From: "Lydia Perovich" <fauxprophete-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Adieu to 2003
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 17:29:36 -0400


You're right Evgeni, I was wondering how they came up with 160-plus pages 
for the English translation of that book...  Maybe they put more Beckett 
excerpts in the back, we'll see.

Some of my own items for the list...

Most recommended author by the people whose judgement you trust, yet a 
complete disappointment: Michel Houellebecq.  Honestly, could anyone tell me 
what all the rage for MH in Europe (and more and more in North America)?  
There was an article in a recent Harpers' on him and after all the twists 
and turns of the text the author concluded that MH was one of the last 
romantics in this world... I beg your pardon?  The more accurate sentence in 
that essay was the quotation from MH himself "I am not capable of holding an 
idea for any amount of time."

Best web find: www.ubuweb.com

Most disconcerting off-hand remark read in a book by an author you generally 
concur with: Donna Haraway's (in Modest_Witness -- I know, I know, a book 
several years old but I read it only this year) comment that the arguments 
against inter-species gene splicing (say, cold water fish into tomato) 
remind her of the right-wing fears of human miscegenation.  Huh? (Although 
her analysis of vampirism as a trope in that discourse is very compelling.  
The mentioned comment must have been a sudden derailment in an otherwise 
right path...)

The best book you haven't manage to read yet again this year: *nevermind*

First prize for the country definitely gone mad: Eric, you're right, the US 
-- and the competition is great in this category.

The huge-success book that is actually unbelievably politically cold, 
old-fashioned and repeatedly inane: MacMillan's *Paris 1919*.

Most anti-feminist leftist: Zizek of course, though I think that Badiou can 
be very successfully used as a tool for radical feminist action malgré lui.

Greatest Hollywood sacrilege: Nicole Kidman playing Virginia Woolf.  I shall 
never see that movie. (Personal commendment # 23)

Best cinematographic finds from the past: Romero's The Dawn of the Living 
Dead (the ultimate leftist horror movie -- probably started the whole 
oxymoronic sub-genre of the leftist horror); Hitchcock's Marnie (highly 
polysemous, and ends with a legendary sentence that forms the hetero-couple: 
"I'd rather stay with you than go to jail")

Best journal/magazine discovery of the year, to be carried over to future 
years: The London Review of Books.

[and so on]

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