April 28, 2010

The Middle East Debate in a Nutshell

I'm reading Sam Lipsyte's new comic novel, The Ask, which is like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas if Hunter S. Thompson were on the wagon and had a really emasculating job working in the "development" office of a mediocre New York university asking rich people for money for even more grandiose facilities for the privileged but talentless students of the Fine Arts department:
I crawled to the computer and hoisted myself into the chair. It was time to catch up  on the state of the world. I'd start with the Middle East. I found the report of a recent debate between two professors at the Ivy League college uptown. One of the experts said the Palestinians were irrational and needed a real leader, like maybe a smart Jewish guy. The other professor said that the central paradox to all of this was that Jews both were Nazis and didn't really exist. But how could they be both? He was still working on it.

2 comments:

Bill said...

mediocre New York university

I suppose one should immediately "get" this. Is it NYU or CUNY? NYU is not mediocre, but they are kind of tense about Columbia being Ivy while they are not. CUNY is mediocre, but it isn't a playground for rich, artsy fartsy types, is it? Or is it one of the littler ones?

I also always get confused while watching Law and Order, since they insist on calling the NYC universities by weird nicknames. Hudson University is Columbia, right?

Anonymous said...

I went to NYU and was not impressed on any level. Waste of time.

Middle East? Oh yeah. Well, my thoughts are.... ZZZZZZ.