Top 3: Name-droppable Authors
April 27th, 2007 at 00:59
Being the educated type, I’m not adverse to reading the odd book. I do enjoy reading, and I’d like to do more of it.
Right now, I’ve picked up John Keay’s Sowing the Wind again, and I’m trying to force myself through it, as I know it’s good for me. It’s about the history of the Middle East and why it’s all fucked up, basically. It’s an irritating read, because it’s full of flowery poetic descriptions over the sort that can never be verified scientifically. Talking about Lawrence of Arabia, Keay describes what was going on inside his head and exactly what he was thinking at that time – he doesn’t even say “Lawrence wrote in his diary…” or anything, so it just comes across as baseless assertions. It’s the same sort of irritation that William Shakespeare felt on July 8th 1610 at around 3pm, when one of the lesser playwrights told him that he thought he should cut some of the “chick crap” from Romeo and Juliet.
But anyway, one of the best things about reading is that it makes you feel self-satisfied and entitles you to act like a smug knowledgeable twat for a couple of weeks after you’ve read the book. This feeling lasts longer if the author is well known and is invariably described as an “academic”, or if the book is described as a “classic” or “seminal” work. So I present to you, my top 3 name-droppable authors (who’s work I’ve read).
Richard Dawkins is quite popular at the moment. Or at least that’s the impression I get from the observable evidence (hoho!). The God Delusion is an excellent book, and despite what you may think is merely a man ranting about religion, it’s actually a sort of operators manual for atheists, which arms you with a rebuttal for every pro-religion argument. Idiots may say things like “Dawkins is just a fundamentalist atheist” whilst stroking their beard in a self-congratulatory way about how wry they can be, but Dawkins argued his own way out of this: he’s not a fundamentalist because his beliefs are willing to change if evidence proves that he was wrong before, which is something a religious fundie would never do. Drop Dawkins into your conversation and you’ll immediate add loads of rational scientific weight to whatever you’re saying.
2) George Orwell
This is largely assumed reading, but if you’ve read Orwell, you’re allowed to make knowing references to aspects of his work without actually naming the book. It sort of separates you from the proles – if you can casually drop “everyone is equal but some are more equal than others” into a conversation about say, receiving preferential treatment when acquiring a good or service, your peers will immediately respect you and laugh at your clever reference.
1) Noam Chomsky
Said to be the world’s most important academic, Noam loves saying vaguely controversial things about America in his books. It’s almost a trump card in a political argument to say that “Chomsky proposes that democracy isn’t about letting people run their own affairs, it’s about keeping power from the people and running their lives for them”, or whatever. And you can’t really go wrong if you make a comparison between the war on terror and the Nazis, just like Noam has done. Chomsky loses points, however, because he’s somewhat polemic. He’s a big liberal, so can be undermined by an idiot saying “Yeah, but he’s bias” because of his left-of-centre opinions, whilst unwittingly implying that everyone else is somehow not bias. But still, name drop Chomsky and you’re guarenteed to sound educated.
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