A friend of mine- I will be very happy to mention his name but for some reason refrain from doing so - sent me photocopies of a huge four volume collection on Nationalism, published by I.B. Tauris, London, New York. This is a publishing house which has the distinction of publishing the debut novels of Derrida, Foucault, Aristotle, Tom Hanks and even Kurt Goedel.
It was very nice of him in many ways. Photocopying was not on unbookly A4 size spreads. In a4 size, even Terry Eagleton reads like Raymond Williams. In other words, any author in A4 size becomes unreadable. If you are an academician, therefore do not know about these matters, imagine your partner in double her present size.
They were bound in the size and shape of a book, exactly like the originals except in color and font size. It must have cost him a fortune and he said he was unhappy only with the huge postal charges. It is again, as justified as finding your partner's cloths more offensive than he himself.
However, it was not the collection I asked him to send. I had in mind John Hutchinson and Anthony Smith's(Editors) Nationalism in five volumes published by Routledge.
This generous gentleman, who sacrificed his weekly-off to go to somewhere 35 km away from his place and went through the pain of issuing a book from the university he was no longer a student of, and then took the trouble of finding the best xerox and binding service in Hyderabad and then underwent the not so entertaining experience of standing in the queue at the post office to parcel them, surely deserves a public acknowledgement of my sympathetic concern about his masochism..
As many of you know very well, though I am a bloody bastard but not an ungrateful kind. I forwarded the announcement of the book- the one I wanted, not the one he divinely sent- to this generous gentleman as a token of my indebtedness.
I shall refer to my philanthropic friend as 'B,' for no particular reason than to derive from its diminutive quality and the lovely immunity from libel. I may mention that he is a journalist. It is only those who are jealous of our friendship (or a 'nexus' in Sundar kaka's immortal words) might suspect that I am scandalizing B. Their jealousy is based on the mistaken belief that journalists are more known for things they don't write than the academicians for the things they write. I take such feeling no more seriously than I would of those fans of Madhuri Dixit who consider her a great singer for her song 'ek do teen'.
I also know that Cultural Studies morons will see only a potential rift between me and B in the reference to Raymond Williams which they find designed to humiliate the possessor of the greatest number of Williams' books among the journalists I know of.
For those Cultural Studies critics my answer is just noting that 'perceptions differ.' B is surely mature enough to see that, when it comes to readability, the gangs known for an inability to read are the least reliable guides.
Moreover, I consider Raymond Williams's 'Key Words' is eminently readable. In fact, you can even say that it is the best book among its kind. I don't know of any any other etymological dictionary whose entries are so easy to complete. Size matters in such matters.
Here, I refuse to offer my comments on the vexed debate among the Marxists as to which of William's work, his fiction or theory, is more boring. I attribute this unfair debate partly to Terry Eagleton's malicious influence. Eagleton on his own read Williams, his teacher and later a colleague, and still entertains grudge against him as if his still remembered pain of having read William's work was not self-inflicted. These Marxists are like the Hindus, for whom everything has to be higher or lower to every other thing.
Or, these groups have read only either his fiction or theory and assumed that the master's other genres can't beat the one they read. I am mentioning these things not to dishonor the first great Marxist theorist from the working class, but to highlight the B' scholarship. When B was a research student, he refused to read either fiction or theory of Raymond Williams. As a journalist, he tasted both of them without partiality and found both were equally boring. Not many journalists are so exhaustive and impartial.