>On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 6:35 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
>>based on that horrid thing he wrote about Reading Lolita in Tehran, I can't
>>fathom the guy is ever anything but nuts on stilts.
>
>What does that book have to do with Hamid Dabashi?
>
>Michael
He wrote a bizarre review of the book accusing Nafisi of being a native informant to the West, one among the many Iranians who lusted for the Occident and, in order to gain favor, encouraged the US to bomb the shit out of Iran. If he's read the book, he'd have seen that this was not at all what Nafisi advocated.
Moreover, his critique of the book cover - had he simply left it as a critique of the way idiotic publishers try to sex up covers to sell books (in this case, sexing it up as a cover exemplifying Orientalism) - this would have been fine. But Dabashi reveals an intense prudery (for lack of a better word) in that essay. It was embarrassing because you felt like you were reading a confessional of what gets him off and, therefore, terrifies him.
he accuses Nafisis of sexing it up, IIRC, as if her book is a discussion of yummy sexy things. But what she's talking about is how Lolita is like Iran and Humboldt is like Iran's oppressive leaders, the mind gaps Humboldt plays on her, his abuse... his refusal to both let her grow up *and* be a girl, etc. (It's been 3 years since I read and I packed the book, so I might have got some of this wrong)
It was just horrible to read him, and later read the book, and realize what an awful, sinister, ideologically bound creep he is for he's either willing to purposefully misread a book to score points or he is so ideologically hog-tied he can't actually read the book in front of him.
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