What Are You Reading

[Harp]

I read Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet about an hour ago...

Any thoughts?

 

[carter]

I just finished reading the 1937 edition of Last Flight by Amelia Earhart. Most of the book is in her own words as assembled by her husband, George Putnam, from her letters, flight logs, and diaries she posted from various locations as she and Fred Noonan circumnavigated the globe, as well as a few telephone/wireless conversations Putnam had with Earhart during the trip. Fittingly, Earhart's words end with their departure from Lae, New Guinea for Howland Island. The two pages that follow contain a wireless message to the NY Herald Tribune and the text of a letter she wrote to Putnam before a dangerous flight, to be read if it proved to be her last flight. It's a very poignant experience reading Earhart's own words since we know the ending. I can only imagine what it may have been like to read this in 1937.

I've read other books about Amelia Earhart as well. She was an amazing and inspirational woman. I'd like to have known her.

 

[imoldfashioned]

I recently read Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism, which quotes liberally from her books. I really do need to track down the original books--I especially want to read The Fun of It.

I just finished reading the 1937 edition of Last Flight by Amelia Earhart.

 

[Lenah]

Just finished "Beyond the Rocks", by Elinor Glyn, and am slowly fighting my way through "Dead Souls" by Gogol. Switching back and forth between that and "An Ideal Husband" by Oscar Wilde.

 

[Choeki]

I've been reading an English translation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Demons for the past couple of months during my lunch hour at work. I'm more than halfway through, but I have to admit that I'm losing interest since I'm distracted by a few antique books I picked up for sale at the public library a week ago.

 

[Sunny]

After a spree of re-reading a dozen early Andre Norton science fiction, I've switched gears. Now I'm reading some James Oliver Curwood, an author I found on the Gutenberg Project. They are... hmm... intensely romantic (in more than one sense of the word) books set in Canada and/or Alaska. I snagged a bunch on ebay pretty cheaply, since there's not much of a market for 1910s and 1920s hardbacks.

 

[Lily Powers]

"One Night Stands and Lost Weekends," a book of short crime stories written between 1958-1962 by Lawrence Block. Pure pulp, lots of fun. With all the catch up at work after the holidays, short stories are about all I can handle this month.

 

[filfoster]

What are you reading? Can you read?

The one I'm reading (slowly, as my aged lips tire easily), most interesting to this forum would be "Desert War" by Alan Morehead. What wonderful evocation, from a Brit journalist's point of view, of the war in Africa and around the Mediterranean. He takes a sojourn to India too and the US and you feel like you were there. He pays attention to manners and fashions and libations.

 

[lindylady]

Well, it's not vintage, but I'm reading Fireproof by Eric Wilson. It's based on the new Christian film about a firefighter who is trying to save his marriage.

 

[Harp]

Searching for John Boyer's recommended,
Three Outsiders: Pascal, Kierkegard, Simone Weil
by Diog Allen.

Just wandering through the subzero PhD postmodernism thesis jungle. :whip:

 

[Dr Doran]

Searching for John Boyer's recommended,
Three Outsiders: Pascal, Kierkegard, Simone Weil
by Diog Allen.

Just wandering through the subzero PhD postmodernism thesis jungle. :whip:

Vintagewise I'm finally reading Gentleman's Agreement, a falling-apart 1952 paperback copy I that my father and I found in Turkey for a buck.

And Harp, I am sorry about the postmodernism jungle ... it was the reigning paradigm even in the teaching of History for most of the time I have been at Berkeley, until Walter Scheidel at Stanford started publishing tons of historical work which relies on QUANTIFICATION, ECONOMIC SCIENCE, POLITICAL SCIENCE, ANTHROPOLOGICAL SCIENCE, and DEMOGRAPHY, de-emphasizing the allegedly slippery texts that postmodernists love, and emphasizing scientific thought, which postmodernists love to "deconstruct" as only a "totalizing Western confection" aimed at oppression and "domination and hegemony."

I shall be happy when we all decide (as I have already done) that we have learned what we can from the "linguistic turn" and then declare the "linguistic turn" kind of over-exaggerated and useless and move on to other things; right now, I like Missing the Revolution by Barkow and most especially The Literary Animal edited by Gottschall and Wilson, as far as literary theory goes.

 

[Madcap72]

"Hell I was there" by Elmer Kieth.

 

[Harp]

And Harp, I am sorry about the postmodernism jungle ...
I shall be happy when we all decide (as I have already done) that we have learned what we can from the "linguistic turn" and then declare the "linguistic turn" kind of over-exaggerated and useless and move on to other things...

Consentiere amicus.
ut Virgil inquit, "Non ragionam di lar, ma guarda e passa"

Inferno, iii

Ever read Saul Bellow's posthumous tribute to Allan Bloom, Ravelstein?

 

[Dr Doran]

Consentiere amicus.
ut Virgil inquit, "Non ragionam di lar, ma guarda e passa"

Inferno, iii

Ever read Saul Bellow's posthumous tribute to Allan Bloom, Ravelstein?

I haven't, but I have read and found interesting Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, and I also have found his protegée Camille Paglia interesting.

Bloom himself was a student of Leo Strauss, and although Strauss is beloved by the neocons these days, no less a giant than Robert Bellah told me in a personal communication that that's not the Strauss he knew.

 

[Harp]

Bloom

I haven't, but I have read and found interesting Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, and I also have found his protegée Camille Paglia interesting.

Bloom himself was a student of Leo Strauss, and although Strauss is beloved by the neocons these days, no less a giant than Robert Bellah told me in a personal communication that that's not the Strauss he knew.

I devoured Closing, it had an effect on me. I searched all over
Hyde Park for Bloom; whom had skipped Chicago for Paris.
One of my profs, George Anastaplo, a friend of Bloom's, hated Closing,
was openly sarcastic, and ripped a paper of mine to shreds....lol
I've read some of Camille Paglia, wouldn't mind meeting her.
Bloom wrote highly of Strauss, and whatever other views may be
regarding Closing's content, his book shook things up at Chicago.

 

[Dr Doran]

I devoured Closing, it had an effect on me. I searched all over
Hyde Park for Bloom; whom had skipped Chicago for Paris.
One of my profs, George Anastaplo, a friend of Bloom's, hated Closing,
was openly sarcastic, and ripped a paper of mine to shreds....lol
I've read some of Camille Paglia, wouldn't mind meeting her.
Bloom wrote highly of Strauss, and whatever other views may be
regarding Closing's content, his book shook things up at Chicago.

The negative press and overreaction over some very (as far as I am concerned) sensible statements about race relations and gender in Closing of the American Mind was the very, very last nail in the coffin of my previous infatuation with the radical left.

The PC-directed expulsion of Larry Summers from Princeton disgusted me even more, but that was years after I'd said goodbye permanently to the type of people who freaked out over Larry Summers' rather innocuous statement which got him fired.

Bloom's comparison of the late 1960s American students taking over entire university buildings and demanding "reforms" in the curriculum with the equally idealistic young students in 1933 Germany was rather apropos (although, as a comparison, this one is usually trite).

At least Summers has a Cabinet post now -- he didn't fare badly after all.

 

[John Boyer]

I devoured Closing, it had an effect on me. I searched all over
Hyde Park for Bloom; whom had skipped Chicago for Paris.
One of my profs, George Anastaplo, a friend of Bloom's, hated Closing,
was openly sarcastic, and ripped a paper of mine to shreds....lol
I've read some of Camille Paglia, wouldn't mind meeting her.
Bloom wrote highly of Strauss, and whatever other views may be
regarding Closing's content, his book shook things up at Chicago.

I, too, am a great fan of The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. I just recently loaned my old tattered first edition to a young high school english teacher, who has since requested to keep the book (this is good news). I ordered a new copy; I hate to be without it. Where should I start with Camille Paglia? John

 

[Dr Doran]

I, too, am a great fan of The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. I just recently loaned by old tattered first edition to a young high school english teacher, who has since requested to keep the book (this is good news). I ordered a new copy; I hate to be without it. Where should I start with Camille Paglia? John

I'd start with Sexual Personae, which tries (and largely succeeds) to be an analysis of Western culture from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (I am not kidding) along Nietzsche's Apollonian (or Apollinian) versus Dionysian axis or nexus or whatever you want to call it. The introduction is particularly valuable and I very much enjoyed her opinion of Rousseau.

A long essay she wrote for the journal Arion is quite good. i have it, but it's hard to dig out. It bashes postmodernism pretty eloquently.

Paglia is weird, but she's interesting and her life-history has made her very different from many Ivory Tower types. She saw postmodernism as a sham from Day 1 -- she thought Erving Goffman in books like The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life had already said everything useful that Foucault was to say, but more clearly.

Warning: various losers will think, if they see you reading either Paglia OR Bloom, that you are a Bad Person. Swat them.

 

[Harp]

I, too, am a great fan of The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. I just recently loaned my old tattered first edition to a young high school english teacher, who has since requested to keep the book (this is good news). I ordered a new copy; I hate to be without it. Where should I start with Camille Paglia? John

I had a similar experience with a favorite college student/waitress.
Sadly, inquisitive kids who read these days are few; or perhaps this is
just my impression, but she had never heard of Bloom, which I found
surprising since his Closing and its resultant campus furor is not
that dated.

I would echo Doran's lead regarding CP. I must confess I regret not
paying her more attention.

 

[Dr Doran]

I had a similar experience with a favorite college student/waitress.
Sadly, inquisitive kids who read these days are few; or perhaps this is
just my impression, but she had never heard of Bloom, which I found
surprising since his Closing and its resultant campus furor is not
that dated.

I would echo Doran's lead regarding CP. I must confess I regret not
paying her more attention.

Often college students have shorter memories than do ordinary people who are out of college (or never went) but read newspapers and have an active interest in intellectual affairs. The former are often young and have worked so hard to get into a good college that their reading has not been truly broad. I started college late and had the huge advantage of having read broadly (if indiscriminately) for many years longer than my competitors. It was thus very easy to get good grades. Of course this advantage did not last in grad school which is so specialized and subject-focussed that the only way to keep your head above water is brutally hard work -- the wide reading didn't cut it.