Ghostwriters

Last weekend, a friend sent me a message that contained what must be the most potent and enticing combination of words it is possible to send in my direction. It was a "job" listing from Craigslist, and its pitch was simple. "Ghostwriters wanted," it read. "No experience necessary." Seldom have I responded to any summons with such alacrity. An email was off within fifteen minutes, followed by obsessive re-checking of my inbox every couple of seconds.

For those who do not suffer from exactly my combination of personality traits, it may not be immediately obvious why this would be the response. For me, however, becoming a ghostwriter for some faceless online entity was one of the most dream-fulfilling ambitions I could contemplate. Had I not just a few days previous been talking with another friend, who expressed aloud our shared thought: "I wish being a hack writer was still more of a professional option."

"White Noise" and the Fear of Dying

On two recent cross-country flights, I began and then finished Don DeLillo's justly famous 1985 classic, White Noise. Reading this darkly hilarious book on a plane ride was not only a source of great pleasure, it was also a test of sheer white-knuckled fortitude, for someone who once struggled mightily with a fear of flying. DeLillo's book is a meditation on the fear of death, after all, and one of his more vivid scenes to illustrate the concept involves sudden plunges on commercial airliners through tens of thousands of feet.

To plow with glee through several hundred pages of such reflections, while being jounced about in turbulent air at thirty thousand feet, is to marvel both at the extent to which one has managed to conquer one's own previous phobia, as well as at the delight of DeLillo's prose. Who else could make this forbidding topic so riotously funny?

"The Malthus Factor" by Eric Ross: A Review

Eric B. Ross: The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics, and Population in Capitalist Development (Zed Books, New York/London, 1998).

At long last! One has unearthed a book that contains one of the most salutary arguments in the contemporary world -- an argument one has long desired to hear. One only wishes that argument were somewhat better made.

Dr. Ross's book can't always be described as felicitously written; it has its share of copy errors, which for once I won't bother counting up. It also makes its claims with a stridency and absolutism that it hasn't always earned. In other words, at several critical junctures, the book seems to assume the argument it should be presenting.

This is particularly a shame, though, because that argument is an important and much-needed one.

Errata and Marginalia 006: Steinbeck

John Steinbeck, The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), originally published 1957.

Yes, that's right, it was Steinbeck's first and only political satire set in modern France. The forgotten not-quite-jewel in the great author's crown. The rough in the diamond, if you will. I have to love this book simply for the fact that such an oddity exists. This is sufficient to my mind to forgive the book its faults.

Of which there are many. An unprepossessing man, in fulfillment of his creator's slightly Hadrian VII-esque fantasy, is suddenly elevated into the position of King, under the newly-restored French monarchy. Not-quite-hilarity ensures. The satire of this piece, if not altogether toothless, is certainly gummy.