Knowing lots of things
"Not knowing something is one way to be independent of it – but knowing lots of things is a better way and makes you more independent."
— Elif Batuman: Get a Real Degree
Recommended reading: My 12-Hour Blind Date and The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which made me laugh and laugh and laugh.
Finally, as Pushkin, a Russian, was ambiguously positioned between the "Orient" and the seventeenth-century Anglo-French tradition of travelogue, so was I ambiguously positioned between Turkey and the exasperating twentieth-century discourse of "shoestring travel": the quest for an idyll where, for three U.S. dollars, Mustafa would serve you a home-cooked meal and tell you about his hair collection. The worst part of this discourse was its specious left-wing rhetoric, as if it were a form of "sticking it to the man" to reject a chain motel in favor of a cold-water pension completely filled with owls.
Fri, September 17, 2010
