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.)

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.

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.

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. . .

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.