literature, philosophy

On literature, a few corrections.: I found Flaubert's Sentimental Education quite wonderful, I don't suppose it's any great revelation that Flaubert is a wonderful writer, except that I was less impressed with the more famous Madame Bovary. Also read Dostoyevsky's The Double a great work of wry Russian humor. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is still sending chills up my spine, as I work my way towards the end of Zola's L'Assommoir--a poignant testament to the ills of alocholism and inner city poverty.
On philosophy, I've missed out on a pretty bunch of the required readings, but did just read Nora's "Memory and Collective Identity," and found it rather interesting. Or perhaps it is the subject matter that I find compelling--more compelling, at least, than the ridiculous preoccupation with history as art vs. history as science. How about history as history and let's leave it at that. And really I do think interpreting the significance of historical narrative structure is taking things a bit far. Can't we just leave well be and focus on things that are actually of some real concern, intellectual or otherwise?
Then there is the Jewish thing. History is largely irrelevant when it comes to Jewish religion and ritual, which are essentially all about memory. Biblical narrative is less concerned with transmitting a history than with preserving a memory.
For Nora, the Jews are the people of memory, for Benjamin they are the people of history. To make things simpler, we can say the Jews are the preservers of the past.

Saul Bellow: Literary Genius & Jew

Saul Bellow is gone. Herzog was my bathroom novel, I read it and reread it, as an adolescent, trying to make sense of torments I could not comprehend, at the same time finding myself profoundly drawn to the pathetic character of Moses Herzog who perhaps epitomizes the neurotic, obsessive-compulsive Jew, thrust, unaware, into the drama and hype that is American academia. Somehow this psychotic but likeable man represents so much of everything that is wrong, or right, or simply that which is. Cruelly abandoned by his second wife, weighed down by guilt feelings over the failure of his first marriage and his inattentiveness to his children, Herzog communicates with the dead and people from his past: relatives, women, colleagues, ancient philosophers, biblical heroes and villains. Bellow's characters, from Moses Herzog to Ravelstein , create a sad but compelling testament to what it means to live surrounded by hostilities, both perceived and actual, confused by the vastness and indifference of a world one enters unknowingly and becomes inextricably, yet essentially bound to. This what Bellow communicates so well, and perhaps nowhere more poignantly than in his eloquent preface to Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind