Debris
«chaque notaire porte en soi les débris d’un poète.»Archive for books
Der verlag mit der fleige
German publisher Eichborn staged a clever promotional stunt at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair: they released flies bearing tiny banners attached with wax. Insect rights activists were outraged. Everyone else was amused.
(Thanks to Moldy Chum for the tip)
Tell me about yourself
The Fall term may be winding down (I teach my last class on Monday), but there is no slackening of activity at the law school. After the Thanksgiving break, while the students run the gauntlet of final exams, we will play host to several very promising faculty candidates. Now, thanks to Jeffrey Harrison, I’ve got some good questions to ask:
1. What was your favorite book at age 15?
2. What were the last 10 books you read that had nothing to do with law?
3. Name your favorite opera, aria, symphony or any non pop, folk, alt music?
4. Who was your favorite teacher before law school and why?
When I was a candidate, I’m sure I’d have found these more interesting to discuss than the standard interview queries, though I’m not at all sure whether I’d have fared better or worse in the process. In any event, here are my own answers:
1. Favorite book at age 15:
- Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet” (actually the entire Homes canon).
2. Last 10 non-law books read:
- H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man and The Time Machine;
- Joseph Mitchell, My Ears Are Bent;
- Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking
- Studs Terkel, Giants of Jazz
- Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet
- Zane Gray, Riders of the Purple Sage
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
- Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life
- James Prosek, Fly-Fishing the 41st
- Sholom Auslander, Foreskin’s Lament
3. Favorite opera, aria, symphony or any non pop, folk, alt music:
- Opera:Verdi, Aida
- Symphony: Mahler, No. 1
- Other “non pop, folk alt music”: Thelonious Monk(I’m presuming that this qualifies)
4. Favorite teacher before law school and why:
- Moishe Postone, University of Chicago. More than any teacher I’ve had before or since, Moishe challenged me to think critically and carefully, especially but not exclusively about sociological theory. He also gave me my favorite University of Chicago image, when he described students not dancing at parties because they feared falling off the edge of the existential abyss. He is the epitome of a scholar and a mensch.
Who buys these books?
I was perhaps unduly stunned to learn that there is actually a book called of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design. It reminded me of another unintentionally amusing volume in the series: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Home Schooling. The marketing of these books is a bit puzzling. Do people interested in “intelligent design” really want to be reminded that they are complete idiots? Is it really a good idea to encourage complete idiots to home school their children?
Back to the garden
This past weekend, we took an overnight trip to Asheville, North Carolina. While driving through downtown, distractedly gazing at the various shop-window displays of healing crystals, hemp clothing, and other new-age tchochkes, I nearly rammed into an SUV with a bumper sticker reading “Joy is My Compass”.
The day after my near-collision, I finished reading Foreskin’s Lament, Shalom Auslander’s wonderful, agonizing, hilarious, and angry memoir about growing up in, and growing estranged from, an ultra-orthodox Jewish family and community. The book ends with Auslander coming to terms with his “God problem” and making a life with his wife and their son in Woodstock, NY. His depiction of their hometown could just as easily apply to Asheville, or any number of similar commodified hippie havens:
It is a few days from my son’s first birthday, and I am sitting in a local Woodstock cafe, waiting to speak with the owner about a cake I would like him to bake for the party we are planning. A young man enters, sits down at a table near the window, and begins reading his newspaper. When the waiter approaches, the man asks if the waiter wouldn’t mind turning the music off.
–I need … I need to think, he says. –You know, and in order to think I need to connect, you know, spiritually, internally, I need to find my way to my inner source and it’s very disturbing, because thought is a bubble, your spirit and inner space, you know?
–Sure, says the waiter.
After a moment, the man spots a woman at a table nearby. She has long Pippi Longstocking braids and wears a floral dress and Birkenstock sandals.
I have just described everyone in Woodstock.
–What are you drawing? he asks.
–Something from a dream, she says in a spiritual whisper. — I had a dream and I saw the Christ, and he was resurrected, only his body wasn’t filled with skin and bones and pain and agony. It was filled with rainbows.
–Rainbows?
–Mmm-hmm. And the rainbows were love. And they filled the world.
–That’s beautiful he said.
He moved to her table, handed her his business card, and pressed her to come to his film, which he was screening that night at a local pub. She handed him her business card, in case he wanted his skull read and his chakra mapped. Or his chakra read and his skull mapped. I forget.
Woodstock is a thriving tourist town known around the world for something that didn’t actually happen there; the famous music festival took place in Bethel, a non-thriving town not famous anywhere for something that actually did happen there.
Pictures do not represent actual contents.
[...] In recent years, the town has changed, or we have changed, or both. It has become the art version of Vegas. Artists name themselves Love and Peace and Free and sell oversized, overpriced canvases featuring brightly colored flowers and brightly colored doves and brightly colored people holding hands, canvases that barely fit in the overpriced, oversized Hummers of their Manhattan customers. People wear tie-dyed shirts with Diesel jeans. BMW sports cars wear stickers reminding the Lexus sports cars behind them about the tragedy in Darfur. In the back of our minds, we know the search for our Promised Land is not yet over, and may never be.
If I can’t read comics, I don’t want to be part of your revolution
A new book recounts the life of Emma Goldman in graphic form:
Now dead for nearly seven decades, Red Emma — anarchist, activist, advocate of women’s rights — is still an inspiration to the young, rebellious and artistically inclined, an unlikely muse for anyone from the indie rock band Pretty Girls Make Graves to the Wachowski brothers, the filmmakers behind The Matrix series and the 2005 hit “V for Vendetta.” Comic books, then, fit quite naturally on the nexus of pop culture artifacts devoted to this long-deceased revolutionary, a testament to her central role in the American political imagination.
Rand-om association
Like LGM’s “D”, I believe that showing admiration for the works of Ayn Rand is prima facie evidence of severe mental illness. The 50th anniversary explains why references to Rand’s magnum dopus, Atlas Shrugged seem to have grown more frequent recently. It even showed up in a recent episode of Mad Men, in which agency head Bertram Cooper (played by the wonderful Robert Morse) recommends the book to mysterious mad man Don Draper.
Food for thought
Yet another academic book about a staple food item and how it changed or explains the World. Beans: A History is undoubtedly a fascinating read, deserving a place on the shelf alongside such other classics of the genre as Salt: A World History, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Spice: The History of Temptation, The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World, and The Story of Corn. Personally, I can’t understand why nobody has yet written The Rutabaga: How a Simple Swedish Turnip Altered the Course of History and Rescued Mankind From Certain Doom.
Additions to my “to read” list
Evidentiary, my dear Watson
Another interesting book review from the Forward. I’ve been a huge Sherlock Holmes fan since childhood, though my obsession has waxed and waned over the years. It has long been my peculiar and baseless pet theory that Holmes was Jewish and changed his name from Shlomo Hellerstein. (Perhaps Michael Chabon, who has already authored a Holmes tribute novella, would be interested in this idea as the basis for a sequel?)
