• Re: The "Better-Thans" ("The" author on ----)

    From Jeffrey Rubard@21:1/5 to Jeffrey Rubard on Wed Jan 5 20:05:45 2022
    On Tuesday, August 18, 2020 at 7:48:24 AM UTC-7, Jeffrey Rubard wrote:
    Hello all,

    Some authors are the "absolute masters" of their field, at least at a time; this phenomenon is notable, laudable, and important. To give you a "feel for the idea", it is arguable that Stephen King is the best "writer" in the United States today in
    terms of simply producing texts. Whatever goals others have as "scriveners", to his fans it as though Led Zeppelin produced an album every year full of listening pleasure and few costs, isn't it?

    Similarly, though many have written on the American Civil War there is obviously only James M. McPherson at the top of a not-too-complex-or-appealing pile. McPherson's 1988 book *Battle Cry of Freedom* completely reoriented the discussion of the Civil
    War at a time younger people will not remember, away from the "Confederate sympathy" that even liberals like Schlesinger affected.

    He continued on in this vein, writing just the Civil War materials the reading public would need (it probably "went hard" with him to write a book about Jefferson Davis, but if it were to be necessary to explain...) There is no body of text on the
    subject, from whatever motive, that is as "anodyne" regarding the contemporary consequences of that series of events.

    More latterly, Ibram X. Kendi's *Stamped From The Beginning* is a near-definitive study of the history of "Africanness" in North America. Many have thought to "undo whiteness" through meditations upon the long history of outrages against African-
    Americans in the United States, but if this isn't Mr. Kendi's problem it isn't either, and the "documentary" quality of the book is at a level such that the petty concerns we have about "moral failure" on a personal level would have to be properly
    informed by such a theoretical perspective to have any "bite" or meaning.

    In another field which is *reckoned* important without always being properly cultivated, if there is to be an "American novel" it is a category which of course includes the works of Mark Helprin, 73 years old as of this writing. This "arch-conservative"
    has produced a vast number of exercises in style in various genres: his *Memoir from Antproof Case* is virtually a *refutation* of most efforts in the "zany humor" genre, for example. However, the 1983 novel *Winter's Tale* is simply one of the vastest
    efforts in an Am. English idiom and one of the few works in English to compare to the *hispanohablante* magical-realist movement. (A more recent novel *In Sunlight and In Shadow* revisits the scene of a great city, a topic in which I am not expert.)

    Helprin's "redoing" of the actual principles of Dickens is to be reckoned what a novel (as opposed to a "screaming vector of social transformation") written using the linguistic resources of American English would be. If he happens to be an older,
    shorter man perhaps overly concerned with the fortunes of the "IDF" I suppose he is. His works are simply the "tonics" that things in that category should be supposed to be.

    Similarly, though we all tire of children J.K. Rowling's works ("in that category only", for she writes adult fiction) are of course "acclaimed by fact and by right" to be the items of an "Anglosphere childhood around 2000". Ms. Rowling knew very well
    what might be expected of youth, and practically asks less of their "attentions" than older material concerned with Social Reality would. (Personally never been to a Long Island junior high, m'self.)

    As for "real-world" things like Vietnam, they are occasionally poorly served by fantasias like *Apocalypse Now*. A recent novel by Karl Marlantes, *Matterhorn*, is an "on-the-ground" account of combat by US forces in that war by one who would know. The
    rightness or wrongness of that "international intervention" can now be reckoned at a distance of half a century, but if the thing was wrong (as I was taught to say myself) a lurid sense of unreality about it can hardly help matters.

    Finally, if there must be a *de rigueur* American sociologist it is Jeffrey Alexander, late of Yale University but long of residence in Los Angeles (not a city of dreams in which one is caught up in the schemes to the extent you may have been
    instructed, as per a J. Moreland and some others). Mr. Alexander represents the best respect in which an "American way of thinking" can inform world society's view of society; "foreign imports" may be excitingly dynamic, but if there is to be "the
    Jeffrey" on the topic it's him.

    Jeffrey Rubard

    2022 Update: Identifying different but similar persons as "nonpareil" is often a good way to explain a skill or metier.

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