Thursday, March 31, 2011
Eric Hoffer
This is worthwhile to cruise around on. Some great tabs within the link, too. As usual, sorry to surface only to submerge so quickly again. But when I came across this Hoffer link, I knew where it needed to be posted.
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7 comments:
Hey, great to hear from you MFT. We tried a couple of times to wake you from your scholastic slumbers with a juicy item or two on the evils of Greater NorthDak..but you didn't take the bait, eh?
Is this weekend a good time to call you?
This weekend would be just fine, AA. It's been too long. I've been busy as a grad student should be, and as of late just finished up Djilas (Tito's left-hand man) "Conversations With Stalin." In the West, I just did a short review for a discussion tomorrow on Gilbert Fite's "Farmers' Frontier" (1966). Still think Willa Cather, "My Ántonia" (1918) is the best novel that represents the ethnic dynamic of the settlement of the Plains. Something I'd recommend for your summer 2011 reading lists.
Funny, MFT, I just read "My Antonia" this past week [students left their copy lying around, and so it became fodder for the bored]. It was good. I think Cather's strongest novel, overall, is "Death Comes for the ArchBishop", but "My Antonia" does give a mean look into that "ethnic dynamic" you mention.
As for Djilas, no kid left his book lying around.
Damn these are good.
It's been a long time since I read Hoffer. One page of his writing beats all the reams pouring out of Sartre, for example. Brilliant stuff.
A little bit of Camus, a little bit of Marcus Aurelius, and a strong heaping of unregenerate American. Amazing what an education free of our schools allows the once blind to see.
I should read the stuff, but goddam if I have 10 minutes.
Glad to read that a copy of My Antonia was abandoned in the proper place. In her time, the book created quite the row: it undermined the then-standing Anglo-Americentric literature (and culture: think of how Frederick Jackson Turner and his disciples dominated the scene then). Remember who was the pervert in the book? Yes, the Anglo-American. The other immigrants — the Bohemians and Scandinavians — brought their respective kinds of culture to the Great Plains without having to be perverts.
Harold Bloom has a reader out there on My Antonia — although it's also a good idea to stay away from readers and instead just read the originals.
Glad you dig the Hoffer, Rot. His aphorisms are perfect for the Yankee or Texan with limited time.
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