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I’m not going to go into any detail or comment much on the latest decision rejecting the Argus Leader‘s efforts to dismiss Dan Scott’s libel suit against it and executive editor Randell Beck. (The opinion is available in PDF format here thanks to PP.) Suffice it to say that the written opinion reflects comments I made early on. In fact, in noting that the question is how a “reasonable reader” would have viewed the column, the opinion discusses the same cases quoted in that post.
The next big question isn’t a legal one. It’s how long and bloody the road to trial or the next dispositive motions will be. One thing is certain. If tickets were available to Bill Janklow taking Beck’s deposition they would generate premium prices.
[T]he nature of the Argus, as well as the context in which Beck’s column appeared, may not signal to a reasonable reader that they were only reading a parody of Scott’s actual apology letter.
Memorandum opinion, Scott v. Beck and The Sioux Falls Argus Leader, April 28, 2008
It’s surprising sometimes just what the popularization of certain scientific ideas can do. Certain concepts work their way into popular culture, despite the difficulty of math or science truly behind them. David Ambrose’s The Man Who Turned Into Himself indicates that even theoretical physics can actually prolong the life of and perhaps even resurrect a book.
Originally published in London in 1993, The Man Who Turned Into Himself made its U.S. appearance in 1994. In fact, I still have the first hardbound U.S. edition on my bookshelves. The book made it through a couple U.S. printings with different covers and imprints, occasionally ending up in the remainder stacks. The book reappeared in print in London about five years ago and now has returned to the U.S. in a trade paper edition with another new cover.
How does its reappearance have any thing to do with theoretical physics? Well, the plot is predicated on the “many worlds” or “parallel universes” theory that flows from quantum mechanics. When the book first appeared, the theory was receiving increasing attention in the scientific community. Over the last several years, the idea has found more mention in mainstream culture. Thus, not only are publishers dealing with an interesting novel, they’re finding new audiences for it.
It’s tough to go into too much detail about The Man Who Turned Into Himself without giving away core parts of the plot. Rick Hamilton is a publisher of small trade magazines who barely avoids serious injury or death one morning in a spill from the roof of his house and a near-collision with a large truck driving to work. Then, he runs from a business meeting several hours later, overwhelmed by a premonition of the death of his wife. He arrives at the scene of a car accident and while his young son is alive, his wife dies before his eyes. A moment later he is Richard Hamilton, a real estate developer, who was just involved in an accident with a truck and whose wife is alive and well and insistent they never had a son.
This is the launching point and framework by which the reader — and the main character — examines which of these two lives is the “real” one. Has Hamilton somehow landed in a parallel universe, has he gone mad or are was he in shock and just hallucinating? Yet that is really only one of the thought experiments at work here. The more significant ones explore larger questions of selfhood and meaning. What makes us who we are? Is the meaning we search for merely a self-construct? How would our relationships with others change if a few elements of our life or theirs changed? It is, in essence, perhaps the most core philosophical questions: who am I and why am I here?
Ambrose doesn’t rely solely on the many worlds theory as the vehicle for this exploration. There are plot twists and stylistic approaches aplenty. And perhaps an indication of his success of his story telling rests on one simple fact. Unlike most popular novels published 15 years ago, even in republication today The Man Who Turned Into Himself has a scientific framework that remains topical and, more important, still contemporary writing and ideas.
I can tell you with some authority that no man is a hero to anyone who knows what he’s thinking.
David Ambrose, The Man Who Turned Into Himself
I’ll admit that sometimes I just don’t get it. Or maybe it’s just that my literary tastes are too prosaic.
I picked up Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas after seeing repeated references to it, most of them rather glowing. I knew what it was about. I knew that Bolaño, a Chilean author who died in 2003, was often haled as being in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and what has come to be called “slipstream” fiction. I know I’ve not really been a fan of the slipstream I’ve read. In other words, I knew what I was getting into. It’s just that knowing what you’re getting still may not assist in being able to appreciate it.
I’ll admit Nazi Literature, first published in Spanish in 1996, shows Bolaño had both a stunning imagination and fine prose skills. It is a collection of biographical sketches of fictional fascist writers in North, Central and South America. And while Nazis and neo-Nazis appear (some still alive in this literary world), the emphasis here is not necessarily on Hitler’s world view but a general ultra-right, fascist view of society.
Yet not only does Bolaño create the profiles of 30 novelists, poets and journalists, he places them in various schools and categories and with a variety of talents. In other words, he truly has created an entire alternative literary world and history. Thus, there’s the Mendiluce Clan, an Argentinian mother and two of her children, and the Schiaffino brothers, whose poetry reflected their deep involvement in Argentinian soccer gangs. There’s the right-wing Catholic author who writes endless tracts “refuting” Enlightenment and leftist philosophers, some of whose ideas he does not grasp. There’s the Columbians who not only write books but actually fight for the SS in World War II. And there’s the American writer born in Los Angeles in 1962 who creates interminable interwoven science fiction sages involving the Fourth Reich in America.
In addition to the insight and inventiveness in creating these profiles and the literary world they populate, there is an “Epilogue for Monsters.” It contains appendices describing a variety of “secondary characters” in the literary movements, outlining various publishing houses and magazines, and providing a bibliography of books in the genre. Again, this all flows from Bolaño’s mind and pen.
Plainly, then, the imagination involved in this work, which totals slightly more than 200 pages all together, is mind boggling. Similarly, there is little doubt it may be an excellent example of of slipstream or metafiction. But I end up struggling with the ultimate point. Perhaps it’s as simple being too unfamiliar with various literary schools or being unable to recognize the occasional appearance of real authors or literary controversies to pick up on anything more than some of the obvious irony or humor. In the final analysis, it strikes an illiterati like me as an interesting, even amazing, exercise but one which makes you wonder where Bolaño might have taken us in terms of particular ideas or characters had a similar investment of imaginative effort been focused on one or a few of the wide variety of story lines and ideas here.
Maybe I’m just too linear. I appreciate the unparalleled skill and craftsmanship but the ultimate upshot eludes me. Still, I have to admit that is not a failing on Bolaño’s part. If I don’t get it, it’s a matter of personal taste and preference.
Real life can sometimes bear an unsettling resemblance to nightmares.
Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas
The Telegraph‘s book critics are at it again. It’s another one of their books lists, this time the 50 best cult books. Still, I get a kick out of these, particularly some of their comments about the books. So here’s the list with occasional quotations from what the critic selecting the book said about it. The ones I’ve read are in bold, I’ve underlined those I started but never finished and placed asterisks by the ones I’ve never heard of, for which I attribute the large number to the U.K. source.
- Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut (1969) (“Sideways fantasy from the Diogenes of American letters…. this is savage anger barely masked by urbane anthropological sarcasm.”)
- The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (1957-60) (“Some beautiful sentences, sure; but lots of them don’t make sense.”) **
- A Rebours, JK Huysmans (1884) (“Plotless, morality-free salute to decadence. “) **
- Baby and Child Care, Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
- The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf (1991) (“The most important feminist text of the past 20 years.”)
- The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath (1963) (“one of the original misery memoirs”)
- Catch-22, Joseph Heller (1961)
- The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger (1951)
- The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield (1993) (“For a similar effect on the cheap, rent an Indiana-Jonesalike film – Tomb Raider, say – and ask a hippy to whisper nonsense in your ear while you’re watching it.”)
- The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart (1971) **
- Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut?, Erich Von Däniken (1968)
- A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1980) (“Ignatius J Reilly is a fat anti-hero to thwart Promethean selfdramatisation in any reader.”)
- Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
- The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg (1824) **
- Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, L Ron Hubbard (1950) (“Do you often feel unhappy? Depressed? Ill at ease with others? You will if you read this. “)
- The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley (1954) (“The book that launched a thousand trips.”)
- Dune, Frank Herbert (1965)
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (1979)
- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe (1968) (“Now a vivid social history of a period that seems as remote as Byzantium. “)
- Fear of Flying, Erica Jong (1973)
- The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer (1970)
- The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand (1943) (“Loved by the kind of person who tells you selfishness is an evolutionary advantage, before stealing your house/lover/job. “)
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R Hofstadter (1979) (“Loved by maths geeks and anybody with Asperger’s syndrome and anyone with sense. But at root a chess textbook.”) **
- Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
- The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Michael Baigent, et. al (1982) (“Staple text of the bonkers brigade.”)
- I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith (1948) **
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino (1979) **
- Iron John: A Book About Men, Robert Bly (1990)
- Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970) (“The book that gave 1970s idealism a bad name”)
- The Magus, John Fowles (1966)
- Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
- The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958) **
- The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
- No Logo, Naomi Klein (2000)
- On The Road, Jack Kerouac (1957)
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson (1971)
- The Outsider, Colin Wilson (1956) (“Modesty was not one of [the author’s] virtues; nor, sadly, was literary ability.”
- The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran (1923) (“a beautifully phrased exercise in pointing out the obvious”)
- The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell (1914)
- The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Edward FitzGerald (tr.) (1859)
- The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron (1937) **
- Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse (1922)
- The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774) **
- Story of O, Pauline Réage (1954) (“Bewildering, creepy and joyless, it’s a guaranteed detumescent.”)
- The Stranger, Albert Camus (1942) (“If you don’t love this when you’re 17, there’s something wrong with you.”)
- The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos Castaneda (1968)
- Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain (1933) **
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85) (“Incendiary declamation through a megaphone “)
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1960)
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, Robert M Pirsig (1974)
A cult following is a nice way of saying very few people like you.
Martin Mull
Over the years, some trademarks became commonly used to describe a broader class of products or services. Kleenex is frequently used for facial tissue. And back in the day, it wasn’t uncommon to have someone Xerox documents rather than copy them.
That means trademark owners sometimes worry about how their marks get used. As a result, the International Trademark Association used the inside back cover of the most recent Columbia Journalism Review to provide journalists with some “important usage guidelines” to help avoid complaints from trademark owners. Among other things, it instructs that trademarks are “proper adjectives” that modify a generic noun or phrase which, together, describe the product or service.
To assist in that endeavor, the ad lists a variety trademarks and the generic terms with which they should be used. Depending on your point of view, some of these show either the inventiveness or denigration of American English. All but one of the following comes from that ad. I couldn’t resist using the first phrase, though, after stumbling across it in the INTA’s “Trademark Checklist” on its website. The checklist gives generic terms for nearly 2,500 trademarks.
- The Baggies in your kitchen drawer are “bags made of flexible transparent sheeting.” According to the ad, though, the Ziplocs in the drawer must be lower tech as they are only “plastic bags.”
- Bubble Wrap is “cellular cushioning packaging material.”
- While most people might say it’s a flying disc, a Frisbee is actually a “toy flying saucer.”
- Your iTunes program is “audio data computer software.”
- MapQuest, similarly, is “online access to geographic information.”
- Because trademarks are never verbs, you can’t TiVo something. Instead, you use TiVo “subscription television broadcasting services.”
- Pundits erred for years by failing to call Reagan the “Teflon flourine-containing resins president.”
- And who among us wouldn’t know that the generic phrase SPAM precedes is “Family of Products”?
American English is packed with euphemisms, because Americans have trouble dealing with reality[.]
George Carlin, Napalm & Silly Putty
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