Errata and Marginalia 019: Coover

Robert Coover, The Public Burning (New York: The Viking Press, 1977)

It turns out, all these years later, that Coover's one-of-a-kind postmodern phantasmagoria The Public Burning still has the capacity to surprise. 

For one thing, the book is perhaps more readable than anticipated. As a teenager—the age when I first began to marshal the list of books I would read over the rest of my life—I taught myself to regard all heavy tomes produced by postmodern luminaries as notoriously "difficult" and extravagantly highbrow. I therefore beheld all the longer works of Pynchon, Gaddis, Coover, Barth and company with so much reverence that I could scarcely make an attempt upon them. 

To R or to A? That is the question.

 A friend sent me a cartoon this morning by email that showcased a familiar solution to the problem of absurdity. The panels of the strip depict a pig climbing onto a stump of "deep thoughts," whence he proceeds to contemplate the futility and hollowness of existence. We try to distract ourselves from it through seeking money and power, he observes, or through achieving immortality via the works we leave behind, or by losing ourselves in daily routines; but ultimately we confront the fact that all these things must end. And so must we. Thus, he decides at last, the best we can do is to laugh and love each other while we're here. 

No doubt such a solution will seem satisfactory and familiar to many of us; it is the kind of humanism that gains ready and widespread assent in our present society. It strikes me, however, that it makes a couple logical leaps that may not be fully justified. 

Value Systems

 There is a scene in Jack London's memoir of vagabondage, The Road, in which he recalls a time he was cadging money from a businessman. The latter was willing to offer him work tossing bricks, but only at the price of having to listen to one of his sermons. He proceeded to lecture London on how he too could one day be prosperous and successful, if only he and the other tramps would apply the same bourgeois virtues the businessman embodied: prudence, diligence, temperance, and the rest.

London recalls that he listened to this for a good while, then couldn't refrain from pointing out a logical flaw in the businessman's advice. "[I]f we all became like you," he said, "[...] there'd be nobody to toss bricks for you." This fair point promptly sent the businessman into a rage. "Get out of here, you ungrateful whelp!" he roared.

Resentment

As I've mentioned before on this blog: despite not being resident in the state of Florida for more than a decade now, I still receive periodic e-blasts from the crudely right-wing member of Congress who represents the district where I was raised. Most of these mailings come in the form of ludicrously tendentious "polls," which purport to be a neutral way to gather information on his constituents' views, but always display the author's bias in their choice of wording—especially when it comes to matters of immigration. 

I had come to be inured, or so I thought, to most of this language; yet the last one left me baffled. The subject line read: "Payouts to Illegals?" In essence, the congressman was asking whether we supported a legal settlement that the Justice Department was apparently contemplating to families separated under Trump's "zero tolerance" policy. 

What surprised me wasn't that the congressman opposed paying these damages (that went without saying) but rather that so many people seemed to agree with him. Once I clicked through to the results page, more than 80% of the reading public apparently thought the same as him. 

Fooled

In his memoir Hand to Mouth, the writer Paul Auster recounts a time in his late twenties and early thirties when—as a freelance translator and critic—he was struggling to make ends meet. At last, in his desperation to make a quick buck, he hit upon a particularly bizarre scheme to market a children's board game that involved playing virtual baseball with playing cards. He drew up his own version of the cards, then began marketing them around various toy conventions where the makers and distributors of such games could be found. 

After several discouraging attempts, he describes one seemingly promising encounter with a pair of toymakers from Illinois. Two brothers who ran the business together, they agreed to sit down with him and play through a round of the game he had invented. They seemed to enjoy it profoundly, and sent him many encouraging signals. They gave him their contact information, and told him to get in touch soon so they could make a decision as to whether or not to market the game. He sent them a letter after he left and waited. And waited.