So I come back home after teaching Madame Bovary; in the course of today's lecture I happened to mention Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas, which Wikipedia describes fairly accurately:
The Dictionary of Received Ideas (in French, Le Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues) is a short satirical work collected and published in 1911-3 from notes compiled by Gustave Flaubert during the 1870s, lampooning the clichés endemic to French society under the Second French Empire. It takes the form of a dictionary of automatic thoughts and platitudes, self-contradictory and insipid.
They also have some of the author's relevant quotes about his work:
In a letter to Louis Bouilhet from 1850, Flaubert wrote: "Such a book, with a good preface in which the motive would be stated to be the desire to bring the nation back to Tradition, Order and Sound Conventions—all this so phrased that the reader would not know whether or not his leg was being pulled—such a book would certainly be unusual, even likely to succeed, because it would be entirely up to the minute." He wrote to Louise Colet in 1852: "No law could attack me, though I should attack everything. It would be the justification of Whatever is, is right. I should sacrifice the great men to all the nitwits, the martyrs to all the executioners, and do it in a style carried to the wildest pitch—fireworks.... After reading the book, one would be afraid to talk, for fear of using one of the phrases in it."
And then I get home, and I see that Richard Cohen has updated the entire concept, only the poor dumb fucker didn't do it on purpose.
Cohen is highly advanced in the art of banality.
Cohen needs better writers. He's dying out there.
Posted by: K. Ron Silkwood | September 06, 2007 at 01:37 AM
William Kristol called for an invasion of Venezuela and East Hampton. Instantly, the proposal was debated throughout the entire weekend on TV talk shows.
So Cohen is mocking the commentariat's propensity for taking William Kristol seriously, despite the clear evidence that Kristol is insane, all while remaining a full dues-paying member of said commentariat?
How very dada of him.
Posted by: SteveB | September 06, 2007 at 09:33 AM
Bush is still President.
In other news, Franco is still dead. Lack of film at 11. (One hour and two minutes from now as I type this here. Half an hour later in Newfoundland.)
Posted by: Interrobang | September 06, 2007 at 09:58 PM
So, what did you teach Emma ?
Posted by: marc page | September 10, 2007 at 10:33 PM