The Required Amount at the Prescribed Rate (Handcrafted From the Finest Corinthian Leather)
Robert Kaplan: More Analogies!
When my wife and I lived in Syria, it made sense for me to read a lot of Robert Kaplan: Balkan Ghosts, An Empire in Wilderness, The Coming Anarchy, Arabists, The Ends of the Earth . . . then we returned stateside, bought a house, had children, and our travels to exotic overseas locales ended . . . as did my obsession with the most literary of geopolitical analysts-- because reading Robert Kaplan takes a lot of concentration, it's not like breezing through a Thomas Friedman book-- but just because I forgot about Robert Kaplan, doesn't mean he stopped writing, and I've decided to catch up: I picked up Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific in a used bookstore in Vermont and I'm wading through it, trying to sort out analogies like this: "Whereas Hanoi is Vietnam's Ankara, Saigon is Vietnam's Istanbul."
"[J]ust because I forgot about Robert Kaplan, doesn't mean he stopped writing" might be my favorite Clause of Dave so far this year. I naturally assumed that no one wrote after Dave forgot about them. This changes everything. I don't have to comment here just to keep being able to write--it's ok if Dave forgets about me!
ReplyDeleteyou know what i mean . . . it's like the fact that woody allen is still making movies . . . but is he? not in my world
ReplyDeleteMidnight in Paris
ReplyDeleteI absolutely know what you mean but it's much more fun for me to distort your words than to take them at face value. And to be fair, you've said some preposterously self-aggrandizing things in the past.
ReplyDeletetrue . . . and midnight in paris was the last woody allen movie i saw . . . so he hasn't existed since 2011
ReplyDelete