Dr. Dillingham's opinion on blogs

Dr. Dillingham was my English professor at college, and no one can put things the way he does. I jokingly criticized him recently for writing on his own wall in Facebook (I told him it was uncool) then I said he needed a blog instead. He replied:

"As for blogs, I must admit that I have very mixed feelings. Of course, some of them are just as terrific as the folks who are producing them (no doubt true of yours), but my early experiences of them turned me off, as they were almost invariably run by people of small twisted minds holding very inflated views of the infallibility and value of their own opinions, which they would go on about at excruciating length.

Perhaps one is tempted to step away from one's egalitarian principles when confronted with the hardrock evidence that some 'thinkers' are unequivocally inferior and unworthy, suddenly forcing the creation of a kind of hierarchy and aristocracy where none might be wanted, but reality forces the issue. Oh well. I can blather with the worst of them, of course, but I wonder."

I usually ask Dr. D for book recommendations. I have posted some earlier in this blog but here are some more of this thoughts:

"Here's a conundrum--as I think about it, I realize that almost all the novels I have really liked in the past year have been translations. For example, the best novel I have read recently is old, but I never read it before--Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, on which Fassbinder's 15 hour film is based. The translation is not great, so there needs to be another by a better translator, but it is an amazing and gruelling work, wildly funny and ferociously satirical. If you know the drawings of Georg Grosz, you know images that would be perfect illustrations for this novel--same world."