Light Holiday Fare

The semester's done now, so I was able to read some things just for pleasure. I read Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, by Faiza Guene, a completely conventional bildungsroman narrative of disaffected urban youth, remarkable mainly in that it's a depiction of life in the Muslim ghettos of Paris told from the point of view of young woman. The book's not bad, nor is it that dazzling. It saddens me to say its interest seems mostly anthropological. Scott Smith's The Ruins, which I read next, also seemed mostly interesting as a sort of fictional or speculative anthropology--what the writing seemed most like was a story problem from a high school algebra book, and the only two hooks pulling the reader through are What horrible thing happens next? and What horrible mistake are these turistas going to make next? For all that it was, after about page 60, a fun read. Like my girlfriend says, it does what it says on the tin.

So then I moved on to something a little more engrossing, Thomas Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew, a marvelous confluence of diatribe and meditation on death, madness, city life, philosophy, opera and racing from everyone's favorite Viennese crank. Then it was War and the Iliad, a little compilation book fromNYRB of essays from Simon Weil and Rachel Besbaloff on The Iliad, and from Hermann Bloch on Rachel Besbaloff's essay. Weil's essay is abrasively strident, whining about the cruelty of humans and cringingly reductionist when faced with the complexity of her subject. Besbaloff's essay is brilliant, interesting, lucid and illuminating, and Bloch's is good too. Almost as interesting as Besbaloff's essay is the historical context discussed in the book's introduction: Besbaloff and Weil wrote their essays at nearly the same time, at the opening of the Second World War and just before the fall of France. Various choice tidbits and interesting coincidences beg for a novelistic treatment of these two women's parrallel lives.

Enjoying a life-saving holiday from New York in the country in Ireland. Long walks in the rain, no crowds but some cows, plenty of food, hospitality and family comfort, breathing the life back into me. Reading Kitto's The Greeks and Rawl's Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, and have begun Vollmann's Europa Central.

I got off at the wrong stop. So sue me.

Well, it’s looking like this blog is basically an off-site archive for my own wanked out nerdiness, recording simply the books I’ve read. So be it. I got no time for bullshiz. So, now, it’s been nearly another month, I don’t email my friends, I don’t go out on the town, where’s all the time go? I run dogs, I read what? I think most of my time gets spent worrying about where my time’s going. What the fuck. This city gimme ADD, turn me into fucking asshole fuck yeah, fuck you, jack.

Marxism and Literary Criticism, Terry Eagleton

Okay, yeah, concise and fairly lucid explanation of the fairly complex relationship between dialectical materialism a la Marxism and the consumption and analysis of literary texts—Eagleton though, who is remarkable I think for his clarity in finding the weaknesses in various theories approaching literature, fails in this case to take up arms and explains away the idiotic excesses of Marxism as applied to lit crit. That is, he makes a “best case” case, which is not the whole case. In the “best case,” every half-cocked theory is worth something, but this isn’t the way it happens, huh. But it was short, and I read most of it sitting at a G-train stop in Queens at two in the morning, so maybe I missed something.

On the Dignity of Man and On Being and the One, Pico della Mirandola

Pico is crazy. I need to reread this because I can’t. . . Wait, let me get this right, Plato and Aristotle were both. . . Christian? Huh?

Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann

Brilliant analysis of public opinion, basically a Modern reiteration of Plato’s Republic, from the cave to the philosopher-kings, exploring the Modern (1920s) ramifications of the idea that most people don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about (or thinking about) most of the time. Makes the all-too-necessary point that mass media propaganda has completely changed the way politics and society function, and that political science has yet to catch up. Totally great, right up until the point when he says he’s got answers, that a legion of expert researches should be funded by the government to explain the world to people, and thereby federalist democracy can function. Well, okay, but you still have to believe in the essential rationality of the human creature when he’s just spent the previous 190 pages reminding us how irrational and essentially stupid most people are. So I guess as long as you’re one of the experts, it’s all good.

Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris

This is a wretched, vile, stupid book. Hero-worship is nauseating enough without the sleazy attempts at literary language and portentous epic narration. And it’s bad history.

The Prince and selections from Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy, Niccolo Machiavelli

Machiavelli’s always refreshing for his straightforwardness. Although there are certainly issues to be taken into account in considering how much he might want to flatter the Medicis, I don’t really think they outweigh the essential feature of his writing, his clarity and honesty. You might call it cynicism to describe the way people actually function, but then you might also be a deluded fool.

parts of Keeping the Corporate Image: Public Relations and Business 1900-1950, Richard Tedlow, and Propaganda, ed. Robert Jackall, and most of Public Relations and Business 1900-1920, Alan Raucher.

See above. . . Interesting, historically, to look at the way PR and propaganda really got rolling (and scientified) in the “progressive era,” and also at how WWI (via the Creel Committee) blew open the field. Not that The Enlightenment had succeeded prior to WWI, but it’s interesting to note the first faltering steps of its total failure.

Call Me Ishmael, A Study of Melville, Charles Olson

This poetic essay on Melville and Moby Dick is not without it’s luminous moments, but overall it tends to grasp for more than it can reach. It begins strong and loses energy as it goes, confusing an aesthetic response to Moby Dick with a biography of Melville. I suppose he felt the narrative had to go somewhere, which is a shame. It would have been better left floating like Queequeg’s coffin.