Old, Learned, Respectable Bald Heads
I saw this book on my shelf, opened to a page, and found this– But that is the sort of thing we can expect from the Abstract Owl, the dried-up Western descendant of the Confucianist…
Category: Intellectuals
Neither Conformism Nor Eccentricity
John Armstrong, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007 Almost twelve years ago I read this book, and the themes of Bildung and mastery were most…
Why Do They Come to Hinder Us?
Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs) [1927] Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals can be read as a gloss on the Dreyfus Affair. In this polemic against intellectuals who have…
“I Belong to Chomsky”
The following is the chapter, “Peril,” from The Book of Mev. Spring 1994 was blooming in the Bay Area. We participated in a Good Friday demonstration at the Lawrence Livermore nuclear laboratory with Steve…
For Friends in NYC: Norman Finkelstein Lectures
Check out Norman Finkelstein at the Brooklyn Central Library for his lecture series, “Bracing for the Revolution: Landmark Documents and Speeches in American History”: Bracing for the Revolution is a free ten-week class offered as part…
Jew-in-the-Library, Jew-in-the-Streets
Jill Krementz, The Jewish Writer, Henry Holt and Company, 1998 Portraits, bios, occasionally quotations form this coffee table book collection of Jewish writers, poets, novelists, scholars. Wiesel is here, as is his nemesis Hannah Arendt,…
To Have Been Exiled by Exiles
I was rereading Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, which is a great collection of essays on literature and culture with exploration of the experiences of dislocation, exile, migration, and empire as well…
“My Library Is What Is in My Head”
Leland Poague, ed.Conversations with Susan Sontag University Press of Mississippi, 1995 Sometimes I feel that, in the end, all I am really defending—but then I say all is everything—is the idea of seriousness, of true…
Giving No Peace to Those in the Country Who Are Violating All the Laws of Truth
She represented the honor and conscience of Russia, and probably nobody will ever know the source of her fanatical courage and love of the work she was doing. — Liza Umarova, Chechen singer Colleagues helped…
Alexander Cockburn on Edward Said
Only last week did I learn that Alex Cockburn had a book that came out in 2013, A Colossal Wreck. Earlier today I was reading entries from 2003, and came across this tribute to Edward…