Many years ago I dated a woman who was very fond of buying me surprise gifts.
Without fail these presents were within the category of things I loved, but somehow always not-quite-right.
No doubt, someone has written a treatise on handling, with flash, your lover's well meaning misfires - that would've come in handy for my younger self.
One lovely spring day, she popped her very lovely self over to my apartment bearing a book. "I know you'll love it" she said, her eyes ablaze with anticipation, "it's a philosophy book and I know how into philosophy you are."
She was right; that spring I was reading a collection of translated Simone Weil essays along with Foucault's "Discipline and Punish." It was a serious French thought kind of season.
She pressed the book into my hands and planted a juicy kiss on my lips, a good start to the afternoon.
I looked at the book's title:
"Jacob the Baker".
Which, disconcertingly, is still available for sale:
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/034536662X/104-9497768-5749527?v=glance&n=283155>
As I held this book there was a moment, a sliver of space-time, when I synaptically course corrected to swerve my reaction away from its natural trajectory and towards something sweet to the ear yet neutral on the topic of my opinion of the work.
"Oh. Wow. Thank you" was the best I could do at the moment.
I read the book. At first, I wondered about the author - what kind of person was he? Did he really take this material seriously? Later, I wondered more about the audience. There were people out there who loved this book, who drew solace from it, who considered it to be a profound thing - what sort of folk were these?
Who's the audience? That's always the more interesting question.
...
The eXile's John Dolan first unmasked Frey in 2003 -
<http://www.exile.ru/2003-May-29/book_review.html>
- beginning his review with these words: "This is the worst thing I've ever read."
Dolan has appropriately returned to the topic of Frey on the occasion of the latter's public flogging (a precursor, undoubtedly, to his rehabilitation and a new book) but instead of taking the easy way out by focusing his fire against Frey the liar (the standard op for this story), wonders aloud - and with the correct portion of rudeness - about the people, both high and low, who accepted such an obviously stupid work as important and praiseworthy.
"...I was stunned at the number of emails boasting proudly that Frey's books were the only ones the writer had read in years. I guess this comes from decades of patronizing illiterates with "Reading Is Fun" soft-sell campaigns; I guess I'm supposed to be grateful, as a representative of the bad old elitist tradition, that millions of people who move their lips when they read actually finished a whole book-gold stars for everybody, a hall pass for the ones who read both Frey's books.
But it's a very, very strange argument, as if I were to start sounding off on mathematics with the boast that it took me three years to pass Algebra in high school, or show up as color man on an MLB broadcast bragging that I hate baseball and still hold the season record in Pleasant Hill's Little League-not one hit or walk in an entire season.
These readers actually consider themselves noble savages, whose responses are all the purer because they haven't sullied themselves with books. That fraud is a perfect complement to Frey's: he pretends to be a scarred veteran and they pretend to be cultural virgins, rather than thrashed sluts who've been fucked a million times by every after-school special, every Brian's Song death-porn tearjerker, and can't imagine anything better."
[...]
full at --
<http://www.exile.ru/2006-January-27/freys_fall.html>
.d.
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I'm sending the two of you to hell to take more lessons from your dead teacher!
White Lotus Chief Bai Mei