Tomorrow, my UChicago e-mail address is no more. In the final few hours that sudeep@uchciago.edu is still active, I can't help but feel a few pangs of nostalgia -- reminiscing of all the many hours I could (and should) have been doing something better with my time...

Not, of course, that anyone or thing can fight fate and NSIT to do anything about it*. Lebewohl.

*Cum semel occideris, et de te splendida Minos
Fecerit arbitria,
Non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia, non te
Restituet pietas.

Co-blogger Jeremy Reff and I have just finished debating by email the question we blogged about last weekend, namely is Van Veen, hero/antihero of Vladimir Nabokov's Ada evil, is he morally vile? Reff said yes; I was more hesitant.

But Jeremy has reminded me, that, despite my cavilling, Van Veen is indeed a brute-- he may not hurt Percy or Rack (because fate gets to them before he can get his hands on them) but what of poor Kim, who snaps illicit photos of young Van and young Ada in bajillions of compromising frolics? Admittedly Kim is a blackmailer and a child pornographer, which makes him a felon in our world, but it's not clear that's true in Antiterra, and even if it is, it doesn't excuse Van's finding him and beating him blind:

"That ape has vulgarized our own mind-pictures. I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle."

"Oh do!" said Ada.

"But you know, there's one thing I regret," she added; "Your use of an alpenstock to release a brute's fury-- not yours, not my Van's." ...

"Amends have been made," replied fat Van with a fat man's chuckle. I'm keeping Kim safe and snug in a nice Home for Disabled Professional People, where he gets from me loads of nicely brailled books on new processes in chromophotgraphy."

I recently read Paco Underhill's excellent Why we Buy, a discussion of the science of shopping. My short review is here - though my notes are more about my brief career as a persian rug salesman than about the book itself. On the whole, I think Underhill is extraordinarily talented, but sometimes a little careless - read, for example, the following passage:

"[if you go to a bookstore], you'll be treated to the sight of shoppers stroking, rubbing, hefting and otherwise experiencing the physical nature of a product where no physical attribute (aside from maybe typeface size) has anything to do with enjoyment. Still, helplessly, we touch."

But that's not actually true, is it? My dad only buys certain kinds of paperbacks, because he needs them to easily fold so he can read while walking our increasingly ridiculous scottish terrier. My favorite copy of Lord of the Rings , on the other hand, is my favorite precisely because its familiar hard-bound heft assures that it stays open when I'm lingering over a choice passage - and I'm pretty sure I only buy Gastronomica (rather than reading it in a bookstore) because of its slick, glossy, finish. Feel matters a lot in books, at least to me. And I don't even buy leather bound. Comments are open.