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He went on expounding to me his theories, according to which the author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions. I feel I can share many of his affirmations, but I was careful not to let him know this. He says he is interested in me chiefly for two reasons: first, because I am an author who can be faked; and second, because he thinks I have the gifts necessary to be a great faker, to create perfect apocrypha. I could therefore incarnate what for him is the ideal author, that is, the author who is dissolved in the cloud of fictions that covers the world with its thick sheath. And since for him artifice is the true substance of everything, the author who devised a perfect system of artifices would succeed in identifying himself with the whole.
!
Strange people circulate in this valley: literary agents awaiting my new novel, for which they have already collected advances from publishers all over the world; advertising agents who want my characters to wear certain articles of clothing and drink certain fruit juices; electronic technicians who insist on finishing my unfinished novels with a computer. I try to go out as little as possible; I avoid the village; if I want to take a walk, I choose the mountain trails.
how is he SO FUNNY omg
A girl came to see me who is writing a thesis on my novels for a very important university seminar in literary studies. I see that my work serves her perfectly to demonstrate her theories, and this is certainly a positive fact— for the novels or for the theories, I do not know which. From her very detailed talk, I got the idea of a piece of work being seriously pursued, but my books seen through her eyes prove unrecognizable to me. I am sure this Lotaria (that is her name) has read them conscientiously, but I believe she has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.
I tried to say this to her. She retorted, a bit irritated: "Why? Would you want me to read in your books only what you're convinced of?"
I answered her: "That isn't it. I expect readers to read in my books something I didn't know, but I can expect it only from those who expect to read something they didn't know."
(Luckily I can watch with my spyglass that other woman reading and convince myself that not all readers are like this Lotaria. )
Passing again beneath the ginkgo, I said to Mr. Okeda that in the contemplation of the shower of leaves the fundamental thing was not so much the perception of each of the leaves as of the distance between one leaf and another, the empty air that separated them. What I seemed to have understood was this: an absence of sensations over a broad part of the perceptive field is the condition necessary for our sensitivity to concentrate locally and temporally, just as in music a basic silence is necessary so that the notes will stand out against it.
"For this woman," Arkadian Porphyrich continues, seeing how intently you are drinking in his words, "reading means stripping herself of every purpose, every foregone conclusion, to be ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book, beyond the author, beyond the conventions of writing: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not yet have the words to say. As for him, he wanted, on the contrary, to show her that behind the written page is the void: the world exists only as artifice, pretense, misunderstanding, falsehood. [...]"
[...] I have no interest in writing a suburban California survival memoir, either, and I write about myself like a bad bowler anyway, always headed straight for the gutters of historical context rather than for the pins of personal revelation.
cute
“The children of California shall be our children,” Leland Stanford told his wife, Jane, when they decided to build Palo Alto. It’s a grandiose claim, but as applied to me it’s not as inaccurate as I’d prefer. History doesn’t stay put: It works itself under your skin in fragments like shrapnel; it steals into your bloodstream like an infection. I’m a product of my environment, and I’m shot through with its symptoms. If that experience is to be useful rather than obfuscating, then it’s as a place to start, a set of intersections between biography and history.
The rush called into being a new creature: the California engineer, master of water, stone, and labor. These frontier scientists were a superior, more evolved form of the panner, still entrepreneurial (and often motivated by an equity share in the project rather than a wage) but also dependable and often college-educated. California exported these men to English-speaking colonies, from the Hawaiian Islands to British-occupied India and Palestine to South Africa and Australia to foreign-owned mines in South America and East Asia. There they replicated their Golden State experience, turning the water against the land and subordinating the nonwhite laboring populations. California’s cowboy scientists helped transform the colonies for commodity agriculture and the societies for white capitalist rule, increasing the profitability and therefore the plausibility of colonial projects. As Jessica Teisch observes in her book Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise, the “California model” was so adaptable because it reformatted the relationships between capital, labor, and the environment according to a generic formula: Anglos rule; all natives are Indians; all land and water is just gold waiting to happen. Geopolitics took on the character of the gold rush, as European colonial powers engaged in competitive scrambles for colonial territory in sub-Saharan Africa and China.
When the Quicksilver Mining Company took over at New Almaden, workers quickly realized they faced a new, worse order. The American owners took a holistic orientation toward the workers, extending the mine’s control over their lives. Quicksilver instituted a company store, monopolizing commerce in “Spanishtown” and jacking up prices for new, inferior goods. The owners claimed title to everything on company land, including the homes workers built for themselves and even the firewood they were accustomed to harvesting for use and sale. Quicksilver banned independent peddlers, merchants, and water carriers, as well as Mexican-run taverns and restaurants. In their place, a company saloon served expensive rotgut. The new mine owners changed the compensation metric to one they controlled and started paying monthly instead of biweekly like the Brits had. Real wages fell, and workers ended up in perpetual debt, borrowing to pay for essentials such as food and funerals. By 1865, New Almaden’s Mexican laborers had had enough of U.S. capitalism, and at least 600 of them (along with some white coworkers) halted production and issued a set of reform demands. The Quicksilver company petitioned the genocidal state militia, which in turn petitioned the Northern California regiment of the Union Army, which, having finished defeating slavery, came to San Jose to intimidate the state’s largest Mexican-American community back into the mine. What had been a relative haven for the state’s Spanish-speaking population during the war and gold rush years became a trap. As much as anywhere this was the birthplace of the Mexican proletariat, forged in contrast and service to the new white owners of California.
now San Jose
At New Almaden we can see the steps in the proletarianization dance: the alienation of indigenous and peasant populations from the land, the formal establishment of white racial rule, scientific management continually optimizing for maximum profits, looming soldiers. It all adds up to a laboring class with no legal way to reproduce their lives except to sell themselves hour by hour to an employer, on the employer’s terms.ii Anglo-American settlers found themselves correspondingly enfranchised, whether squatting on land until the government recognized their claims or getting grants legitimately by joining a militia gang and murdering Indians on the state’s behalf. California’s agriculture was ranch-based, with amber waves of grain and large herds of cattle, so there was no significant yeoman tradition. Instead, California smallholders saw their titles as speculative investments that they could sell or rent to planters and other capitalists, less territory than an increasingly valuable entry in the expanding U.S. property register. After the Homestead Act, for example, mill owners encouraged their employees to register timber claims and then lease them to the company. That didn’t always work out so great for the small speculators, as I’ll explain in the following chapter, but they weren’t wrong about the land’s potential value. It soon came to outshine even the gold.