This extended stay in the modern capital of Persia is lacking an appropriate, nay, deserving, reading companion. I wish my tattered copy of The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire is beside me (somehow, prejudices have rallied and ruled against the online substitute). It must only be this ragged copy, of course: survivor of dozens of countries and skirmishes with careless porters, an unwieldy, belittling object that has out-lived two passports. Literary stature may have contributed to this durability, but the enduring charm surrounding Gibbon’s work can only be handed down, passed on - never merely “acquired” - and nutured, more by the touch of its previous guardian; for this, much is owed to Howard Caygill, who casually, free of fanfare and compunction, gifted this on my very first day at Goldsmiths College.

One of the greatest blessings of the internet is the creation of alternative distribution channels for the dumbing down democratization of standards and commodification of taste. Witness allreaders.com. It offers “detailed book reviews from many different genres of books!” and the chance of untold riches upon submission of reviews, for which allreaders.com sets stringent criteria.

You can also make 1 dollar per review, subject to these terms
BUT… it isn’t easy to write a good review.
Not everyone is intellectually positioned to be an Allreaders.com scholar.

“Intellectually positioned”? What does that mean? I want to earn $1, dammit, and before the euro appreciates. It goes on:

Keep in mind:

(o) The review will take from 5-7 minutes to enter.

(o) You’ll have to categorize the book from a preset list of plots, characters, settings and themes so we can make the book searchable by said attributes.

(o) You’ll have to write a few sentences describing the plot in standard, grammatically correct English.

So the question of being “intellectually positioned” basically requires (apart from the actual ability to read, of course) that one

1. does not suffer from ADD, or at least only suffer from its mildest forms.
2. is able to recall the main themes of the book and select from a multiple choice questionnaire.
3. is able to string a set of coherent sentences.

Let’s see how this translates in action. For example, this is the allreaders.com entry on Antony Loyd’s My war gone by, I miss it so.

Yeah, I guess that’s just about worth a dollar, but Antony Loyd surely deserves better. Better still, visit ReadySteadyBook.

The Atlantic Monthly site is accessible, but The Believer is not. Yes, granted it could be that the latter’s moniker is taken to heart and makes it deserving of being blocked on religious grounds, but the NYRB is open for all, yet The London Review of Books is blocked. I sense a conspiracy, a conspiracy instigated by the macro-manager filtering sites and sheltering us web-crawlers here in Tehran against a certain outlook, that kind of self-deprecating disposition. As if humour ever hurt anyone.

Well, at least laughter takes away gravitas, and gravitas is the province of dictatorship - that much we glimpse in Kundera’s novels. And dictatorships lack taste, as demonstrated by Idi Amin, Marcos, Ceausescu et al (see October’s edition of Wallpaper*). Now I see the correlation. As if:

In exchange for the repression of your freedoms, I renounce my true aesthetic sensibility!

Gravitas sans taste. That is the tag-line of dictatorship in the 2oth century.

By the way, Google searches for “Hannah Arendt” fail to filter pass God’s sieve, however, which tends to undermine my hypothesis, such as it was.

The most peculiar things happen when one’s inalienable right to internet access is denied, as mine was for the past days while in (whisper it) Tehran. Not only did someone comment on a post here, thereby dispelling fears that this site’s commenting system was ill-installed, but that someone happens to be a someone who is a writer in the proper sense of the term - you know, “published” and “good”. Nothing beats that, right? Until the same Susan Henderson then directs readers of her blog to “this interesting little blog”, as in this-very-blog-that-your-eyes-are-scanning-as-your-inner-voice-is-reading. Cool! (She gets extra cool points for linking to largeheartedboy.com and for playing football)

Hey, wait, that was my first blurb!

Wonder if anyone has ever framed a comment …

truly an idiocy on an altogether different scale.

“flight plan”
+
movie
+
“Association of Professional Flight Attendants”
+
strike

Google ‘em.

Bless Dan Brown.

This week’s prize goes to Joseph Jenkins for The Humanure Handbook This is marked at $16.49. No, that’s the amount you have to pay.