Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Adina reviews my book "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," filtering it through her interest in Talmudic interpretation. As you know by now, Adina is way smart and an incisive reader.

There are two points where I'd either object or ask a question (or, better, passive-aggressively object by asking a question). First, she takes "authenticity" in a way that I don't quite get and don't think I intended. She seems to think I mean by it something having to do with the purity of one's roots when in fact I use it as something like taking ownership for who one is.

Second, she is put off by the book's romanticism. I can see why. And it is certainly a reasonable objection to "The Cluetrain Manifesto." But I'm bothered by this because I intended "Small Pieces" not as a barbaric yawp in favor of individualism, yada yada, but as a way of talking about our weird representationalist self-understanding, i.e., our belief that experience is something in our own minds.