Books Update: Nicholson Baker's Wild Talk

[abnonymous]

So how would YOU guys feel?

YOPJ

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Otto" <ottosell at yahoo.de>
To: "Pynchon Liste" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, August 06, 2004 11:00 PM
Subject: Fw: Books Update: Nicholson Baker's Wild Talk


> >
> > Books Update from NYTimes.com
> > Friday, August 6, 2004
> > -------------------------------
> >
> > Leon Wieseltier: Nicholson Baker's Wild Talk
> >
>  "Checkpoint" by Nicholson Baker
>
> "Yet the discussion of Bush-hatred, and of Baker's book, cannot be
concluded
> with a polite absolution. For the virulence that calls itself critical
> thinking, the merry diabolization of other opinions and the other people
who
> hold them, the confusion of rightness with righteousness, the preference
for
> aspersion to argument, the view that the strongest statement is the truest
> statement -- these deformations of political discourse now thrive in the
> houses of liberalism too. The radicalism of the right has hectored into
> being a radicalism of the left. The Bush-loving mob is being met with a
> Bush-hating mob. Liberals are forgetting why liberals are not radicals.
When
> Jay demands to know how Ben would feel if Bush were killed -- ''won't part
> of you think, He's got it coming to him? Huh?'' -- the most that
center-left
> Ben can muster in the way of principle is this: ''I don't -- I'm not -- I
> can't predict how I would react if the president were actually shot,''
> followed by some sensitive mutterings about ''the simple sight of any
human
> being stilled.'' American liberalism, in sum, may be losing its head."
>
> Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic
>
> > =====================
> >
>
> Half of the review isn't about the novel!
>
> Otto
>