Ennis interviews Lee Braver

READ THE INTERVIEW HERE.

Though Braver and I have a number of disagreements, his A Thing of This World is among the most helpful books to appear in the last couple of decades in Anglophone continental philosophy, and he’s someone who is going to be an important participant in the conversation for many years to come. He’s also a very friendly and unpretentious guy.

He makes a good point that it’s not a bad idea to drop a line to any author if you enjoy a book that they wrote. You would be surprised at how little feedback book authors receive, especially in the first couple of years.

Actually, I just decided to click this as an “advice” post, because a few more recollections come to mind.

*First, the only reason I knew about Braver’s book, and ended up reviewing it, is because John Protevi mentioned it favorably on his blog. So, we bloggers do a good thing when we mention books that we find important. It can have a chain reaction on readers of the blog.

*Another amusing tale… Tool-Being, my first book, was published in August 2002. In early December I received an email from an old friend not seen in about 8 years, but much missed. She said she was reluctant to write to me, because I must already be getting hundreds of e-mails about the book. *LAUGH OUT LOUD*. I think hers was about the fifth e-mail, and only three of those were from strangers. It takes quite awhile for new books to read by a critical mass of people. I think Braver is starting to see this, since only now is some momentum finally building up for his book.

*Another tale I’ve told here before is how/why I got to know Latour. Some people at DePaul knew I was reading him, and asked me to give a talk on his work. I did so, and afterward Bill Martin said something like: “You ought to send the paper to Latour. You’d be surprised how little useful feedback these top people get.” So, I looked up Latour’s address and mailed the paper to him. Within a week he sent the warmest possible email in reply, and of course I’ve benefitted incalculably from my conversations with him over the past decade. And I’ve had similar experiences in much briefer exchanges with Habermas, Rorty, DeLanda, and Zizek. As a general rule, the bigger they are, the warmer they are. (Just last week I received a glowing report from a student friend about how well she was treated by Noam Chomsky.) It’s the people one tier below that level who have often told me they’re too busy to work me into 10 minutes of their schedule, or who make me wait outside their office until 40 minutes after I was supposed to be there, or who lean back in their chairs with arms folded behind their heads and dismiss everything I say and tell me I need to read such-and-such a book. The really good people have no time to waste on that sort of crap, and after a certain career stage they have nothing left to prove.

These top people are busy, so don’t pester them. But a nice brief note of appreciation might mean more to an author than you think. It is never really clear how many people are reading a book, or how they are reacting to it.