Subject: Rushdie & Coetzee
From: Malcolm Lawrence (Malcolm@wolfenet.com)
Date: Wed Jun 04 1997 - 20:27:39 GMT
Well, Rushdie pretty much goes without saying. As far as I'm concerned ANY
writer good enough to have a random fatwa hanging over their head which, of
course, causes one to shell out oodles of money for bodyguards, ENSURED
anonymity and privacy (Salinger should be so lucky), not to mention a
resulting divorce from the wife whom he loved, deserves whatever he/she
wishes from this world. My heart was lost to him after reading his
EXCELLENT collection of essays entitled Imaginary Homelands. Anyone born in
one country and raised in another (or living in another) should drop
everything and read this essay, not to mention his checklist of whom he
thinks are the major contemporary writers of the day and his spin on them.
And J.M. Coetzee is pretty blazing, too. Especially Waiting for the
Barbarians, which I read in college and had to do a presentation for a prof
who was the EPITOME of "You guys don't know anything, you guys haven't read
anything, as opposed to ME who is going to (rubs his neck and looks up at
the ceiling) Paris and London this summer to read some papers I've written.
Thomas Mann is God. Magic Mountain, blah blah blah." (General gagging
sound). My presentation was so good that this little fuck basically
absorbed what I said (which was a completely new and insightful way of
looking at the structure of the text which no one in the class, not even
the prof, had even touched upon) garbled it up into his own words and spat
it back at me with the most hideous condescending tone I've ever heard a
prof use, as if it was oh so obvious. MY tuition and OUR tax dollars at
work.
Reminds me of that great Dylan quote: "More people die in college than in
old age homes."
Octavio Paz anyone? Especially The Labyrinth of Solitude and the amazing
essay therein called The Dialectic of Solitude.
Malcs
-
To remove yourself from the bananafish list, send the command:
unsubscribe bananafish
in the body of a message to "Majordomo@mass-usr.com".
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Oct 09 2000 - 15:02:02 GMT