Long Sunday

A Bit of James Wood

Whatever else he may be, he gets this sort of thing mostly right:

At present, contemporary novelists are increasingly eager to "tell us about the culture," to fill their books with the latest report on "how we live now."  Information is the new character; we are constantly being told that we should be impressed by how much writers know.  What they should know, and how they came to know it, seems less important, alas, than that they simply know it.  The idea that what one knows might – to use Nietzsche's phrase – "come out of one's own burning" rather than free and flameless from Google, seems at present alien.  The danger is that the American fondness for realism combines with this will-to-information to produce a hyperliteralism of the novel:  you can see this in Tom Wolfe....

Paxless in Americana

It's a match made in heaven.  One wonders if they know each other?  A commenter on the latter, one "Big Billy" asks a good question:

What if a pair of opposing hypocrits (where one says one thing and doesw [sic] the other, and the other says the other and does the one thing) team up? As a human, I find it impossible to constantly avoid hypocrasy [sic], so why not pair up and embrace out hypocritical natures, and then we can really progress, right? My partner will do my work for me while I do his work for him. We will both get our jobs done while approaching more exagerated extremes.
But then again, we're probably better off if you just call me an idiot too.

In this our quest, for the ultimate blog brevity I then leave it to you, dear eater, to draw your own excursions.  For it is a black and white world, with the Author sitting f'evern top (ever'n especially whilst claiming the bottom!) and we was only ever kiddin', once Hugh challenged e to a duel. 

A duel, e says!  At dawn, no less.  E dunno, somehow "be offended, but say so" just don't 'ave the same ring to it.    An' sometimes it be da fools who call idiots, "idiots" best.