I was searching Amazon trying to find Constance Garnett's translation of Gogol's "A Portrait" -- oh, don't ask why -- and hit the familiar roadblock of Amazon's neglecting to include translators' names in most of its public domain listings of foreign literature (that's not the h0rror story). I was checking customer reviews thinking that there might be a chance the name of the translator would be mentioned, when I came across the following nightmarish entry:
As far as I can tell it was a very good collection of some of his best works. Unfortunately for me I was looking to study his story 'The Diary of a Madman' for university, one of the stories that is not contained in this collection.
Here is the table of contents of said book:
1. The Calash
2. The Cloak
3. Dead Souls
4. The Inspector-General
5. The Mantle
6. A May Night
7. Memoirs of a Madman
8. The Mysterious Portrait
9. The Nose
10. St. John's Eve
11. The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich
12. Taras Bulba
13. The Viy
So, who is this university student who failed to recognize that "Memoirs of a Madman" is the same as "The Diary of a Madman"? And who someday may be reading your MRI or flying your drone or teaching your kids? And what university is it which accepted him for admissions even though he is brain dead? "Clueless" would be too kind.
The kid's Amazon name is Ben Moltzer, although I found no one by that name on Facebook which one would think would be a required haunt for this type of jerk.
If this cretin's name is, indeed, Ben Moltzer, or something similar, then the story becomes doubly horrific, because it would mean that whatever Talmudic genes may have been passed down to him from the old world have been withered, mutated, squished in our hellish zeitgeist in which, pace Ray Bradbury, thinking is being left to the machines which, as any computer search makes eminently clear, do a really crappy job of it.
The kid's Amazon name is Ben Moltzer, although I found no one by that name on Facebook which one would think would be a required haunt for this type of jerk.
If this cretin's name is, indeed, Ben Moltzer, or something similar, then the story becomes doubly horrific, because it would mean that whatever Talmudic genes may have been passed down to him from the old world have been withered, mutated, squished in our hellish zeitgeist in which, pace Ray Bradbury, thinking is being left to the machines which, as any computer search makes eminently clear, do a really crappy job of it.