Jonathan Goodwin

I believe that the following scenario is comparatively rare in science fiction: humanity has developed viable interstellar travel and has discovered habitable planets but has not colonized any of them because of a static social structure. The social stasis of Jack Vance’s To Live Forever has been produced by a combination of artificial intelligence central planning and population control. A relatively small geographic region of a future Earth has sealed itself off from barbarous tribes and has separated its population into strict castes: brood, wedge, third (arrant), verge, and amaranth. Each caste provides a slight extension of life-span, which is constantly adjusted by a computer to maintain the desired ratio. The quantity in each “phlye,” as they are called, is strictly controlled. So whenever someone achieves the next status, which is awarded by the Actuarian’s estimation of their contributions to commonweal, a certain amount of those in the lower castes are visited by assassins. The upward progress is referred to as “striving,” and the rate of increase as “slope.” Once members of the community (which is called Clarges) achieve amaranth, they become immortal. Scientists had discovered how to preserve human life forever, and this social structure evolved as the only way to prevent violent revolution from below, as before only the very wealthy and privileged had access to the life-extending technology.

If this is sounding like an anti-planning, anti-socialist document of its times (mid 1950s), it certainly is. But Vance, even in an early novel such as this, which I suspect may have been edited beyond his preferences (the Vance Integral Edition, which I very sadly do not own, calls it Clarges. It may also have significant textual variants.), engages in considerable anthropological speculation and social satire. The Wodehousian dialogue flourishes seen in The Dying Earth books are almost wholly absent from To Live Forever, and the interactions of the Amaranth Society with each other and those from lower phyle provided ample opportunity. The hero of the novel is in the Vancian rebel/rogue mode. Gavin Waylock had achieved Amaranth as a publisher. He was known as the Grayven Warlock, and he committed the worst crime of all: he took the life of a fellow Amaranth. Once citizens of Clarges have achieved Amaranth, they protect their immortality from the vagaries of chance by sequestering clones throughout the city. Each clone takes time to grow and to become invested with the personality and memories of the host. So those who take life of any type are referred to as Monsters, since the taking of life is now a far greater crime (even with clones) than it would have been for mortal humans.

The qualities that allowed Warlock to make Amaranth also allow him to escape the assassins, and he now inhabits the liminal era of the edge of the city known as Carnevalle. This perpetual carnival provides release and an elimination of social distinctions, as the psychological pressures associated with striving overwhelm a substantial part of the population. Warlock has escaped the further attentions of the assassins by impersonating one of his clones. Since the clone would not have been fully empathized, it would not share the crimes of Warlock, so he has taken the similar name Gavin Waylock and plots ways to recapture his former status. A recent Amaranth, the Jacynth Martin, who achieved her immortality through anthropological fieldwork and academic distinction, is enjoying Carnevalle, when she meets Waylock and eventually guesses his identity. Waylock is forced to have her killed to prevent discovery of his secret; and the remainder of the plot involves her clone’s attempt to bring him to justice pitted against Waylock’s own striving to survive and regain his former status.

The culmination of Warlock’s elaborate plot for revenge is that a revolution is triggered, and the phyle system and the Actuarian are all destroyed. Warlock knows that he has no future at Clarges or on the planet at all, so he invites the masses to follow him to the stars. It is easy enough to see that the individualism which led Warlock to murder fellow human beings in order to gain his objectives or satisfy his pride is the same instinct which causes humans to be perpetually unhappy (the scenes describing Waylock’s work at the palliatories where depressives are treated contain some interesting remarks about Vance’s understanding of psychoanalysis, which are typically respectful given its cultural prestige at the time) in a system where their achievements are bounded at mere immortality. Vance often takes a very distant and detached view of human endeavor, and he certainly does not expect much in the way of ethical sympathy for Waylock/Warlock. The John Clute-authored entry on Vance in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia describes To Live Forever as dystopian, which I am not entirely sure I agree with. (Clute also notes that prevalence of revenge plots in Vance’s work, which might simply be a lazy way of touring the worlds he creates without having to engage in overly long exposition; anger blinds, after all.)

I saw this handsome fellow yesterday on a walk:

A Lake Martin Hawk

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.)

What is the nature of the salesman’s fantasy? Satires of the gameshow are familiar enough, and the first commercialization of the fantasy, which involve bisected, ventro-dorsal coitus with the camera of the mind’s eye moving between both sides of the wall, has contestants on a game show answering questions while the piston-like activity of the anonymous copulator is shown in an inset. The pivot, such as it is, of the fantasy, is that the copulatrices have to act as if nothing is happening and answer the questions normally. From there, Joe the unsuccessful salesman, realizes the next stage of commercial actualization: what better way to defuse the sexual tension in the workplace that leads to expensive sexual harassment litigation than to provide “lightning rods,” or anonymous, randomized sexual encounters to take place in a converted rest room fitted a clever mechanism to actualize his original, bi-sected, a tergo fantasy.

Joe finds a customer, one of a thousand companies he contacts after buying a thousand-dollar suit (in one of the repeated scatological images in the book, his original suit was bilirubin-ish). This large firm has a problem with the inappropriate behavior of their best salesman–a somewhat Todd Packer-like figure, and the rest follows naturally. Joe even does his own programming for the mechanism that would allow for the scheduling of lightning-rod encounters, though, curiously enough, we are never told what language it is in (perhaps an attempt to make the narrative as undated as possible–Visual Basic would be the most likely guess). A special ADA-bathroom, unused in the firm, is outfitted with Joe’s technology. The only problem was finding the relevant employees.

It was an important insight to make the lightning rods normal employees whose special duties would be supplements of their regular salary. The idea is that no one would know who the lightning rods were. Human Resources is removed entirely from the process, which leads to an amusing development later. DeWitt pursues most of what happens later to the logical conclusions of the premise. When I first read about this book, I assumed that it would remind me in execution of Wallace’s fictions of white- and pink-collar life, but it was written before most of those were published; and it is stylistically very different. The narrative is focalized through Joe, an homme moyen sensuel* without much going on mentally independent of his entrepreneurial vision.

DeWitt has indicated in interviews that she was inspired by The Producers and Aristophanes. I see the satire in Lightning Rods as more pointed than those rather broad traditions. Two extremely professional lightning rods, for example, go on to become successful graduates of the Harvard Law School—one becoming a commercial litigator and the other a Supreme Court justice (this latter case provides an interesting test of Joe’s principle of anonymity). The satire here—or at least a prominent element of it—is that such success is itself an element of the idealized extension of masculine fantasy to the liberating quality of such degradation. The only authorial or reader-like stand-in the books is a briefly mentioned librarian whose moral disgust is quickly forgotten in the larger narrative.

*With all of the satirical implications, etc.

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. Or where certain ideas find a more logical or consistent home, for that matter. The Mary Sue phenomenon is a reliable proxy for what I am talking about here.

I was reminded of this interpretive gambit, or problem, or however you want to construe it, when reading this NYT article on children kidnapped in Argentina’s “dirty war.” I was at first appalled that you won’t find the name “Kissinger” in the article, or any other mention of how the United States—driven by such nuanced reasoners as Jeanne Kirkpatrick—did nothing to intervene in such atrocities. I then thought of my long-held suspicion that the origin of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which is a long first-person narrative of a torturer in a far-future South America who ends up redeeming humanity, was inspired by the news accounts from South America during the mid-to-late 70s. That’s not particularly interesting or novel, I suppose, but the fact that Severian offers up in the course of the novels an apologia for his profession has always struck me, in the care with which the argument is presented, as being endorsed by the author. (The argument is that essentially it’s more humane to torture people for crimes rather than to imprison them, and that also it is the only way to maintain order when threatened by external subversion. This last element—reprehensible as it is—is not argued as strongly in the text, to be fair.)

Most interpretive orthodoxy would the stress the inevitable undermining tendency of novelistic discourse and might even appeal to older, New Critical notions about the independence and autonomy of the text. The psychological notion that literary creation involves so many unconscious processes that authorial intention is a necessarily limited concept is also quite persuasive.

Even so, however, the Wolfe case strikes me as very clear. This comes from knowing about his political beliefs and sympathies and having read (almost) all of his other fiction, in which similar ideas recur. I don’t even think of this as a superficially esoteric interpretation, the way that I see Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden and Anton Chigurh as the true heroes of Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men. (I wrote about the latter novel and film here.)

Another thing that has got me thinking about this issue is reading Ezra Pound’s radio broadcasts. I don’t see a tension between thinking that the Pisan Cantos should have been awarded the Bollingen prize and that Pound should have been hanged for these broadcasts. But those poems are a remarkable example of the transformative power of art. The ideas expressed in the radio broadcasts are loathsome and simply stupid.* The very same ideas in the cantos are expressed with great aesthetic interest while remaining utterly repellent.

*Pound read Canto XLVI in one broadcast (2/19/1942), which you can listen to here. The recording isn’t very good, and it comes from a period of inferior writing; but this is an interesting test case.

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.

As far as I can tell, it’s in the yahoo and bing indexes, and I don’t want to make it seem like this is some kind of big deal; but I did amuse myself by considering the possibility that the algorithm had decided my cv wasn’t impressive enough to be indexed under any circumstances. Not probably the best way to establish and maintain digital humanities cred. . .

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.

I can’t remember if I did this in a class one time, or if I was just thinking aloud, but I remember speculating that “sincere” meant “without corn,” with “corn” having something like the American-derived meaning of sentimental or hackneyed (said to derive from seed catalogue jokes of the late 19th C). That the original meaning would then be somewhat contrary to the present meaning of the word I counted in anachronistic favor.

The “new sincerity” seems first to have applied to some Austin-area bands, I just learned. One of them, now called The Reivers, after a choral group objected to them also calling themselves Zeitgeist. About their album, Translate Slowly (1985), Robert Christgau observed, “There’s hope, though–if they get picked up by Elektra and break through on a fluke video, they may start writing about cocaine and Holiday Inns.”

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 but 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 Miéville’s The City and the City, which I have only recently read, did not live up to its failure to pay off. The only thing legitimately interesting about the conceit of the book is its history. The estrangement device is used to tantalize the reader, and there is a built-in level of unspecified political allegory. There are, after all, several real-world examples of cities divided by complex political circumstances; but none in which the schism has been institutionalized. The existence of these two cities would constitute the most salient fact imaginable in our world, even if the technology involved is more naturalistic than it at first seems. The implications for perceptual psychology and the ability of governments to manipulate and control their citizenry would go far beyond the dreams of the most utopian counterinsurgency planner. But the interest of world governments in the divided city seems to be restricted to archaeological smuggling.

The nature of the archaeology seems to warrant comparisons with the hrönir from Borges, and there’s all-too-expected twist in which a guru of liberation and reunion turns out to be a controlling psychopath. The plot tricks you into sympathizing, to a certain extent, with the most authoritarian state apparatus imaginable, and Miéville is a very theory-aware writer. So many of the more obvious readings are built-in.

But it still is a failure in my eyes for the lack of back story. I wanted a specific “as you know, Bob” chapter. I did not want this in Roadside Picnic or even Lem’s The Investigation.

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.

In other news about historical novels (and Orlando), the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (“Century 1969″) arrived. The plot is what you would expect: Aleister Crowley and an astral battle at a Stones concert leads to Mina Harker inventing punk. Jerry Cornelius also makes a cameo.

The pan-fictionalist conceit of the Moore books, along with his decidedly eccentric take on what fictional characters get representation in his particular world, gave me an idea about a pan-fictionalist world in which canonicity and market-value compose two differing levels of fictional existence. It could have interesting tie-ins with the various “how to live in a simulation” arguments I’ve always found fascinating.

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. The result, Popular Crime, was disappointing on many levels, however.

In the acknowledgments section at the end of the book, James mentions being difficult to edit. I saw little evidence that this book was edited. I found little in the way of typos (Megadeath for Megadeth is the only one I remember), and I wasn’t tracking historical information very closely (no footnotes, marginal in-text citations). But the style of the book is rambling and inchoate. You can ramble while writing journalistic, punchy prose. James doesn’t seem to realize this, and he relentlessly criticizes the books that he has read, especially if they were written by academics, for including too much detail or various other stylistic faults.

The book reads very much like a chronologically organized series of blog entries. Chronologically by date of the subject of the murders, I mean. It’s obvious that a few of the cases drew much more of James’s attention than others, and I found his take on the JonBenet Ramsey situation to be as cogent as anything I remember reading about it (which to be fair, isn’t much. I only recall something by Joyce Carol Oates.)

But James does have some sociological observations. He thinks that the Warren court is responsible for the resurgence of the death penalty and the size and conditions of prisons currently. James argues that the death penalty would have withered away naturally were it not for judicial action to render it unconstitutional, and he also argues that overcrowded prisons are the result of judges allowing too-lenient paroles in the 60s, which has led to a backlash of tighter sentencing, plus the law libraries that prisoners have access to take away from the space necessary to house them. His proposal to reform all of this is to have many small prisons built. Everywhere. Gangs and related prison violence would be less likely to be a serious problem with a small inmate population, and, as for NIMBY, well people will just have to get over that the way that scouts had to get over their prejudice against short pot-bellied guys who hit .385 in college or managers had to get over the idea that stolen bases win ball games.

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.) This means increasing audits and other enforcement actions, making the IRS even less popular than it already was. Furthermore, by diverting money from complex cases of tax evasion involving large amounts of money to many smaller cases involving far less, it recruits the IRS into a class war of rich versus poor while perpetuating the delusion that it is the IRS itself which is the problem. I actually had an opportunity to observe a consequence of this process when I was a child, though I didn’t understand the larger context then.

What economic recovery there was during the Reagan era is generally attributed to the stimulus effect of massive government investment in the defense industry, as I mentioned, but I had never thought much about the tax policy issues (at least not from the perspective of low-level workers involved in it) until reading the fragments and drafts collected as The Pale King. I haven’t finished the book, and this is not going to be a complete review. There’s a bit of speculative autobiography in it that was so convincing that I found myself wondering if it could be true. Parts of what he’s proposing there have been verified by other parties, as I understand it, and I found myself wondering about the possibility of an honor court hearing. The scenario he describes is quite plausible, I would imagine, but I don’t know how extensive the term paper writing actually was. A remarkable—even by his standards—piece of writing.

I haven’t investigated the matter thoroughly yet, but I do not think that there has been much literature yet devoted to the tax code. This quite possibly could have drawn him to the subject; I don’t know. I also haven’t ever encountered the concept of “psychic facts” before, and the absurdity of those examples must have been a lot of fun to come up with. The Pale King is much more coherent and seems closer to a final product in terms of the writing of tits discrete sections, although not its plotting, than I had been anticipating. I’m most curious now to learn what there is to know about how long he intended the final thing to be, if there’s any evidence of that. I would hope that they release the documents in the HRC to scholars before too long; the sales figures on this book already seem to be quite impressive.

A full review will follow.

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). Not everyone finds the minor dramatic production of a well-known novelist or the three-hour digital video indulgence of a certain director as intrinsically fascinating as I do, of course, and these are fairly broadminded subjects as far as scholarship goes.

So, according to the bookseller, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King will arrive tomorrow. I have somehow managed to teach his last story collection, Oblivion, which may have had material intended for this posthumous book, several times now; and I am greatly anticipating this glimpse of where Wallace’s interests would have taken him. For me, “Mister Squishy,” the titular story from the collection, and even “The Suffering Channel” were the best things Wallace wrote. Some find them unreadable aberrations, though this opinion was more common before his death than it seems to be now. And I find myself growing increasingly detached from Infinite Jest in my middle age.

The announced theme, boredom, does not seem that plausible to me. I don’t find taxes and all that’s associated with them to be a boring subject, personally. I once taught a graduate-level “Writing for Accountants” class (around the time of Sarbanes-Oxley), and I probably learned much more from them about accounting than I taught them about writing. Of course I realize that pre-computerized rote checking of tax forms might not have been as diverting as Maria Wyeth and her rattlesnakes, but not everyone needs that level of stimulation. Maria Wyeth didn’t.

I’ve read the excerpts as they’ve appeared in various organs, but I’ve tried not to read any reviews. I don’t know much what to expect about the level of completion, though I have read of the circumstances of the manuscript’s discovery, which might suggest a relatively complete draft. Or it might mean nothing at all. I take it that there’s introductory material which addresses the editorial process. I doubt that there are many contemporaries of Wallace who have had the same relationship with editors, and whatever of this correspondence that is in the Ransom archive would doubtless be fascinating to read.

I saw this amusing article on metafilter yesterday. The basic idea is that a four-person family making 250K/year is, depending on where they live, just barely getting by because of tax burden.

A budget is provided, and it’s reliably absurd. When I last looked at the metafilter comments, however, I don’t know if anyone recognized what the actual rhetorical target of this piece was. To me, it seems clear that the profligate amounts being invested by this family in their 401K and college savings accounts (presumably also investment interests) are designed to make the (almost certainly poorer) readers of the article not just outraged by imaginary tax raises but anxious that they are not putting enough of their money into investments.

Assuming that the basic figures provided here correspond even loosely to reality, which is probably not wise, I was astonished yet again by how low our property taxes are compared to the rest of the states. We’re talking orders of magnitude in some cases.

John Ashbery has a translation of Rimbaud’s “Conte” in the most recent New York Review. The final line of the poem, “La musique savante manque à notre désir” is translated there as “Wise music is missing from our desire.”

Wallace Fowlie renders it “Our desires are deprived of cunning music.” Paul Schmidt, “Our desire lacks the music of the mind.” Ashbery’s translation seems amusedly literal for the most part. He translates “les bêtes de luxe” as “thoroughbred animals,” which does seem better than Fowlie’s “pet animals.” (I can’t remember what Schmidt does there offhand; something with “luxury,” I think.)

What does “Conte,” mean, though? Ashbery’s translation moves away from the orientalist trappings in the poem, and it also seems to preemptively deflate any conception of it as sterile autoeroticism/psychic automatism standing for the failure of art to transform life (which I understand is the influential biographical reading proposed by Étiemble). An unfragmented “Kubla Khan.”

A bit of looking around tells me that the phrase “la musique savante” was used in French to describe the unwelcome contrapuntal and polyphonic complexity of Austro-Germanic music in the 19th C, which might be what Fowlie had in mind with his otherwise hard-to-understand use of “cunning.”

I earlier wrote about my experience with Knut Müller’s Rhem 2, and I gave the third game a shot over the last few days. I came infinitesimally close to solving it without any hints. No puzzles or missing information thwarted me; I merely failed to see something in plain sight. I don’t know if my last post captured how complex the game is. Here are some notes I made while attempting to solve a problem with incomplete information:

Needless to say, all of this turned out to be wrong. I filled thirteen pages of 9 1/4″ by 11 3/4″ quadrille with increasingly esoteric sigils, irresponsible conjectures, and unconfirmable hypothetics before turning in abject despair and shame to the walkthrough, where I found that I had failed to notice a simple lever. (I should note that I had solved 95% of the game by this point, however.) As I wrote before, most of the problems come from not knowing if you have sufficient information. The puzzle I was trying to solve in the diagram above seemed to be a simple substitution cipher with symmetries that would allow it to be decrypted, but it turns out that you find the complete key (which I didn’t check for consistency with the symmetries) later.

I’ve been reading some reviews of these games published in the adventure game community, and I’ve been a bit surprised and disappointed with the negative reactions. People often criticize the graphics and apparent lack of plot. I find the graphics to be appropriately rusty and grimy for the world that they depict, and the signs and general sense of design are of consistent aesthetic interest. The plot is also appropriately absurdist; too few computer games have a Beckettian sensibility.

Anyway, having come tantalizingly close to solving Rhem 2 and Rhem 3 without consulting the walkthroughs, I have pledged to do so with the fourth game. Rhem 4 opens with a puzzle almost exactly like the one I described above, and I spent several hours trying to decrypt a code that it turned out I missed a simple key for. This is the very first puzzle in the game, by the way. I suppose I should be getting worried about my ability to learn from my mistakes. And it seems, from what I’ve seen thus far, as if this is the most complex game of the series.

I want to write something later about what I think it’s important to solve games without consulting walkthroughs, hints, etc. (Or at least to try until frustrated beyond human endurance.) Which character in No Country for Old Men would have been most likely to solve a game like Rhem without hints, for example?

In the second book of the Histories, Herodotus tells us of the Egyptian king Psammetichos, who wanted to discover who were truly the oldest people of the Earth. He took two infants and had them raised by shepherds in isolation from human voices. When they were finally brought out of their huts, they cried “bekos,” a word that means “bread” in the Phrygian language. Thus Psammetichos concluded that the Phrygians were the oldest humans.

I haven’t investigated the matter thoroughly, but I would be interested to know how widely circulated this variety of linguistic essentialism was in Greek thought at the time. Some preliminary rummaging around on the experiment tells me that Albert Churchward’s The Origin and Evolution of the Human Race (1922) cites the Herodotean model for a similar argument about Pygmy tongues and the African origin of humans. (There’s also a great deal of ominous-looking material in this book about the exterminating stellar-mythos. . )

I’m reading the Landmark edition of Herodotus, and I noticed that while other translations tend to say something like Peisistratos did not sleep with his wife in the “usual” or “accustomed” way, this one chooses “indecent.” I should check the Greek here, but that sounds a bit more moralizing than Herodotus would tend to be.

Both the LRB and NYRB reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom make the astute point that the long autobiographical section of the book is not sufficiently distinguished in style from the rest. Though it’s undeniably Patty’s thoughts, it’s not Patty’s writing that we’re reading. And James Lever argues that this could have been exploited in terms of the reaction that Walter and Richard have when they read it. I do wonder, though, about a comment Walter made about the manuscript after he finds it, which I didn’t actually remember from reading it (it was something about a libel on his “manhood,” about which there were many general things mentioned but nothing as specific-seeming as he seemed to mean it at this point). This could in fact indicate that the manuscript in the book is not the narrative of the manuscript we read, which would be rather sly, especially as there’s no other reason to suspect a trick like this in the broad social realism of the rest of the novel.

Franzen’s particular brand of social realism interests me quite a bit. Chip Lambert was a very broad caricature of an academic, yet many readers seemed to find him believable. Similarly, I found many parts of Freedom, while consistently grabbing, to veer wildly from my perception of the world. Franzen seems to believe that only those who’ve gone to selective liberal arts colleges can have thoughts worth expressing, or at least be able to express worthy thoughts. That he seems to regard the University of Minnesota as a provincial ag-school and Macalester as a potential intellectual breeding ground (for Minnesota) is only an instance of this. The presentation of the student culture of the University of Virginia is not far removed from Tom Wolfe (or Alexander Theroux of Darconville’s Cat, for that matter). His treatment of the rural West Virginians, particularly the encounter in the steak house, could have been reconsidered; and I don’t think anyone would confuse Linda Hoffbauer with Marilynne Robinson.

The whole plotline with Joey’s roommate Jonathan, his Podhoretzian or Kristolian father, whose absurd exoteric Straussianism Franzen couldn’t even pretend to treat seriously, and the sister Jenna, whose vacuity is only slightly more plausible than that of the average Less Than Zero (which is brainstormed as a depopulation slogan, interestingly enough) character, was poorly constructed (though, again, gripping to read. I can’t stress enough how much of my attention this novel demanded and how skillfully this was done, even as I was resisting much of what I was reading.) I did find interesting the references to Joyce’s scatological letters to Nora in the phone sex that Joey and Connie were having, and the scene where he reclaims his wedding ring seemed to want to be compared in some way to Wallace’s “The Suffering Channel.” (Perhaps it’s because I just taught Oblivion that I noticed this. One thing that was very clear, however, was the acid portrayals of people like Jessica in Wallace’s story compared to the modest disapproval of complete identification seen in Franzen’s novel.) Joey’s world was set askew by 9/11, after all. I really would have enjoyed reading more about the point where he has to go to Poland to negotiate for obsolescent truck parts.

U2’s Achtung Baby makes an appearance. At one point, Richard Katz makes an ambiguous crack about Bono Vox in an interview he’s giving in a fit of petulance or pique to the spoiled son of a titan of industry whose deck he’s putting in. (This becomes viral in the same way that Walter’s drug-induced jeremiad does. I felt that Franzen was very amused by the concept.) Anyway, here’s a scene from Joey’s adolescence: “It took him back to their earliest days as a couple on Barrier Street, in his first fall of high school. U2’s Achtung Baby, beloved to both of them but especially to Connie, had been the soundtrack of their mutual deflowering. The opening track, in which Bono avowed that he was ready for everything, ready for the push, had been their love song to each other and to capitalism” (412). For those a bit older than Joey, making out to The Joshua Tree would have produced quite different associations. The grotesque irony of the album, the “Fly” persona, and all of the rest of it would not likely have been lost on a kid as smart and perceptive as everyone agrees Joey to be (or Connie, for that matter), so I couldn’t help but wonder that this was something else sly that Franzen was doing.

What does the novel have to say about demographic management? Is there any distance between the bird-watching author and the cat-napping Walter Berklund, really? Is the deliberately obtuse presentation of Straussian* ideas not just a mordant commentary on the equally obtuse circulation of said ideas during the buildup to the Iraq war but a coded lesson to the wise to listen to everything that Berklund says, and more, about the dangers of overpopulation? (To be fair, Joey even recognizes that there are obvious commercial motivations behind the rhetoric of infinite democracy (“freedom”) being bruited about in this discourse, and Jonathan demystifies it for him later.) Who, having adequate opportunity, does not procreate in the novel? What is that telling us about the good life? One of the essays in the recent n+1 colloquium on Freedom suggested wanting to read a spin-off novel about Richard Katz’s adventures. Does limitless growth allow Richard Katzes? Does it produce them? Or should population growth be checked so as not to threaten Katzian habitats? The more obvious answer here is that Katz is a cat, so to speak, a wanton predator who eliminates one reproductive-aged female that we know of—-an instance inviting generalization.

*I would say “pseudo-,” but I think that might give the wrong impression.

George Basalla’s The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge UP: 1988) is a fine book, filled with many illuminating examples. In a section on how fads influence technological development, however, Basalla writes:

By the mid-1980s, the home computer boom appeared to be nothing more than a short-lived and, for some computer manufacturers, expensive fad. Consumers who were expected to use these machines to maintain their financial records, educate their children, and plan for their family’s future ended up playing electronic games on them, an activity that soon lost its novelty, pleasure, and excitement. As a result, a device that was initially heralded as the forerunner of a new technological era was a spectacular failure that threatened to bankrupt the firms that had invested billions of dollars in its development. (185)

The entire chapter, with its discussion of government-funded nuclear power projects, and the preceding one, with its discussion of the role of military investment in technological development, had the makings of an epiphany about the internet. Hindsight, etc.

I do wonder what the sales figures of games specifically for personal computers would reveal here. I suspect that Basalla’s analysis was essentially correct from that vantagepoint.