Further thoughts on "The Vertical Hour."

One of the themes of this play that stays with me is the idea, echoed in a quote by Edmund Burke, that "all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." The play dealt with the Iraq War as one of its major points of contention between the two main characters, and the Julianne Moore character was largely of Burke's opinion. Her Nadia Blye believed that it was the responsibility of the West to do something when faced with the suffering of the world. When asked why one should persevere and continue to hope in the face of such despair she responded that we have no other choice.

And, of course, she's right. And wrong. There's always a choice - the easier choice to do nothing, to turn away. I think, though, that the heart of her belief had merit. In the face of despair, a decent person has a duty to continue to try. This challenge can be met with anger if necessary, for while anger can be destructive it can also be galvanizing, and there's nothing wrong with raging at the universe, or at god, or at whomever. God can handle our anger. The greatest crime against her, as against life, is indifference. As the play commented, terrorism is the wrong answer to the right question. Terrorists make the mistake of throwing their anger at people instead of at god, forgetting (or perhaps never knowing) both that she can take it and that she's the one who's earned it.

Said Biffs.

I've caught our dear friend Edward Said in an instance of what my mother likes to call "intellectual laziness" and what I like to call "a serious biff." At this point in Orientalism he's making an argument about three types of Orientalist texts that each involve pilgrimage to the Orient as their basis. He describes the three types of texts, by means of describing their authors, as follows:

"One: the writer who intends to use his residence for the specific task of providing professional Orientalism with scientific material, who considers his residence a form of scientific observation. Two: the writer who intends the same purpose but is less willing to sacrifice the eccentricity and style of his individual consciousness to impersonal Orientalist definitions. Three: the writer for whom a real or metaphorical trip to the Orient is the fulfillment of some deeply felt and urgent project." (157-158).

He then goes on to give an example of each category: Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Sir Richard Burton's Pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Meccah, and Gerard de Nerval's Voyage en Orient. He elects to use these texts to demonstrate the "relative spaces left in the text for the exercise and display of authorial presence" (158). And then he spends the next eight pages discussing Lane's book. There the chapter ends (a problem in itself), and when we pick up the argument again he's jumped to Chateaubriand?

So, like... I'm wondering if we'll ever see Burton and Nerval again – or if they were just a red herring or something. And in the meantime I'm thinking, "Dude, that’s a pretty bad biff right there. That's an argument that goes nowhere; the logical equivalent of a dangling participle, if you will."

Now, for the most part, I've enjoyed Said's argument (although he spends a lot of his time hitting the reader over the head with an anvil, which is annoying), but this is pretty reprehensible for a major intellectual figure. Perhaps it's just bad editing, but it's disappointing to say the least.

EDIT: And now I've gone far enough forward to find that, while Said does mention Burton and Nerval he certainly doesn't dedicate eight pages of comp. lit analysis to their works, which begs the question of whether this biff falls into the category of "intellectual laziness" or "intellectual dishonesty."

New York - Day Three.

We decided to spend a laconic day in New York instead running madly about as we'd initially planned.

I slept badly last night - very badly, if the truth be told - as strange and disconcerting dreams plagued me. Mom had a sore back from all our tremendous wanderings of the previous day. In the place of aimless sightseeing, we stayed in the hotel for most of the day, although I ventured out in the late morning to collect coffee and breakfast materials from a nearby cafe, and to enjoy the new chill in the overcast air. Mainly we read: Mom a fantasy novel, myself excerpts from Said's Orientalism.

At dinnertime, I searched the web for nearby restaurants and decided that I wanted something decadent for out last evening in the big city. We decided on Savann, a French/Eclectic place that served delightful fare. I had a mint-yogurt rice soup for starters and pan-seared salmon over peas and risotto for the main course. They offered a fine selection of wines, and I chose a bottle of their 2004 Beaujolais, which was sprightly and sumptuous. The entire meal was a treat. We lingered over it, moving from course to course, drinking our wine and conversing on a variety of subjects. The entire process took nearly three hours and was a joy.

Tomorrow we'll go to the MoMA and the Onassis Center, as we had planned for today, before making the run out to JFK for the noble charger that will ferry me home.