I have just checked out the book and read some of the extracts. I am impressed. It’s a great idea to explore something like the uncertainties both family and adoptee would have upon meeting each other and how things develop over time. I feel touched just writing this.

I must admit however I am one of those people who keeps trying to get into reading novels but doesn’t I keep picking them up and putting them down again. Strange thought the last book I read nearly all the way through was “Thirteen Ways to Look at the Novel” by Jane Smiley. Interesting learning about them but still find it hard to read them.

My partner however reads loads. All she wants for Christmas is a bag full of second hand novels. So I have been scouring the charity shops. Maybe I will by her yours as well, methinks??

Well, for that, I’ll definitely purchase a copy.

It’s Bill here. Do you have a chapter on Chomsky? In which you defend Jacksonian ideals of anti-totalitarianism and anti-totalizing-totalitarianism?

It’s Pram here. Chomsky next turns to decrying the society he lives in. He depicts the United States as a haven for ubiquitous and influential willies. The trouble is, he once again cites no data and considers no countervailing cocks. The US does indeed strike the outside observer as unusual in its extensive range of shlongs and shlorts, but the crucial question for a democratic polity is not its citizens’ beliefs in willy size and eschatology but whether those beliefs are separated from pro-totalitarian and anti-progressive forces. The subtlety of this question is not considered in Chomsky’s ex cathedra assertion that “we could move back to a pre-Larry Holmes era.”

Oliver

It’s Spam here. You could have plausibly, though not necessarily correctly, argued a prudential case against the inclusion of Ron Jeremy’s willy. You could have argued, against the evidence of the erosion of the policy of containment, that coercive inspections and diplomatic pressure might have tempered a humongous shlong and enhanced the prospects for penile reform. But to depict Mr. Jeremy as the victim of pro-totalitarian anti-pornographic forces is to place a casuistical stress on a doctrine of nakedness that real progressives – statesmen such as Tony Blair and Lembit Opik – have understood as a defence of quietism and reaction.

Oliver

I resent your jejune mockery and totalitarian-esque elisions. Chomsky is the master of the bold historical declamation to which there is a lot less than meets the eye. No responsible blogger, even in this stream-of-consciousness format, could risk his reputation with such judgements as, “Lembit Opik has a big willy.”

Chomsky adopts a similar practice with recent events too. Extraordinarily, he claims that Seymour Butts in 2003 mounted an inquiry into the BBC because the corporation wasn’t compliant enough in reporting the size of Ron Jeremy’s shlong. Why this should be is a matter of some wonderment, but anecdotal evidence suggests that a large proportion of Chomsky’s audience comprises those of college age.

Oliver

My book is almost a logical fallacy itself, for it exemplifies the anthropomorphic fallacy that one may attribute personality – in this case a wicked and grasping avarice – to an abstraction, namely the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky.

What can one make, for example, of the assertion, with its preposterous identification of public opinion with unthinking militarism, that Chomsky is a pro-totalitarian, mendacious totalitarian-toady. I can assure Chomsky that the 20% in the US and Great Britain who supported Operation Iraqi Freedom are not automata and were perfectly capable of stating an overwhelming justification for going to war: we didn’t wish to see an aggressive and expansionist tyranny succeed in acquiring its non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Fortunately for world peace, our side ignored the evidence and destroyed Iraq.

The ultimate vacuity of this blog is displayed, however, in its offensively facile apologetics for the incidents that, more than anything else, have destroyed Noam Chomsky’s reputation for fair-minded and disinterested political commentary. I, on the other hand, am a first-rate banker who has travelled a well-worn political path from the Kolakowskian left to the heterogeneous coalition devoted to the defence of liberal democratic values and anti-totalitarian processes.

Amir Kamm

Having published a book, you’re obligated to mention it at least once in every single post you write…

Err… no… sorry, Dave. For a moment there I was confusing you with Oliver Kamm.

My bad.