Rootless cosmopolitans

Via Adam Shatz, Tony Judt's 2004 essay on Edward Said.

Strangers in the night

Lots of genuinely thought-provoking stuff in Edward Said's On Late Style (I must listen to more music!), but I am instead unfairly singling out this funny curiosity of a passage, which I could not resist and in which Said recalls an evening spent with Jean Genet in Beirut (the essay on Genet opens with Said's account of watching Genet speak - and be wildly mistranslated - at a 1970 rally in support of the Black Panthers on the Columbia University steps):

He smoked constantly, and he also drank, but he never seemed to change much either with drink, emotion, or thought. I recall that during the evening he once said something very positive and surprisingly warm about Jacques Derrida -- un copain, remarked Genet -- whom I had thought of as a quietist Heideggerian type at the time; Glas had not yet appeared, and it was only six months later, when Mariam, our little son, and I spent a few weeks in Paris, that I learned from Derrida himself that his friendship with Genet had originally been sealed as the two of them watched soccer matches together, which I thought was a nice touch. There is a brief allusion in Glas to our little encounter at Reid Hall in April 1973, although I've always been slightly miffed that Derrida should refer to me anonymously only as "un ami" who brought him news of Genet.

(I am also reminded that one of the things I did the last time I was on sabbatical was read Glas!)

The blank page

From Edward Said, Out of Place:

I have no concept of leisure or relaxation and, more particularly, no sense of cumulative achievement. Every day for me is like beginning a new term at school, with a vast and empty summer behind it, and an uncertain tomorrow before it. Over time “Edward” became a demanding taskmaster, registering lists of flaws and failures with as much energy as accumulated obligations and commitments, the two lists balancing and in a sense canceling each other. “Edward” still has to begin every day anew and by the end of it normally feels that very little has gone right.