The week in reading…

LAX “Theme Building”

The Trystero exists! “Thomas Pynchon‘s The Crying of Lot 49 revolves around a conspiracy theory about a secret postal system called “The Trystero.” Alongside the release of Pynchon’s complete eBook backlist, Trystero signs have been planted in 200 spots around the world. These signs link to an online message system, a 21st Century version of The Trystero.”

On the boon and the burden of Twitter: “There’s not much point in deploring the over-tweeters of the under-important. Just unfollow them. (Except, of course, where the elaborate social politics of Twitter forbid unfollowing.) But two-faced Twitter has also brought about, in its opposite aspect, the very last thing to have been expected from the internet: a renovation of the epigram or aphorism, a revaluation of the literary virtues of terseness and impersonality.”

Michael Agresta on the future of “TV-as-literature”: “Whereas feature films were always limited in comparison to literary novels by their brief and rigorous story arcs, TV is free, theoretically at least, to use a broad canvas and unfold over tens or even hundreds of hours of screen time. The medium has been held back only by its historical lack of niche venues for challenging but well-financed work and its reliance on advertising for revenue. From the turn of the century on, thanks to a fortuitous array of new technologies and market forces, TV showrunners have finally been set loose to try to match in light and sound what their 20th-century literary heroes wrought in ink and paper.”

Rob Corradetti, printmaker, musician, and indie cover artist, responds with drawings to his interviewer’s questions about the future of gaming, the disconnect between creator and player, how our spaces are changing to accommodate games, and the future of gaming culture.

In which Robert and Edward Skidelesky praise leisure: “Keynes asked something hardly discussed today: What is wealth for? How much money do we need to lead a good life? This might seem an impossible question. But it is not a trivial one. Making money cannot be an end in itself—at least for anyone not suffering from acute mental disorder. To say that my purpose in life is to make more and more money is like saying that my aim in eating is to get fatter and fatter. And what is true of individuals is also true of societies. Making money cannot be the permanent business of humanity, for the simple reason that there is nothing to do with money except spend it. And we cannot just go on spending. There will come a point when we will be satiated or disgusted or both. Or will we?”

Edwin Turner reviews the audiobook of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams: “Will Patton’s reading perfectly matches the tone, pacing, and depth of Train Dreams. He understands the restraint of Johnson’s prose, never tripping over into bombast or ghastly over-emoting. Patton’s wry, not-quite-dusty, not-quite-dulcet tone brings Johnson’s small cast to vivid life. In particular, he breathes energy into the humorous dialogues. I found myself laughing aloud…”

ERIC BEEN talks to THOMAS FRANK

about his new book, Pity the Billionaire.

Photo: Lisa Jane Persky

When Thomas Frank co-founded The Baffler in 1988, according to the introduction of the recently relaunched opinion journal’s first anthology, Commodify Your Dissent, its crucial mission was to “restore a sense of outrage and urgency to the Literature of the Left.” [Click here to read an interview with John Summers, the Baffler’s new editor, on our staff blog.] And, over the past fifteen years, Frank has continued to follow this ethos in his own work, publishing one progressive-leaning barrage after another on America’s political and cultural contradictions. In his first book, 1997’s The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Frank made the convincing case that some of the most iconic signifiers and artifacts of the counterculture were concocted by Madison Avenue rather than as a reaction against it. Next, in One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy, he gave a scathing account of how America’s business elite used the dot-com bubble of the 1990s to make a case that the free market is the perfect mode for organizing society. In 2004, Frank published his best-known work, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. There, he charged Republicans with duping the working class by using cultural issues to get them to vote against their economic interests, a critique sustained in The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, a survey of how conservatives have financially prospered from intentionally dilapidating Washington.

In his latest investigation, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, Frank fleshes out how and why the recent economic meltdown has inexplicably revitalized the Right when it should have led, in his mind, to the reevaluation of “conservative dogma” and the “laissez-faire utopia.” It’s a rejoinder, according to Frank, that doesn’t have a precedent in American history. “Before 2009,” he writes, “the man in the bread line did not ordinarily weep for the man lounging on his yacht.” I spoke with Frank about Pity the Billionaire on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, while he was visiting family in Kansas in between dates on his book tour.

          – Eric Been


The Evolution of Conservatism

While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues — summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art — which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. And it is these economic achievements — not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars — that are the movement’s greatest monuments.
— from What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

But the conservative flowering that has taken place since early 2009 is different. For the first time in decades, the Right wants to have the grand economic debate out in the open. The fog of the culture wars has temporarily receded … When I first started writing about market populism many years ago, it was almost exclusively a faith of the wealthy. To write about it was to write about propaganda … But then came a near-catastrophic failure of the economic system, and market populism, the sole utopian scheme available to the disgruntled American, went from being a CEO’s dream to the fighting faith of the millions.
— from Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right

Thomas Frank: Market populism — which I defined in my 2000 book, One Market, Under God, as the belief that markets were a popular system, a far more democratic form of organization than (democratically elected) governments, and which I viewed as primarily a faith of the wealthy — is now all over the place. When I wrote about it 12 years ago, it was a phenomenon that you saw in management theory and things like investment books. It wasn’t something that rallied the masses the way it does today. We should be more precise than that: It’s a movement that looks populist, that talks populist, that acts populist. And to all appearances, that’s what it is: a hard-times protest movement. Only the content of the populism is this free-market ideology. That’s very strange for all sorts of reasons. The most obvious is that free-market ideology is an experiment that was a colossal failure. And to have people rally to it in a moment of complete breakdown? That’s just bizarre.

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