Top Five

Kira suggested we go to Borders last night, since we hadn't gone bookstore browsing in a while. I didn't buy anything (she got some Graham Greene, and William Carlos Williams, and a book of essays by Barbara Kingsolver) but being there got me thinking about writers that have really, truly been important in my intellectual formation.

Okay - yeah. LOTS of writers will make that cut. But I was wondering if I could isolate just a handful that were absolutely, positively (in my opinion) essential reading - or, at least, essential reading if you want to think the way somebody like me thinks (and I realize not everybody is going to want to do that - even people like me. This gets complicated).

Anyway, I thought I would venture a top five, purely for the sake of conversation. I'll annotate a bit - though not too much - so that there's some context around the names.

So here we go - Let's call it David's Top Five Essential Writers for Getting your Theory Hella Tight. (How's THAT for a pretentious overture?) - in no particular order, then. Ahem:

1. Frederic Jameson - Last night I was reading the blurb on the back of a book by a Scottish emergent-church bohunk who shall remain nameless, and it mentioned that he got a Ph.D. in "deconstruction theory." (First, I would love to find the school that actually has such a thing in its major offerings. Second, do I need to mention how vehemently Derrida argued against those two words every being placed next to each other? Ah, fair poststructuralism, we barely knew ye...) Such tripe makes one long for a good old Marxist, doesn't it? And Jameson is the best of the good old Marxists - his Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is already a necessity, but so is everything else the man writes. Brilliant, readable, funny as hell, polymathic, and cruel to anyone evincing idiocy. You could not ask for better than that.

2. Umberto Eco - If Noam Chomsky were as wise about language as he is about politics, he would actually be Umberto Eco. I can't vouch for Eco's fiction, which I have not yet read, but I tell you on no uncertain terms you should read everything the man writes about hermeneutics and semiotics (I would suggest Interpretation and Overinterpretation as a good starting point). Then, once you have read it, you should disagree with a lot of it (because a lot of it sounds too much like Noam Chomsky), but then you should read it again, and still disagree with it, but then read it again... you get the picture. Brilliant and absolutely worthwhile even when it is flagrantly and wildly wrong. I cannot give a writer a higher level of praise than that.

3. Stanley Fish - Speaking of rereading, I find myself returning to the essays of Stanley Fish again and again, always finding that of value in them. An annoyingly clear thinker, and a master of following matters to their peskiest logical conclusions. A latter-day Scottish rationalist dressed in a tweed sportcoat, he sidles into the bar where all the sloppy thinkers are drinking, whips out his pen and simply aerates the sonsabitches (to steal a phrase once deployed in praise of Bob Black). My colleagues will remind you that the likely reason I was so annoying throughout my Ph.D. studies is that I was mainlining a lot of Fish, and such behavior will often make one Difficult. Why not start with There's No Such Thing as Free Speech (and Its a Good Thing, Too)?

4. George Steiner - Simply the most intelligent writer living today. Period.

5. Roland Barthes - It is so clear now. The book is a woman. She sees you, and she wants your eyes on her. The book will do everything in her power to make that happen. You enjoy it, and you can't help yourself. (Don't believe me? Read Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text.) Bracing stuff, this. Structuralism at its very best.

So there you have it. My top five. Simply one reporter's opinion, of course. I'd be delighted to hear your suggestions for alternatives. We can have us a theory pow wow. Go to it, kids. Enjoy.