Yet another day done. Today I ate pizza for the first time in God knows how long. Now I'm paying a price, but it's not that bad; the pizza tasted so good.
Today I'm staying non-technical, entirely:
Poor Zadie. I just read a review of her latest book, The Autograph Man, in The Economist:
"The Autograph Man" is neither properly picaresque nor, despite the boast in the cover blurb, terribly funny. The characters are shrill, cartoon-like figures, and the bubblegum text is so distended with italics, capital letters, lists, diagrams, poor jokes and faux parables that you end up wanting to stick it to the underside of your chair and leave it there.
Ouch! Under normal circumstances I'd rue the harshness and assume it was some tight arsed WASP who reviewed it but I've come to trust The Economist (of all magazines!) in its Books and Arts section.
I did attempt "White Teeth" but put it down after about half way - there was a lot of life, it was funny but it wasn't the sort of mind bending story I usually go for. Well, Zadie still has fans, and I'm sure she'd much rather the positive review from Salon over a positive one in The Economist.
Besides The Economist, another great magazine to absorb yourself in is The Atlantic Monthly. The writer therein who is most appealing to me is David Brooks. I like Christopher Hitchens too, but not for content, just his erudite writing style. Actually, honestly speaking, I don't think I understand Hitchens at all. I don't know that many do; reading him makes you feel such the intellectual (his latest article was about Byron but he managed to work in Jane Austen, Napoleon Bonaparte, Auden, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Victor Hugo, Adam Mickiewicz and I could go on and on and on...).
I imagine that sometimes Hitchens is deliberately abrasive to a common reader, a person like me who is trying to follow but simply hasn't the background. Yeah, if I had to put my finger on it, he writes like an academic, not a journalist.
This weekend it looks as though I'll be in Minneapolis. Yeah, Brookings broke me down like that - I have to leave.
6:21:52 AM 
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