Month: June 2011

Tactician, Plan Thyself

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by Eric Martin Given my oft–stated concern about what a potential post-Qaddafi period will look like (would there be purges/an insurgency, would it require a peacekeeping/nation building mission, overseen by which groups/nations, etc.), these paragraphs from a recent New York Times piece on the conflict in Libya stood out: …Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, returning from a brief … Read more

Naipaul follow-up post: On authors and authority

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by Doctor Science

Hilzoy appeared in the comments to the previous post, saying

Wrong of me to say "it would be a mistake", just like that. I was responding on TNC’s thread, and should have said (what I meant): it would be a mistake not to read him because of what you see on this blog", which is what the person I was responding to said s/he was planning to do. I don’t think, and should not have implied, that there is any such thing as a book that’s good for everyone. (Personally, I am allergic to Wordsworth. I am reliably informed that I shouldn’t be, but there we are.)

Fair enough.

A Trinidadian friend told me that many people in Trinidad no longer read Naipaul’s books after his visit to the country in 2007, where he insulted and publicly humiliated schoolchildren who had been invited to a Q&A with him. At least some Trinidadian schools no longer have Naipaul on the high school reading list — in his tirade he said that literature is for adults, not children, anyway.

Derek Walcott, who numerous commenters at that Trinidad&Tobago News site mentioned as someone who they can respect whole-heartedly, wrote a poem, The Mongoose, expressing his view of Naipaul:

After its gift had died and off the page its biles exude the stench
of envy, "la pourriture" in French
cursed its first breath for being Trinidadian
then wrote the same piece for the English Guardian
Once he liked humans, how long ago this was
The mongoose wrote "A House for Mr Biswas"

Trinidad-textile-art
Textile art by Clara Applewhaite-Mitchell, of Trinidad and NJ.

I could write about how knowing things about the author changes (or doesn’t) how we view a text, but I just don’t feel like it right now, it involves too much talking about people’s failings. Feel free to discuss in comments, but for the moment I want to talk about authors and authority.

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On not reading V.S. Naipaul

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by Doctor Science

It’s not often that I disagree with either hilzoy or Ta-Nehesi Coates, and rarer still for me to disagree with both of them at once, but today I do.

1892 woman writing impressionist painting
The source describes this as “1892 woman writing impressionist painting”, but I haven’t been able to figure out who it’s by. It’s in the style of Gauguin, but I can’t find it in any of the Gauguin archives online.

Backstory: V.S. Naipaul, Nobel Prize-winning Trinidadian writer, is known to be a giant, flaming dick. In an interview this week

Naipaul, who has been described as the “greatest living writer of English prose”, was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: “I don’t think so.” Of Austen he said he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”.

He felt that women writers were “quite different”. He said: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he said.I don’t see that there’s any doubt about which body part to compare him to.

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