I’m trying to read Fire in the Minds of Men by James Billington, but it’s slow going. Every other paragraph seems worth reading aloud, googling some previously unknown topic, or jotting down for later. Then you hit a footnote like this, about a 1975 Russian text:
…this article provides a tantalizing hint of the analytic insight that the remarkable Soviet school of semioticians could undoubtedly bring to bear on more contemporary subjects if they were not restricted to writing about distant times and places.
I’d very much like a peek at an alternate universe in which the structuralists of the 1980’s American academy had been in conscious competition with Soviet counterparts. Like ice hockey, but with more jargon.
