What are the odds that two bloggers would be at the same Christopher Hitchens talk? Pretty good, as it turns out. (I can't recognize if that's my lecture companions in this photo, who were waiting for me outside when I had actually arrived in the auditorium first.) From my front-row perch, I could smell the alcohol on Hitch's breath, and he and Wheen polished off a bottle of wine between them during the proceedings. Hitchens was still in fine form: "Faith is the most overrated of the virtues—after patience." Hitchens paraphrasing Karzai: "You fools! You just burned down the library of Jalalabad with 200 copies of the Koran in it!" (Repeating from this article, of course.) And his mildly misogynistic take on Mother Teresa: "To say contraception is the greatest threat to world peace is the hysterical ravings of a crazed virgin." As State notes, the audience questioning was devoted to Iraq. Francis Wheen served as moderator, and his book on "mumbo-jumbo" seems like it would be entertaining. We didn't stick around for autographs. I was impressed with myself that I had purchased the fifteen-pound "Love, Poverty, and War," for ten pounds until I checked my Amazon wish-list and discovered that it was available for $11 in my home country. Katie Newmark suggests that I've received additional utility from the earlier purchase, but I can't say that my internal discount rate is that high.

Katie Newmark links to a fascinating interview with the poor soul tasked with translating IACS, with all of its unique slang and neologisms, into English.

A great, great book on this subject, especially in the context of poetry, which often has the additional constraints of rhyme and meter, is Douglas Hofstadter's underrated "Le Ton Beau de Marot." On the web is this interesting amateur review from a Brit who notes the irony of the difficulties of translation from American English to British English just within this (itself untranslatable) book.

I had it made clear to me how much translation is about culture as well as language from the very first sentence: "Picture Holden Caulfield all grown up, now a university professor, writing a book about translation." Holden who? I read on, hoping for clues, until I got to "This sounds like poor, poor Salinger." Aha — Salinger — so it's a literary reference then — presumably Catcher in the Rye? Pull a reference book off the shelf — yes, Caulfield is the protagonist. Apparently, Catcher in the Rye is deeply part of American culture, one of those books nearly every American has read; but it's not part of my, British, culture. I'm vaguely aware it's about American teenage angst, but that's all. So the very first sentence doesn't translate for me!

Katie Newmark assigned me homework reading on IACS, to wit, three essays on related subjects, including a Terrence Moore essay called Heather's Compromise that I just know will provoke reactions from my female readers. Surely there's a happy (and feminist-enlightened) medium between "barbarianism" and a return to 1940s courtship rituals. (Speaking of 1940s courtship rituals, I think the other Moore essay has an idealized nostalgia for how generations of men past treated women and war; cf. Heller's "Catch-22" for one satiric look at the Greatest Generation better than any Wolfe novel.) And it surely isn't the case that women universally want a return to "chivalric/romantic" courtship strategies. The proposition that women "do not get involved in sexual relationships based upon the pleasure principle" should provoke some controversy, too.

The Peter Berkowitz review makes the case for the Wolfe novel.

p. 290: "Edgar's attempts at campus vernacular were inevitably embarrassing."

You know how in every bad 1980s comedy, the end credits featured some variant on the joke "Hey! Tim Conway is doing that crazy rap music!" That's about the verisimilitude of Wolfe's rendition of rap lyrics.

Still, I'm halfway through "I Am Charlotte Simmons," and I'm enjoying it nevertheless.

Update, 10:30: I know I'm six months late, and I'll have to reread the reviews, but I don't understand why so many people hated this book. No, it wasn't the dazzling tapestry of "Bonfire of the Vanities," and, as noted above, there were a number of clunkers that an editor should've caught (such as the scene supposedly set in the "30-story atrium" in Washington, DC), but it hung together much more satisfyingly than "A Man in Full" did. Even the infamous sex scene wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as promised. The satire of campus politics was a nice undercurrent. The book held my attention for a full day of reading, and not many novelists have that power. Ok, there wasn't a single sympathetic character (the "intellectuals" were merely pretentious—but what 20-year-old wasn't?), but since when was that a requirement? (I do agree with Shani's assessment, communicated to me in a November e-mail that I assiduously avoided reading until now, that Charlotte's post-formal self-pity dragged down the book.) I didn't find Charlotte's naivete as implausible as some reviewers did.

Spoiler: I had read the story going in the direction of Adam self-destructively taking down Jojo, as his mother before him, so the ending surprised me in that sense; it is, perhaps, the saddest of all possible endings for Charlotte, but I'm not sure that it isn't a good metaphor for the social pressures that cause some women to bypass intellectual achivement. Perhaps others can comment on that.

Maybe I should've taken Shani's advice and read the Guardian's digested version, which is actually about as good a 200-word summary as one could have. The British cover of the book also seems more appropriate than the American cover. Another link: Slate book club.