makes man the measure, the scientistic view assimilates beauty to personal preference. It puts beauty in the eye of the beholder, and so makes pushpin as good as poetry. Such a view is contrary to all intelligent experience. Beauty is evidently part of how things are. It forces itself on us as something of indubitable value that cannot be reduced to personal preference. That is what it means to recognize it as beauty. Our perception of it may depend on taste, but a personal element does not make a perception merely subjective any more than the dependence of knowledge on qualities such as intelligence, experience, and good sense makes truth merely subjective (5).

Beauty falsifies the dogma that denies reality to whatever is difficult to analyze and impossible to measure. It connects the material world to something beyond itself and gives us an immediate perception of something transcendent that is worthy of our love. It gives pleasure, so it attracts and pleases, but it is no less at odds with the technological outlook than fasting and prayer. It cannot be forced, and technique serves it, but does not create it. You have to wait on it and let it be what it is.

So anti-technocratic education must emphasize the beautiful. When those who appeal to tradition and the transcendent lack a sense of beauty, what they propose seems less an absorbing way of life that leads us to a grasp of the reality of things than one arbitrary ideology among others, a matter of rules, team spirit, and group dominance and not much else.

5. For a ground-breaking study of the objectivity of aesthetic valuby by a scientifically-trained architectural theorist, see Alexander, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe.

I think beauty is even more problematic than truth. There is truth, based on facts, objective, scientifically obtained facts, but how does one objectively establish beauty?

The problem may be less difficult for scholars and (honest) artist, but how does an ordinary person identify and accept beauty?

One's children are "beautiful" however ugly they may be in reality. One's religion is beautiful. Look at the beautiful mosques that Muslims build to express the beauty they see in their religion. One's language has beauty, however gutteral it may sound. An ugly outfit designed by a prestigious designer is considered beautiful by the high-society woman who wears it.

Yet, these same people will recognize truth, and reject lies, if they are truthful to themselves. An ordinary person can identify truth and lies, and will often discern lies even when sugar-coated with what seems like truth.

Beauty, in modernity, is far more problematic, and far easier to misidentify, than truth. It requires a different level of discernment. It may indeed really be the territory of experts who can identify it, and who relay that information to others. People can live without beauty for a longer period than truth, as long as they have some basics fulfilled like a family life, a comfortable income, shelter and food, and even find it acceptable to live without beauty.

But, ultimately, lack of beauty is far more insidious, because it drains people's objective reality slowly. One can fight against an obvious lie, but how does one fight for beauty? Walking by an ugly building, day after day, will numb the soul. Perhaps we can be saved by small acts for beauty, like Winston in Orwell's 1984, when he bought a paperweight simply because he found it beautiful amidst the soul-numbing ugliness around him.

Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr. Charrington's shop. Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly outof the half-darkness...

[Julia] brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of her hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance of the glass.[1984, Part 2, Chapter 4]

And here is the seemingly innocuous paperweight being smashed to pieces by the thought police:

Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back. The head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had burst in the frame. Someone was climbing through the window. There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands...

There was another crash. Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone.

The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!...

There was another, lighter step in the passage. Mr. Charrington came into the room. The demeanour of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Something had also changed in Mr. Charrington's appearance. His eye fell on the fragments of the glass paperweight.

'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply. [1984, Part 1, Chapter 10]

Charrington knows that beauty is revolutionary. It can ignite the rebellion of the weakened and submissive, like Winston. Once Winston realized the possibility of acquiring beauty, he started to gain some strength.

Kalb makes similar observations about the re-creation of language and meaning in liberal society in his new book:

To some extent, the new standards are based on the view that the old ones were bad, because they had to do with the non-commercial and non-bureaucratic arrangements of the old society. Reversing and violating those standards has therefore become a virtue. Central and marginal have changed places: Islam has become a religion of peace, homosexual couples stable and loving, blacks wise and spiritual, immigrants the true Americans. In contrast, Christianity is presented as a religion of war and aggression, Middle Americans as violent and irrational, Republicans as the Taliban, and traditional marriage as hateful, oppressive, divisive , and pathological. When women and minorities do well, they deserve the credit, when they do badly, white men deserve the blame. Any flaws in the groups promoted from the margin to the center are whitewashed, the more glaring the flaws the thicker the coating. [P. 8]

How Multiculturalism Took Over...

Excerpt from a February 2017 article:

'I am American, not Asian-American.' Writer Bharati Mukherjee (1940-2017) never wanted a label:

She did say “I am American, not Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally.” But her rejection of the hyphen was not a rejection of her roots at all. She loved going to Durga Puja celebrations.

About the article source Scroll.in:

Scroll.in is an independent news, information, and entertainment venture. We bring into sharp focus the most important political and cultural stories that are shaping contemporary India. Our goal is to add critical perspectives to these stories through rigorous reporting, objective analyses, and expert commentary.

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I recently wrote this brief (unpublished) commentary on "Third World" writers in their "First World spaces:"

Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space
By: Arun Prabha Mukherjee

Although this collection of essays...demonstrate the topics that the majority of Third World writers and essayists broach. Mukherjee presents a harsh and racially negative view of the Euro-Canadian arts and literary world.

Here is an excerpt from Larry Auster's more extensive commentary from his article in Frontpage Magazine:
How Multiculturalism Took Over America from July 2004.

Moderate Myth [Number Five]: The Pro-Western Multiculturalist

Another soothing fiction that has helped advance multiculturalism is a personality type rather than an idea. It is the friendly Third-World immigrant, who warmly professes his or her love for America, yet who, on closer examination, reveals a desire to do away with America as an historically distinct country. Such a moderate is the novelist Bharati Mukherjee, an immigrant to the U.S. by way of Canada, who had this to say in a public television interview with Bill Moyers in 1990:

What I like to think, Bill, is that you and I are both now without rules, because of the large influx of non-Europeans in the '70s and '80s, and more to come in the '90s. That it's not a melting pot situation anymore, and I don't like to use the phrase melting pot if I can help it, because of the 19th century associations with mimicry; that one was expected to scrub down one's cultural eccentricities and remake oneself in the Anglo-Saxon image. If I can replace melting pot with a phrase like fusion vat, or fusion chamber, in which you and I are both changed radically by the presence of new immigrants, I would be much happier. So that you are having to change your rules, I like to think, and I am certainly have to change my Old World rules.… [Emphasis added].

There are no comforts, no old mythologies to cling to. We have to invent new American mythologies. Letting go of the old notions of what America was shouldn't be seen as a loss.… I hope that as we all mongrelize, or as we all fuse, that we will build a better and more hopeful nation.(16)

Underneath Mukherjee's confiding and civilized tone, she was informing her American audience that they must "mongrelize" themselves in order to accommodate non-Europeans. In this new dispensation (unchallenged by her supremely passive and "open" interviewer, Bill Moyers, who piously hung on her every word), the preservation of America as a historic nation and people was not even an issue any more. To grasp how unnatural this situation was, imagine an immigrant in some relatively sane country—say Japan or Italy or the pre-1965 America—who, shortly after his arrival, announces to his new countrymen: "Oh, by the way, you people must—in order to make me comfortable—give up everything that has constituted your culture and identity. But don't worry! You shouldn't see this as a loss!" He would be thrown out on his ear. Yet by the 1990s America had become the sort of decadent place where a smooth-talking "moderate" could make a career saying exactly that.

Like most imperialists, Mukherjee seemed complacently oblivious to the culture and people she wished to dominate. At one point in the Moyers interview, she predicted an increase in ethnic violence, "because there's a kind of disinvestment in America.… [P]eople have not invested in the country. There's been a 'What part of the pie is for me?' kind of an attitude …" It didn't seem to occur to her that the disinvestment in America that she regretted may have had something to do with the devaluing of America's historic identity that she applauded. Indeed, if anyone was wondering, "what part of the pie is for me," it would seem to be Mukherjee herself and her fellow immigrants, whom she spoke of as "we, the new pioneers, who are thinking of America as still a frontier country."

I think that the original American pioneers had to have been in many ways, hustlers, and capable of a great deal of violence in order to wrest the country from the original inhabitants. And to make a new life, new country, for themselves. So that vigor of possessing the land, I like to think, my characters have.

16. 16. Bill Moyers interview with Bharati Mukherjee, PBS, 1990.
Full transcript of the interview is here

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Addendum


Grandparents Muharjee and her husband Clark Blaise (who is also an author)

Clark Blaise:

...has been married since 1963 to writer Bharati Mukherjee. They met as students at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and have two sons. In 1978, Blaise and Mukherjee moved to Toronto. However, Mukherjee felt excluded in Canada, attributing it to racism and publishing an essay in Saturday Night.In 1980, the couple decided to return to the United States, moving to San Francisco.
[Source: Wikipedia]

The perfect multicultural grandchild:

Mukherjee's son Bart Anand, of Indian and Canadian heritage, married Kim, who is half Irish and half German American and they have just adopted a baby girl from China. Says Mukherjee, "So it's a very poly-national American family that we represent. What I want to get across is that I hope this will be the way American society goes, that we are all going to be embracing so many different ethnic and racial groups within our families that this whole anxiety about ethnic origin - what does it mean to be a hyphenated American - I hope will disappear."
[Source: Little India Half And Half: Just how authentic an American are you?]

Exclusive Christianity

Arthur Rimbaud's House in Harar, Ethiopia

(A post from 2005 at Camera Lucida)

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Arthur Rimbaud has his own house/museum in the city of Harar. Perhaps it is in the name of literary tradition that Canadian novelist Camilla Gibb has made a special ode to this walled, Southern Islamic city in Ethiopia in her new book Sweetness in the Belly.

It is always curious why writers pay such high praises to this city. Although Rimbaud initially said he was living in boredom, he stayed in Harar on-and-off for ten years.

Sir Richard Burton preferred to investigate Harar in his First Footsteps in East Africa rather than travel to the northern Christian Highlands of the Amhara people. And even Evelyn Waugh couldn’t see the ancient strength of this Christian civilization, and in his journalistic travelogues Waugh in Abyssinia and Remote People at times appeared much more complimentary toward the Southern Harare/Somali Muslims. His novel Scoop, based on his journalistic experience of the fascist invasion of Ethiopia, is centered around the fictional "East Africa" country of…Ishmaelia. This is all the more surprising in light of Waugh’s recent conversion to Catholicism. But it could just be that he was temporarily side-tracked by the Catholic (yet fascist) Italians. And such a basic Christianity may have been too much to handle.

I suspect that it is mostly atheist/pantheist/agnostic writers who are lured into the facile spirituality (sensuality) of places like Harar. As always with exotic works, the subject rings of the writer/traveler himself, in his spiritual (or similar) quest to find some meaning in his life. Usually, the farther away from home, the better.

The disciplined, ancient and exclusive Christianity of the highlander Amhara is too difficult and too demanding, and too close to home. I think this Biblical fear drives these writers away. It is easier to wallow in the accessible sensuality of a Southern Muslim city, in search of a generalized spirituality.

The Islam of Harar may be beguiling, and easier to enter. But it is far less forgiving and far less compassionate than the Christianity of the austere Highlanders.

I have been cited in three books...

Nicole Kidman, as Lady Ashley in Australia
Arriving in Darwin

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I have been cited in three books:

1. Little Mosque on the Prairie and the Paradoxes of Cultural Translation
By: Kyle Conway
University of Toronto Press, Feb 10, 2017

(From my article in American Thinker: How Canada's Little Mosque on the Prairie is Aiming for our Souls)

In Chapter 1 : Sitcoms, Cultural Translation and the Paradox of Saleable Diversity

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2. Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice
Ed. Peter Dickinson et al.
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Mar 27, 2014

I am referenced in Chapter 16 in an essay by Regina Barreca: Layla Siddiqui as Holy Fool in Little Mosque on the Prairie:

Baber and his continual critique of Canadian morality no doubt inspired the claim of columnist Kidist Paulos Asrat that the show's intention is to convert North Americans to Islam.

This is once again based on my article How Canada's Little Mosque on the Prairie is Aiming for our Souls, but it is an incorrect interpretation of what I wrote. This is the usual hyperbole of multiculturalists who wish to find a demon in any critic of multiculturalism.

What I wished to communicate was that the show's intent was to make North Americans sympathetic towards Islam, and not to convert them. Little Mosque on the Prairie was still an exotic sitcom then. The show came out in January 2007 as Canadians were learning about it, and was cancelled in April 2012 as the novelty wore off, and not because of "Islamophobia."

Barreca is a feminist academician (no oxymoron there) who also wants to be funny. She quips:

“I used to assume my students were feminists,” she says. “It seemed like everyone got my jokes and laughed. Now I have to explain myself.”

For more on Baber (and his daughter Layla) see their character descriptions on Wikipedia

Layla Siddiqui (Aliza Vellani) is... a portrait of an average teenage Muslim girl struggling to find the right balance between her desire to be a good Muslim and her desire for the lifestyle of a regular Canadian teenager who's into music, clothes and boys. She can be rebellious and sarcastic, especially at her father's foibles (she refers to their home as "Baberistan"), but is also very perceptive and insightful. [

The book is a compilation of lectures at symposium at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia in 2011. The essays collected in Women and Comedy: History, Theory, and Practice, originally presented and discussed at a 2011 symposium held at Simon Fraser University.

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3. Baz Luhrmann
By: Pam Cook
British Film Institute; 2010 edition (July 6 2010)

I am cited in the end notes (104) of Baz Luhrmann, which I presume is in reference to my article: Australia: Whose Land is it Anyway, by Austral filmmaker Baz Luhrmann, in American Thinker. I write about the difficult integration of aboriginal mysticism with British pragmatic colonialism. I come in favor of Nicole Kidman's austere but brave femininity, and her kindly adoption of an aboriginal orphan, rescuing him from being interned in a mission school.

Pam Cook tells us in her "welcome page":

I have been thinking, writing and teaching about moving image culture since the 1970s, and these pages are a record of my work up to the present. Since 2006 I’ve been Professor Emerita in Film at the University of Southampton [UK].

Re-re-Appropriation

The title of my previous post "Native Son" is a play on words and meaning from the book Native Son by Black American (then referred to as American Negro) writer Richard Wright, who was no "son" and refused to be a "native."

Black Americans appear to be in perpetual anger against their white countrymen, towards whom they never feel convivial. Wright wrote his "Native Son," just before the tumultuous "sixties" to which he contributed nonetheless as a Communist, when white Americans were cornered into accepting the superiority of blacks, and not simply their equality.

Here is a quote from what he wrote:

The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.

This must be where former President Barrack Obama must have got his Whites, guns and religion reference from.

And here is the homosexual spokesman for Wright, James Baldwin, who fled America to France, not as some original form of protest, but to join other American expatriate writers and artists who preferred to criticize their country from a distance:

Out of this incredible brutality, we get the myth of the happy darky and Gone With the Wind. And the North Americans appear to believe these legends, which they have created and which absolutely nothing in reality corroborates, until today. And when these legends are attacked, as is happening now—all over a globe which has never been and never will be White—my countrymen become childishly vindictive and unutterably dangerous. The”
- James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

So I can re-re-appropriate "Native" whenever and wherever like. Here it is again:
Homer Watson: Native Son.

I've read Native Son. It s a lyrical book. But it is unforgiving and even petty:

Reading in an Idyllic Garden

I have always been an avid reader.

Above, I am at around age 13 when we stayed at a small B&B in Eastry, a village in Kent, England. I was a pupil at the nearby Betteshanger School with the lofty title of "Head Girl." Eastry was the closest place near our school where we could find a few places to visit. By our last year, "seniors" were allowed to go out to the village. Our favorite was the village shop were we could buy "gobstoppers," huge hard candy balls which we would buy in threes or fours, with the kind store lady dipping into her large jar to fish them out . I'm not sure why we liked them except that they lasted a long time. Some of the younger staff at the school would also take senior prefects and head girls and boys to the local pubs. I'm not sure if we were allowed to drink beer (I never did), but I'm sure I could have a shandy (lemonade and beer, with a higher lemonade concentration for us "children").

I'm not sure what I was reading in that idyllic garden covered with daisies, but I always had a book with me. I was a loyal fan of those historical romances, but of the more sophisticated kind (I've never read a complete Harlequin romance). The book could be an Anya Seton romance (Katherine was my favourite). Seton wrote about individual women who seemed to make a presence in their surroundings.

I remember a school friend and I having a discussion about these books. "You should just enjoy them," she said. "There is time to read other books." I'm not sure I fully agreed with her. In any case, this blimp didn't last very long. I was an eclectic reader, from Dickens to Laura Ingalls.

I just looked up Anya Seton. For such a proponent of "romance" Seton married twice and divorced twice.

This is the book cover that I remember. It is a first edition and revised cover from 1954.



I cannot find the B&B online and it is probably closed by now, but this home resembles it and it is close enough to the school that it might be the one. In any case, it is a close resemblance.

"Sometimes they climbed trees"

Woods in Northbourne Park School (called Betteshanger School when I attended)

Laura Wood of The Thinking Housewife quotes from Anthony Esolen’s Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child [ISI Books, 2010].

Here is one part that stood out in my regard:

Sometimes they climbed trees.

I never really climbed trees, but I did find one tree with a seat in its trunk that was low enough for me to climb into. I would sit there even in the cold of those English winters, put on my mittens and scarf, and read my books, which carried me to distant woods and forests, oceans and continents. I climbed metaphorical trees perched in my secure trunk.


Cathedral Forest
[Photo by: KPA]

Ishiguro photographed in an English countryside.
[Photo credit: Andrew Testa]

Here is a tweeter who writes:

[R]umour has it that @SalmanRushdie was hiding post fatwa in this house in Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire.

and a tweet reply:

@wodekszemberg @SalmanRushdie is there supposed to be any significance in this being next to a graveyard?

Ishiguro has a daughter Naomi with his English wife. Here is photo of her with a school friend from 2008.

As luck would have it, the mansion in front of which Ishiguro is posing is in Camden. So we can conclude that Ishiguro lived in Camden, and is now a Londoner according to his Wikipedia entry.

That is a strange coincidence that he lived n the same region in England as where Rushdie was rumored to have stayed during his fatwa. Or maybe not. Possibly, Ishiguro arranged Rushdie's secret accommodations.
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Here is more on the location of the photograph in the beautiful Cotswalds made to look like some abandoned barren land:

Kazuo Ishiguro, a novelist, in Chipping Campden, England, Jan. 26, 2015. Ishiguro’s new novel, “The Buried Giant,” is the riskiest and most ambitious venture of his celebrated career, a return to his hallmark themes of memory and loss, set in a ogre- and pixie-populated ancient England. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Ishiguro said. “Will readers follow me into this?” (Andrew Testa/The New York Times) - XNYT109

Below, I have posted and artcle I wrote at Camera Lucida in 2005 (!) where I clearly understood the perils of "diversity:" Diversity in Writers

Update (December 22, 2016) on Zadie Smith and Kazuo Ishiguro:
Smith continues with her theme of race/multi-race/mixed-race/ and some sociopolitical commentary about racial divides and biases often subtly elevating the "black" side of her own mixed-race "heritage." Here latest book is Swingtime which I have reviewed and will post soon.

Ishiguro abandoned the silent Butler narrator of a very real British household a while ago and started to write science fiction, not C.S. Lewis' Christian-based allegories, nor Tolkien's adventure sagas (also religious allegories) but dystopia fantasies of the world, or lives, falling apart. Although should add that The Butler had this creepy ghost-like aura. Ishiguro's latests, The Buried Giant:

Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge and war. [Source]

As wrote (full post below):

[If] you don’t have your full emotions invested in a place, how can you write positive things about it? Like Rushdie, Smith and Ishiguro, who seem to deny a possibility for a future in their books, and press on with their circular exaggerations trying to find meanings for themselves.

Non-allegorical, dystopian science fiction fits that creative void.
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Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Diversity in Writers
Will the Real Jeeves Please Stand?

England has witnessed several years of non-English authors who keep winning literary prizes, or just literary acclaim. Zadie Smith was recently in the headlines, Salman Rushdie has managed to outlive his fatwa, and another less famous but prolific writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, has written yet another book from those fair British Isles.

I’ve read books by all three, even tried more than one of each. And all leave me less than enthralled, slightly confused, and struck by a lack of authenticity. I find their characters to be caricatures. Both Rushdie and Smith go for hyperbole, while Ishiguro goes for exactly the opposite.

I’m beginning to wonder if non-British writers, however much they were born on the Island, can really capture the spirit of the land.

“Remains of the Day” by Ishiguro has a gloomy, undecipherable, remorseful butler try to recapture something of what he’s lost during all those years of selfless service. Actually, I recant my observation about Ishiguro’s understatement. What could be more of a hyperbole than this?

Then there is P.G. Wodehouse, with the inimitable Jeeves. His adroit butler who really always does save the day, after a lot of scampers and near-disasters along the way. And he does get to have his day at the sea-side also, and quite frequently.

I think Wodehouse captured his character with affection as a butler who certainly is not going to be bossed around by any Lord! No remains for him to collect.

Sometimes I wonder; if you don’t have your full emotions invested in a place, how can you write positive things about it? Like Rushdie, Smith and Ishiguro, who seem to deny a possibility for a future in their books, and press on with their circular exaggerations trying to find meanings for themselves.

Ishiguro’s 2001 book “When we were orphans” is about an Englishman who mysteriously lost his parents as a young boy in Shanghai. He returns as a professional detective to solve that ultimate mystery. It reminds me of these writers, trying to find clues about their past by digging into words.

Ishiguro’s latest book forfeited the unapproachable Far East, and his ancestral home, for something even more alien. It seems like he’s completely given up on ‘his’ England. “Never let me go” is about a Utopia (or a dystopia) on cloning. No more real people, real places or real stories for Ishiguro in the advent of the 21st century.

Why doesn’t this progression of his thoughts and stories not surprise me?

Quote from an interview with Ishiguro on "When we were Orphans":

There's a certain kind of branded, packaged atmosphere of Shanghai: this exotic, mysterious, decadent place. The same in Remains of the Day. It was a case of manipulating certain stereotypical images of a certain kind of classical England. Butlers and tea and scones: it's not really about describing a world that you know well and firsthand. It's about describing stereotypes that exist in people's heads all around the world and manipulating them engagingly.