As I have had time to get back into deeper reading of the New York Review of Books, owing to my getting back a subscription in the past year or so, and now, as MF Blog, The Sequel, has re-emerged, I realized it was time to resurrect the Review of Book Reviews that the relatively few readers of the original MF Blog appeared to enjoy.
1. From the latest NYRB: Laura Kipnis has important things to say in the latest New York Review of Books about the exposure of male sexual oppression that has finally ripped open from the bowels of the entertainment industry which includes politics. For, as Frank Zappa memorably said, Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex.
Kipnis became infamous among the academic community by providing the libertine Woodstock era sexual freedom perspective to the ongoing important debate over sexual assault on campuses. Her take is part ironic, part radical, part conservative (only in the sense of recognizing the importance of decorum within the discussion), and a demand that we grow up. What this last part means is that sexual desire and activities make us do stupid things, are highly emotionally laden, and there are distinctions that are made that cannot be neatly compartmentalized. It is, in short, more than treating men and women equally in some anti-septic, non-discriminatory way. But what it is, says Kipnis, we are not quite sure yet.
I supported the California law for college campuses known as "No Means No/Yes Means Yes," despite my Lenny Brucian/Woodstock era misgivings. I felt it was time for the culture to change more, ahem, forcefully, and make sure when a woman said No, she was comfortable saying that is exactly what she meant. Human history has long put premiums on women's "maidenheads" so that No often meant Maybe, and even, You guys have to work for it or you are wimps. And no man wants to be called a wimp, not even us wimps. I felt at the time of the regulations being proposed and some implemented that it was in fact time to change the dynamic, and remove fear of the Madonna/Whore Complex we as a society or culture put on women.
What has gone on in the past two months is spectacle as this issue has been thrust into the full limelight of reality television. It has occurred in a way where others are manipulating attacks for political ends, whether with Moore or much more especially Franken. But Kipnis has, again, something to say, and I am so glad the NYRB has decided it worthy of free reading.
2. This excellent review of the expurgated biography of Czeslaw Milosz is great reading about a great 20th Century literary person who lived through the tumultuous times of Europe's 20th Century. The only thing missing is the perhaps ironic fact that Milosz became an opponent of the Berkeley radicals as they descended into more cultural radicalism, which Milosz, a man of decorum in his adult years, abhorred. Milosz's "The Captive Mind" should be required reading, not for the usual attacks on Stalinism, but for his generalized way of writing, which shows how a mind can be captivated by most ideologies, including capitalist, libertarian, corporate, etc. It is why Milsoz was seen as someone not useful to American government propagandists when they spoke with him following his defection. Milsoz never really lost his faith in a social democratic ideal, but he spoke and thought in paradox, in subtlety, and irony. In some ways, Laura Kipnis and Milsoz have that important intellectual set of attributes in common.
I was going to write another Review of Book Review note, but The Wife has rightly commanded me to join her for a Breakfast Outing.
