I could write a great novel if my neighborhood weren't so upscale (book thread)

[coldforge]

HaShoah, PLEASE

[davy]

I finished the first half of Julian Cope's autobiography (Head-On) yesterday and started part 2 (Repossessed) this morning. Wow, what a difference a hit record makes.

Head-On deals with The Teardrop Explodes stuff and Repossessed with the beginning of Cope's solo career. Since I'm a much bigger fan of his solo stuff, I suppose it should come as no surprise that I prefer Repossessed, but it's more than that. Head-On was written as if it were being told by Julian Cope, the rockstar lead singer of The Teardrop Explodes--it's petty, snobby, egotistical, immature, drug-smothered, mean-spirited, inconsistent, hyperactive, etc etc. When he moves on to talking about the isolation and depression that followed the dissolution of his band, and then how the recording of his first solo album turned everything around for him, the maturity level skyrockets, the prose calms down, the view turns inward, and you start to see this decent, complex, engaging character emerge.

It's really quite fascinating, and I can see why they decided to combine the two books into one volume.

[ralphvirus]

Today is John Barth's birthday, strangely enough (given all the recent conversation about him). 

The Barth Yahoo group notified me, in case anyone was wondering whether I had some kind of stalkerish obsession with the man.

[elpollodiablo]

Also he's having toast for breakfast and his laundry smells like jasmine and chlorine

[RavingLunatic]

Am finishing up reading Flow and old best-seller by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Much of it borders on platitudes about work and friends and happiness, but they're platitudes of the sort that it's good to remind yourself of frequently so that they stay somewhere near the forefront of your mind.

Have also been off-and-on reading and am about two-thirds through The Story of Philosophy, another old best-seller, this one by historian Will Durant. It's the sort of popularization of philosophy that I'm sure GI would have serious reservations about, but I got it for like $3 and figured I'd do a quick refresh on some of the main historical currents in philosophical thought before I got down to reading more detailed and intensive stuff.

[Good Intentions]

My problem with those things is that I've never learn anything from any of them. And God knows I read enough of them. As far as I can see, there's nothing to philosophy except the detailed and intensive stuff.

[RavingLunatic]

Yeah, I see what you mean, but for someone who's not really explored that stuff intensively, I think there's value in having a general idea of the wider picture before delving in. I feel similarly about history. It seems better to me to read textbooks and general histories before reading more detailed studies. When things can be placed in a general context I think their meaning becomes more clear and understandable, and in this stage of my belated and halting intellectual development, I'm still trying to lay those general foundations for the most part. The hard part is knowing when you've done enough and should move on from the wide canvas to the particulars.


Mostly unrelated to the above, but how many people here have read Marx's Das Kapital (volume 1 I mean)? Last summer I was sort of starting a reading project in which I would read the primary works of all the major economists. Since Marx was one of those figures, I started in in Das Kapital and was really surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The first 150 pages or so are a little difficult and I had to read that part two or three times, but I really like his enthusiastic, immensely learned, and surprisingly funny writing style. 140 years after he published the book, large parts of it still struck me as revelatory. I'm no expert in economics or anything, but I've read a fair bit and my college degree includes a minor in economics, and I'd never really come across or been taught any of the basic tenets of Marx's economic philosophy. I think it's a very poor reflection on the academic discipline of economics that alternatives to the extremely narrow marginalist/neoclassical models are not even mentioned in basic texts or college courses. I have such divergent feelings about economics in general. I've always like its general rational mode of analysis but despise the framework and details of the way in which that mode of analysis is used. I completely agree with Robert Heilbroner's statement in The Worldly Philosophers (his famous book about the great economists) that economics has become altogether too narrowly focused, often on inconsequential matters to the detriment of its understanding of the larger picture and society and philosophy as whole.

[Good Intentions]

I read Das Kapital, I thought it was great. The bits that stuck with me most were the social and historical observations, like that the only segment of employment that actually increased with the industrial revolution in England were domestic servants and prostitutes, and his remarks on the campaigns for shorter working days. I'd probably take a lot more out of it if I reread it.

[elpollodiablo]

I would like one day to read Das Kapital.

[RavingLunatic]

Yeah, I'll probably reread it someday. I've heard that Grundrisse is the next thing of his to read. I actually started in on volume 2 of Das Kapital and made it about 150 excruciatingly boring and vacuous pages in. It gets bogged down in trivialities; most of the first 150 dealt with the money-->capital-->production cycle, and bewilderingly devotes an entire chapter to each of three variations on this cycle, the only difference between the variations being whether one starts with capital, production, or money. This being a continuous cycle it is not clear what purpose this serves, and after over 100 pages it is still unclear what difference it makes whether one begins one's analysis with capital, money or production. After the entertaining and hard-hitting volume one of Das Kapital, this all seems shockingly dull and meaningless. [Maybe it would've gotten better later on, but I didn't have the patience.

[RavingLunatic]

I would like one day to read Das Kapital.

I'd recommend it definitely, though I'd warn you that the first 150 pages or so are kind of mystifying and that it's not really necessary to have a complete understanding of that part to enjoy the rest of the book and absorb the main points. I really didn't expect to like Marx nearly as much as I did but came away really impressed and able to understand the immense appeal his writing has had over the years to radicals of all sorts.

[coldforge]

Brainiac rounds up a bunch of good responses to Harold Bloom's execrable review of a new book on British """"""Anti-Semitism"""""". I was able to quickly forget about that review when I first read it, but now it's come back to me and I'm deeply irritated all over again.

[donblood]

Your link is so messed up.  This one works:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2010/05/anti-semitism_a.html

[coldforge]

done fixed it.

[Greg Nog]

Shakespeare, still competing with the ghost of Christopher Marlowe, implicitly contrasts Shylock with Barabas, the Jew of Malta in Marlowe’s tragic farce. I enjoy telling my students: let us contaminate the two plays with one another. Imagine Shylock declaiming: “Sometimes I go about and poison wells” while Barabas intones: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” It is Shakespeare’s continuing triumph over Marlowe that such an exchange will not work. Shylock is darker and deeper forever.

For Julius, “The Merchant of Venice” is both an anti-Semitic play and a representation of anti-Semitism. I dispute the latter: the humanizing of Shylock only increases his monstrosity.

Uh

[Good Intentions]

That whole series of book reviews in the NY Times was somewhere between bizarre and infuriating. There's not much to pick between the three (or was it four?) pieces published in that series on the 29th of April.

[elpollodiablo]

With a training both literary and legal, Julius is well prepared for the immensity of his task. He is a truth-teller, and authentic enough to stand against the English literary and academic establishment, which essentially opposes the right of the state of Israel to exist, while indulging in the humbuggery that its anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. [...] The new English (and Continental) anti-Semitism is hatred for Israel, which among all the nations is declared to be illegitimate. The United States remains almost free of this disease, and any current writer would not be tolerated for portraits like those of Hemingway’s Robert Cohn in “The Sun Also Rises,” Scott Fitzgerald’s Wolfsheim in “The Great Gatsby” or the several Jewish males who are Willa Cather’s villains. This is hardly to congratulate ourselves, but to point out that the United States, despite bigots left and right, does not encourage the genteel anti-Semitism that is woven into the English academic and literary world.

Uh...

[coldforge]

Disapproval of the state of Israel is anti Semitism because it is Anti-Zionism. Appreciation for the role of the Jews as sacrifical lambs and catalyst to the end times is Zionist, pollo! You love us.

Hm, actually maybe it's just that the British are snotty and upper crust about it while American anti-semites tend to be the kind of crazy gun-toting nut you could sit down and have a beer with.

[elpollodiablo]

I ain't never appreciated no Jew

[coldforge]

Yeah. I mean, there are just so many truly disgusting sentiments in that essay. The smug offhand sureness that Anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism, with its tone of, 'Oh, we've heard THAT one before, Jew-hater.' The bizarre flattening of all perspective and nuance in literary analysis WHENEVER a Jewish character is concerned: all British writers stand for Britain today, though Americans have the luxury of being placed in temporal context; and whenever a Jewish character is being portrayed, the portrayal is anti-Semitic, even if he is in a roman a clef and has a clear real-life analog (though in truth the simple problem of Bloom's anti-semi-dar as his first and foremost priority in critical reading doesn't actually account for the incomprehensible "let us contaminate"). That shameful sine-qua-non of bullying political correctness, whereby he vaguely generalizes about liberals and intellectuals and the secretive, malignant cabal that they've formed. Guh.

[coldforge]

Oh, and in a response to one of the responses, which points out that many of the academics Bloom hand-wavingly condemned are themselves Jews, Leon Wieseltier responds, 'Can't Jews also be anti-semitic?' Well, I guess it's possible. Ryan Gosling was pretty good in The Believer. But I'd have to, like, find some literature under their bed, or something.

[G.C.R]

I've only come across Bloom from his editorship of essay collections on popular novels, which tend to include one or two WTF moments (Things Fall Apart is not a fiction, but more an ethnographic history!), but have sometimes included some good stuff too. Now I'm embarrassed I used them for any assignments ever. Ugh.

[ellaguru]

I got about 150 pages into Das Kapital (actually, my bookmark says I am on p. 162. Bookmarks do not lie). I'd like to pick that up again, too.

[Captain]

Things Fall Apart is not a fiction, but more an ethnographic history!

This confuses me.  I can see a reading of Things Fall Apart as an ethnographic history (or even a revision of an ethnographic history), but how is it not a fiction?

[G.C.R]

Sorry, I just realised my sentence was confusing - that was the nuts argument that an essay in this book was putting forward, not what I think.