#121

Just purchased a copy of John K. Fairbank's China: A New History, among other things (more books*, couple toothbrushes, a sandwich and a couple pints of cold antipasti from the deli) and looked the dude up after I got home.

First, I ate a sandwich.

Then I found out this dude finished the manuscript for his book in the summer, delivered the final copy to his published on September 14 and when he got home his heart flexed goodbye and the dude died right there. Also he took a microphone away from Howard Zinn once which is hilarious. I liked Zinn's People's History of The United States and that Zinn's Comic History of American Empire, but I got my differences with the dude for sure and would totally have wrestled the mic out his hand at the drop of a hat. Now I am halfway through the wikipedia article on the American Historical Association.

Bearing in mind that it is impossible to fully disentangle the two, I don't like the academy influencing politics and I don't like politicians going anywhere near the academy, and that includes communists and the humanities.

It may be that individual academics are correct in believing that their specialized knowledge confers upon them a special clarity in perceiving and judging government policy at every level, and that their political views justify sophistry; that every agenda in the academy is abhorrent except for the one whose ideology they happen to espouse. I think sophistry is sophistry no matter how virtuous you think your opinions are or who agrees with you.

Of course it bears remembering that what the fuck do I know. At the end of every workday, I wipe a disinfected rag over a bunch of stainless steel and I throw a garbage bag from one garbage can into a bigger garbage can. Then I walk home. I don't have nearly the sufficient confidence in how much I know to act like I deserve for it to earn me anything.

Anyway if a dude gets accused of being a communist and of being an imperialist, I'm probably going to at least find his book interesting. I read on both sides of every aisle; that's how libraries are designed.

*

One hundred and twenty-one is a pretty good number. Not one of the coolest, but pretty cool.


--JL

*from the library I got this book on Murakami Takashi and this book on Picasso and Surrealism. From the used bookstore I got a book on the war between the Zulu Nation and Victorian Britain, a book on European culture from 1500 to the present that is thicker than this complete history of Europe I'm reading right now, a Star Wars book by Karen Traviss, a couple of Philip K. Dick books, and the omnibus print edition of the unbelievably good and important webcomic Digger, by Ursula Vernon, which I started reading online as it was starting out, when I was just thirteen years old.