economists and bad fiction
Why are economists into such bad fiction? Why do they so enthusiastically announce that they are? Is Stross to the soft neoliberals what Rand was to Greenspan and the like?
Do you know what’s funny to reconsider in exactly this light? Marx’s thing for Dickens. Shhhh. No I love Dickens. But you know, there’s a way to my jadedly modernist eyes that maybe, if you pull the covers around on the bed just the right way, there’s a commonality there.
In order for this to be about something other than being mean and elitistly snarky about bookjackets, I have to say something about the fiction itself, don’t I? What I would say would have something to do with the basic anticipation / fulfillment / frustration model of narrative form that I somewhat idiosyncratically have been carrying around ever since I was a wee litscholar.
Anyway, more, perhaps, to come, when less worked right to the brink of adieu.
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Yeah but Marx had a much bigger hard-on for Balzac.
EC
January 24, 2009 at 5:29 am
Hmmm yeah. Just reading endless amounts of CD now so it’s frontward in my mind.
AWP
January 24, 2009 at 5:31 am
In a bookstore once in New York City, a bookstore where I had once worked, a really lovely guy sold me for a long train ride to Ithaka a Charlie Stross book, which might have been Accelerando and which said lovely and perhaps entirely correct person assured me was the best account of neoliberalism appearing in fiction, which if so (though I doubt it since surely this is Necronomicon if one is prepared to accept the populo-Libertarian drive as the true id of neoliberalism) I was never given to know, being unable after 37 pages to continue as a result of the profusion of sentences in which somebody does something often to somebody else utterly I thought unreadable.
jane
January 24, 2009 at 8:57 pm
the admiration of marx for balzac culminates in lukacs defense of realism against modernism as a symptom of bourgeois decadence. the gulf that seperates thomas mann from ann ryand is the gulf which seperates the conservative marxists from the greenspans
the irrationality, or sheer insanity, of rand can hardly be fit into this category of tame bourgeois conventionality…in their aesthetic tastes the financial republicans belie their professed rationality, their brookes brothers suits, their simple hard-headed conventionalism.
you should complete your study of the aesthetics of the reagan republicans with an examination of william buckleys spy novels.
micah
February 1, 2009 at 9:05 pm