How well read Bostonians play rock paper scissors
Erin Peterson is delving into Tolstoy and she's started blogging about it - such as how the act of taking Anna Karenina with her on the Green Line has made her take notice of what everybody else on the trolley is reading:
... Sometimes, I find myself playing a mental game of rock-paper-scissors with our reading choices. Most times I find I hold the rock, but this morning, a guy (rather attractive) was reading Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. He clearly had the rock, and I was a little enamored. He barely glanced at me. He was probably a philosophy major or self-proclaimed philosopher - pretentious and uninteresting. But, if I see him again, I hope I look better than I did this morning, and I might consider toting my beat-up copy of Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death as a back-up plan - my rock. ...
Via Andrew Ivers.
Comments
long ago
I took a class in quantum chemistry. Mind-numbing stuff, chock full of words like Eigenvalues and Hamiltonians and Schrödinger. You would think that carrying this book on the T would give you some cred, that they would have titled it something like "Impossibly Advanced Quantum Chemistry for the Genius-Level Gods Who Live Among You Mortals" or the like. So what did they call this book? "Atoms and Molecules". I shait you not. They gave an ultra-advanced tome the same name you would expect to see on a 6th grade chemistry book.
That's why my detective novel, which is full of terse hard-boiled dick and cop dialog interspersed with gunfire, is titled "Structuralism and Semiotics in Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference in the Works of Joyce, Yeats, Spenser, and Shelley".
wait, so she picks the
wait, so she picks the common title from every single author's top 3 list, waves it front of people on the T, blogs about it, blogs about other people's choices, and somehow the guy sitting quietly on the T reading his own book is "pretentious and uninteresting"? Is my sarcasmometer broken? Is this from the onion? what gives?
It could be worse
She could be the person who offers unwanted suggestions to the passengers doing crossword puzzles or Sudoku.
errr
I hate that. I do my crosswords to avoid the fact that I'm sitting on a train. I don't need no nosy person reading over my shoulder going "oh 41 down is metaphor."
No, but this is from the Onion
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/31366
metaphor fail
This well-read Bostonian displays a tragic ignorance of the nature of the game she invokes! Rock carries no more weight than paper or scissors. Wouldn't be much of a game if rock always won, would it.
Apart from this detail, I have no beef with her.
I thought that, too
Then I thought it's OK in this case, because everything beats paper, particularly if that paper is the Metro.
Scissors cut rock.
No, rock crushes scissors.
But, they're REALLY GOOD scissors.
Scissors cut books
That's because book=paper.
It's ok
She was completely unaware of Plants vs Zombies too. You don't *harvest* the plants. You use them to kill the zombies like gun turrets! (the best is when the potato mines go off -- SPUDOW!)
As they say, Get ready to soil your plants!
I've
been involved in a few T conversations based on what I was reading. A bunch of Germans who were visiting scholars to Harvard got crazy excited that I was reading Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" in German with an English gloss. Another time I was reading the Iliad with a companion book: someone asked what I was reading, I showed him, and he began passionately denouncing my translation (Lattimore's, considered the standard) in favor of ...Pope's!
If I saw someone reading "Anna" on the train I'd assume she picked it up from Oprah, especially if it was the Pevear/Volokhonsky. Maybe I'd be impressed if she was reading "Hajji Murad."
My current choice of T reading wouldn't impress her
A Japanese comic book (in Japanese) in one hand -- and a dictionary in the other (at least from time to time, as needed).
are you there, blogger?
I'd like to know which translation she has chosen. Will reserved judgement till then.
Come on, you know it's P&V,
Come on, you know it's P&V, and you know she has the Oprah edition.
HA, her blog is protected
HA, her blog is protected now, we can't see it.... methinks there is your answer.
I use the Kindle
She can just GUESS what I'm reading on my Kindle. She sounds like a very silly person.
A few years ago...
....I was reading Ulysses while riding back and forth on the subway. I thought I was cool. Then on the Green Line I saw someone reading Finnegan's Wake, and knew my rock had been covered with paper.