Odds and Ends

Since my last post, I've read a issue of The New Yorker, and started another, started an issue of The Economist, an issue of OK Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The New Scientist, as well as Eclectic Reading. I've also read Ruth Wisse's If I Am Not For Myself, and The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, Mudslingers by Kerwin Swint , Ken Hamilton's After the Golden Age, and Al-Mazini's Egypt.

Wisse's is the most intense Zionist literature I've ever read, and this comes from a Canadian, no less. I found it interesting if extreme, and I must say I have greater tolerance because I knew she had been a refugee as a child, possibly a Holocaust survivor. Schlemiel made me jealous: a 126 page doctoral dissertation? I wish mine was that short. Mudslingers was fun to read: the list of dirty tricks in US politics is seemingly endless, and there were lots I didn't know about. The worst, as one might expect, was probably George Wallace and his naked appeal to racism. Al-Mazini's book was a trilogy of picaresque novellas about Egyptian society. Hamilton's is an essay on pianism, i.e. the ways of being a pianist. I thought it was interesting.