Love Kingsley Amis. Thanks for a reminder to reread his oeuvre.

My review here.

“The father of the modern campus novel, and the wittiest of them all. Extraordinary to think that ‘political correctness’ was so deliciously dissected 50 years ago.”-Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

In particular, one mariner, brother of a Lisbon-based mapmaker who had very good access to state-of-the-art geographical knowledge, had taken advantage of this new capability and had voyaged as far north as Iceland and as far south as the Canaries; a breadth that no classical explorer had managed. This allowed him to intuit the wind patterns of the Atlantic and come up with a new approach.

So you could say that the ultimate economic impact of new shipbuilding techniques was substantial indeed.

(I actually went out and bought “Deaf Sentence” by David Lodge, which, oddly enough, has been blurbed by Oprah’s magazine: “A darkly witty novel of missed signals and mixed messages.” I also bought “The Appointment” by Herta Muller, and “The Good Soldiers” by David Finkel. I spent wwwaaayyy too much money, but perhaps I can reduce my guilt by passing the books off to my brother – I do this a lot! – when I am done, and perhaps also reviewing one or the other for Chicago Boyz.)

http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/5170.html

We are the kind of people who would walk into a used bookstore, see that book on the top shelf, get a ladder to reach it, flip through it, and look at the bibliography.

There are not many of us out there.

Thank God for the Internet. We might not have found each other without it.

Speaking carefully, having just survived the nth layoff at my employer in the past few years, all the while remaining unsure about the usefulness and significance of my own work, I can assure you that something quite analogous to the Amis book could be written about many situations in early-21st-century corporate America. Academia is perhaps more blatantly useless, but as the saying goes, Dilbert isn’t a comic, it’s a documentary.

So I think it is safe to say that he was sufficiently interested in technology that the topic in question would have seemed quite fascinating to him. My guess is that he choose this example to characterize Dixon as somebody who is lacking intellectual curiosity.

Simon Kenton – that book ends up on every “best academic satire” list I’ve every seen. Must be that good!

Lexington Green – it’s been years since I’ve read Brideshead Revisted, and, you know what? I can’t really remember it that well. Yikes!

Sgt. Mom – fun fact, I graduated from Iowa State (grew up in the town as a faculty “brat”) and Jane Smiley, author of Moo U., was a faculty member at ISU. Hmm, I wonder what I would recognize, from memory, reading the book?

Jim Bennett: I had the same thoughts!

“The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485″ is actually the sort of thing that I would probably enjoy reading, if it were at all decently written…