Scholarly Base Maintenance Month

On his interesting and useful blog that helps people become research scholars, Jonathan Mayhew introduces the concept of scholarly base. This term refers to all the readings, all the knowledge that a scholar has accumulated in the course of his or her life. This is the kind of knowledge that one draws upon in one's research, that allows one not to feel stupid and lost at scholarly conferences, and that helps one to maintain a coherent picture of one's own field of study as well as several other fields that in some ways overlap with or border upon one's own research area(s).

A scholarly base needs to be maintained and expanded at all times because nothing is sadder than a scholar who works on the basis of limited and outdated readings that were done 20 years ago. I usually have my scholarly base maintenance month in the summer. This year, however, I have other things planned for the summer vacations, so my scholarly base maintenance month started this week. I have gathered a stack of books that need to be read before the end of the semester five weeks from now. Here are what these books are:

1. Three Latin American novels. As I was writing my recent blog post on Latin American literature, I discovered that my familiarity with it has grown pretty dim. To be completely honest, I read nothing new in this field since my doctoral comprehensive exams in 2005. So now I will be catching up using great reading suggestions from a fellow blogger who publishes her informative posts here.

2. Four books of philosophy (Badiou, Laclau, Bauman, and Eagleton).

3. Two books of literary criticism. Possibly I will write a review of one of them since it came out very recently.

4. Four books in my field of contemporary Spanish literature. There are several authors that I follow and some of them have recently released new books (most of which are extremely long, too.) 

The good news is that I read extremely fast, so I have no doubt all these books can be read by the end of the semester. I really can't wait to get into each one of them, so it will be a very fun month.

The readers of this blog should expect to be inundated with book reviews.

An Update on My Heroic Struggle with Twilight

I know that I promised to take a glance at the Twilight Saga and post a review. But, sheesh, people, how can anybody manage to get through this thing? Forget about the plot, forget about the characters, just tell me how it can be humanly possible to read something so badly written? I've managed to get through sixteen pages in this entire time and the flat, choppy sentences are driving me up the wall. 

Teenagers don't talk like that, act like that, or think like that. Why, oh why, do they read thousands of pages of this sad excuse for a novel? There is so much great stuff to read in the world and so little time to read it. And still people choose this??

I knew Twilight would be bad but I had no idea it could be this abysmally low-quality.

What I Find Very Annoying About Myself. . .

. . . is that I read very fast in Russian. Like 100 pages per hour fast. And that's if I try on purpose to go slower. I just bought this two-volume novel, which I was hoping to make last for at least three days, but no such luck. I'm almost done already. I miss reading in Russian but finding anything good to read is next to impossible. Russian literature died a slow and painful death a while ago, and I read all the classics already. Even if you do find a book you'd want to read in that language, you have to wait for it to cross the ocean and appear in North America. And then, of course, it costs a lot more than most North American books. (The Kindle does not support the cyrillic alphabet yet, unfortunately.) So it's really annoying that when I finally get a book I want to read and then gulp it down in a few hours.

What Is Your Favorite Book of 2010?

I started thinking about all the new books (70+) that I read this year, trying to figure out which one I enjoyed the most. My answer to this question surprised me: El corazon helado by the Spanish author Almudena Grandes. This book is 1248 pages long and could have easily been at least 200 pages shorter because it does get repetitive in places. Still, it's really good. Almudena Grandes first became popular when she wrote her pornographic bestseller The Ages of Lulu. Since then, the writer has been trying hard to prove that she can attract readers with anything other than graphic sex scenes.

Even though I have published scholarly articles on Almudena Grandes and used her work in my doctoral dissertation, I didn't really consider her to be a serious writer. Her magnum opus Corazon helado, El (Spanish Edition) (translated into English asThe Frozen Heart) finally managed to convince me that Almudena Grandes is worthy of attention as an actual artist. The novel is about the trauma of the Spanish Civil War as it is relived by the representatives of my generation. Even though this topic has been addressed by numerous writers, Almudena Grandes still managed to make her lengthy novel impossible to forget or confuse with any other.

I haven't read the English translation of this novel, so I don't know whether it's any good. It does exist, however, which is always a testimony to a novel's success.


Of course, unless you are really interested in the Spanish Civil War, I don't think I would necessarily recommend this novel to you. El corazon helado is also a beautiful love story, which, in my opinion, is an absolutely impossible genre to write in nowadays. Everybody who writes about love ends up being either vulgar or sappy. Almudena Grandes, for the most part, manages to avoid that. Seeing a good romantic story that is well-written and not all that cheesy might be a reason to read the book.

The reason why I'm writing about this book is that I'm truly surprised that it was the one I enjoyed the most out of the entire year of reading. There have been more important and better-written books, yet I still remember this one with the greatest fondness.

Which was the book you enjoyed the most in 2010? Please share your favorite in the comment section.

Art or Entertainment? A Review of Franzen's Freedom, Part I

I didn't buy Jonathan's Franzen's Freedom because of some spat this writer apparently had with Oprah. Nor did I buy it because, according to rumors, President Obama was so eager to read it that he rushed to the publishing house to get an advance copy. I also did not buy it because of the comparisons many readers and critics have made between Franzen and Philip Roth. I bought the book simply because of its length. As I mentioned before, I cannot resist a novel that is over 500 pages long, so I did not resist this one.

I want to begin this review of Freedom: A Novel by putting to rest the perennial questions of whether Franzen is "the new Philip Roth" and whether this is "the next great American novel." My answers are: no he isn't and no it isn't. This is a very good book, I have enjoyed it thoroughly. This is one of those books that preclude you from doing anything else until you finish it. It is, however, not a work of art. It is great entertainment that has nothing to do with literature. Now, whenever I say things like that, people interpret them as an attempt to denigrate a novel. They believe that entertainment is some kind of a lower-quality art. This cannot be further from the truth. Art and entertainment are things of a completely different order, like a star and a steak, a river and a song. They cannot be placed into the hierarchy of better vs worse because they don't belong in the same category of phenomena and do not serve the same purpose.

There are two main characteristics that place Freedom: A Novel into the category of entertainment rather than art. One is the author's use of artistic means, in this case, the language. Franzen has an unfortunate tendency to find a cliche he really likes and then reiterate it to death. To give an example, he comes up (pun intended) with the following metaphor that has been done to death long before Franzen chanced upon it: "His prophetic dick, his divining rod." Then, the author keeps returning to this tired image, as if he feared that the readers missed it the first 15 times he brought it up (pun intended, once again.) Even if he were the first writer ever to create this metaphor (which he is not by far), this insistence on such a clumsy image is similar to Dr. Phil's repeated use of his trademark cliches: "Who's gonna buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?", "Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?", etc.

Franzen also has trouble avoiding pomposity. The narrative flow of Freedom: A Novel is often interrupted by statements whose grandiloquence is completely out of sync with the tone of the scene. For instance, the author spends half the novel ridiculing a really horrible marriage of two completely mismatched people. The narrator pokes vicious fun at their pathetic attempts at a sex life: "Craving sex with her mate was one of the things (OK, the main thing) she’d given up in exchange for all the good things in their life together" and "the weekly thirty minutes of sexual stress was a chronic but low-grade discomfort, like the humidity in Florida." This is beautifully said and very funny, as I'm sure everybody will agree. Then, Franzen has to go and spoil this verbal beauty by slipping into annoying and completely misplaced pomposity. After sex, these same two people "lay and held each other in the quiet majesty of long marriage." Once again, this reminds me of Dr. Phil. He would bring some really horrible parent to his show (like that woman who follows her 27-year-old daughter on every single date she has ever had) and launch into a pompous rant on how they are a great parent who obviously truly loves their child.

Another reason why Freedom: A Novel is entertainment rather than art is that there is nothing in this novel worth analyzing. As much as I loved reading it, I would not be able to teach it in a course. There is nothing to teach or discuss. The author explains everything with so much painstaking detail as to leave no room for the reader to have a single thought of their own. After doing that, he explains his ideas once again. And a couple of pages later, even one more time in case there are still some readers who misunderstood his purpose. In short, I will know that there is no hope for the system of higher education in this country when novels like this one become part of college curricula.

(To be continued. . .) 

Markos Moulitsas' American Taliban: A Review

Due to Blogger trouble, I couldn't blog almost for the entire day yesterday. As a result, many things I wanted to say have accumulated. Now I will be bombarding my readers with posts. I hope nobody minds. :-)

So I've been reading American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right by Markos Moulitsas, the founder of DailyKos, and I love it. The book is both insightful and entertaining, and I recommend it to any one who loves making fun of the right-wing stupidity and hypocrisy.

The main idea of the book is to show that

the Republican Party, and the entire modern conservative movement is, in fact, very much like the Taliban. In their tactics and on the issues, our homegrown American Taliban are almost indistinguishable from the Afghan Taliban. The American Taliban—whether in their militaristic zeal, their brute faith in masculinity, their disdain for women’s rights, their outright hatred of gays, their aversion to science and modernity, or their staunch anti-intellectualism—share a litany of mores, values, and tactics with Islamic extremists.

Sure enough, the Republicans insist that more and more of our poor teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds should be sent to Afghanistan supposedly to fight Taliban. They denounce the "uncivilized," "medieval," and "barbaric" Muslim terrorists. They even oppose the building of a peaceful Muslim house of prayer because they believe that their own religious fanaticism is vastly superior to Islam. In reality, though, they should be the last people to condemn anybody for barbarity and terrorism. When the conservatives denounce American progressives for supporting the Taliban, they are completely dishonest:

Progressives hate the Taliban and other Islamic fundamentalists precisely for the same reason we hate rabid conservatives at home: their fear of change, their contempt for nontraditional lifestyles, their mania for militaristic solutions, and their fascistic efforts to impose their narrow worldview on the rest of society.

Markos draws very convincing parallels between the actions of our homegrown religious fanatics and those we see in other countries. He writes in his incomparable sarcastic style that made his blog so loved by the good guys and hated by the idiots. This, for example, is what he has to say about Texas secessionists:

I’m partial to ceding a portion of the Texas Panhandle to these wackos, naming it Dumbfuckistan, taking it off the federal dole, building a wall around it, and arresting anyone trying to enter America illegally. I can always dream.

The book offers a lot more than humor, though. There are some really great insights about why the conservative message attracts so many people in spite of being both oppressive and contradictory. Markos doesn't shy away from pointing out how often women participate in their own oppression and why:

Promise Keepers proclaims its mission to be “to ignite and unite men to become warriors who will change their world through living out the Seven Promises”—one of those promises being to commit to “building strong marriages and families through love, protection and biblical values.” Such talk of “protection” can have an appeal, and not just to the biblical “warriors” declaring their belief in the inerrancy of scripture and their god-given right to be head of household. In a world fraught with economic uncertainty, the notion of being shielded from the harshness of the free market, with its downsizing, outsourcing, and discarding of workers, can be deeply appealing, particularly to conservative women. In the wake of 9/11, we’ve seen how quickly Americans are willing to surrender democratic values—such as the need for search warrants and the right to free speech—for even the appearance of security. It should not surprise us to find women willing to give up autonomy, choice, and, yes, even the right to vote, in exchange for “protection.”

It's great to see a progressive writer who is not afraid of going in this direction in his analysis.

The book is very well-researched. There is a lot of interesting data that I never saw before. To give just one example:

In a study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in the winter of 2009, Benjamin Edelman examined the zip codes associated with all credit card subscriptions of a top online adult site, over a two-year period between 2006 and 2008. Here are some of his findings: In the 27 states where “defense of marriage” amendments have been adopted (making same-sex marriage, and/or civil unions unconstitutional), subscriptions to this adult entertainment service are... 11 percent more [prevalent] than in other states. ... Subscriptions are also more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles, and sexuality. In states where more people agree that “Even today miracles are performed by the power of God” and “I never doubt the existence of God,” there are more subscriptions to this service. Subscriptions are also more prevalent in states where more people agree that “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage” and “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior.”

How cute is that, huh?

The book costs less than 8 bucks on Kindle and is honestly worth every cent. I still can't stop laughing over some of Markos's brilliant quips.

I hate reading!!

This is a sentence every literature professor hates hearing. I can torture my students with endless lab assignments, written exercises in their workbooks, oral presentations that need to be prepared in their free time, and all kinds of boring, time-consuming activities. They bear everything patiently and almost never complain. When, however, I mention that we will be reading something, a collective moan of "I hate reading!" is the most frequent response I get. The best way of having students drop the class at the beginning of the semester is by announcing that there will be a lot of reading.

The funny thing is that most of them don't really hate reading. When we start reading texts, they obviously enjoy it. Most students offer really interesting, original interpretations of texts, and the ensuing discussions are always lively and exciting. In a way, it feels like they say they hate reading because it's the expected, acceptable reaction.

The anti-reading, anti-intellectual propaganda in this country is very strong. People who like to read appear in TV shows as objects of ridicule. They always look strange, have poor hygiene, and their personal lives are miserable to non-existent. Often, their bookishness leads them directly to madness. (One example, is Detective Goren of Law and Order: CI, whose favorite way of spending his free time is to go to the library and who suffers from one mental breakdown after another. Need I mention that this character has no personal life whatsoever?)

Since being an intellectual, well-read person is presented as unattractive and weird, the younger generation feels obligated to profess an intense hatred of reading. As a result, they get all their information from stupid TV shows that offer nothing but endless streams of propaganda.

Jose Saramago Is Dead

The greatest Portuguese writer of the second half of the twentieth century, a Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago is dead. Until the last days of his life he kept writing. A little while ago he created a splash by starting a blog that immediately became extremely famous and has now been turned into a book. If you read Portuguese, the blog can be found here.

I can't believe that this great writer will never write anything else.

Some of my favorite books by Saramago are:

  

Terry Eagleton's On Evil: A Review, Part I

In his book On Evil, Terry Eagleton offers his readers an eminently readable treatise that combines literary criticism and philosophy in a way that does justice to his complex and charged subject. In my view, Eagleton does what every scholar of literature should attempt to do: make his analysis accessible to a wide reading audience without sacrificing the intellectual rigor of his work. As usual, the book is written beautifully, and Eagleton's sense of humor is highly enjoyable.

Eagleton begins On Evil by discussing how the concept of evil has been appropriated by a certain type of political discourse. The implication behind referring to terrorists as "evildoers" and their actions as "pure evil" is that if we accept that there is a rational  explanation for acts of terror, we somehow condone them. This, of course, is completely wrong:

Calling the action evil meant that it was beyond comprehension. Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable. . . if evil really is beyond explanation—if it is an unfathomable mystery—how can we even know enough about it to condemn evildoers? The word “evil” is generally a way of bringing arguments to an end, like a fist in the solar plexus. . . No Western politician today could afford to suggest in public that there are rational motivations behind the dreadful things that terrorists get up to. “Rational” might too easily be translated as “commendable.” Yet there is nothing irrational about robbing a bank, even if it is not generally considered to be commendable.

 The tendency to refer to terrorists as evil only serves the purpose of shutting down any kind of discussion of their actions. As a result, we are left with no understanding of what they do and what. Consequently, we cannot possibly hope to combat terror since we have precluded any opportunity to analyze terrorism in any meaningful way. There are other consequences, says Eagleton in his incomparably delectable writing style, to the constant references to evil that populate a certain kind of political discourse:

Once the middle classes get their hands on virtue, even vice begins to look appealing. Once the puritan propagandists and evangelical mill owners redefine virtue as thrift, prudence, chastity, abstinence, sobriety, meekness, frugality, obedience, and self-discipline, it is not hard to see why evil should begin to look like a sexier option.

Even though Eagleton ridicules the way certain politicians have appropriated the word "evil," he believes that evil actions and evil individuals do exist. In this, he disagrees not only with a certain brand of liberals but with many Marxists as well. (We have to remember that Eagleton himself is an unapologetic Marxist, which does not preclude him from pointing out the many subjects where he disagrees with his fellow Marxists):

For there are indeed evil acts and individuals, which is where the softhearted liberals and the tough-minded Marxists alike are mistaken. As far as the latter go, the American Marxist Fredric Jameson writes of “the archaic categories of good and evil.”1 One is forced to assume that Jameson is not of the view that the victory of socialism would be a good thing. The English Marxist Perry Anderson implies that terms like “good” and “evil” are relevant to individual conduct only—in which case it is hard to see why tackling famines, combating racism, or disarming nuclear missiles should be described as good. Marxists do not need to reject the notion of evil, as my own case would exemplify; but Jameson and some of his leftist colleagues do so partly because they tend to confuse the moral with the moralistic.

 I quote so much because it is impossible not to love Eagleton's way of expressing himself. As I said before, if I ever learn to write half as well as Eagleton does, I will die happy.

In Eagleton's view, the nature of evil is metaphysical, in the sense that it aims to destroy being as such, not just certain parts of it. It is the metaphysical nature of evil that Eagleton tries to analyze (and in my view, succeeds in doing so) in On Evil. The most intolerable thing for evil is that anything should exist. Its most important goal is the annihilation of being as such:

Evil would actually prefer that there was nothing at all, since it does not see the point of created things. It loathes them because, as Thomas Aquinas claims, being is itself a kind of good. The more richly abundant existence is, the more value there is in the world. . . Given the intolerable fact that things do exist, however, the best evil can do is try to annihilate them.

Eagleton comes up with the strongest and the most convincing explanation for the reasons that push people to engage in mass murder, genocide, extermination of others, etc.:

The kind of others who drive you to mass murder are usually those who for some reason or other have come to signify the terrible non-being at the core of oneself. It is this aching absence which you seek to stuff with fetishes, moral ideals, fantasies of purity, the manic will, the absolute state, the phallic figure of the Führer. In this, Nazism resembles some other brands of fundamentalism. The obscene enjoyment of annihilating the Other becomes the only way of convincing yourself that you still exist. The non-being at the core of one’s own identity is, among other things, a foretaste of death; and one way of fending off the terror of human mortality is to liquidate those who incarnate this trauma in their own person. In this way, you demonstrate that you have authority over the only antagonist—death—that cannot be vanquished even in principle. Power loathes weakness because it rubs its nose in its own secret frailty. 

In his  Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek says that the question we need to ask ourselves is not "Is there life after death?" What we should ask instead is, rather, "Is there life before death?" Eagleton echoes this statement in On Evil. He mentions "the worthless purity of those who have never lived", which can lead people to desire to bring destruction to those who have the capacity to enjoy the richness of human existence. It is among those who have never actually allowed themselves to live, to enjoy, to love life that evil has its perfect breeding ground. We can't but think of the glee with which the US Evangelicals indulge in their apocalyptic fantasies of world destruction. It is no wonder, then, that those very Evangelicals are so prone to wage wars on all and sundry.


[The second part of the review is here]

Beginning Gibbon's Decline and Fall

Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has always had a huge symbolic importance for me. All the way through two different grad schools, I hoped that the day would come when I would have enough free time to read this humongous work of an eminent historian completely and entirely for fun.

Today, this day has finally come. I am starting to read Gibbon's 6-volume history. It will probably take me a couple of years to get through it. Possibly even more. It's really great to have a job that allows one to dedicate lots of time to "impractical" things like reading, contemplation, reflection, and a completely gratuitous pursuit of knowledge.

Reading in Russian

If you read in Russian, you must have already noticed how difficult it is to find good books by contemporary Russian-speaking writers. Most of what passes for literature in the Russian-speaking world is badly written, boring, repetitive, and annoying.

This book, however, is a breath of fresh air compared to the regular Russian-language literary fare of the recent years. I was the first literary critic to work with the short stories and the novel that comprise this volume, so I can testify to their high literary value.

Those of you who like Borges, Cortazar and the poets of the Russian Silver Age will especially enjoy this book.

Hatred of Sex as the Guiding Principle of Russian Literature

God, I'm happy I recovered this post. (The post on Norway will have to wait for now, since I need to go look for the pictures I used in it once again.)

I almost never read anything by the Russian authors any more. Russian literature has not been able to recover from the political, ideological, and artistic constraints imposed on it in 1934. When literature is not allowed to develop naturally, it withers away and dies. And this is exactly what happened to literature written in Russian. I have tried for years to find good Russian writers but they don't seemk to exist any more.


This is why I was happy when my favorite Times Literary Supplement published a long review of Kamennyi most by a writer named Terekhov. I immediately bought this huge 800+ volume and started reading it. Of course, as was to be expected, I discovereed some really bad writing, a complete incapacity of the author to use his own language correctly, and a boring attempt to imitate Western authors in a very clumsy manner.

However, buying and reading this book was not a total waste. It helped me realize that the guiding principle of the Russian prose writing by men is hatred of and disgust with sex. (Until well into the XXth century there were no well-known female prose writers in Russia, which has always been a profoundly patriarchal society. So there is no literary tradition to speak of in the case of Russian female novelists, and I don't know if my argument would apply).

The main character of Kamennyi most (in Russian) has a lot of sex with a lot of women. His descriptions of these sex acts are filled with so much hatred and disgust that they are impossible to translate. I tried to think of translations for them but in vain. I simply don't know any words in English that would transmit the same emotional charge.

For anybody who read the XIX century Russian novelists, however, this is not surprising. The same hatred of human sexuality informs Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, Chekhov's The Duel, pretty much all works by Dostoyevsky. The list can go on ad infinitum. There is no way anybody can understand why the protagonist of Terekhov's latest novel hates sex so much, unless one has read his literary precursors.

So if anybody is looking for a doctoral dissertation topic in Slavic Studies, feel free to use this one.

Books for Spring Break

I'm going to Miami, Florida on my spring break today. The most important thing to pack for a beach vacation (besides my huge pink straw hat, of course) is reading matter. There should be enough variety in it for all kinds of moods, weather conditions, and activities. On top of my regular subscriptions to newspapers and magazines that I get on my Kindle, here are the books I will be taking with me:

1. I got this book as a free gift from the New Left Review.  Zizek is one of the most important philosophers living today, and I absolutely adore his writings. In case you've missed these posts, I wrote about him here and here. Some conservative journalist (whose name I don't remember right now) referred to Zizek as "the most dangerous contemporary philosopher." So you can imagine how fantastic Zizek's writings must be.

I couldn't wait to start this new book and began reading it yesterday. Zizek's writing is clear and incisive, as always. For now, I'm loving First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. Of course, I will write a review of the book, as soon as I finish it.











2.                                      









Since Spanish mystery novels are my new research interest, I feel completely justified in reading as many of them as I can. So I'm bringing these three to the beach with me.

I love my profession. :-)











3. I just discovered that Louise Penny has a whole series of mystery novels set in Quebec. How amazing is that?? I miss Quebec dearly and will love reading about it during my vacations.

I can even kind of justify reading this novel from a scholarly point of view. I do need to familiarize myself with mystery writing in all languages in order  proceed with my research into Spanish detective fiction.

Hopefully, the university will pay for all these books when our money gets unfrozen.

What I'm Reading Right Now

I always read half a dozen books at the same time. There are books for all kinds of moods and purposes among them. This is what I'm reading right now and why:


1.  Almudena Grandes, a well-known Spanish writer once wrote a hugely famous pornographic novel The Ages of Lulu. Since then, she has been trying very hard to show that she can do something other than pornography. (I do not recommend The Ages of Lulu as pornographic reading because it's really unappetizing kind of pornography. Although there is no accounting for tastes. I analyzed the novel in my doctoral dissertation and feel beyond fed up with its inept porn scenes.)


The main reason why I decided to read this author's El Corazon Helado/ The Frozen Heart is that it is 1200 pages long. I love endlessly long novels. Even though it's a mild form of exercise to keep this volume in your hands. (saly, it's not available on Kindle yet).


This novel about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath turned out to be pretty good. It even made me cry twice. And I'm only on page 537.


2.  This is my mystery novel du jour. I picked it up because the main character is a psychoanalyst who is being pursued by a deranged former patient. Or a deranged child of a deranged former patient.

I have to say this is the weirdest mystery novel I have read for a while (and I read detective novels all the time.) Not only does the psychoanalyst have a pretty poor command of the English language, he is also a pretty freaky individual. You go into therapy with somebody this weird, you'll come out a lot more messed up.

I've been reading this book in bits and snatches for the past week and it always puts me to sleep in ten minutes or less. So I feel very rested.

It isn't a really bad book or anything. It's just very weird.

3. This book by a Canadian professor is brilliant. It discusses many of the important issues that the higher education system faces today in North America.

As somebody who was worked both for Ivy league schools and a public university, I can appreciate the truth of what Giroux is saying.

How can we talk of a higher education if the system is under the growing control of corporate entities? Should the purpose of higher education be to create obedient zombi-like robots, willing to sacrifice their lives in the service of their employers? Or should we remember that the purpose of higher education is to educate students as thinking individuals, capable of being responsible citizens, aware of the world around them?

Great book, even though it is sadly unavailable on Kindle.

4. Howard Zinn died recently and among the flurry of obituaries dedicated to him, I suddenly realized that - to my great shame - I never read any of his books. So I bought this one.

I only just started reading it, so my impressions for now are minimal. At this point, I can say that even though he is not as good as Eric Hobsbawm  (my favorite historian), his writing style is clear and precise.

I will share my impressions when I'm done.







5. This is another detective novel I'm reading. But this one is actually work-related.
I am preparing a talk based on this novel for a conference in my field. I really wanted to attend this conference for personal reasons (it will take place in Montreal, my home and my favorite city in the world!). There were no sessions of even remote interest to me, though, except a session on detective novel in Spain.

So I thought that since I spend so much time (and money) reading (and buying) detective novels, I could put all this effort to good use by turning the detective genre into my new research. And then the university will pay for the mystery novels I buy.

This novel is really good. It is written so well and the language is so delicious that you even forget to care who the killer is. And that is no easy feat to accomplish for a mystery author.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan: A Review

After his brilliant novel Atonement (that not even a horrible movie based on it manged to destroy), I was weary of reading anything else by Ian McEwan. You never know if a writer is one of those people who manage to create one great work of literature and then keep trying to feed on its fame. Still, I decided to risk being disappointed with McEwan's On Chesil Beach. It turned out to be one of the best reading decisions I could have made.

On Chesil Beach is a fantastic novel. It tells the story of two newlyweds who, on their wedding day in the summer of 1962, are preparing to have sex for the first time in both of their lives. Neither of them knows what sex is like, they are both scared, and the bride finds the idea of having sex with the groom extremely disgusting, in spite of thinking that she "loves" him. The couple's lack of knowledge about sex turns their wedding night into an unmitigated disaster.

Now, this might sound like a pretty depressing topic, but the book is absolutely hilarious. I tried reading it while administering an exam to my students but had to give up on this idea. It simply isn't nice to laugh out loud and bang your head against desk becuase of the hilariousness of the reading matter while students are struggling with their exams. The following, for example, is the description of the marriage proposal:

When they were alone one afternoon in late March . . . she let her hand rest briefly on, or near, his penis. For less than fifteen seconds, in rising hope and ecstasy, he felt her through two layers of fabric. As soon as she pulled away he knew he could bear it no more. He asked her to marry him. He could not have known what it cost her to put a hand - it was the back of her hand - in such a place. She loved him, she wanted to please him, but she had to overcome considerable distaste. . . She kept that hand in place for as long as she could, until she felt a stirring and hardening beneath the gray flannel of his trousers. She experienced a living thing, quite separate from her edward - and she recoiled.

If it seems surprising to you that in 1962, of all times, anybody would be naive enough to mistake something like this for love and even want to get married on the basis of such an evident lack of physical desire, think about how many people buy into the religious propaganda of abstinence before marriage. Imagine how many people - even today - are going through the following self-torture for the sake of some vaguely defined social requirements:

They whispered their 'I love yous.' It soothed her to be invoking, however quietly, the unfading formula that bound them, and that surely proved their interests were identical. She wondered if perhaps she might even make it through, and be strong enough to pretend convincingly, and on later, successive occasions whittle her anxieties away through sheer familiarity, until she could honestly find and give pleasure.

It becomes clear soon enough that where desire is lacking, there can be no love. Physical desire is the foundation of love within a couple. The struggle to understand the other person, resolve problems, forgive, try to figure things out is fruitless if people do not experience a powerful physical attraction to each other. If this kind of desire is lacking, the motivation to keep trying is just as big as the one a person would have with a neighbor or a simple acquaintance. (I can't even say a roommate because these characters have never tried living together, so their bond is even more ephemeral.) As a result, Florence and Edward discover that their relationship dies a painful but a very fast death in the first few hours of their marriage.

I believe that instead of filling the heads of adolescents with idiotic pro-abstinence propaganda, any sex ed in high schools should begin by an obligatory reading of On Chesil Beach. There are so many people even today who screw up their lives completely because they mistake simple friendship for love and try to force a romantic, physical relationship where there is no foundation for it in actual physical desire. There are many people who, like Florence, force themselves to suffer through sexual acts with people they find repulsive for the sake of this castrated definition of love. How much self-violation could be avoided if people were to recognize that sexual desire is not supposed to serve their social expectations. When you try to make your body comply with what you think is prestigious, this poor, violated body of yours will make you pay dearly.

As hilarious as this book is, it also raises some very important issues. On Chesil Beach is one of the most insightful things I have read in a long time about the crippling nature of the puritanical understanding of love.

Philip Roth's The Humbling: A Review

While Philip Roth's latest novel The Humbling is definitely not on the same level as his earlier masterpieces American Pastoral and The Human Stain, its is still pretty good. Written in Roth's luminous style, The Humbling tells a story of Simon Axler, an aging actor who loses his capacity to act and is plunged into a depression as a result. His wife leaves him, and Axler sees himself as condemned to loneliness for the rest of his days. Then, he starts an affair with Pegeen, a lesbian who is 25 years younger than he is. When Pegeen gets bored with their relationship and leaves, Axler is devastated.

This novel offers a profound critique of the male chauvinist way of thinking and of the problems it causes to the men who try to hold on to the obsolete macho ideology. Axler treats Pegeen as a voiceless, malleable doll, who needs to be transformed into a version of womanhood he considers to be acceptable: "All he was doing was helping Pegeen to be a woman he would want instead of a woman another woman would want." Understandably, his efforts to "cure" Pegeen from being a lesbian through fancy clothes and expensive jewelry fail.

In his efforts to analyze his relationship with an independent, self-sufficient, intellectual woman from the vantage point of outdated chauvinistic beliefs, Axler makes himself look utterly pathetic. he expects Pegeen's parents to be happy about their daughter's relationship with him because he is rich and can 'take care of her', whatever that means: "Here is this eminent man with a lot of money who's going to take care of her. After all, she's not getting any younger herself. She settles down with someone who's achieved something in life - what's so wrong with that?" Later on, Axler expresses a belief that Pegeen is involved with him because of his erstwhile fame as an actor.

Axler forgets that, unlike decades ago, an educated professional woman has no need to be with a person of any age or any gender because of money, the imaginary need "to settle down," or because she needs anybody to take care of her. What Axler fails to understand - and what costs him very dearly in the end - is that Pegeen's only reason to be with him (or with anybody else) is her desire. Gone are the times when women like Pegeen needed to attach themselves to an older man for prestige, money, or protection. Today, a woman who makes her own living can choose the sexual partner(s) she wants based on nothing but her own feelings and desires.

Pegeen is not the only woman Axler misjudges on the basis of his outdated sexist beliefs. Sybil, a woman he meets in a hospital, is for him "helpless, frail, and child-like." He misunderstands Sybil's inner strength and determination and ends up completely clueless about her.

In his long career as a writer, Roth often was criticized for the sexism of his novels. In my opinion, The Humbling is the writer's attempt to atone novelistically for that.

P.S. After I finished this review, I checked out some of the other reviews on this novel. I was shocked to realize that most people who have reviewed it consider the novel sexist. Apparently, for some people the mere fact of mentioning a relationship between an older man and a younger woman is in itself sexist. According to this weird logic, in order to avoid being sexist we have to pretend that such relationships do not exist.

My Subscriptions

After years of grad school penury and a gruelling two-year-long job search process, I finally have a permanent academic postion and can indulge in my love of periodicals. Here are the journals and newspapers I subscribe to:


The Nation magazine is my absolute favorite. It is an example of truly superior progressive journalism. The Nation comes out every week and I practically dance around my mailbox every Monday, waiting for it to arrive. The writing style of The Nation's journalists is really good. After the feeble attempts at writing that come out of the so-called journalists writing for The New York Times and Washington Post, the style of The Nation's contributors is a breath of fresh air.

The articles address the most pressing political, social, economic, and cultural concerns. Last week's issue, for example, had (among other great things) a really good article by Sasha Abramsky on the current crisis in California. It finally helped me understand what is going on in that state and why it is falling apart. My favorite journalists who regularly contribute to The Nation are Alexander Cockburn, Katha Politt, Naomi Klein, and others.

At the end of every issue, there are very good reviews of interesting books of cultural studies, literary criticism, history, philosophy, etc.

A Kindle subscription to The Nation costs next to nothing, so I recommend you at least give it a try. Keep in mind, however, that the Kindle edition doesn't have the beautiful cover art, the great crossword puzzle, and the hilarious classifieds. For this reason, I overcame my Kindle-dependence and this year switched from a Kindle subscription to a paper version of the magazine.



El País is the leading daily newspaper in Spain. I started subscribing to it a couple of months ago and can say that it was a fantastic choice. Spanish journalism is truly superior to its US equivalent. It tells you a lot about the sorry state of the US print journalism when I always go to El País for the news on the events in the United States.

The most prominent Spanish and Latin American writers regularly contribute articles to El País. Juan Goytisolo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Rosa Montero, Almudena Grandes, Antonio Munoz Molina, Juan Jose Millas, and many other bestselling authors publish their articles in this fantastic newspaper. The equivalent of this would be seeing articles by Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates in The NY Times every single day. Instead, NY Times regales us by badly written inanities from Douthat, Dowd, and Brooks.

Very well-written, progressive, well-organized, El País is also available on the Kindle. The day's issue is delivered to you on the stroke of midnight of the previous day.

The New Left Review is not available on Kindle. However, don't let this prevent you from checking out this great journal. The most prominent philosophers, journalists, cultural and literary critics, and academics write for this journal. Jean Baudrillard, Alain Badiou, Terry Eagleton, Perry Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, Franco Moretti, the list of the eminent names that appear on the pages of New Left Review goes on and on. If you want to keep in touch with what these leading thinkers are doing and writing, this journal is for you.

Some people might get scared by the word 'Left' in the journal's title. Remember, however, that the very fact of being a thinker and a philosopher in itself means that you are on the left of the political spectrum. A conservative philosopher is a contradiction in terms.

Narrative is an online magazine of literary fiction available on Kindle. Its mission statement says that "Narrative is the leading online publisher of first-rank fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. A nonprofit organization, Narrative is dedicated to advancing the literary arts in the digital age by supporting the finest writing talent and encouraging readership around the world and across generations. Our online library of new literature by celebrated authors and by the best new and emerging writers is available for free."

I only started subscribing to it recently but the experience so far has been highly enjoyable. The amazing Joyce Carol Oates (whose fantastic, beautifully-crafted short stories I can read all day every day), Saul Bellow, E.L. Doctorow, Amy Tan, Jhumpa Lahiri, and lesser known but still very good authors have published in Narrative. If you want to keep in touch with what is happening with the English-speaking literature today, check out this magazine.


I first subscribed to St. Louis Post Dispatch in order to support journalism in this economically devastated area and to keep touch with what is going on locally.

It turned out that this newspaper isn't half bad. Of course, I have to skip letters from the readers that often exhibit the depths of bigotry I never encounter in real life. The 'Law and Order' section about the local crime is also very depressing. Still, it does the job of keeping me informed about the economic, political and cultural developments in the area.

Of course, I subscribe to the Kindle version in order to save paper and bring down costs. Before Kindle subscriptions appeared on the market, I always felt horrible about taking out a daily because of the obscene amount of paper it wasted. Now I subscribe to two dailies on my Kindle and as soon as I get a raise I am subscribing to Canadian Globe and Mail. Or maybe to The Montreal Gazette. Or both.

Of course, nobody can be all about politics, literary criticism, and intellectual stuff all the time. Even an academic needs to have fun and relax. My way of doing that is detective fiction. Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine are sister editions that offer great selections of short stories in the mystery genre.

I also subscribe to them on Kindle, which is beyond cheap, and once again, allows you to save paper.

I haven't seen much difference between these two magazines so far. This is why I subscribed to both. They compliment each other very well and offer stories for all kinds of tastes in the mystery genre.

Of course, give it to an academic to spoil even the most innocent kind of fun. Recently, I have been thinking of taking up a research interest in the mystery genre, so that all this detective novel reading I have done over the years doesn't go to waste.

But more about that in later posts.