15 Responses to “Et Tu, Kristof?”

1. OliverCranglesParrot Says:
   January 25th, 2007 at 6:42 pm

   “And you out there: what other classics should we be talking about?”

   I certainly think that this would be very helpful to explore. Additionally, I would ask: What works or artifacts have emerged/are emerging/will likely emerge from the current context that the future may find useful. Perhaps it won’t even be an artifact, but something far more intangible that we cannot express within our current thinking?

   As for me, I’ve found two non-classic pieces to ruminate upon:

   Hermann Hesse’s If the War Goes On

   David Gates’:
   The Spanish Ulcer: A History of the Peninsular War

2. OliverCranglesParrot Says:
   January 25th, 2007 at 6:54 pm

   This is a bit more classic, but a interesting translation: The Art of War: The Denma Translation

3. Porfiry Petrovitch Says:
   January 25th, 2007 at 9:19 pm

   As Elias Canetti (in The Human Province) wisely observed, “This would be the time, Dante, for a precise world judgment.”

   So, how about The Divine Comedy or, at least, the canticle that is most relevant to our times, The Inferno?

   Call up John Freccero, at NYU (I think). He would make as superb a guide for us as Virgil was for Dante. And as an added bonus, check out Sandow Birk’s project to update Inferno in a toy theatre movie production, “imagining whom you would meet in Hell today” (The Daily Free Press, November 15, 2006, http://www.dailyfreepress.com).

4. hilde Says:
   January 25th, 2007 at 11:04 pm

   The Iliad: a proud but facetious pretext (WMD–woman of mass destruction) leads to a long bogging down, with pride being the ultimate obstacle to a shorter way out.

5. Nathaniel Landry Says:
   January 26th, 2007 at 2:39 am

   Conrad would fit quite well with two more non-classical thinkers of war and exile: Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.

   As far as OliverCranglesParrot’s suggestion that we think historically about our present–a critical idea–I might suggest (in the very specific and insufficient context of the United States in the Near East) Patrick Cockburn’s “The Occupation: War and Resistance In Iraq” (Verso Books, 2006), Amira Hass’s “Drinking The Sea At Gaza” (Owl Books, 2000) and David Hirst’s relentless “The Gun and the Olive Branch” (Nation Books, many editions since 1979 [I think]?”

   Thanks for opening this up.

6. peggysue Says:
   January 26th, 2007 at 3:58 am

   I’m currently reading Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. Earlier this year I read Margaret George’s Helen of Troy. Atwood’s Penelope cuts Helen of Troy no slack what-so-ever. In both cases I appreciate revisiting the story from the female point of view. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Firebrand is perhaps a bit cheesy but is a fun revisit of Troy in the voice of Cassandra. But the Greek heroine whose point of view I would find most interesting today is Medea’s. In the 1960 movie Never On Sunday Melina Mercouri attempts to exonerate Media from the bad press she gets from Euripides. I wonder though what today Medea would have to say to the Christian Right-to-Lifers? Also, I think it is interesting that where Medea came from, the far end of the Black Sea from Greece… is today’s Chechnya.

7. Potter Says:
   January 26th, 2007 at 8:34 am

   Kristof must listen to ROS to come up with such a piece. Perhaps there is one grand mind that we all check into now and then.

   I have been very slowly reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain ( John Woods translation- hardcover and too heavy to carry around). It is like walking through a three foot high snowstorm. I mentioned I was reading this to a friend of mine and she instantly felt sorry for me. Boring she said. Yet as I look back I see dog-earred and post-its on the pages. I am getting nourished along the way, living with it. Like Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” I suspect I won’t know what hit me until I am done and realize how I have internalized the experience. (definition of a great work of art?)

   For this kind of reading it takes more than one lifetime — especially if you stop to chew your food well. I am a hopeless reader when it comes to such works. When I hit something profound the book closes for a bit.

   I was on my way to your dystopia/utopia thread to mention the Berghof, the spa, the world apart, it’s own little society, death (from tuberculosis) ever-present,

   I am not exactly suggesting this book, but whatever, let it be great. French? Flaubert?

8. Tom B Says:
   January 26th, 2007 at 3:24 pm

   Books for our time?
   Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ (a second go around?)
   Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Cat’s Cradle’ (whistling in the dark?)
   Jean Paul Sartre’s ‘No Exit’ (I live in an insane asylum)
   Thomas Hobbes ‘Leviathan’ (this is even worse than Baghdad!)
   Voltaire’s ‘Candide’ (maybe we should stop traveling and simply start a garden)
   On a lighter note, and much more whimsical:
   Unamuno’s ‘San Miguel Bueno, Martyr’ (keep em happy, no matter what)

9. silvio.rabioso Says:
   January 27th, 2007 at 11:27 pm

   Funny that Brendan mentions Camus in the blurb…the Decider said he was reading The Stranger last summer. Adam Gopnick had a masterful reflection on what that [Bush reading Camus] means in a Talk of the Town.

10. silvio.rabioso Says:
    January 27th, 2007 at 11:28 pm

    http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060828ta_talk_gopnik

11. silvio.rabioso Says:
    January 27th, 2007 at 11:46 pm

    While we’re on North Africa, how about Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers? I’m sure many of you about the contraversial 2003 Pentagon screening of the film…if not, it was essentially the equivilant of screening Oliver Stone’s _Wall Street_ as the centerpiece of a day-trader business ethics seminar.

12. silvio.rabioso Says:
    January 27th, 2007 at 11:47 pm

    sorry about the controversial spelling…

13. peggysue Says:
    January 31st, 2007 at 5:27 am

    The only French books on my bookshelf are The Diaries of Anais Nin Vol I & Vol II.

14. herbert browne Says:
    February 16th, 2007 at 3:06 am

    My thanks to silvio.rabioso for the “New Yorker” link above… pretty good read, that.

    Now that my life is less hurried, perhaps I’ll revisit Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class”… it just didn’t stick when I tried to grok it in the wayBack when… ^..^

15. peggysue Says:
    February 17th, 2007 at 8:45 pm

    Herbert B.

    I’ve never read Veblen but I once knew a low-bagger who had a theory about the leisure class existing on either end of the economic spectrum.

    hey, nice stuff on the Haiku page

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