Foreign Dispatches

Bibliomania and Shame

Daniel Drezner asks his readers to name the book they're most embarrassed not to have read, and the funny thing is, I can't think of any, not a single one. I can think of several books I'd like to take a look at if I ever have the free time, but none at all that I am in the least ashamed of not having read.

Before anyone starts to get the wrong idea, let me explain that this is not so much a matter of philistinism on my part, but rather a consequence of the simple fact that in a single year I get through at least 200 items or so (I'm a very fast reader, and finished Moby Dick in a single sitting), peaking at a volume a day during my college years, and thus worked my way through all the books I'd considered "important" quite a long time ago. Indeed, one reason for my reading volume tailing off over the last few years, quite apart from no longer being an undergraduate with lots of free time, is that I simply couldn't think of very much I really wanted to put on my reading list, and an ever larger share of my reading now consists of old titles I'm revisiting.

Of course, this voracious appetite for reading has had its negative consequences, non-congenital myopia being the most important one, so I wouldn't recommend this kind of behavior if one wants to be a surgeon, a pilot, or make any career choice which relies on good eyesight. Another consequence, naturally enough, is that it imposes severe limitations on how much time one can spend socializing: it helps to be extremely introverted if one wishes to become a book-reading machine. Yet, having mentioned these drawbacks, they pale next to the pleasure of being able to truthfully say, whenever challenged with the old "Have you read Proust?" line, "Yes, from Swann's Way to Time Regained": that always shuts any would-be challengers up!

At any rate, I fear that if I ever were to be invited to an academic soiree, having done my homework a tad too diligently, I shall be destined to lose any games of "humiliation" I am asked to play.

[Via Peter Nolan.]

An Interesting Take on an Old Stalwart

Now that the elections are over, Brad Delong's weblog is once more fun to read. Can anyone tell me that isn't a brilliant take on a story you thought you knew?

PS: Maybe it says something about my background, but whenever the term "Veronese" is used, the primary assocation that comes to my mind is the notion of the Veronese surface, not the city of Verona, so much so that using the term "Veronese" to refer to the latter almost seems perverse ...

Crab Canon

As I've recently mentioned Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, I thought to myself, why not link to an excerpt from the book that shows why it's such a fascinating work? Enjoy.

PS: Edward Rothstein's 1979 review of the book for the NYRB is available online, and it's surprisingly critical of what has since come to be almost universally accepted as a modern classic.

Sensible Fellow

Tom Wolfe plays the rebel to the hilt in this interview, but amidst all the snook-cocking at bicoastal liberal elites, which I'm sure will be heartily received by all the usual right-wing types, he does say something very much on the mark:

Wolfe is by no means afraid to offend the political right - "I'm gratified if you find me to be hard on them too," he says. He also anticipates that "conservatives will not like this new novel because I refuse to take the impact of political correctness seriously - I think PC has probably had a good effect because it is now bad manners to use racial epithets." (emphasis added)

How true. To be sure, political correctness has led on occasion to excesses like mandating "persons of color" in place of "racial minorities", silly arguments over the real and implied meanings of "niggardly", and teachers marking down students for sexism for using the generic "he" or "mankind" (I should know, as I had a few of my papers corrected in such a manner in my college days), but it's almost always the case these days that when someone on the right uses the phrase "I know this may be politically incorrect", it's usually no more than as a precursor to some bigoted remark.

An Illuminating Conversation

In response to a question about the lack of respect accorded to authors of science fiction by the denizens of the world of "high literature", Sci-fi Author Neal Stephenson recalls the following:

... a while back, I went to a writers' conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we'd exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me "And where do you teach?" just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another "And which distro do you use?"

I was taken aback. "I don't teach anywhere," I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. "Then what do you do?"

"I'm...a writer," I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.

"Yes, but what do you do?"

I couldn't think of how to answer the question---I'd already answered it!

"You can't make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?" she tried.

"From...being a writer," I stammered.

At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She wasn't snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different creature from the sort she generally associated with.

Literature Nobel Prize Winner Announced

And her name is Elfriede Jelinek. Going by the description of this Austrian author's ouvre, I'm most unlikely to get anything at all out of reading it.

Prominent themes in her work are female sexuality, its abuse and the war of the sexes in general. Novels such as including "Wir sind Lockvoegel, Baby" (We are decoys, baby), "Die Liebhaberinnen" or "Die Klavierspielerin" shock the readers with unemotional descriptions of brutality and power play. Her novel "Lust" is a stark description of sexuality, aggression and abuse.

Wonderful. I'll pass on all that, if you don't mind.