NP but somehow very P. BE? or AtD and more. Anyway, goes out for Morris and N.O. Brown, sorta. And Joseph too.

[Mark Kohut]

Someone very smart about novels posted this excerpt while recommending the
book highly:
And other smart friends of mine have praised it highly too.

Read an excerpt from "Homeland Elegies":
[image: 📷] LITTLE, BROWN
Overture: To America
I had a professor in college, Mary Moroni, who taught Melville and Emerson,
and who the once famous Norman O. Brown — her mentor — called the finest
mind of her generation; a diminutive, cherubic woman in her early thirties
with a resemblance to a Raphaelesque putto that was not incidental (her
parents had immigrated from Urbino); a scholar of staggering erudition who
quoted as easily from the Eddas and Hannah Arendt as she did from
Moby-Dick; a lesbian, which I only mention because she did, often; a
lecturer whose turns of phrase were sharp as a German paring knife, could
score the brain's gray matter and carve out new grooves along which old
thoughts would reroute, as on that February morning two weeks after Bill
Clinton's first inauguration, when, during a class on life under early
American capitalism, Mary, clearly interrupted by her own tantalizing
thought, looked up from the floor at which she usually gazed as she spoke —
her left hand characteristically buried in the pocket of the loose-fitting
slacks that were her mainstay — looked up and remarked almost offhandedly
that America had begun as a colony and that a colony it remained, that is,
a place still defined by its plunder, where enrichment was paramount and
civil order always an afterthought. The fatherland in whose name — and for
whose benefit — the predation continued was no longer a physical fatherland
but a spiritual one: the American Self. Long trained to worship its desires
— however discreet, however banal — rather than question them, as the
classical tradition taught, ever-tumescent American self-regard was the
pillaging patria, she said, and the marauding years of the Reagan regime
had only expressed this enduring reality of American life with greater
clarity and transparency than ever before.

*The Imperial Self *is a good work of lit crit which explores this concept
in many of America's best novels and writers.