The Possessed

No, not Dostoevsky's The Possessed, rather Elif Batuman's homage to all things Russian and Central Asian, as well as to the graduate study of literature as an enterprise. This book taught me several things: (1) I must reread Rene Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, which I haven't read since I was seventeen, but which Batuman claims will explain a great many of what I consider to be the great books; (2) if I wanted to get funding, I should have studied Uzbek, which would have let me travel to even stranger lands with even stranger foods and facilities and which, frankly, would have been even less useful than Russian; (3) elite graduate programs in the humanities are all pretty much the same and attract pretty much the same characters (demonic characters, some of them) but some are MUCH better funded than others (damn you Stanford!); (4) I wholeheartedly approve of the graduate study of literature for its own sake and believe that it needs a better defender than Batuman who seems at times wishy washy and opportunistic, as if she's constantly in search of her next paid gig. Sorry, sucker. The study of literature was, is, and always will be largely pro bono, and if you try to make it anything but you probably deserve to end up in some godforsaken hellhole in Uzbekistan. 'Course, she did get a book contract out of it. Now if only I could harness some of her good fortune. Hmmm....I'll have to think on that one.