Shteyngart, who could pass for my friend Tim Dawson
“I don’t know how to read anymore. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it.”
“American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.”
From Shteyngart’s recent interview with The New York Times Magazine. Shteyngart’s new novel is on the way. I’ve only read Absurdistan, but am looking forward to what’s next.
I found this strolling along the “Freedom Trail” in Boston today, from Benjamin Franklin:
“Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”
—-Benjamin Franklin
Refreshing for me since American responses to education are so deeply anti-intellectual (even pragmatism– our only real contribution to philosophy–doubts the efficacy of learning. Anyway, experience too often is another name for prejudice, a form of justification that verges on narcissism, believing that if it isn’t true to my own experience it isn’t true at all. The dream of reading, true or false, has at least sometimes included the notion that we can see beyond our own experience into the experience of others, that my own experience may be a starting point, but left in it I am left to my own limitations.
Side note: I have to say I love Boston. I’ve never spent more than a few hours in the city itself, once on a visit years ago after graduating from college, and then a few years ago for an afternoon with my parents. A school on every street corner, it seems. A place where walking is its own entertainment.
Advent of Revolution
One question, what is the deal with Dunkin Donuts? Did they start here? There are more dunkin donuts than pictures of patriots, and that’s saying something. According to boston.com “there are 1100 Dunkin’ Donuts within a 50-mile radius of Boston. So far as I can tell it doesn’t affect the waistlines, but watch out Boston.
The following from Alice Walker
Perfection
In nature nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can
be contorted, bend in weird ways, and they are still beautiful.
ALICE WALKER
This kind of thing reminds me why I liked her and actually included her in my book. However, by that time Walker was well along in her efforts to become an oracle instead of a writer. Too bad. She could have been a great writer, The Color Purple and a few other things attest. Instead she often sounds like a half-baked version of Shirley McLain. Which leaves her about quarter-baked, I guess.
The following from Frederick the Great is cited in Harold Meyerson’s op-ed in the Washington Post today:
“He who would defend everything ends up defending nothing.”
Just goes to show that even autocrats come up with a good one every once in a while.
Peter Kerry Powers 