Which is okay. I am content with what I have done. I would like to do more but that is out of my hands in large part, because the AI infestation is gradually taking away my ability to be productive in the physical process of writing. Hardly anyone sees how bad it is yet, because hardly anyone spends as much time on a keyboard every single day trying to write outside the median cultural vocabulary. I employ a lot of neologisms, for example. AutoCorrect insists on turning neologisms into something(s) else. It’s slowing me down. A lot. Not going to prove it. Don’t need to. What I think I can prove is that I am the most prolific literarily minded writer on the American scene in my lifetime. I have done things no one else has even dreamed of doing. At this moment, my proof is all over the Internet, whether my name is on anyone’s lips or not.
When I got serious about being a literary writer, in my early twenties, I ran into obstacles I soon came to recognize as a wall. I was on a cliff facing the wall. The abyss was between me and the wall. The writers I admired were either writing vaguely about looking for a “next dimension” or accepting that the future of literature meant accepting the abyss and coming to terms with the wall; that is, accepting the absence of meaning except in the most esoteric and evanescence of terms.
It brought me up short. I had been modeling my own writing on greats who had either failed tragically to find what they were looking for or settled (in)elegantly for something far less.
What I have done that they didn’t:
Now I’m on the other side looking back. First steps? Two apparently contradictory sources of inspiration. One seeded at Harvard and the other at the great anti-Harvard called Cornell. Followed by rediscovery of a much older inspiration set from my earliest childhood. Three things that made me completely different from everybody else apparently.
At Harvard I had a course called Anglo-Saxon poetry, taught by an eminent professor to a small group of us. There was epic poetry, riddles aplenty, and smaller works or fragments that worked on their own. I learned to read the Anglo-Saxon words aloud, but I delighted in declaiming the faithful English translations to myself and listening to how it all sounded. It sounded like rows of standing stones speaking from the depths of ancient memory. Technically, they were ruled by the Caesura (a pause in the middle of each line) alliteration, and a preference for words of few syllables. (I’d had a French teacher who pointed out that in English two-syllable root words are generally Latin, three-syllable toots are generally Greek, and all the punchiest words (including are the dirty words) are from the Anglo-Saxon. I began turning myself in this direction to find a voice that sounded more like me than the one I’d been learning.
At Cornell I discovered math. In college I’d had no math except in a “Physics for Poets” course that required at least three natural science credits even for English majors. We learned how to calculate Lorenz Transformations for space-time computations, which humanities majors rejected as philosophical impossibilities based on the intimations of Wallace Stevens on a Sunday morning or something. Cornell Business School was ready for this kind of innumeracy in its MBA candidates from other Ivy schools, and we were required to attend a pre-enrollment math boot camp, featuring 8-hr a day instruction in Algebra 1 and 2 for one week, and Calculus for a second week. There was a lot of homework too. Welcome to the world of numbers.
A lot of business math is elementary arithmetic, what’s needed for accounting totals, present value calculations in finance, and the operands of computer programming languages. But there was also statistics, probability, the mathematics of prediction based on pattern recognition. The importance of these is easiest to see in what was then known as the ‘Case Study Method,” pioneered at Harvard by using the Socratic instructional methods employed in law school courses. The Harvard MBA curriculum was 100 percent case study. The U. Chicago curriculum was 100 percent quantitative, meaning you learned by studying complex subjects, not complex real world situations. The Chicago approach was harder. You had to be better at math than Socratic spinning. Other schools, including Wharton, Carnegie, and Cornell, split the baby so to speak. Heavy quantitative requirement, augmented by case study courses to provide training on integrated analysis.
Sorry it took so long to get here, but Quant+Case Study was the other new source of inspiration for my writing. What are Case Studies? They are short stories (or even novels) without endings. There is no unifying narrative. There is just evidence, in no particular order, no clear way to see in which direction a logical pleasing answer might be found. There can be income statements, interoffice memos, selected staff bios, reproductions of product advertisements, some historical timelines, dense data like funds statements and treasury stock transactions, and no list of questions at the end to guide your analysis.
Why no itemized questions? Because they’re always the same questions. “Who are these guys? What’s the story here? Is this enterprise in trouble? Probably or we wouldn’t be here. What kind of trouble? Staff? Manufacturing quality? Marketing? Morale? And how would we argue any agenda we’d propose for future initiatives?
The Harvard approach was definitely more pure and glamorous than our mongrel mix of course requirements. There was even a legendary story about the toughest Harvard case of all, some concrete company in troubles so intricate, that generations of MBA candidates were toads beneath its harrow. I’m personally convinced that the famous Star Fleet Academy case study about the”Kobayashi Maru” was actually inspired by the Harvard B-School’s concrete case.
The beginning of my realization that all writing, including, you know, all of it, is fiction. The case study is never all the data. It is always some one’s selection of the data arranged for a student to learn from. Which means it’s a fiction even if the numbers are factually correct from the records of a real world company. All subsequent analysis is based on the assumption that the provided data can be trusted as representative of the greater reality behind it. It probably isn’t.
Where the quant part has an invaluable role to play. Where do the numbers come from? How are they calculated. What are the weaknesses of the measurements we are using? How can they be manipulated, hidden, replaced? Why you do the dreary stuff in cost accounting and play with present vale calculations till you view them with as much suspicion as respect.
Contemporary American fiction is, and long has been, the Harvard Case Study approach. We trust writers in their selections of evidence in support of whatever theme they are exploring. When we ask why they make the choices they do, they point at their words, sentences, and paragraphs and say, it’s all right there on the page, as am I, because I wrote it. See?
We know more about their “fictional” characters than we know about them. When they’re young and have no other subject, they write their “autobiographical” first novel, which is a fiction designed to make them feel real and valuable to themselves first, and us second. Mostly, they hide after that, either by repeating their fictional successes with different names and settings or by going first-person in burnishing their own media personas, à la Hemingway’s “Death in Green Feast of Africa” trilogy.
And if we go back to the Case Study questions, where do we stand? “Who are these guys? What’s the story here? Is this enterprise in trouble? Probably or we wouldn’t be here. What kind of trouble? And how would we argue any agenda we’d propose for future initiatives?” The quant side of us wants more data, more about the who doing the writing. In other words, we want an answer to the question, “How much should we, can we, trust the ‘wisdom’ this person is imparting to us? Pretty writing is one thing, deep emotional responses to fictional constructs is another thing, but writing that is real enough to influence the course of my own life is a big step beyond those things. Playboy interviews don’t seem like enough background info somehow.”
Before I took my big step into the abyss, I was stewing about the ideas I’ve just described and looking for other ways to start over. How I returned to the very oldest part of my education, the part that occurred before I could read.
The nursery rhyme most deeply burned into my brain was this:
The Shut-Eye TrainCome, my little one, with me!There are wondrous sights to seeAs the evening shadows fall;In your pretty cap and gown,Don't detainThe Shut-Eye train -"Ting-a-ling!" the bell it goeth,"Toot-toot!" the whistle bloweth,And we hear the warning call:"All aboard for Shut-Eye Town!"Over hill and over plainSoon will speed the Shut-Eye train!Through the blue where bloom the starsAnd the Mother Moon looks downWe'll awayTo land of Fay -Oh, the sights that we shall see there!Come, my little one, with me there -'T is a goodly train of cars -All aboard for Shut-Eye Town!Swifter than a wild bird's flight,Through the realms of fleecy lightWe shall speed and speed away!Let the Night in envy frown -What care weHow wroth she be!To the Balow-land above us,To the Balow-folk who love us,Let us hasten while we may -All aboard for Shut-Eye Town!Shut-Eye Town is passing fair -Golden dreams await us there;We shall dream those dreams, my dear,Till the Mother Moon goes down -See unfoldDelights untold!And in those mysterious placesWe shall see beloved facesAnd beloved voices hearIn the grace of Shut-Eye Town.Heavy are your eyes, my sweet,Weary are your little feet -Nestle closer up to meIn your pretty cap and gown;Don't detainThe Shut-Eye train!"Ting-a-ling!" the bell it goeth,"Toot-toot!" the whistle blowethOh, the sights that we shall see!All aboard for Shut-Eye Town!
My mother used to read to us from the Treasury when we were very young, and that’s how I first heard about the Shuteye Train, Alice in Wonderland, the Walrus and the Carpenter, Little Boy Blue, and the Little Match Girl, and the boy sitting halfway down the stairs.
These three elements — Anglo-Saxon poetry, MBA case studies, and the children’s lit I heard at my mother’s knee combined with life events to propel me into a creative career not like any other of my my acquaintance.
I am confident in saying that there is no one alive who is competent to criticize my body of work as a writer in terms of the criteria I have extended far beyond the tottering status quo. That’s okay. All I want now is for future writers to be able to find enough of my stuff to explore the new paths I have opened up.
They say the Internet is forever. I think they mean if you’ve done something wrong it will always hunt you down. I could live with that easily enough if the converse were true: if you’ve done something new or big enough, it will eventually find its way into the open.
AsI’ve said, I can prove that what I)EV done is both new enough and big enough that it could be a direct inspiration to the young ones who will have to start rebuilding the arts we’ve allowed to plunge toward ruin.
Did someone say ‘ruin’?
I’ll explain more later.
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