Hoplocrisma-spongus

Tue, Oct 23, 2007

I’ve been reading the back issues of the New York Review intermittently over the last few days. I’m still in the glorious era when they would print things like this [subscriber, though, given the author, I suspect it’s online elsewhere].

It’s fascinating reading (with the increasingly strong feeling that it’ll be anagnostian throughout for me with this venue) through this admittedly narrow aperture of intellectual history. There are more bird-books reviewed than you might think, and only Foucault and McLuhan (and Ong) have, as of early 1968, made any appearance from the theory-pantheon. Chomsky’s published “Responsibility of the Intellectuals” and an account of a Pentagon protest, but there’s been nothing about his linguistics. (I should add that I’ve been scanning the table of contents and reading things which catch my interest, not doing anything systematic, so it’s quite possible that I’ve missed something; and I also know, if you’re curious, that this is well-covered ground, even owning a book about the early years of the NYR, which might be thought to be one of the more superfluous volumes in my collection.)