the politics of analogy always tend right: Putin as Yeltsin's heir, not Stalin's

When Americans decide that so and so is a dictator, so and so always becomes Hitler. Except in the case of Russia. American pundits have a great time making the connection between Putin and Stalin. It is a mythogram that is set and fixed in the narrative.

However, it is absolute nonsense.

Stalin’s economic and social policies look nothing like Putin’s. One doesn’t see a major purge of former Putinista trundling off to the camp. One doesn’t see the enormous resources devoted to an industrialization that will create a proletariat which will retrospectively legitimate the regime. To put very briefly events that deserve, and have generated, opuses. Opusi?

No, the Russian leader that Putin resembles most closely is America’s favorite Russian leader, Boris Yeltsin. From the crony capitalism, which brings into alignment the government and certain favored oligarchs, to the manipulation of the media through companies that are aligned with the ruling party, to the use of war as a means of stirring up nationalism and support, to the reliance on primary products as the base of the economy, it is all Yeltsin. Of course, Putin isn’t a drunk, and he hasn’t shelled parliament or signed any treaties breaking up Russia between glasses of vodka. Plus, he hasn’t allowed Western economists of the privatize and profit school to share in the gravy of the Russian economy. But Putin is a product of Yeltsin, both politically and programatically. The class that favors Putin is the clas that favored Yeltsin – the class that has received, in fact, the most favors.

Thus, the backstory of the convenient forgetting of Yeltsin and the conjunction of Putin and Stalin has to do with a piece of shared history. Somehow, though, neither side – Yeltsin’s abettors in the West, and Putinistas in Russia – want to credit that history.

This is what makes the “defense”  of Russia in, for instance, Ukraine such a muddled thing. There are, indeed, unregenerate leftists who really do think Putin’s Russia is like unto the kind of socialist project that needs to be defended against capitalism. This is rather like defending Kuwait’s socialist project against capitalism. It is moronic. It isn’t even sweetly moronic. It is simply making Russia a rag for political anger generated elsewhere.

No, the defense of Russia should be confined to the criticism of obvious stupidities in the attack on Russia by unregenerate neo-libs and cons. I always think that what happened in Ukraine shows how off the mark both sides are. To my mind, the Maiden revolution choked what would otherwise have been an election that would most likely have overturned the corrupt as fuck Party of the Regions. It would have put in place the corrupt as fuck opposition parties. And it would have moderated the issue of accepting the EU’s terms for economic aid, as opposed to Putin’s.

Instead, what happened is that the heart of the Party of the Regions’ vote – Crimea – voted itself out of Ukraine with the aid, obviously, of Russia. I don’t think the vote would have gone against that course even if it had been overseen by some international body. Crimea was responding to the loud, radical right in Kyev. In doing this, however, Russia created a very unbalanced Ukraine, in which the heirs of the Party of the Regions vote will never gain a majority in the Parliament. This is a very Yeltsinian outcome, of course – the grab for power leading to the quagmire that disturbs that quiet period during which the powers that be can digest their booty.

The EU and the US have, of course, made up a different narrative that simply excludes the history of the recent past – one of the favorite tricks of the interventionists in the opinion world, who disdain referring to recent history – they prefer high sounding labels, Democracy, Stalinism, etc., which they attach with abandon to the baggage they intend to support, regardless of whether the baggage is mislabeled or not.

It isn’t really that hard to remember recent history and to make reasonable inferences, however. That is what the Internet is for!

the era of splaining 'splained

The Upshot was supposed to be the NYT’s ‘splainer. Splaining is very popular among the center-liberal crowd who went from their twenties to their thirties in the Bush and Obama years. The center of the ‘splainer universe is Vox, which has decided the gimmick is to present opinion pieces as though they were explanations. It is as if you received a box containing, say, the parts for a tricycle, and were given an instruction sheet that told you why the person who wrote it prefers a red to a blue tricycle. This is why it is ‘splaining. Usually, there will be some grafs thrown in, as though we were big boys now, but grafs are only convincing in a convincing context. For decades, the climate change denialists would use a graf to show that the climate worldwide was actually getting cooler. Easy to do: just take the outlier peak of 1998 and graf everything from that.

And so it is with the Upshot. Every once in a while, the Upshot magisterially surveys the presidential race so far to tell us all what its about. And it always includes grafs like this one:

“The polls get most of the attention, but they’re not the most important part of the early stages of a presidential campaign. The better guide to who’s really winning is known as the “invisible primary,” in which candidates compete for support from their fellow politicians, from party leaders and from donors.”

This is a very press-centric view of how presidential campaigns function. And as it has crashed into the fact that the polls are actually driving, for instance, the invisible primary – why else is Jeb Bush now number 2 on their little chart – it has remained in place, just as a sort of sign that says: peons stay out. Serious ‘splaining going on.

In fact, to say what is and what is not important about a dynamic system is – as explained by even a brief acquaintance with any of the literature – requires not only being able to break it down into its “natural” parts, but the ability to build it up again into the way those parts function with each other. The Upshot people have, in their wisdom, divided one set of facts – the polling of the population of voters – from another set of facts – the inputs from funders and established political figures. And in their account, the latter drives the former.
However, this kind of dynamic has not been the story of the campaign so far. Now, to the ‘splainers, since this is the kind of dynamic that gives them the advantage, knowing the insiders and all, this is very disturbing. So, the way to paper over that disturbance is to pretend it isn’t happening.
An excellent example of ‘splaining in action occurred when Trump basically blasted the war record of John McCain. McCain is a hero to the press corps. Famously, a Times reporter in 2008 compared being around McCain like being able to hang around a football hero in high school. So the attack on McCain, they naturally assumed, would create a great wave of horror that would topple the Trump clown.
Not only did this not happen, but the Trump clown has grown in the popular polls. This has led to the ‘splaining meme of the leak. The leak will sink the Trump “balloon”. This metaphor has been independently discovered by Politico, Vox, the Upshot, and other fine outlets of ‘splaining, and they are all watching for their prediction to come true. Meanwhile, the invisible primary’s number one, Jeb Bush, has been having a campaign much like Humpty Dumpty’s after the unfortunate wall incident. And his response has had that entitled touch which crosses Mitt Romney at his country club worst and Neil Bush explaining Silverado:

“If this election is about how we’re going to fight to get nothing done, then I don’t want anything, I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation. I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, be miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that.”
This is the kind of talk that endears Jeb to the ‘splainer heart, since gridlock is a terrible thing. It has prevented, for instance, that Social Security reform that could have tracked us onto privatizing that thing, and lowered social security benefits as well! There’s a graf somewhere that ‘splains how great that would be. Plus, of course, the idea of cool is something you don’t have to analyze among the thirties group: they all love cool unthinkingly, with all their invisible polling heart!
I am wondering, though, whether the cool kids aren’t about to turn on ‘splaining. After a while, it seems a bit, oh, patronizing…

the decoder ring

We name our epochs or ages like we name our pets – to give them a handle. Spot may have spots, and the industrial revolution might, in some places, have indicated an enormous increase in manufacturing. But when we fall to quarreling over the name, we are, perhaps, succumbing to magical thinking. Spot may also rove, like Rover, but she still has spots. She thinks of herself in entirely doglike terms, so it is impossible to say that she gives herself something like a name at all.

There is something, well, vocational about a name – a name is also a calling. Mysteriously, an age seems to conjure into being its symbols, which coalesce around what we call it. This happens even on a trivial level. Thus, the post-war era, in which transistors and computer languages figure so largely that it has been called the information age, gave birth, on the level of children’s toys, to the decoder ring.

The decoder ring evolved in the twentieth century about the same time structuralism as a recognizable school of thought emerged in academia and the popular press. Levi-Strauss’s Les structures elementaires de la parenté appeared in 1949, the heydey of the radio show, Jack Armstrong, which promoted a whistling ring and a decoder pin. In the popular memory, which operates much as Freud theorized that dreams function,  these things have coalesced into the “secret decoder ring”. As far as I can tell, the fabulous object itself did not yet exist, as such.

In fact, what we discover at the origin of the decoder ring is a shift in the binary distributing properties to the boys and the girls. A pin, of course, is coded female. A badge is coded male. But in the thirties, when Shirley Temple and Captain Midnight offered decoder toys, the toddler male was often an in-between thing. I remember pictures of my own father when he was around five, in the thirties. His hair rolls down in a luxurious blonde wave, to his shoulders. He wears – or am I wrong about this? – a rather effeminate Buster Brown outfit. This was not due to some aberration of my grandmother, but rather, expressed an entire conformity with cuteness as defined by the upper middle class of that time. In stories from that era, the boy wearing such things was often the target of the street kid – the son of a worker, the kid signalled by his ain’ts and his dirty knuckles and face.

In the post-war era, the fashion for long haired male toddlers dressed in girl-like clothes waned. Pins became badges. And the badges were often surmounted by violent male emblems, like guns, or atom bombs.

Yet the ring remained. This is of interest. The standard WASP prohibition of most male jewelry did not extent to the ring. True, single men did not often, under this standard, wear rings – that was confined to ethnics, with their pinky rings. But the military established a certain acceptance of rings as the kind of insignia that a man could wear without embarrassment.

I could compare, at some length, this prehistory of the decoder ring with the pre-history of structuralism, which also begins in the era of movies and radio shows – the twenties and thirties, when phenomenology, formalist literary theory, and Sausserian linguistics came together in places like Prague or Moscow (where the people who met to hash these things out, like Jan Mukarovsky or Roman Jacobson, were part of circles).

The secret decoder ring came together in a supreme act of bricolage at some point in the late fifties. It was if not the golden era, at least the silver era of prizes in boxes of foodstuffs (of no nutritional value) for kids. Breakfast cereals used these “premiums” to sell their stuff, and in so doing they sold the cartoon that the ring was usually associated with. Sometimes, though, it was other products that promoted themselves through rings. Thus, the cartoon Jonny Quest, which accurately reflected a racist, imperialist mindset that ran through this stage of the American empire, was associated with a magic ring, which seemed predicated on the old idea, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny – the ring had forur distinct components (a magnifying glass, a dial a code a signal flasher and a secret message compartment) that were all distinct components of earlier rings.

The classic decoder ring was, indeed, the ur structuralist text. The ring contains two bands. The inner band has inscribed on it the alphabet and numbers 1 through 9.The outer band has a corresponding sequence of letters and numbes. One has merely to establish a turn for the inner ring: say, one notch, to change the a to a correspondence to a to b. Voila, the code! Elemental structures of kinship, indeed – here was all the exogamy and secret names you could want.  

Perhaps the Jonny Quest ring, with its baroque structure, signaled the coming decline of structuralism. It came out in 1965. A year late, in October, 1966, Johns Hopkins sponsored a conference on the latest wave of European thinking entitle, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structural Controversy" at which, for the first time on these shores, Jacques Derrida presented a paper commonly thought to foreshadow the coming destruction of structuralist hegemony: "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences."

The decoder ring, as it were, was broken.

Which is another story.

a day in the life

This weekend we had a late afternoon picnic over at Emerson Reed Park with some friends. The friends had two kids, one five and one seven. We have Adam, now three. The Park is a heterogenous space. There’s a large structure that houses a theater, a typical California house circa 1940 with the Spanish look – whitewashed walls, red tile roof. There are tennis courts, two rows of them, behind large fences with green netting to give the players privacy from the steet, I guess, which go down to Wilshire and up to the right wing of the theater, almost, leaving a little space for a garden and a fountain and some rose bushes in the between area. There is, next to the left wing of the theater, an almost acre area of grass and trees. There is a basketball court, or rather, a large asphalted area that boasts three basketball courts. There is, behind the theater, a sort of garden, with a pathway that leads down to a structure with four bathrooms. Then there’s another house, also Spanish style,  that faces Seventh street. And finally, there is the thing that interests us, a children’s play area, neatly divided into two, which lies next to the basketball court and is separated by a metal fence from it.

These are the features of the park as you would find them on a plat. My description is pathetically 1-D. But the major feature of the park, for the person who first wanders in 3-D into it, is the presence of lounging street people, who are everywhere on the acre of grass and trees, or sitting on the steps of the theater building. Some have shopping carts, some sleeping bags, some nothing. There’s a rule that is spelled out on a sign on the gate to the children’s area – no adult unaccompanied by children allowed. This is very much obeyed.

After one adjusts to the use of the acre, it soon becomes obvious that, like some watering hole in the jungle, the varieties of type all coexist there reasonably well. The basketball court is much used by pickup players, coaches teaching little league basketball, and weekend regulars. The children’s area, which, as I said, is divided, offers a sandy area, swings, a trampoline, a small labyrinth, and a low hanging basketball hoop on its one half, where the children are usually younger, and a more busy jungle gym and slide area, where the children are a bit older. Here there are some picnic tables. Here parents, grandparents and nannies sit. Adam is a traveler in both realms, although sometimes he abandons playing in the sand, swinging on the swing, trying to put the basketball through the low hoop, climbing on the jungle gym, rising and falling on the seesaw, or sliding down the slide, to hang, longingly, on the fence between the children’s area and the adult basketball area and ask, can I play basketball?

He can’t, we explain. He doesn’t like this.

After an hour or so, we all decided to head home. The five year old and Adam decided, though, to charge the seagulls that pick among the lounging streetpeople. So they charged the birds, which skittered off into flights just above the ground, and came perilously close – Adam and his friend - to this or that sleeping body, knowing enough by some instinct to veer off before they actually trod on a limb or ran into a recumbent mass. I thought, as I often do, how insane it is that our contemporary world enfolds a permanent Great Depression within it, which we all see and which we all exclude, not even thinking, from the “we” that is the subject to how we are – watching HBO or wondering whether to put “our” children in the pre-school that costs 24,000 dollars a year.

Mark Bowdon interviews enlisted men! Bystanders applaud. Heroes win!

This paragraph by Mark Bowden, defending his version of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, is the loveliest expression of the pres bubbleI have seen in a long time:

“While Hersh’s story (and Mahler’s) suggests that mine was, in effect, handed to me by administration spokesmen, it was (as the book notes) based on dozens of interviews with those directly involved, including President Obama. One wonders where else the story might come from, since the hunt for bin Laden and the mission to kill him were conducted by government officials, right down to the enlisted men who conducted the raid. Basing a story on those government sources directly involved makes it “official” in some sense, I suppose, but I have never been in the employ of the government, and have carved a fairly extensive career working with complete journalistic independence.”

Yes, one does wonder where a story about an event in fucking Pakistan would come from if not from American officials, including the President. Pakistanis? Oh please. Those guys don’t even speaka the English. They couldn’t possibly know anything about what happened on their soil. No, it was enlisted American men – enlisted – the U.S. Army – heroes! – who filled my ears. Enlisted men, not draftees. Of course, there are no uh draftees, but I thought I ought to mention that they were enlisted. Heroes!

This is how the press works, as a not very subtle propaganda machine.

His list of sources doesn’t include one Pakistani. Not one! Not even an enlisted one! Cause they aren’t heroes, I guess.

“I interviewed J.S.O.C. commander Admiral William McRaven, who helped plan and who oversaw the mission, and members of his staff. Some of the others (without listing their job titles) were Tony Blinken, John Brennan, Benjamin Rhodes, James Clark, Thomas Donilon, Michèle Flournoy, Larry James, Michael Morell, William Ostlund, David Petraeus, Samantha Power, James Poss, Denis McDonough, Nick Rasmussen, Michael Scheuer, Gary Schroen, Kalev Sepp, Michael Sheehan, and Michael Vickers. These sources—and others—worked on the case in various capacities for years and were present and often involved in the key decisions that led to the mission.”

Why, how somebody would look at that list and say that it was an official government version is just beyond me.

Oh, and here is the telling series of grafs from the Mahler piece that Bowden is replying to:

“Eleven days after the raid, an unbylined story appeared on GlobalPost, an American website specializing in foreign reporting. The dateline was Abbottabad; the story was headlined: ‘‘Bin Laden Raid: Neighbors Say Pakistan Knew.’’ A half-dozen people who lived near bin Laden’s compound told the reporter that plainclothes security personnel — ‘‘either Pakistani intelligence or military officers’’ — knocked on their doors a couple of hours before the raid and instructed them to turn the lights off and remain indoors until further notice. Some local people also told the reporter that they were directed not to speak to the media, especially the foreign media.

When I contacted the chief executive of GlobalPost, Philip Balboni, he told me he considered trying to aggressively publicize this narrative when he first posted it. ‘‘[B]ut that would have required resources that we did not possess at the time, and the information against it was so overwhelming that even we had to wonder if our sources were right,’’ he wrote me in an email.

Balboni put me in touch with the reporter, Aamir Latif, a 41-year-old Pakistani journalist. Latif, a former foreign correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, told me that he traveled to Abbottabad the day after bin Laden was killed and reported there for a couple of days. I asked him if he still believed that there was some level of Pakistani awareness of the raid. ‘‘Not awareness,’’ he answered instantly. ‘‘There was coordination and cooperation.’’

Understandably Latif, being Pakistani, wouldn’t know anythng about it. I mean, enlisted Americans! Samantha Power!

It would be totally silly to actually go to Abbottsford and interview the inhabitants. Which is why, thankfully, our American reporters don’t do such things. Imagine there was a fire in say, Chatanooga, and one interviewed Chatanoogans about it… uh, oh, sorry, bad example, since Chatanoogans are Americans, many have enlisted, and all are heroes!

It is so sad that Sy Hersch doesn’t, once, admit how Americans are heroes. He must be violently attacked by all the right people. This will not stand, this act of aggression!

the heteronormative American tone

I have a hunch that the comedy of self-consciousness, in other words, self-consciousnessery, has about exhausted itself. It is the prevailing tone adopted by white male American novelists and writers from about the 90s forward. I’ve been reading 10:04, Ben Lerner’s novel, and finding it both less irritating and less amazing than Leaving the Atocha Station – and this is significant. Lerner’s first novel was to self-consciousnessery what, say, Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans was to metaphysical poetry – it pushes the tone and tic to such an extreme that it undergoes a fatal crisis. Hmm, perhaps my analogy isn’t perfect – to my mind, the self-consciousnessery of LAS produces something interesting, the picaresque rouge as uber-self-conscious American. Perhaps it was the Spanish locale. Perhaps there was a subtle reference to Lazarillo de Tormes or Quevedo.

As David Foster Wallace made clear, self-consciousnessery with its endless fastidiousness and play of retraction and assertion was, in part, a response to a previous generation of asshole writers (Mailer, Updike, Bellow, Roth, etc.). Politically, the self-conscious style was supposed to mark and check the white privilege – heteronormativity, y’all, the great white whale itself, this time as hero. But of course it did no such thing. Updike, perhaps the most assholeish of the previous generation’s writers still set on foot and dealt  in novelistic terms with a host of female and black characters. SC-ery, to my mind, has largely failed to pick up the challenge. Perhaps I can exempt The Corrections from this charge, but otherwise, the story for the women – upper class, college educated, white – largely falls into the same as-it-ever was: women are seen as objects of romance or as failing to be objects of romance. Their interest, in other words, is outside themselves. Esse est percipi, which is one of the great formulas for disempowering the other -  the colonialist principle elevated to a cosmic injunction. Thus, the meaty american story of the last couple of decades is approached only obliquely. That story, of women – mostly upper class and mostly white – experiencing the market place and upward social mobility – escapes the SC-ery trap, which is, perhaps, designed not to trap that historic moment.

As an aside, here, let’s not be heteronormative ourselves about that moment. It is definitely a story of class and race as well. For the vast majority of American women, lean-in feminism is a joke, another management ploy in order to keep labor cheap and disorganized.

Along with 10:04, I’ve been reading a much more obscure book about NYC. Stanley Walker’s Mrs. Astor’s Horse was published in 1935. Walker was just coming off his stint as the news editor of the New York Herald Tribune, a position he held down beginning in 1927. He’d seen the peak of the Jazz Age and its collapse in the Depression. Someday, given the perpetual nostalgia for accounts of New York City low life and glamor, Walker’s book will be reissued. I can just see a NYRB edition, with a preface by Luc Sante. Walker’s tone is keyed to his generation’s wisecracking white male American. It is a language that uses the slang of the ballpark and vaudeville, and that plunges into what the American Mercury, Mencken’s magazine, used to call curiosae Americanae – the eccentric side of American life. Eccentric in the broad sense that includes lynching and the antics of California radio evangelists. It crunches down on electrocutions and adultery among the rich, with the aim of casting an unflattering light on the American booboosie, the eating, drinking, ticket paying esse who loved nothing more than gawking at the spectacles of that which supposedly violated their norms.
Mencken, Winchell, Ring Larnder, and the early New Yorker wits were very good at this. Because it is the kind of writing that presupposes the yawning cretinism of the American middle class, one might be lured into thinking that it is performing a progressive critique. But as the progress of Mencken showed, it wasn’t. It was the kind of satire that does a turn around in the fifth act. Although the businessman is a Babbit, heaven help us if we take the economy out of his hands. Although the ossified WASP is ridiculous as any kind of arbiter, in the end, he is our true bearer of civilization and lets not mess with our current arrangements, lest we get Bolshevism.
Within those limits, though, this enjoyment of the American carnivalesque does give us a point of view from which to see the limits of S.C.-ery, and in particular, the latter’s surprising piety about res publica.
About which more later.  

more on thoreau

I’ve thought some more about the essay on Thoreau that I dissed yesterday. I actually see where Schulz is coming from in her recoil from the idea that Thoreau was a saint, rather than a writer. But Schulz certainly fails to understand Thoreau the writer.

It is a misprison that comes out best, I think, in Schulz’s staging of the gotcha moment. Which is here:

“The book is subtitled “Life in the Woods,” and, from those words onward, Thoreau insists that we read it as the story of a voluntary exile from society, an extended confrontation with wilderness and solitude.

In reality, Walden Pond in 1845 was scarcely more off the grid, relative to contemporaneous society, than Prospect Park is today. The commuter train to Boston ran along its southwest side; in summer the place swarmed with picnickers and swimmers, while in winter it was frequented by ice cutters and skaters. Thoreau could stroll from his cabin to his family home, in Concord, in twenty minutes, about as long as it takes to walk the fifteen blocks from Carnegie Hall to Grand Central Terminal.”

This reading of the book can only be held if we think that Thoreau was thinking of his audience as composed of high school and college students one hundred fifty years hence.

But Thoreau did not think of his audience as composed of people reading Walden in a classroom. His audience was composed of people who knew exactly where Walden was. If, as I think is evident from the text itself, this is the case, then Schulz’s idea that the subtitle tells us that “Thoreau insists that we read it as the story of a voluntary exile from society, an extended confrontation with wilderness and solitude” is simply foolish, a denial of the mass of references and ironies that any literary text brings with it, especially one written in the train of an essayistic tradition of crossing the serious and non-serious – in other words, the romantic tradition of the ludicrous. In American culture, as I pointed out yesterday – following in the footsteps of such pioneers here as Constance Rourke and her book on American humor – the ludicrousness of Dequincy or Lamb or Byron (when he was in the mood) becomes the deadpan. By erecting a vision of Thoreau which makes Walden and all his works the direct, unironic expression of Thoreau’s personality, Schulz gives a perfect classroom reading of Thoreau’s work, one in which the idea that Thoreau was talking about Life in the Woods shows how he was throwing dust in our eyes, and hence was no saint, and hence can be tossed in the dump.

But if you are not sold on the the idea that the text can be read with absolutely no attention to the contexts that make sense of the effects it aims for, then Schulz’s piece reads like less of an attack on Thoreau than on some odd poster of Thoreau, with an inspiring quote caption, hung up in a dorm room. The class room, the dorm room – these are very much reading scenes. And of course any text that is worth killing trees for should lend itself to multiple reading scenes. But what is usefully done in a college classroom, or should be done, is to invigorate the text with its material context. If I read Thoreau mentioning dead drowned children cursorily and turning from them to evoke the landscape and I put this in some universal moral place, eliminating the time and place of the writing, I have one reaction – one tracked by Schulz. But putting the writing in the context of the vast amount of sentimental writing about dead children – Thoreau’s was the era in which the death of Little Nell in the Old Curiosity Shop became an actual cause celebre, as was famously attested by the anecdote about American readers gathering on the docks when ships from England came in, wanting to know more of Dickens’ story – than you might pause and ask what is going on here. Schulz thinks what is going on here is that a misanthrope – Thoreau – is expressing his hatred of humanity, un point c’est tout. But that an author might devise an image of himself as a misanthrope – in fact, a standard practice in the ludicrous thematic throughout romantic literature – never seems to cross her mind.
Writers lie. Hunter Thompson really probably didn’t take all the hallucinogens he claimed to have taken in his self report in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Writers lie, but they hope to illuminate something larger with their lies and sometimes they do.  Fredrich Prokosch, in his memoir, Voices, wrote that “in order to be truthful, one must always lie a little, just as in order to tell a lie, one must tell the truth a little,” The art of adjusting that ratio is the writer’s business.