[lbo-talk] Talking about what you don't know

Curtiss Leung curtiss_leung at ibi.com
Wed Oct 6 06:37:38 PDT 2004


I understand that when Nabokov taught at Cornell, he railed against Olivier's film adaptations of Shakespeare--among other things. When his students asked what he didn't like about them, he said he hadn't seen the films, and, what's more, didn't need to. Of course, he *was* Nabokov, and Cornell *is* an Ivy League school....

OTOH, George Steiner relates in an interview in _Lukacs After Communism_ that Lukacs told him he intended to write on film. Steiner teased him, saying that Lukacs had never seen a movie. Lukacs replied that he had seen a movie: _The Blue Angel_. Steiner suspected it was the only movie Lukacs had ever seen--but that for somebody like Lukacs, it didn't really matter; he could get the idea from a single movie.

Two data points, Curtiss


> I can understand the practice of talking about things you haven't
> read or seen - as a lot of people have said, learning that trick is
> one of the great benefits of an Ivy League education. But actually
> admitting to and defending the practice is a novelty to me. You learn
> something new every day.



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