I came back early from Spring Break, yesterday, meaning to get a jump on the pile of work I've accumulated - it's been a wash so far, though, sadly. Maybe tomorrow.
Anyways, no one's been around, so I've been reading, drinking beer, and watching Good Will Hunting (no news), got through a few books:
1.) Christopher Hitchens. Letters to a Young Contrarian. Pretty interesting. I like Hitchens, even if he's a bit liberal and a bit too infatuated with socialism - he was the only good reason to read the Nation. The book's about 120 (?) pages long, and consists of about 12 'letters' written by Hitchens to someone named "X", the forementioned young contrarian. (What's the difference between "forementioned" and "aforementioned"?)
The point is seeing how Hitchens would advise someone who wanted to become a contrarian - as far as I can see contrarianism involves distrusting everything other than your own sense of right and wrong and having a good sense of humor. I like it, anyways, should read the book again. His prose gets sort of thick. Hitchens' book was a lot better than Dinesh D'Souza's Letters to a Young Conservative, which read like a sort of pocket manual you could whip out if you wanted to frustrate a liberal: "Need to tell someone the reason why you believe abortion is wrong? Read them this passage!" Nuts to that.
2.) FM Cornford. Microcosmographia Academia. Hitchens recommended this; it's a short (30pg), funny little essay, written 1908, by some classics professor from Oxford. Cornford lampoons various elements of academic politics - what's surprising is how, I dunno, how well it's held up across a century, wars, "PC"-shit, so on. Kind of surprising, I think, to read about these complaints pre-communism, pre-post-modernism, and all that shit. Sort of slow going for a 30 page essay, can't imagine that it'd be easy to find, but still interesting.
3.) Martin Amis. Time's Arrow. I picked up (actually bought) London Fields (another more often recommended Amis book) a couple of days ago, but I just couldn't get through more than a few pages of it. It felt like a simplistic parody of stuff like A Heartbreaking Work, Everything is Illuminated, so on - characters with names like "Nicola Six" who go to 'bitingly' generic places like the "supermart" or some shit, 'interesting' notes near the Library of Congress stuff up front.
It was like being introduced to Virtua Fighter 1 for the first time after playing a lot of Virtua Fighter 4 - you can see why it would've been interesting at one time, but you've got no desire to hash it out all over again, now.
Anyways, Time's Arrow's pretty short, about 160 pages. The book covers the life of this guy named Tod in reverse, from death to birth, and the narrator is either Tod's conscience or some sort of disembodied joyrider unavoidably attached to Tod. The narrator is essentially born at Tod's death (unaware of basically everything other than the stuff he needs to know to be our narrator), and the book follows the narrator as he follows Tod's process of unliving his life.
Everything, including the conversations, occurs in reverse - Tod vomits up food at every meal, gets a particularly disgusting sort of enema once or twice a day, so on. Tod's a doctor (imagine being a doctor in reverse).
The book gets pretty boring once you get tired of the reverse gimmick, at least until you begin to expect the plot un-twist that comes about 80 pages into the book. The results of the realization are fucking horrible but they make the rest of the book more interesting. I'd tell you what it was, but I can't figure out how to make the text invisible (in case someone ends up reading the book).
UPDATE: Don't read this if you're planning on reading the book, although if you read the spoiler, then you'll want to read the book. You get to find out that Tod was a Nazi doctor that aided in the murder of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. The narrative consciousness, though, doesn't think of it as murder - he sees the ovens as having produced the victims: ashes and teeth go through the flame and turn back into people. It's fucked up.
Anyways, good stuff in general, creative, entertaining in a sense. I'd try to read the whole book at one time, or I would think that some of the effect (and most of your interest) would be lost in the interim. I think I'll probably have another go at London Fields.
