Spring Break Reading Roundup

Did very little but read backlogged frivolities last week, and drank lots of Pepsi One which no one in Manhattan but me seems to like, which is a pity (found a cache at Rite Aid last week and bought 9 bottles, to the checkouter's horror).

Anyway, after working my way thought the V.S. Naipaul catalog, have approached point at which there are just a few left, which will have to be rationed. India - A Wounded Civilization is my least favorite of his 3 India books, but still better than lots. A Bend in the River, on the other hand, is right up there with Mr. Biswas. And A Turn in the South is also a damn fine book about race and the history of the Southland.

Finally got around to Edmund White's States of Desire, very smooth. Reminds me of a comment from an impossibly witty English professor from central casting I admired, that Oscar Wilde ruined it for all the witless gay men out there, who will always seem less than. Speaking of, Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool was kind of a disappointment, especially after The Line of Beauty, but will put it back on the shelf and dust it off in a few years. And Samuel Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, for my money, may be the best thing going on the cleanup of the deuce. Also, has one of funniest meta-riffs on writers' conferences that I've ever seen. Missing the chance to grow up in TS movie theaters goes on my list of things to regret about being born too late.

Ever sharpening my inexplicable but not yet worrisome Rothschild family fetish, also got through Amos Elon's lean little Founder which focusses on the first two generations, and gives a very atmospheric plenty of pics and maps spin cam feeling for Frankfurt, especially the Jewish quarter, felt like in the late 18th C. Less chatty than Frederic Morton's The Rothschilds, but still elegant, and I guess he wrote it in English (does Elon write in Hebrew and English, anyone?). This summer - Niall Ferguson's House of Rothschild.

And, since MTV didn't seem to have any livecast spring break mayhem to watch, thought turned to death and dismemberment. J.M. Coetzee's latest, Slow Man, about an amputee who falls in love with his nurse is really something. Age of Iron was less riveting, but still pretty damn good. Which leads me to something I've been meaning to get off my chest for a while.

After a stint in London playing with IBM punch cards, Coetzee did his PhD in linguistics at UT Austin. His diss, I think, was something like a computer algorithm that would generate Beckett prose, also back in the punch card days. (Which reminds me, Vonnegut mentions somewhere his equally nutso Master's thesis which was going to be a structuralist-style graph explaining the narrative of the Bible, which was duly rejected). Anyway, Coetzee taught for a while at one of those upstate SUNY schools, at which time he went to some Vietnam protests, like everyone else. And so later, when he applied for permanent resident status, or maybe citizenship, for the US, he was denied. So, he went back to Africa, taught at U Capetown for 30 years, and now has retired to Adelaide, Australia, a city that prides itself on being the only Ozzie settlement that didn't consist of convicts. Reason enough to hate this city, which when I was there struck me as one of the most boring places on Earth. I think Rushdie commented something along the lines that the absolutely straight Adelaide grid of streets had to reflect what must be the chaotic and brutal inner lives of its citizens.

Anyway, my point: It's a fine thing that Coetzee has written such astonishing things about Africa. Sure, he's African and all. But he could have been an American writer, and I'd probably have a shelf full of Coetzee books set in the US, and that is such a disappointment. Instead we have Slow Man, set in suburban North Adelaide, which is going to be thickened and refracted by Coetzee's voice, instead of, I guess, Albany, or wherever he would have got hired next. America, you blew it on this one. J'accuse.

Ian Buruma's new book Inventing Japan is also full of zingers, but that's enough for now.

I Got Your Easement Right Here

Am thinking it may be about time to compile a directory of crazy hold-outs whose refusal to sell their property to developers leads to escalation that makes us chuckle.

My favorite until now was the person who seems to own a small 1BR house in the middle of the parking lot across the street from Temple Medical School in Philly.

But, not to be outdone, this Chinese guy, is holding out to beat the band.

Edit: Not to be stymied by some guy not to be outdone, Chinese government shows how they roll, over houses.

Edit: Luis has supplied this handy link of other noble nutso holdouts

Also, just came across this book by Andrew Alpern that focuses exclusively on the topic: New York's Architectural Holdouts

Undead form PAC in World's Largest Democracy

Recently reading Mary Roach's zany book Stiff has temporarily sensitized me to the neglected political rights of the deceased.

And so, this just in from India:
"In order to bring attention and justice to the throngs of the undead , Bihari formed Mritak Sangh, the Association of the Dead."

Thematization is the Sincerest Form

After going bunjee jumping sometime around 1997, I had an idea for a company, "Manhattan Muggings" where thrillseekers would be given a bullet-proof vest and experience a faux mugging. And I guess by now NY has let its brand association with muggings lapse. Anyway, when I actually saw someone had started such a company a few years ago I was pretty pissed.

But, much better is this theme park in Mexico which allows you to pretend you are crossing the US-Mexico border illegally at night.

Madame Brittany, C'est Moi

I've never particularly identified with Britanny, but support her decision to be bald and beautiful.
Is shocking how many talking head shrinks have come out of the woodwork citing this as proof that she is disturbed and close to hitting rock bottom.

Is it Still Schadenfreude If It Hurt Me Too?

Here's my old scrapbook of articles on the annual MLA convention (Modern Language Association, that is, supposedly the nation's largest convention, at 10,000 professors and grad students strong) and a few scared-straight articles on the market for humanities PhD's.

1. A classic MLA undercover with a focus on job seekers and plenty of boilerplate observations. A good warmup.

2. Here's one on the 2003 MLA convention from the Believer -- sharply observed, but suspiciously sympathetic.

3. Smug-on-Smug action. Some stylish potshots on the 2002 MLA convention from the NY Observer. Lead sentence: "The famous line about the MLA is that you’ve never seen a convention where people drink so much and fuck so little."

4. A Villiage Voice piece on grad student strikes from Anya Kamenetz, whose book "Generation Debt" vaporized her student loans along with her generational spokesperson privileges. Includes a nice tidbit from the pseudonymous Thomas H. Benton of Chronicle of Higher Ed fame: "Top undergraduates are arrogant; they lack perspective. They've been fawned over all their lives, and they think grad school is there to help them realize their potential, not to use them up and toss them out."

For Anyone Considering Grad School . . .

We present: A Brief Documentary History of Graduate Students Who Murdered Their Advisors

1. We begin with the legendary Theodore Streleski, who after 19 years of graduate work, killed his advisor with a ball-peen hammer, and told the court that he found his act to be "logically and morally correct." I heard that for a while it was fashionable at Stanford to bring a ball-peen to your dissertation defense. Any news about this estimable tradition, please let me know.

2. On a cold and dreary November day at the U of Iowa, a recent Ph.D. graduate in Physics from Beijing, disgruntled because he had not won the $2,500 prize for outstanding doctoral thesis in 1991, and who felt his appeal of that decision was not being handled promptly or fairly, shot and killed five people, shot and paralyzed for life a clerical worker, and then killed himself . .

3. A University of Arkansas graduate student was found dead near an English professor in an apparent murder-suicide. He had been kicked out of the degree program one week earlier, after a decade of lackluster work.

4. Harvard's Jason Altom left behind 3 suicide notes, one to his parents, one to his graduate advisor Nobel laureate chemist Elias J. Corey, and one to the chemistry department chair.

5. Basilis (Vasilis) Xanthopoulos was a Greek theoretical physicist who made important contributions in Relativity and gravitational physics. Xanthopoulos and Stephanos Pnevmatikos were shot to death by a mad student, 32 year old Giorgos Petrodaskalakis.

6. Valery Fabrikant was a professor at the time he killed 3 other professors, but hey, close enough.

Constitutional Propps

Vladimir Propp, that guy knew his way around a fairy tale.

Basically, Propp read a ton of fairy tales and came up with a taxonomy of 31 building blocks that they use -- like when the hero about to embark on a journey meets an old crazy person who gives him some kind of magical whosits.

I've been a fan of Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale since I read it in grad school, and am pretty sure it had some kind of influence on one of my favorite books of all time, Roland Barthes' S/Z. I think Jospeph Campell must also have been at least indirectly influenced by Russian formalist narratology, since his Hero With a Thousand Faces uses a lot of similar moves, along with some new age hooey. George Lucas relied on Campell in writing his 318th draft of Star Wars, so when the crazy old guy is Obi Wan, and the mystical thingy is THE FORCE, the whole thing puts Propp at the beginning of a pretty kickass chain. Here's a nifty comparative chart of the different approaches.

Anyhoo, to get to the point, today while reading 10 or so cases for Con law, I was thinking how much we need a morphology of the Supreme Court decision. Maybe one already exists, though it seems more like any given scholar sprinkles a few into there work, but there's no sustained synthesis of this approach.

With my lack of experience, I'm just starting to see the standard moves and postures, but some of my favorites so far include:

- That second to last paragraph where the majority says, "Ok, we know this decision looks kind of broad, so some of you are probably already thinking of ways to take this apparent expansion for a spin. But we mean this one to be narrow, even though it doesn't look that way, so watch it."

- proleptic snark (a Scalia specialty), in which the majority opinion can't resist upstaging and dumping on the dissent.

More to follow. Observations from more experienced con law hands appreciated.

Did Someone Say Eminent Domain?

A recent article in the Columbia Spec has it that after vehemently denying plans to invoke eminent domain to gain possession of the roughly half of the prospective Manhattanville campus area that it hasn't already bought, Columbia has announced that it might consider invoking eminent domain.

Here's looking forward to 14 more Lerner Halls, tilty ramps and all.