Death Drive

  Thanatos is in the driver's seat of today's GOP. I don't know how else to describe the careening suicidalism of the party's most recent activities. Even as the planet bakes and no politician can deny even in front of a hard-right audience (at least not without getting booed) that global warming is real—even then, the party's candidates at their second debate earlier this week spent the evening outbidding each other for who would pledge to burn fossil fuels the most if elected. (One of the few jabs Haley landed on DeSantis, for instance, was to accuse him of cancelling a few drilling and burning operations in his home state.) 

Likewise with the party's ongoing infatuation and death-embrace with Trump. Here is self-destructive behavior at its most incomprehensible. The man lost the previous election, tried to stage a coup, and has spent the years since penning increasingly vindictive and unhinged micro-edicts, in which he calls for the death of his enemies and declares his intent to eliminate the independence of large swathes of government should he be re-elected to office. And yet it seems all-but-inevitable at this point that GOP voters will crown him yet again as their nominee for president. 

"Subterfuge of Economy"

 The aforementioned Omnibus Project podcast did an episode this time last year on the so-called "Boots Theory"—a piece of observational economics attributed to Terry Pratchett. The essence of the theory is that the purchasing of cheap goods is actually more expensive in the long run, due to the shorter shelf-life of the inexpensive goods and the constant need for replacements. Thus, the theory goes—this (along with things like the higher interest payments charged to lower-income borrowers with poor credit ratings) is yet another way in which it is actually more expensive to be poor than it is to be rich. Poverty costs more, that is to say, because it forbids the larger up-front payment that is necessary to afford higher-quality and longer-lasting goods that do not need such frequent replacement. 

The articulation of this theory led to a hunt for literary precursors, according to the podcast, with people finding antecedents of the boots theory is such sources as the works of twentieth century working-class socialist novelist Robert Tressell. No one so far, however—to the best of my knowledge—has previously identified a different forbear of the boots theory that occurs in literature, which I uncovered in my recreational reading this week: the Pooka's theory of cheap factory-made clothes, as it appears in Flann O'Brien's experimental novel (often characterized as a work of metafiction and proto-postmodernism) At Swim-Two-Birds. Since I have not elsewhere seen the passage discussed in connection with boots theory, I offer an account of it here for purposes of our collective enlightenment. 

"The Eerie Synchronicity, Sir!"

 I've mentioned before on this blog that perhaps no other media property in existence has given me as many experiences of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon as the Ken Jennings/John Roderick–hosted podcast, The Omnibus Project. As you may recall, this is the psychological illusion that occurs when you learn about something for the first time in one context, and then suddenly start to notice it everywhere.

I suspect a large part of the psychological basis for this effect is that we tend to overestimate our own front-end knowledge, due to our naturally ego-centric bias as individuals. Thus, if we have only just learned about something for the first time, at what feels to us to be a late or recent date, then we tend to assume that the thing must have been astonishingly rare and obscure—otherwise, why would we not have already known about it long ago? (I'll never forget or live down, for instance, the time in high school I had just learned the phrase "jumping the shark," and hastened to condescendingly explain it to a friend, only to have him roar in outrage that he knew about "jumping the shark" years before I did). Then, if we subsequently see this thing in other contexts, instead of assuming it must simply be less obscure than we initially thought, we feel that something mysterious is afoot. 

"The Reign of Old Men"

 When Mitt Romney unexpectedly announced his forthcoming retirement from the Senate at the end of this term, he chose to use the occasion to warn that American government was at risk of becoming a gerontocracy. He said that he was stepping aside in part to make way for new (read: younger) leadership in politics, and in case this seemed too subtle a hint, he specifically urged both of the current frontrunners for the two major nominations for 2024 to bow out and let someone else try captaining their respective parties. He couldn't vote for Trump, he said; but Biden too—he urged—was too advanced in years to be an effective leader, and ought to quit while he was ahead. 

Romney's words fed into a deeper anxiety among many observers of our political scene that our leadership has gotten too aged, and that there don't seem to be enough plausible young or middle-aged people to take their place. The usual parallels drawn here are to Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Sen. Mitch McConnell—a nonagenarian and an octogenarian, respectively, who have recently had health scares in Congress but have so far declined to retire. 

Burmurdouscak

 Ernest Hemingway was a great big phony 

Who went to war expecting it to be absurd and found, or claimed to find, that indeed it was

Then wrote a book full of danger and near-escapes with death and explosions that everyone assumed was based on his own experience and that he must have had such close brushes himself even though it wasn't and he didn't

And unlike someone like say John Dos Passos who also went to war expecting to find it absurd and found it in fact to be absurd but who at least had the decency to regret going for that reason and wish he had just been a creator instead and foreswear ever after that fact to ever again march with the intolerable pack and sink himself down into the swamp of common indignity just to get more material for purposes of calligraphy 

Team Leyner

 Did Mark Leyner predict the future? His defiantly unique and uproariously funny 1992 novel, Et Tu, Babe, was received at the time of publication as an outrageously over-the-top send-up of celebrity narcissism, shot through with early-nineties cyberpunk aesthetics. Picking it up now, thirty years later, the book feels more like an eerily accurate evocation of the age we now live in. Leyner's ability to conjure our present world three decades in advance of actual history is apparent in instances ranging from the hyper-specific (the book features Justice Clarence Thomas in a brief cameo, defending himself from allegations of improper personal connections) to the more general: the book portrays an overall direction—a precipitous downward slide—of cultural and technological development that has since been fulfilled in our time. A few examples follow.

Leyner's technique is largely grounded in the art of the absurd juxtaposition. This prompts him to imagine such ludicrous future technologies in his novel as software that re-edits any film of one's choice so as to substitute Arnold Schwarzenegger for the lead actor, or—along similar lines—a computer program that will alter the text of Leyner's own books in order to make their contents uniquely relevant to each regional market in the U.S.—thereby maximizing the books' salability and profitability. And as preposterous as these pseudo-technologies must have sounded at the time, neither is completely beyond the reach of present-day generative AI. And neither seems especially far-fetched in an era when people are spawning deepfakes of politicians and Hollywood actors, and digital publications can rapidly generate personally-customized content instantaneously, using chatbots. 

Why My Ántonia is So Great

 My Ántonia is a book often assigned in school, and thereby often ruined. Teenagers pick up a book about nostalgia, about adult regret and longing for the land of lost content, and they realize they don't relate to any of this at all. How could they? They have none of the life experience yet that would make this resonate. So they find the book boring and therefore never pick it up again. And typically they end up concluding that literature as a whole is a recondite language inaccessible to them, or else a pretentious game in which pompous adults merely claim to find things interesting that are actually dull, and they are turned off reading for life. Thanks a lot, school!

But picking the book up for the first time in adulthood (or at least, for the first time with any serious intent of finishing it) one realizes at last what all the grownups were talking about. This is a truly beautiful book! This is one of the greatest books ever! Why? What is so great about it? Let me count the ways. 

Clytemnestriad

I, who only tried
To keep faith with my child,
By crimsoning the tile whereon her killer last respired,
After he declined
The red carpet treatment
Saying “No, no; No sell-out I, I’m
Too rugged,
A man of the people!”
Oh, I smiled, thinking the while,
Is that what they call
Bundling our daughter into the fire
You’re just a touch old-fashioned?

Something to Say

 I have continued my reading of John Barth's short fiction this week, moving on from Lost in the Funhouse to his next collection of interwoven novellas: the wonderfully inventive and occasionally quite moving Chimera, originally published in 1972. One could say that here Barth continues to explore his great theme of the angst the modern writer feels at having nothing to say. Chimera is in part, like its predecessor, a book about not having anything to write a book about. 

I should clarify that I in no way mean this pejoratively. Barth himself is entirely self-conscious about this fear; he himself—as I quoted last time—admits that one of his recurring obsessions is that of the specter of creative "impotency" (to which he draws the obvious sexual analogy in both the earlier collection and in Chimera). And he is committed to responding to this situation, not by retreating into silence and despair, but by forging something out of the very impasse in which he finds himself: he seeks, as he wrote in Lost in the Funhouse—echoing the themes of his earlier essay on the "Literature of Exhaustion"—"to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self-consciousness [...] against itself to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impossibility of making something new." 

Cupid as Metaphysical Rebellion

 Just about the only time I ever gain insight into the present state of pop music is at the tail-end of long road trips. It is then, after the twelfth hour or so of driving, at the end of a long day on the road, when my brain has thoroughly melted and formed two running rivulets down the sides of my face, that I am finally forced to silence whatever audiobook I was enjoying and resort to the radio to keep me in a state of minimal consciousness. I then start seeking through the multiple layers of FM stations, dodging the Christian rock ones (instantly recognizable by their generic chords and  tell-tale vocabulary choices (if you hear the word “glory,” and it’s not followed immediately by “days,” run)), skipping over the hectoring talk radio, and trying to find some basic catchy beat to bounce to. 

In any given summer, there are usually only about two new songs on the radio that will achieve this purpose (a frequency that works great for me, since this is about the number of times per year I make a long road trip of this sort). And these are so easily distinguishable that merely by virtue of searching through stations enough times, catching only the first few seconds of most of the offerings, I am usually able to tell within a few rotations which they are. This summer, one standout was that Olivia Rodrigo vampire song, which was undeniably compelling and engrossing (though, as other critics pointed out, a bit too heavy-handed in its lyrical choices; a trace more subtlety might have helped). 

Ballad of a Presidential Candidate

(Homage to e.e. cummings, "Ballad of an Intellectual")

Listen, you voters great and small
To the ballad of a candidate presidentiall
(And if you don’t emuhllate what he's done
You’re missing out royal on lots of fun)
Seems like his problem wasn’t with smarts
Brains, nerves, etc.—he had all the parts
Nothing seemed missing, when he peered inside,

Errata and Marginalia 026: Barth

 John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (New York, NY, Anchor Books, a division of Random House: 1988), first published 1968. 

What does it mean to find a "typo" in an avowedly experimental work of fiction? How is one to sort out the deliberate eccentricities from the copy-editor's mistakes? Would it even make sense to speak of there being a misspelling in an edition of, say, Finnegans Wake? 

Identifying errata in Barth's celebrated and groundbreaking collection of postmodern metafiction, Lost in the Funhouse, presents some of these same difficulties. Still, even after making allowances for such idiosyncratic but accepted variants as "enounce," and even after acknowledging that there are more than a few instances in these stories where the author plainly intended to repeat phrases or pass off odd locutions, as some of his narrative experiments--even then, I find, there are a few places in the current print edition where the misspellings appear to serve no literary function, and which I feel confident in stating were mere errata. For the convenience of future editors, I list them below. 

Revisiting Trump as Sorcerer

 There's something about Trump's strange power to survive and gain strength from every apparent political disaster (the fact, for instance, that he still holds the frontrunner position in the GOP primary, even as he is now under multiple federal and state indictments) that invites comparisons to dark magic. In a recent review published in the New York Times, for instance, the writer quotes a passage from the new Stephen King novel, in which a character "thinks Donald Trump is a boor, but he’s also a sorcerer; with some abracadabra magic she doesn’t understand (but in her deepest heart envies) he has turned America’s podgy, apathetic middle class into revolutionaries." 

Nor is the implication that Trump is a kind of occult entity limited to his critics and political adversaries. Tucker Carlson, who has done more than anyone to introduce Trump's dark spells into millions of American homes, and to amplify the former president's odds of once again securing the GOP nomination, once characterized Trump in a leaked text message as a "demonic force." 

Glass Boxes

 Earlier this summer, I wrote a post on this blog about a wacky new internet conspiracy theory that purports to trace the decline of Western civilization to the growth of modernist architecture. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say, the theory regards the appearance of big formalistic glass boxes on the avenues of major cities, during the twentieth century, as an aesthetic scar so ghastly that it could not possibly have been self-inflicted. No way people wanted these buildings, the theory goes. Therefore, they must have been planted there in order to cover up the evidence of the luxurious global superstate that preceded their existence, and which ought to have been our true birthright, if only they (who, exactly? architects?) had not conspired to deprive us of it. 

Now, there are a couple things that never made sense to me about this theory. The most significant of these is that I think modernist architecture actually looks cool. I never understood why it would need an explanation other than its manifest aesthetic qualities. People can complain all they want about the dullness and interchangeability of "glass boxes" in the abstract, but actually go online and look up photos of some of the masterworks of Louis Kahn or Philip Johnson, say, and tell me truly you don't think they are at least occasionally awe-inspiring. What would require a diabolical conspiracy, by contrast, would be an attempt to corrupt the cold purity of high modernism and cover it over with extraneous flutings and doo-dads. 

Disintegration of Values

 On a popular politics podcast rehashing the first GOP primary debate of the election season, one of the guest panelists recently opined that the entire occasion felt like stepping through the portals of a time machine and finding oneself on the other side of the first Trump election. To drive home the point, she noted that she had briefly during the debate posted to her social media pages a gif from "Back to the Future," with the dial of the DeLorean set to 2015. 

The reason the debate felt like such an atavistic throwback is surely due most of all to the absence of the race's current frontrunner. Trump's decision to sit out the event and lob fusillades from a side conversation with Tucker Carlson gave those of us watching on TV a window into a Trumpless version of the GOP--the party that would still survive today, if the vast majority of its voters weren't already in the bag for a candidate who represents so little of what it once stood for. Left to its own devices, sans Trump, we realized the party still sounds a lot like it used to. It was momentarily reassuring, if only from the standpoint of sheer nostalgia.