The premise of Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods is simple enough: a traveling salesman, who suffers from a plague of fantasies, transforms those fantasies into successful business. The self-help ethos of American salesmanship is what gives this unsuccessful purveyor of the Encyclopedia Britannica the confidence to keep approaching various potential clients until he is able to convince one of them to try it. (Though there’s a mention of Wikipedia in the text, I believe this book was written in a pre-Wikipedia era, and the idea of such a comprehensive encyclopedia being rendered obsolete by a collective internet endeavor, as funny as it is in the context, doesn’t seem present.
I am becoming increasingly convinced of the necessity of what seems to be a very crude intentionalist method in literary interpretation: that in many cases, the attitudes reflected by characters (or, to a lesser extent, situations) in various texts are in fact direct statements of the author’s own views.
Sophisticated readers tend to reject such a notion absolutely, and the reasons for this are usually good. Many attempts at creative writing start from what might be called the idealized projection of the self, or the creation of an environment in which certain wrongs might be redressed.
How does it happen? I don’t know, but for some mysterious reason, my cv has not only disappeared from google’s index, googlebot will not—under any circumstances I can create—follow a link to it.
This blog was the victim of a php-injection scandal a year or two ago, but I did manage to clear it out, and every single other page or post I’ve made here is still in the index. I created a new cv page to test my hypothesis that the url was blacklisted, and, sure enough googlebot merrily retrieved it.
The word “sincere” was often thought to derive from the Latin “sine cera” or “without wax” and was thought to refer to the adulteration of marble by unscrupulous Romans. Hence Ezra Pound, “We have a word ‘sincere’, said to date from the Roman luxury trade in fake marble” (“Confucius and Mencius,” Selected Prose: 1909-1965, [New York: New Directions, 1973]: 84). The OED notes that this has “no probability,” but it’s easy enough to see why it appealed to Pound, who was very concerned about the adulteration of all things in the present age.
It might be naive to expect your genre fiction to explain itself. Literary, sophisticated genre fiction, especially, will be placed in that category many times by not giving the reader the expected level of information dumping, or payoff, to be found in lowlier and more typical specimens. And I’m ok with this, in general, as a reader.
But China Mieville’s The City and the City, which I have only recently read, did not live up to its failure to pay off.
Perry Anderson has an article on the historical novel in the most London Review. Right after an impressively keen assessment of the importance of Orlando, Anderson notes:
in Britain hoary sagas of doughty patriots battling against Napoleon poured—and still pour—off the presses, from C. S. Forester through Dennis Wheatley to Patrick O’Brian.
Patrick O’Brian? I hesitate to ask if Anderson has actually read one of O’Brian novels, but one must assume that they operate on a different level than Dennis Wheatley, with respect to cultural chauvinism, craft, and pretty much everything else.
I remember fondly reading Bill James’s Baseball Abstracts when I was young. I wrote a computer program to tabulate his formulas and tried to apply his sabermetric analyses to my Little League games. Having heard in various places that he was at work about a book on crime in the United States, I naturally assumed that the product would be an exercise in unconventional criminological wisdom. I have an interest, after all, in the rhetoric of true crime narratives; and James has, by his own count, read over a thousand of them over the years.
I’ve never thought about the Reagan experiment in Keynesianism from the perspective of the revenuers. Cut taxes (for the upper brackets) and increase military spending. Tell people that the monies in the pockets of the entrepreneurs will create new wealth to fill the treasury’s coffers. This doesn’t actually happen, though. So the IRS is told to decrease the tax gap, the difference between what is owed and what is collected. (This figure is currently estimated to be around 290 billion dollars.
I haven’t been writing much here for several reasons. The most important of them was that I was devastated to learn of the untimely death of a teacher, mentor, and friend of mine, Jim Paxson. This form of writing began to seem even more trivial, vain, and frivolous than I had usually thought.
At the same time, even the modest audience I have here is likely to be greater than that of the academic articles I have been working on (not exactly “instead of,” but rather than writing nothing).