I haven't read this book yet.

From a TLS review of Pierre Bayard's Comment Parler des Livres Que L'on N'a Pas Lus (How to talk about books that you haven't read):

Bayard’s project is a serious one. He tells us, in his “Prologue”, that he was born into a family who read little, that he himself has almost no appetite for reading and that, anyway, he cannot find the time for it. As a (fifty-two-year-old) professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII (and a practising psychoanalyst), he often finds himself obliged to comment on books he hasn’t looked at. And yet “non-reading” is a taboo subject in the circles in which he moves. He lists three constraints that we all feel as readers: “The first of these constraints could be called the obligation to read. We live in a society . . . in which reading still remains the object of a form of sacralization”, particularly where certain “canonical texts” are concerned: it is practically forbidden not to have read these. The second constraint “could be called the obligation to read a book in its entirety. If non-reading is frowned on, speed-reading and skimming are viewed in as poor a light”. For example, “it would be almost unthinkable for professors of literature to admit – what is after all true for most of them – that they have merely skimmed Proust’s work”. Can this really be the case? If so, it’s a dismaying thought – presumably Bayard has had some explaining to do to his colleagues since his book was published in France earlier this year. The third constraint, and the one which most of us would take as given, is the need to have read a book in order to be able to talk about it: according to Bayard, it is perfectly possible to have a fruitful discussion about a book one hasn’t read, even with someone who hasn’t read it either. These constraints lead to a lack of openness in our dealings with each other, Bayard claims, and generate unnecessary feelings of guilt.

He does not address the fact that most of us have our blind spots where particular authors are concerned, and that many of us do feel oppressed by the thought of the books we haven’t quite got round to reading, or wish that we had read years ago and know we now never will. Bayard is not interested in this; instead, he divides the works he mentions into four categories: “LI” indicates “livres inconnus” (books he is unfamiliar with); “LP” “livres parcourus” (books glanced at); “LE” “livres dont j’ai entendu parler” (books he has heard discussed) and “LO” “les livres que j’ai oubliés” (books he has read but forgotten). Ulysses, for example, falls into the category “LE”: he claims not to have read the novel, but he can place it within its literary context, knows that it is in a sense a reprise of the Odyssey, that it follows the ebb and flow of consciousness, and that it takes place in Dublin over the course of a single day. When teaching he makes frequent and unflinching references to Joyce.

And here from Jay McInerney in the N.Y. Times, on the English translation. (I really only skimmed this last review, I must confess.)

0.999999. . . = 1

It's true!

Richard Mellon Scaife, you dog.

Charter member of the vast right-wing conspiracy:

Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe) married his second wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued at $1.3 billion. This, to understate matters, is likely going to cost him, big time. As part of a temporary settlement, 60-year-old Ritchie Scaife is currently cashing an alimony check that at first glance will look like a typo: $725,000 a month. Or about $24,000 a day, seven days a week. As Richard Scaife's exasperated lawyers put it in a filing, "The temporary order produces an amount so large that just the income from it, invested at 5 percent, is greater each year than the salary of the President of the United States."

The Post has the story.

50 book challenge: #45, #45.5

#45: Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita. There are some books that you feel obligated to pick up and read because of their status as classics, but which you have been avoiding because you fear they will be dull dull dull. Then, without even getting past the first page you realize that instead the book justifies all the sort of adjectives that are maybe more commonly used for popular literature: a page-turner, unputdownable, laugh-out-loud funny, etc.

For me, War and Peace was like that. The three worst words in the book are its title. They're just so ponderous and vague, which is utterly unlike the actual text and action of the novel, even the more philosophical portions. (Tolstoy should have stuck with his original title, 1805.) Anyway, The Master and Margarita, while not really comparable to War and Peace, was similar. There must be some superficial quality of classic Russian novels that intimidates me, but it's not like I'm reading them in the original language. . . But in fact the Russian novelists that I've read - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Bulgakov if you include him on the basis of this novel - in fact have a reliably playful quality to them.

So in The Master and Margarita, the devil visits Moscow and wreaks havoc on the city's population. Interpolated are chapters on Pontius Pilate's role in the trial and crucifixion of a man named Yeshua ha-notsri, as related by Satan but also in chapters of a book written by another character known as "the master." Oh, and have I mentioned the trigger-happy black cat the size of a hog, who stands on two feet and knocks back shots of vodka? By the way, prospective readers should note that Jimmy Buffett has nothing to do with the story.

#45.5: James Kugel, How to Read the Bible. Begin at the beginning, continue to the end, then stop. This is a fascinating reference book, but I wasn't about to read it straight through. So I figure I'd treat the portions I did read as about half a book.

Happy Halloween!

 

Shuffling off.

The solution to Buffalo's problems? "Shrinking to greatness," according to Harvard economist Edward Glaeser.

Une folle traversée de la Paris à l'aube.

Le film est C'était un rendez-vous. Le réalisateur est Claude Lelouch (qui a un nom merveilleusement français). Route here. Wikipedia here.

C'était un Rendez vous
Uploaded by ben-j

50 book challenge: #44.

#44: Christoph Peters, The Fabric of Night. German art students on frolic in Istanbul get mixed up with possible assassination of American gem dealer; much weltschmertz results.

And the cradle will rock.

Lullaby adaptations of rock classics: Rockabye Baby.

Metallica's Enter Sandman becomes strangely compelling (mp3).

Gabba gabba goo goo (mp3).

Karma police (mp3).

But is there such a thing as a "lullaby rendition of Coldplay"? How could that be any different from, like, just plain Coldplay? zing!

Yes, you can drink the water.

Breaking: N.Y. Times sends intrepid foreign correspondent to Lawrenceville. Report here.