Why you should be reading the New York Review of Books (if nothing else)

I feel vindicated, and disheartened. A recent article in The Chronicle for Higher Education shows why reading the New York Review of Books is just so damned important for anyone interested in not only words, ideas and books, but also in their dissemination.

A general, non-scholarly journal of intellectual culture is the foundation upon which any self-respecting intellectual culture stands. Go out and subscribe.

Update: I just found the first issue of the nyrob online, including all of the texts, if I’m not mistaken. It reads as an intellectual who’s who in the Anglophone world from the 60’s. Big names here : Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, W. H. Auden, Robert Penn Warren, Susan Sontag, and, of course, the ubiquitous Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, among a lot more others. All in the first issue, folks.

How to write fast and well..

While on the subject of people I admire, the Guardian ran an article on David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker a few days ago.

“For better or for worse, by the way. AJ Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I’m one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.”

The man puts out a mean magazine.

The journal of an intellectual

The Sunday edition of the New York Times has a fascinating article in their magazine on Susan Sontag’s journals. It’s heartening to see how prosaic and sophomoric some of her entries are – I had the impression of reading things that could have come from my own journals.

As someone who keeps a (semi)regular journal on various notepads and pieces of paper throughout the apartment, I was glad to see that the inner workings of an intellectual whom I have always envied/admired. Plus all the name dropping, and, of course, the cities: New York, Paris, Bled (Yougoslavia) etc.

And finally, on reading other people’s journals:

We rarely do know what people think of us (or, rather, think they think of us).. . .Do I feel guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes? No. One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal.

So dig in..

Review of The Looming Tower

For all my faithful readers that have been waiting anxiously for an update, here is my review of Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11“.

A well written history of al-Qaeda, for those who still want more to read. Wright’s prose in this book is decidedly non-academic — more akin to that of a thriller — and may be slightly jarring to some.