mirror men
Right now this NYTimes article on Bush's meeting with Blair is called "Bush and Bush Meet to Discuss Mideast Peace." Many a true word in jest, etc., but by the time you read this the monkeys surely will have fixed it.
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism. Kids, I love this book. It's easy to get disheartened after a long day of grappling with Deleuze and whoever his friend was that called everything a machine, and Barbara Johnson reading Derrida reading Lacan reading Poe, and people who call Nabokov a misogynist because they don't have the elementary critical skill required to separate him from his characters, and people who invent really terrible and shaky defenses to save Nabokov from misogyny, and whoever else is out there in the wide world; how nice to occasionally run across someone who has a coherent project, the cojones to go after it in grand style, and enough horse sense to sit down and practice the sort of readings that he advocates. His aim is actually very simple; he doesn't want to take aesthetics out of literature, he just wants to relate it to politics in a coherent way. The fierce and reductive Scylla of reducing all literature to social reportage? He skirts it. The murky Charybdis of goopy generalities about "art"? Gets past that too, and even if he knows we'll never get to Ithaca as such, it doesn't stop him from trying. Forward.
