The Newsstand Sophisticate

Now that I’m (long) out of college, I choose what books to read in three ways: friends’ recommendations, books I need to read for my writing and editing jobs, and books referred to or recommended in books and articles I’m already reading. The first and third method send me down certain paths and subject areas, all related to each other in some way, and thus necessarily excluding other paths, other authors. It occurred to me when Norman Mailer died recently that I have never read anything he wrote, and that’s primarily because nobody I know has ever recommended him to me and the writers I read hardly ever refer to him, and when they do it’s usually unfavorably. The only exception I remember is George Orwell writing that The Naked and the Dead was a good book, so if I read anything by Mailer, it will be that one first. It’s the same thing with John Updike and William T. Vollmann, two other writers whose books I always see in the bookstore but have never read, and there is certainly a vast constellation of others I have never read, and may never read. If I had the time, it would be interesting to draw a chart of these recommendation connections, to see what my own reading’s constellation looks like, and to see just how far away across the galaxy it might lay from those of other people.

Here are some recommended reading lists I’ve found on the Internet recently from writers or bloggers I like:

• In an interview with the National Book Foundation, Christopher Hitchens recommends the following as his favorite non-fiction books: The Strange Death of Liberal England, by George Dangerfield; The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell; and The Prophet Outcast, by Isaac Deutscher.
• Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, has a long list of recommended reading on his Web site, including books on philosophy, religion, mysticism, and neuroscience.
• Michael Weiss and Nic Duquette’s blog, Snarksmith, has a list of recommended books, movies, and music running down the left side of the home page, including Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and several other books I would also recommend and several which are on my “to read” list.
• Butterflies and Wheels, self-proclaimed “fighters of fashionable nonsense,” has a list of favorite books, too. (Hitchens is on it, and is also on the Snarksmith list, providing at least one node in my constellation, or one constellation in my galaxy, perhaps.)
• Journalist Danny Postel has a list of readings in a syllabus he prepared for a class on writing for magazines.
• Finally, a MetaFilter post in which people post their answers to the question, “What single book is the best introduction to your field for laypeople?”

I’m working on my own list, which I hope to post to the site soon.

Via Butterflies and Wheels, a philosophy blog on the silliness (well, it’s a philosophy blog, so rather the unreasonableness) of imagining that being offended—even deeply offended—gives one the right to demand that offending statements cease:

The underlying problem, I suspect, is that our public culture has become so infected with subjectivist assumptions that people don’t realize that there’s a difference between desires and reasons. Sentiments are taken as given; no-one ever stops to question whether their reactive attitudes are warranted. Any kind of negative emotion is not just evidence, but constitutive, of suffering injustice. You’re offended, therefore they’re in the wrong.

A similar phenomenon, perhaps the flipside of this unquestioned subjectivism, is the way people seem to believe that their own anger about an issue is some sort of proof that they’re right about it. Very often among left-wing “viewers with alarm,” and probably among right-wingers, too, though I don’t pay as much attention, we hear that the country needs to see how angry they are. It’s summed up perfectly in the bumper sticker I’ve made fun of before: “If you’re not completely outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Those who are outraged are obviously the best informed, and if you’re not exploding with anger, well, you must not know what you’re talking about.

But isn’t anger generally an unreliable guide to what’s right? Certainly you can be outraged over true cases of injustice, but if I were to look over all the times I’ve been angry and the proximate causes thereof, I’m quite sure I’d find that often I was angry for no good reason at all. Anger and passion can certainly motivate (though they can also exhaust and depress), but they’re only worth celebrating if they’re motivating something worthwhile.

The Christopher Hitchens makeover continues in Vanity Fair, this time with some terrrifying photos of the Hitch’s recent dental work. (The main article by Hitchens is not online.) Don’t worry, there are waxing photos, too.

Incidentally, I hate to perpetuate a national cliché, but what is it with the British and their teeth? One of Hitchens’s (ex-?)friends, Martin Amis, goes into harrowing detail about his rotten teeth and their extraction and replacement in his memoir, Experience, and he, like Hitchens, grew up well-fed and well-educated. What went wrong? Do British water pipes have a sugary lining? Is the National Health Service really that bad? Or is it like obesity here in the U.S.: an obvious problem that most people are simply too lazy to do much about?

I’ve just been reading Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century, and marvelling at his descriptions of intelligent people cozying up to and making apologies for Stalinism in the 1930s and beyond. The impulses that drive that sort of thing aren’t dead, even if nowadays they lead to vastly more ridiculous results, such as in Anne Applebaum’s Slate article about recent trips by “super” model Naomi Campbell and actor Sean Penn to chum around with Venezuelan nuevo-caudillo Hugo Chávez.

It’s yet another story of frivolous celebrities in search of “radical chic,” but it’s an especially disgusting one in light of recent student demonstrations protesting Chávez’s attempts to alter the constitution to allow him to be elected president indefinitely and to increase government control over universities, the media and other institutions. The changes are all part of implementing what Chávez calls “participatory democracy” (as opposed to “representative democracy”). I’m not sure quite what participatory democracy is, but it probably works along the lines suggested by the famous graffito of May 1968 Paris: “Je participe, tu participes, nous participons, ils décident.” (“I participate, you participate, we participate, they decide”).

Wouldn’t it be much more “radical” for a celebrity to go demonstrate in the streets with students than have a photo op with an authoritarian mountebank? Yes, but it would be considerably more dangerous. Recently, a student was shot and killed by unknown gunmen during a demonstration at an anti-Chávez demonstration at a university in Western Venezuela. Chávez’s reaction was to threaten to revoke permits for future demonstrations and to order immediate investigations . . . into the protests’ leaders! As Jeff Spicoli said to Mr. Hand, “You dick!”

I wonder if Penn is even aware of the protests. Campbell seems not to have learned anything about the country other than that it has stunning waterfalls. Applebaum is undoubtedly right:

As for Venezuelan politics, or the Venezuelan people, they don’t matter at all [to Campbell and Penn]. The country is simply playing a role filled in the past by Russia, Cuba, and Nicaragua—a role to which it is, at the moment, uniquely suited. Clearly, Venezuela is easier to idealize than Iran and North Korea, the former’s attitude to women being not conducive to fashion models, the latter being downright hostile to Hollywood. Venezuela is also warm, relatively close, and a country of beautiful waterfalls.

Update (Nov. 7): Gunmen have attacked another student demonstration, this time in Caracas, killing at least two students.