A Team of Reggie Jacksons

I haven't read anything from Canonically Accepted English Literature Properly So Called in like a week, and I am starting to suffer a form of withdrawal, I think. Since I finished Lucky Jim on the Q train Super Bowl Sunday (good work, Saints, btw), and lovingly bumped it off of my Books Unread list, I have been reading, thanks to the vagaries of syllabi and just what at the time I happened to feel like reading -- a whole crapload of theory books, and also Better by Atul Gawande which is so clear and well argued that one hardly feels like getting what he has to say into one's brain represents any literary work.

It's been all steak knives and no steak, I suppose I want to say, or all straws and no drink, or something like that. (And thinking of the most famous use of the straw/drink metaphor, it is funny to imagine the authors whom I have been lugging around -- Horkheimer, Adorno, Marx, Deleuze, and Atul Gawande -- as a team full of Reggie Jacksons). All that nonfiction hurts my head. I remember one summer I decided that I was going to read nonfiction all summer, to rectify what I believed was a serious nonfiction deficiency in my diet, and boy, Did That Not Work. I've talked in various ways about this before, particularly the gap between real people, who are unknowable, and fake people, who aren't, and who is thus more available to counteract loneliness (this all being one of my famously vaunted concerns). But, eating ice cream and watching the best Desmond-Penny episodes of Lost on Valentine's Day, I thought, rather forcefully, of that vaunted concern in particular, and thought to write about it, and I guess to issue a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do: don't stop reading your fiction books! You'll never get enough from just Gilles Deleuze. I am now going to take a dose of my own medicine, and you will be hearing from me on I'jaam tomorrow.