Anyone who has ever tried to read Derrida or other cultural theory, and come away baffled, or even a bit disgusted, should read Brian Boyd’s article “Getting it All Wrong.” It’s a fabulous and bitter attack on modern literature departments’ love affair with deconstruction and cultural critique, to the absolute exclusion of alternative means of reading and analysis. Like, say, the appreciation of beauty, or considering the validity of ideas. Or recognizing that evolution and biological similarities might have something to do with the way our brains work, and with the way our ideas circulate.

A key, and valuable point: Modern “Theory” deconstructs the idea that universal knowledge is possible. “Knowledge” is an artifact of its cultural orgin, this school argues. Boyd notes that this is a misunderstanding of how humans learn. Yes, this may be a useful critique of universalistic Eurocentric philosophy. It’s a devastating rejoinder to medieval scholastic theology. But it parochially ignores the lessons of hundreds of years of actual human thought and activity.

In fact, the progress made in sciences shows a pattern of human learning that is not based on scholastic deductive logic or universal “truths,” but on long series of inductive, error-prone set of evolving theories (small “t”) that progressively add to our tentative store of knowledge about the world. We have medicine that is not culturally constructed (yes, tests have been culturally and gender-biased, but that’s a critique of the test, not of the medicine’s viability). We know increasingly more about the basic fabric of the universe, having come from the harmony of the spheres to an expanding universe and fundamental particles. And so on.

To ignore the universal experience of a *sense* of beauty, no matter if the content of that beauty changes from place to place, is just insane. Theory is blind, but there will always be readers who can see.

Violet Blue in SF has an utterly horrifying post about the bankruptcy of the biggest publishing distribution company in the U.S., and the subsequent fallout on indie publishers and authors. Royalties aren’t coming. Small houses are laying off their entire staff. Even at the large houses, trouble is serious. Random House is owed $43 million. What’s that come out to in advances? The biz is screwed for a while, authors and publishers alike, unless that money reappears somewhere.

Which, fat chance, it sounds like.

My exposure to the publishing industry to date has convinced me only that they’re utterly behind the times. The publishers for D&D were well-meaning, but completely out of touch with modern marketing, anything to do with how the Internet actually worked, blogs, email, you name it (and this was a tech publisher). Sure, it wasn’t their business. But it should have been.

There has to be a new model in the works. For paper as well as bits. Brad’s done some work on it, both with his Demon Press and with future of the book research. I don’t think we have the answer yet, but this kind of disaster shows it needs to happen fast. Like, say, before I finish this extraordinarly charming kung fu novel I spend my cafe days on.

P2P distribution, anyone? Co-op-icize the bankrupt behemoth. Let the readers do the work, and share in the profits. Sure, it’s a dead biz, they don’t make any money — but neither does classical music, and look who turned up with the biggest year-to-year growth last year.

Here’s a confession: I’ve never made it through the Illuminatus trilogy, despite trying several times, despite it being a canonical text (or maybe symptom) of the conspiracy prone, paranoid culture that led also to Gravity’s Rainbow and, say, Dick Cheney. Now its co-author, cult hero Robert Anton Wilson, is apparently sick and poor, and close to being evicted.

That’s really not what you ever want to hear when you’re a writer. But here’s where the Internet comes in. A plea for funds, rent money and then some, is going around the Net, led by uberblog Boing Boing. A day later, it looks like he’s in better shape. Go Internet. This is where the community flexes its muscles for good, instead of just hype.

Every kid should read Aristophanes in junior high. When I’m dictator of the world, this will be done. It will re-open generations of young minds to the possibilities of literature. What? they’ll say. South Park isn’t original? You mean they were doing this stuff 2500 years ago?

I picked up a few of Aristophanes’ plays at a church second-hand book sale here a few days ago, to go along with the Herodotus that I’m slowly making my way through. Read a few yesterday, and was utterly, pleasantly shocked at how entirely crude and obscene they were. I should know better by now; Shakespeare was crude, and the Romans weren’t exactly Queen Victoria’s choirboys. But in print, it never fails to surprise me.

Aristophanes was a comic poet, a satirist who prided himself on skewering those in power. Or anyone else who got in his way. He was merciless to Socrates, who he apparently considered an arrogant con man, and to the leaders of democratic Athens, whom he generally considered crooks or worse.

The heroes thus far are simple farmers and peasants, who want simple things: peace during a time of war, and not to be bothered by misguided patriotism. Wealth, insofar as that involves getting out of debts without actually paying them. Food, drink, wine. They are classic, crude clowns, who can speak truth to power for that reason.

That truth, it seems, includes fart jokes pretty much every few lines. Here’s Socrates explaining how thunder isn’t Zeus’ thunderbolt, after all, but the clouds being too full of rain:

SOCRATES: You yourself are living proof of it. You have no doubt at some time - say, at the Pan-Athenian Festival - had a bit too much soup for dinner? Well, didn’t that make your tummy grumble, not to say rumble?

STREPSIADES: It certainly does, straight away, a terrible noise just like thunder. Gently at first, then like this, and when I crap, it really lets fly — just like they do. (The Clouds)

SOCRATES: Well, if a little tummy like yours could let off a fart like that, what do you think an infinity of air can do? That’s how thunder comes about. In point of fact, I happen to know that in Phrygian - the oldest lanauge on earth - they actually call thunder “phartos.”

And so on.

On another note, the Greek comics had postmodern down to a T in the 400 BCs. The plays are extraordinarily meta, with comic asides to audience, whole sections where the chorus jumps in and takes the playwright’s voice (sounding like a rapper trumpeting his own bling), and generally undermining all the conventions that had already sprung up, winking at the audience while it happens.

It’s a shame that anyone ever gets the idea that ancient literature is boring.

A long profile in Salon of Laura Albert, AKA drug-child-prodigy author JT Leroy. She was an East Village punk rocker, a San Francisco Net sex writer in the 1990s, and a consummate role-player who invented new identities for herself whenever needed. She’s more interesting than the author she invented.

Links:

• She is JT LeRoy | Salon.com News