Thursday's Flurry of Words

Ignore This If You Are Reading DSM

Loyal readers know we have an obsession with baseball. The other day something happened. It looked like this. So, in the spirit of fighting, dissent and obsession, let’s look at the raging media debates of the day. Obsession relates to fighting and dissent, don’t you think? We’ve got people obsessed with health care, which causes them to fight. Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow says Susan Sontag is “inflammably sensual.” Academics love a good fight. They also have dissenting opinions, especially as their relevance continues to wane (we don’t agree. It’s just the devolving course of society). Katherine Howe’s debut gallops across personal history, genealogy and the Salem witch era — those obsessed fighters from the 17^th century. Richard Dawkins is always picking fights with God, and “The Greatest Show On Earth” fails to disappoint. Then again, he already had the New Atheists in his camp. In Case You Missed It, and in light of these recent reports — the reality, the somewhat cool, and the extremely horrible — we have a review of Fight Club, the movie. Countless searches into the archives find that many of the major literary publications missed the book’s release. Go ahead. Put ‘em up. – Andrew Geer

– “Confessions,” wrote Susan Sontag on New Year’s Eve of 1957, “can be more shallow than actions.” That day, she had peeked into the journal of her lover, a woman she refers to as H, and read something she did not want to believe.  According to the journal, H “really doesn’t like me but my passion for her is acceptable and opportune.” — Susan Sontag in Dissent

But Does She Float?

– “I was moved by how fully the past in New England still haunts the present, especially in its small, long-memoried towns,’’ Katherine Howe writes in the postscript to her terrific debut novel, “The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane.’’ — Katherine Howe in The Boston Globe

– How should America’s university presidents respond to the savagery in Iran today?  The incarcerated student protesters forced to lick toilet bowls. The imprisoned dissidents beaten to death in holding pens, some with their fingernails torn out. The many murdered protesters, including Neda Agha-Soltan, the now-iconic young philosophy student shot in cold blood. The banning of foreign and domestic journalists from honest coverage or even access to news events. The arrest of professors and shuttering of academic institutions. — Academic Responses in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Nominated For Death Panels

– This fall, evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins — most recently famous for his public exhortation to atheism, “The God Delusion” — returns to writing about science. Dawkins’ new book, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” will inform and regale us with the stunning “evidence for evolution,” as the subtitle says. It will surely be an impressive display, as Dawkins excels at making the case for evolution. But it’s also fair to ask: Who in the United States will read Dawkins’ new book (or ones like it) and have any sort of epiphany, or change his or her mind? — The New Atheist in The Los Angeles Times

– Of the two current films in which buttoned-down businessmen rebel against middle-class notions of masculinity, David Fincher’s savage ”Fight Club” is by far the more visionary and disturbing. — Fight Club and American Beauty in The New York Times

Video: Fight Club — Where is My Mind