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"In France, nationality is considered something that should be granted immediately and without a republican pledge," he said. "In America, there's a kind of course to follow that makes it more difficult, and once the process is achieved it's much more solidly anchored…. The machine that assembles Americans, the factory that produces citizens, works.The review, in which Marianne Wiggins shows a snarky side, notes that Levy seeks out an incomplete picture of America; rather than find a cross-section of the nation, he grativtates to "a milieu more comfortable to him: an A-list of stars and headliners at home and at work in privileged, white America" All of which suggests that it may not be a perfect book, but is probably a fairly entertaining one.
"What's right about the American model is accepting ethnic communities as a basis for creating citizens. What's bad about the French model is denying ethnicity in order to conjure a citizen who remains imaginary."
Revolutions are the stuff of literature. In fact, literary movements begin only when new generations of writers set to killing their forebears in an effort to find their voice. The rhetoric of iconoclasm and revolution may be fascinating, but the iconoclasm and revolution are never as total as the rhetoric would suggest.
Of course, as English and Casanova would agree, books are read on this side of the looking glass. We are ourselves products of the culture whose products we consume, and we can’t help taking it, for the most part, on its own terms. Still, their very strong books belong to a general challenge to the usual practices of literary pedagogy. Literature departments are almost always organized by language and country, but Casanova’s book gives us many reasons to doubt whether this captures the way literature really works. She has an excellent account, for example, of the international influence of Faulkner—once his novels had been translated into French. ... Faulkner was the novelist of the American South who demonstrated to novelists of the global South how to represent a marginal community in an advanced literary style, a style that could gain the respect of “Paris.”With the examples given by the article (and I guess by English and Casanova) this makes for an interesting exploration of how we assign certain works (A Million Little Pieces anyone?) value in our society.
English’s and Casanova’s books also challenge the conventional “shock of recognition” idea of influence, which imagines literary history as one soul speaking to another across time and space. The soul may speak, but the international context is the reason it is heard.
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Literature is conventionally taught as a person-to-person aesthetic experience: the writer (or the poem) addressing the reader. Teachers cut out English’s middlemen, the people who got the poem from the writer to us, apparently confirming his point that we have to deny the economics of cultural value in order to preserve the aesthetics (emphasis mine).
I've been listening to an audio recording of P.G. Wodehouse's Psmith in the City, which is very enjoyable. More about the book below, but in this case, the medium is the message. I downloaded the book from the LibriVox in the form of mp3 files that I listen to through my iPod on the way to work. Actually, I've only downloaded the first 24 chapters (they come in one to three-chapter files). LibriVox is a nonprofit, community run website where amateurs can post readings of public-domain books. Many of the books, including Psmith are collective projects, in which many different readers submit chapters. I was a bit surprised that the changing voices and reading styles didn't bother me very much, although some are certainly better than others. The biggest difficulty I've had so far was when one of the files started stopped midway through. I'm not sure if the problem was with the LibriVox file or iTunes. In the event, I followed the link at the top to the text of the book and read the two missing chapters there, then picked up again with the book.I'm intrigued. I love the idea of having books in the commons, available to listen to as well as to read. One day, if we ever have the equipment, we'd like to add a couple items to the LibriVox library. I am thinking of stories by Ivan Bunin. If you have any ideas, send them along.
Besides their price (free), a benefit of listening to books from LibriVox is that the files are plain mp3 files that can be played on any computer or mp3 player. Most, if not all of the audio book companies that sell books for use on mp3 players use a form of digital rights management (DRM) that restricts their use to certain kinds of players and a limited number of computers/mp3 players.
Currently, the LibriVox catalog is limited. There are 16 complete books, 12 short works (or story collections), and 13 works of poetry (there are also two works in languages other than English). There are significantly more projects underway. Only works in the public domain--basically books published before 1923--are allowed.
Psmith is about a couple of young men in England who, for different reasons, go to work for a bank in London instead of university. The premise is thinly drawn, but the scenes at the bank are great and show that office life has not changed very much in a century. Psmith--I'm not sure what the P is for, maybe it is just supposed to be funny--is a lazy and spoiled rich kid who believes he can entertain enyone by talking to them. Psmith's friend Mike, who's father has gone bankrupt, is Psmith's straight man, a harder worker who is along for the ride as Psmith schemes ways to make their life at the bank easier. Psmith succeeds in winning over the notoriously strict head of the stamps department by discussing Manchester United with him; he is less successful, so far, at winning over the higher ups.
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There were women in Raveloe, at that present time, who had worn one of the Wise Woman's little bags round their necks, and, in consequence, had never had an idiot child, as Ann Coulter had.Is it wrong that I found that so amusing?
Why couldn't I just get with the wisecracking, confidential tone of this book and have fun? Why did I find it so offensive?She continues with what is supposed to be a reason she'd love the book, but it seems to me to be the reason she'd probably hate it regardless:
Like Melanie, I was a 20ish aide in Washington, D.C., who worked for the losing side in a presidential race. I too can tell anecdotes about Ted Kennedy and Bob Shrum. I was also inappropriately sleeping with someone on another staff and drinking too much and traveling across the country day after day in the same old tired suit.Am I the only one who thinks she sounds a little jealous? Still, when Wagner writes that the novel is "predictable" and "mean-spirited," I can believe that it's true. Which makes me sad. Almost as sad as knowing that Cox has handed over the Wonkette mantle for good.
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I object to people who are celebrities in another field selling novels and getting lots of attention — including reviews in papers like this one — they don't deserve.
