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"Nell", the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people--and this is true whether or not they are well-educated--is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations--in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward. [...]"
"The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code--but their children believe it for entirely different reasons."
"They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it."
"Yes. Some of them never challenge it--they grow up to be small-minded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel--as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw."
"Which path do you intend to take Nell?" said the Constable, sounding very interested. "Conformity or rebellion?"
"Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded--they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity."
[...]
" I suspect that Lord Finkle-McGraw, being an intelligent man, sees through all of the hypocrisy in his society, but upholds its principles anyway, because that is what is best in the long run. And I suspect that he has been worrying about how best to inculcate this stance in young people who cannot understand, as he does, its historical antecedents--which might explain why he has taken an interest in me. The Primer may have been Finkle-McGraw's idea to begin with--a first attempt to go about this systematially."
The lecture halls, the editorships, the endowed chairs that might have been occupied 50 years ago by academics and intellectuals of a more traditional stripe are now occupied--and have been for decades--by insurgents who gained sway beginning in the 1960s and who, ever since then, have been teaching a kind of literary theory variously called post-modernist or post-structuralist or deconstructionist.
What literary theorists--post-structuralists, anyway--are teaching, might be fascinating and encouraging to people who aspire to be critics, but must be just a bit unsettling to people who would like to become authors. One of the founding documents of post-structuralism is "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes!
And I am not here to explain post-structuralism, or to argue with it, but I will say that if I were a would-be author studying literature, one hundred years ago, from professors who were willing to grand that authors actually created, understood, and controlled the meaning of their own wor, I'd feel more encouraged than I would studying it from post-structuralists.
Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that I'd feel more sanguine writing certain types of fiction than others.
the mention of Barthes here is awkward because he is assuming that his audience doesn't really know anything about the work other than maybe having heard of the title, which really doesn't capture Barthes' argument that well; it's a bit of a strawman
in any case, this does sort of explain why he writes the way he does
[...] modern information technology is to totalitarianism what crosses are to vampires. Skeptics might say it's just a coincidence that glasnost and perestroika came just after the photocopier, the fax, and the personal computer invaded Russia, but I thnk there's a connection, and if you read WIRED, you probably do too. After all, how could any country whose power structure was based on controlling the flow of information survive in an era of direct-dial phones and ubiquitous fax machines?
I was carrying an issue of WIRED [...] In one corner were three characters in Hanzi [...] I'd heard that they formed the Chinese word for "network."
Whenever I showed the magazine to a Chinese person they were baffled. "It means network, doesn't it?" I said [...]
"Yes," they said, "this is the term used by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution for the network of spies and informers that they spread across every village and neighborhood to snare enemies of the regime."
lol
[...] The business is as close to being a pure meritocracy as anything ever gets in the real world, and it's only because these guys know they are good that they have the confidence to call themselves cable trash.
about the cable-laying business
the unintentional irony of extolling the virtues of this quasi-meritocracy juxtaposed with the implication that all of its members are male
[...] In any event, this library was burned out by the Romans when they were adding Egypt to their empire. Or maybe it wasn't. It's inherently difficult to get reliable information about an event that consisted of the destruction of all recorded information.
lol
Fiction that's not considered good unless it has interesting ideas in it. You can write a minimalist short story that's set in a trailer park or a Connecticut suburb that might be considered a literary masterpiece or well-regarded by literary types, but science fiction people wouldn't find it very interesting unless it had somewhere in it a cool idea that made them say, "That's interesting. I never thought of that before." If it's got that, then science fiction people will embrace it and bring it into the big-tent view of science fiction. That's really the role that science fiction has com to play in literature right now. In arty lit, it's become uncool to try to come to grips with ideas per se.
god he's such a snob about "ideas" as if technological ideas are superior to, say, ideas about what it means to be human
though he does love DFW so at least there's that
(right after this, the interviewer disagrees with him citing Don DeLillo as an example)
Damasio is arguing that one of the innate faculties of our brain is that we can envision a wide range of possible scenarios and then sort through them very quickly not by logic but through a kind of process of the emotions. [...]
referring to Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist who happens to be a friend of his, who claims that what we think of as "reason" and what we think of as "emotion" are more linked than we'd think
[...] DFW could write high-powered prose better than just about anyone but he well knew the value of mixing it with informal day-to-day English, and, though he was especially good at it, it's worth keeping in mind that he was hardly the first great English writer to do so. For every Milton who kept it all on an elevated plane there was a Shakespeare who knew how to sock us in the chops with some well-timed plain talk (among reviewers with humanities degrees, it also seems compulsory to make some remark--or, just as well, to go on at some length--on "post-modernism," a topic of zero interest to most actual readers).
on the criticisms of DFW's style of mixing high-end vocab with pop culture references and slang