Said reinvents himself

To fully appreciate Edward Said's lecture in Cabot last Tuesday, you'd need to have some sense about what Said did to justify a memoir in the first place. Said, 65, is a prominent literary scholar. He's the University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, but he's undoubtedly more prominent as one of the leading spokesman in this country for the Palestinian movement, whose primary agenda is the recovery of a homeland.