Tag Archives: Books

More on the Industrial Revolution: or why I post in and read English

October 15, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , ,

The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648 – 1815 repeats a theory that partially contradicts the thesis of Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms. Tim Blanning quotes another historian: “‘France was not disastrously behind [in the 1780s [economically]], and the Industrial Revolution might have taken off there with only a few years’ delay in relation to England. But the “national catastrophe” which the French Revolution and the twenty years war meant to the French economy would intensify the discrepancy and make it irremediable'” (the outer set of brackets are Blanning’s, the inner mine). The French were hobbled by wars and revolution around the period of the Industrial (R)evolution, preventing them from exploiting the inventions of the time or developing the capital stocks to fund industry. Instead, they spent all their public funds on war. Had they not been so focused on war, England might not have been the big winner in technological and other terms. Clark argues that English cultural and possibly genetic evolution were the primary causes of the Industrial Revolution’s occurrence in England, but he doesn’t give enough credence to or effectively rules out other factors like geography or politics.

A longer post on Blanning is coming.

Edit: In addition, Blanning implicitly criticizes writers like Clark: “Indeed, the idea of a revolution occurring in the economic history of the world, which then affected every other aspect of human activity […] was given a new lease of life in the middle of the twentieth century.” In other words, Big Ideas like Clark’s are a relatively recent product, and they go back a long way—each one discrediting or changing the one prior.

Good advice for writers

October 13, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , ,

Mark Sarvas writes in The Elegant Variation regarding edits: “[…]I’ve learned to remove ego from the equation in these settings.”

Wise words concerning writing—I try to accomplish the same in my work. Although I’m not a novelist, I am a writer and most clients are unfamiliar with the writing process. When relationships or assignments sour, it’s often due to ego problems that are avoidable.

The Lucifer Effect — Philip Zimbardo

August 23, 2007 By in Books, Links, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil will probably have the misfortune of being an extremely important book that does not find the larger audience it deserves. Its author is most famous for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) in the 1970s, in which he divided two groups of normal Stanford students in “prisoners” and “guards” and observed the students assuming their respective roles with frightening quickness and, on the part of the guards, alacrity. The Lucifer Effect is the first time Zimbardo has detailed exactly what happened in the SPE, and he links it to the recent scandal in Abu Ghraib. To judge from recent events, it will not be the last time scandals like Abu Ghraib happen.

If I could sum up The Lucifer Effect, I’d change a quote I recently posted from Robert Heinlein, “secrecy begets tyranny,” to “bad systems beget bad results.” Zimbardo’s argument, made in meticulous detail on the SPE and then paralleled with Abu Ghraib, holds that in some situations normally healthy people can quickly take roles leading them toward brutality and that our personalities may play less of a role in the extent to which we fight injustice than many of us would like to think. These claims are extraordinary, and The Lucifer Effect must be read in full to understand them and the situations, which usually involve lax oversight by supposed authorities and arbitrary rules, that allow abuse to occur.

Some details from The Lucifer Effect haunt, as when Zimbardo says that when prisoners in the SPE were “released” early, other prisoners or guards often said nothing and made no mention of those who had come or gone, as though they were the trapped rabbits in the bizarre warren from Watership Down. The world the prison creates seems almost independent of the world prior to the prison, bringing to mind Kafka or Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon The latter’s portrayal of psychological torture is political in nature, but the parallels between the SPE and it are there: the uncertainty, the apparent lack of thought on the part of guards, the sense of timelessness and the extent to which people become the role rather than vice-versa.

Despite these issues, Zimbardo’s last and too short section deals with how to combat bad systems. He writes: “Heroism often requires social support. We typically celebrate heroic deeds of courageous individuals, but we do not do so if their actions have tangible immediate cost to the rest of us and we can’t understand their motives.” Such was the case of rabble-rousing prisoners, and such is often the case with political reformers. Passages like this remind us of the larger ideas implicit in the particular actions, and Zimbardo skillfully generalizes from specific incidents and then brings the generalizations back to concrete examples, zooming in and out with the precision of a philosopher and the writing talent of a novelist. In the last and perhaps most important section Zimbardo discusses further research concerning how people disengage their moral senses and conform to communal norms and the like, and, in particular, dehumanization as it affects those in positions of power compared to those who are not.

Only occasionally does Zimbardo go too far afield with his theories, as happened with the long description of burnout inventories and the Abu Ghraib scandal. His puns sometimes elicit groans even when they’re appropriate, as when he has a headline asking, “A Bad Apple or a Chip off the Best Block?” concerning a guard named Chip. Yet the section’s content is so solemn that letting in the joke, even a bad one, prevents reader fatigue—a fascinating strategy in a section concerning how people suffer burnout as a result of stress. While the stress of the reader is nothing like the stress of a prison guard in Iraq, Zimbardo’s reminder of how principles remain the same even as the orders of magnitude of importance changes is reinforced by him using the techniques he describes in writing. That and his tendency to drift into academic language (I will argue x, and then I will argue y…) are the only weaknesses in what is otherwise an excellent book and one that contributes greatly to understanding how social and bureaucratic systems work and can dehumanize both those involved and those controlled.

EDIT: Zimbardo’s next book, The Time Paradox, is probably also of great interest to readers of The Lucifer Effect.

Catch-22 and overrated novels

June 28, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

Lester Hunt thinks Catch-22 is the most overrated novel of the Twentieth Century, a stance I strongly disagree with (link originally via Marginal Revolution, which also asks what readers think the most overrated novel is).

The most pernicious aspect of Hunt’s post is that it misrepresents Catch-22: he writes, “But it consists of basically the same joke over and over again: military people are evil and stupid. They are also stupid and evil.” The joke is that military life—like much of life, especially in bureaucracies—is absurd, and made all the more so by its officiousness and self-importance and lack of awareness of its officiousness and self-importance. With this starting point, Hunt goes on to say that, “It’s a bad argument,” for Catch-22 to argue that military people are evil and stupid. But literature, even satire, is not necessarily written to make an argument: its point, if it has one, is to create art which exists for its own sake. Even so, and even if his initial point is correct, he’s dangerously close to making an argument like the one I attacked in The Prisoner of Convention, a post about Elmore Leonard: that you have to have the “good guys” in a traditional sense—white knight, armor, etc.—be more sympathetic than the “bad guys.” Novels should have the option of making one perceive a situation from other points of view, and one major point of a great deal of art, especially in writing, is that it is often difficult to tell who the bad guys are. (Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and always has been and always will be, right? So why did the former Secretary of Defense shake his hand? We’ve always been at war with Eurasia, right?) If art lacks this option it becomes propaganda.

Although I’d need to reread Catch-22 to cite textual elements for my criticism, I’d suggest Hunt start with some reading with regard to his fourth point, “[t]here is less than meets the eye[:]””Spindrift and the Sea: Structural Patterns and Unifying Elements in Catch 22” by Clinton Burhans, Jr., “It Was All Yossarian’s Fault” Power and Responsibility in Catch-22″ by Stephen Sniderman, both in the journal Twentieth Century Literature, and “War and the Comic Muse: The Good Soldier Schweik and Catch-22” by J. P. Stern in The English Journal. As far as books go, Critical essays on Joseph Heller by James Nagel is probably worth reading, and even big boy on the block Harold Bloom wrote in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

My own choice for most overrated novel depends on whether one is dealing with the question of whether a novel is overrated by critics of the general public. As The Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list shows, the two have substantially different ideas about what constitutes greatness. I’m more concerned with what “The Board” thinks, because its choices are more likely to stand up over time, but my choice overlaps: Catcher in the Rye, a novel that manages to combine spectacularly boring writing with a whiny, indulgent brat. Its only redeeming quality is that high schools assign it—or least mine did—despite the swearing and such, thus potentially moving out of the curriculum books like Ethan Frome—though mine made us read it. Read might be too strong a word—mind assigned it.

To Kill a Mockingbird is also a decent choice, but I doubt most scholars and critics take it seriously anymore, so it does no harm on high school reading lists, and probably a fair bit of good: it’s simple in language but still has enough to sink one’s ill-developed intellectual teeth into, and the symbolism is readily understandable even by 13-year-olds. Catcher in the Rye, on the other hand, still seems to have institutional support. I suspect that when the literature professors and teachers who came of age in the 60s retire, Catcher in the Rye will fade into a curio of its time. D.H. Lawrence I don’t love and can’t see aging well, but he is extremely important in terms of the novel’s history. On the Road is another vastly overrated novel, but I hesitate to call it the most overrated.

The Dud Avocado

June 14, 2007 By in Books Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

The Dud Avocado is a sustaining delight, although some plot twists almost threw me off the imaginative train. Now, after the novel’s last page, they seem fitting, which I suppose is the mark of a good twist: you don’t like it or you find it implausible, but it comes to feel so organic that conceiving of the novel without the twist becomes impossible. Then again, even were the surprises unacceptable, I would still like The Dud Avocado for its language and, at times, innocent snark; one of my favorite lines I will repeat in conversation, modified to suit the circumstances: “We treat each other like a couple of minor United Nations officials, Bax and I. Very protocol, very wary.” With lines like that, what’s a little oddity in the plot?

There were a few other signs of stretching: one character underwent an almost spontaneously change, or so I thought, though in retrospect the transition was foreshadowed if I had cared enough to see—there’s a little bit of the mystery genre in every novel—and now I can see its importance for Sally’s development: she learned she can’t fully trust others, though this sets up an ending that can be interpreted several ways I will not reveal here, as it contributes to an ending as fitting and sparkling as the rest of the novel. Throughout it, you get some philosophy bound with humor—”I gave up wondering if anyone was ever going to understand me at all. If I was ever going to understand myself even.”—and bound with seeing Sally struggle, but not too hard, and not so much that you think she’s going to find herself six feet under. It would be no easier imagining disaster in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Holly Golightly is Sally’s most obvious literary kin, although I suspect The Dud Avocado is the better book (I say “suspect” because it’s been too long since I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but remember it being considerably shallower than The Dud Avocado).

For one thing, Sally is more interesting and self-aware than most heroes, even as she tries at times to be cynical and tough and succeeds no better than she would trying to be the Queen of England. But she is not silly in a disreputable or trivial fashion. The book’s tone might make some readers think it trivial, but The Dud Avocado has much to say about how to grow up (with a sense that the world won’t end and you should feel free to explore) and how to love (with abandon, but not so much as to lost perspective or drown yourself in someone else). Life, Sally realizes, is hard, but not so hard that you should become hard in response, lest you lose what makes it worthwhile, and Sally says, “now the whole thing seemed really more comic than tragic. I found I was almost enjoying myself.”

I feel the same way about reading and many things besides.

More on reviews

May 2, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

I commented previously on the decline of newspaper book reviews, and even in the short month and a half since then much has happened, as chronicled in the National Book Critics Circle Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. Note particularly Michael Connelly’s perspicacious post.

Now the New York Times weighs in. They’re hardly a disinterested party, given that they have one of the strongest, if not the strongest, newspaper book reviews in the country, but the article covers the debate: do book reviews matter in the age of blogs, and if so how much? The debate is occurring chiefly among bloggers—or the public part is, anyway. I like Maud Newton’s assessment:

“I find it kind of naïve and misguided to be a triumphalist blogger,” Ms. Newton said. “But I also find it kind of silly when people in the print media bash blogs as a general category, because I think the people are doing very, very different things.”

I agree, and I do not like to think of myself as a “triumphalist blogger.” But I cannot perceive what force could stem the decline of newspaper reviews, and enlightened self-interest seems unlikely to suddenly ascend in newspapers, and so view the rise of blogs as more or less inevitable, whether it is a net gain or loss. In an ideal world both would coexist, complementing each other, but that works only if newspapers continue to provide real coverage.

The Amis Inheritance

April 23, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , ,

The New York Times Magazine from yesterday ran a long article on “the curious writerly firm of Amis & Amis, founded by Kingsley, who died in 1995, and now run by his son Martin.” It deals with an obvious question in the lives of both writers, but one that hasn’t often been seriously examined because Martin is equally often hostile and dismissive of those who ask one-off questions about how Kingsley affected his writing. Take this response from January titled Martin Amis: You Ask The Questions; The novelist writes in answer to ‘Independent’ readers about misogyny, Islamism, Iran’s nuclear threat and Kirk Douglas’s naked body:

How do you think you might have ended up spending your working life if your father hadn’t been a famous writer? JOHN GORDON, Eastleigh

Well, John, that would depend on what my father had chosen to do instead. If he had been a postman, then I would have been a postman. If he had been a travel agent, then I would have been a travel agent. Do you get the idea?

That echoes dialog between John Self and a character named Martin Amis in Martin’s novel, Money:

‘Hey,’ I said, ‘Your dad’s a writer too, isn’t he? Bet that made it easier.’
‘Oh sure. It’s just like taking over the family pub[,]’ [Martin said.]

Money also tempts an autobiographical reading into aspects of the protagonist, John Self, as he also has an overbearing, promiscuous father and other similarities to Martin. To be sure, I doubt even people inclined towards biographical readings would argue that the Self’s excesses reflect Martin’s lifestyle, but there are certainly parallel elements.

The father figure issue is a subject Martin must get far too many questions about—perhaps his equivalent of “where do you get your ideas?” or like John Banville being asked about Benjamin Black. As a result, the article from The New York Times provides as good a summary as one’s likely to find about them in particular and literary progeny (in a literal sense) in general.

This Amis mania—the links above are just a smattering of recent press coverage—probably comes in part from Martin’s new novel, House of Meetings, and from Zachary Leader’s new biography, The Life of Kingsley Amis. Christopher Hitchens reviewed it favorably in The Atlantic. “Favorably” probably isn’t a strong enough word, as Hitchens says: “In this astonishingly fine and serious book, which by no means skips the elements of scandal and salacity, Zachary Leader has struck a near-ideal balance between the life and the work, and has traced the filiations between the two without any strain or pretension.” The rest of the article discusses little about the book but much about Hitchens’ recollection of Kingsley, as Hitchens knew the father and knows the son, and so complements the larger work.

Like Hitchens, I loved Lucky Jim when I read it, but I didn’t care for Girl, 20 the first time through. I recently gave it another shot, though, and changed my opinion, making posting the previous link a tad embarrassing to post. Regardless, “The Amis Inheritance” is worth reading, as are the books of Amis & Amis.

An update: The New Yorker also has a piece on The Life of Kingsley Amis available online.

Update # 2: Terry Teachout writes more on Kingsley in Commentary magazine.

Writing space

February 22, 2007 By in Life, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Inspired by BlogLily, I took a picture of where I write. Unlike some, I haven’t cleaned up, so you’re seeing my desk au natural. Just to the left of my PowerBook is a stack of six books waiting to be written about and a few recent copies of The New Yorker, which further add to the chaos.

workspace2

While at Kate’s, I also noticed her typewriter post and sent her this e-mail (edited slightly):

I’m a bit younger than you and so do not remember a time without computers, and while I love the convenience of computers I also like the thrack-thrack-thrack typewriter noises and the key sensation. Some computer keyboards offered a similar tactile experience: the old-school IBM Model M and Apple Extended Keyboard II.

Both these have been replaced by soft-key keyboards, although independent companies have resurrected the older style. On the Windows side a Kentucky company sells the Customizer, and on the Mac side a Canadian company sells the Matias Tactile Pro. Like you, I also use a PowerBook, and I bought one of the (original) Tactile Pros and love it. The keyboard is ludicrously expensive, to be sure, and the noise annoys others if they have to share the same space, but it comes as close as you can get to the typewriter.

You can see the white Tactile Pro at the bottom of my desk.

EDIT: Things have changed since this was posted—see the new setup here.

His Dark Materials

November 19, 2006 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

Like so much fantasy, His Dark Materials has more commentary on our world than about its own, just as Paradise Lost is more interested in the world of men than that of God. The fingerprints of Paradise Lost are all over His Dark Materials, and intentionally so, even if one of Pullman’s purposes is the diametric opposite of Milton’s. Pullman has discussed the connections to Paradise Lost in interviews, and a quote from it starts The Subtle Knife.

If Paradise Lost justified the ways of God to Man, then His Dark Materials justifies the ways of Man to Man—or, rather, the fiery spirit and independence of the individual against the poisonous power of authority. It’s more about the relationships of men among each other.

His Dark Materials points toward self-reliance, and the American myth of it informs the books’ championing of the individual against the faceless bureaucracies. The fear of Big Brother is there, although Big Brother is the Church rather than government. It’s anachronistic to cast the Church as a villain—that would’ve been more appropriate five hundred years ago, or at least during the Victorian age, because the major potential oppressors of today are governments, not religions. Still, if Pullman is concerned chiefly with the oppression of a particular individual, his villains work, and when either institution concerns itself with reducing individual liberty, it is as terrible as the other.

Missing all that among the ceaselessly moving plot should be forgiven: The Golden Compass starts fast and never lets up. Not until the middle of The Subtle Knife does the pacing even catch a breath. Lyra, who seems built around the adjective “spunky,” has no one but herself, and like so many Romantic protagonists, begins the story as an orphan. But her parents turn out to be more in the model of the power-crazed and narcissistic ones in Story of My Life or Less Than Zero than the classical model of caring guardians who were forced to abandon her, leading to a joyous reunion. Lyra has to find companions and helpers where she can, and the motley ensemble must take on the mighty, glittering edifice of the dominant social and political structures.Over the course of the flight and then fight Lyra matures. The external plot charts the internal process of growing up: taking on responsibility, dealing with adversity, and a host of other things that, so baldly stated, sound terribly boring. Much better to represent them through a fantastic world filled by marvels and not bound by science as we know it. The external actions are a manifestation of the internal development. In many ways, it parallels the growth of adolescence into adulthood, which is even more explicit in His Dark Materials than most fantastic literature because of Lyra’s age. If the external/internal growth process sounds familiar to regular readers, that’s because it is.

Although featuring children and obviously targeted in part at them, His Dark Materials is a hybrid in the sense that adults can read and enjoy it as well as children, much like The Chronicles of Narnia. The same is true of Harry Potter, although to a lesser extent: His Dark Materials reflects a strong classical education, which allows it to function at deeper levels and with a greater awareness of what has come before. His Dark Materials is stronger than either of those series, both in terms of the writing itself as well as the content; its tone remains strong and serious, even when it is funny, whereas The Chronicles of Narnia at times descends to the level of conventional children’s stories, and Harry Potter never fully leaves that realm.

The ending, like that of Lord of the Rings, is bittersweet: the gains outweigh the losses, but those losses can never be assuaged or made whole; they merely become a burden that can be transmuted to wisdom, but the some aspects of the loss endures despite all efforts to mend them. So it is with the transience of life, and like all the best works of art, His Dark Materials has a lot to say about life—if we are perceptive enough to listen.

The Deptford Trilogy

November 17, 2006 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I mentioned The Deptford Trilogy in relation to Brian Evanson, but the novels are worth an independent post. I have a bit of trouble with whether I should write “a novel” or just “novels,” because although they were published separately, their thematic and structural links means that severing one from the whole—though any one could stand alone—would lessen their combined power, which is greater than the sum of their parts.

Those parts are fabulous: finishing the trilogy leaves one with a sense of completeness, like finishing an excellent meal but not gorging. The books are realistic and yet steeped in the mythological. If this sounds like a difficult to feat, that’s because it is. And yet the blending of myth and commentary on myth into life is so smooth that the mythic overlay is never ostentatious. It is made explicit at times, but not in a way that seems like a lecture or, worse yet, a dissertation.

The books—though I do think of them as a single book than as parts—explain thought without being didactic, and their powerful story—they do tell a single story—allows the many quotable sections to flow without damming the work.

The skeptical but not cynical Dunstan Ramsay narrates and is the subject of, Fifth Business, but only narrates the third, World of Wonders. He is, among many other things, a teacher of the sort it would have been marvelous to have; Ramsay is never fanatical about anything but inquisitiveness, is serious and yet self-effacing, and possesses the quiet and stern humor mastered by the British, but perhaps also understood by their Canadian cousins. He felt a little like a provincial Gandalf stripped of overt manifestations of power but still possessing his wisdom—only Ramsay’s is infused with irony.

Ramsay takes himself seriously enough not to be a fool but laughs at himself enough to know his own limitations. That’s probably the sanest way to go through life without being as utterly ridiculous as so many of us are.

The irony keeps him from being a joiner or true believer. It is impossible to assign Ramsay a conventional political point of view, for what he knows best is human nature, and political views are most often adapted to whatever is most convenient for their holders. The holders, meanwhile, are often unable to perceive themselves, and instead leave to the marginal characters of a society to speak, if not the truth, something close to it:

… like so many idealists, [radical party members] did not understand money, and after a meeting where they had lambasted Boy and others like him and threatened to confiscate their wealth at the first opportunity, they would adjourn to cheap restaurants, where they drank his sugar, and ate his sugar, and smoked cigarettes which, had they known it, benefited some other monster they sought to destroy.

This reminds me of someone I knew who would type his anti-corporate screeds on a Dell computer and defend his choice of a Volvo station wagon as being “less commercial.” He did not perceive the webs that made him, like all of us, complicit in the schemes we disagree with. I do not approve of China’s record on human rights, yet I write this on a computer manufactured there, and I no doubt own clothes made there. China has benefited me—but I do understand the webs that the radical party members do not, and Ramsay, though he doesn’t say as much, probably does.

As such, Ramsay is not easy to co-opt. Ursula K. Le Guin, in receiving a recent Washington State Book Award , said: “most governments dislike [literature], justly suspecting that all their power and glory will soon be forgotten unless some wretched, powerless liberal in the basement is writing it down.” Governments dislike literature and idealists dislike money: Ramsay could believe both things and avoid being a fool by being observant.

That is his chief value as a speaker: the power of observation combined with self-reflection. David Staunton, fierce lawyer and uncertain man, narrates The Manticore, is also observant, but lacks Ramsay’s inner ballast. Still, his therapy sessions illuminate much beyond his inner self, or even the lives of the principal characters from Deptford. As Dr. von Haller says: “The patterns of human feeling do not change as much as many people suppose.”

So they don’t: we read The Odyssey and see the pattern it set—or noticed—in many lives, whether our own odyssey is conquering nanotech or just getting to work in the morning. We see it today as we did then, just as our own history is seldom so exceptional as we might wish it. Much of Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, which synthesizes his lifetime of studying Western culture, focuses on history’s repetition (or rhyming). The similarity of so much of human existence is more astonishing than the differences.

For one thing, the capacity for self-deception seems eternal. As David’s therapist observes in The Manticore:

DR. VON HALLER: Yes, I think that would be best. You have got into your swing, and done all the proper lawyer-like things. So now let us get on.”

MYSELF: What do you mean, exactly, by “the proper lawyer-like things”?

DR. VON HALLER: Expressed the highest regard for the person you are going to destroy. Declaring that you have no real feeling in the matter and are quite objective. Suggesting that something is cool and dry which by its nature is hot and steamy. Very good. Continue, please.

In other words, the way one wants to appear and present oneself is perpendicular to the way one is, and we accept the deception as a way of continuing to function despite contradiction. It’s much like accepting mythic narrative: the specifics of any life or story will not completely conform to the arc, but the arc remains nonetheless. Dr. von Haller specifically talks about lawyers, but she could just as easily discuss a myriad of professions, occupations, or people.

The best part of the book is the language itself, which is so rich that I could post a quote of the highest quality for a month and still have more. I find it odd that I’ve never heard about Robertson Davies in newspapers, blogs or school. For all I know Davies is relatively famous, although this seems unlikely because I’ve seldom seen any reference. I wonder if literary politics explain why I hadn’t heard of Davies before pulling Deptford off the shelf of a bookstore. The school issue is understandable—Canadians are a tough lot for American schools: the “big” authors like Shakespeare and Joyce have to be covered, as do big American authors like Hawthorn, Emerson, and the like. Curriculums need some minority voices as well, which usually get covered by Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, and whoever wrote Bless Me, Ultima. Then, if there’s room, they want a few European writers not from Britain and maybe even an author or two from the third world. The Canadians, meanwhile, are close enough to not to count as foreign or exotic but not actually part of the U.S., so their important authors don’t get stuck in the American lit sections. Therefore, they don’t get read, although if I recall correctly Margaret Atwood is Canadian, which would make her an exception. Australians are in a similar boat: they’re of British descent and mostly white, which means they don’t get minority points, and they’re not sufficiently foreign to make it in under the third world rubric.I’d like to think that’s a view Ramsay could hold about his author’s own relative lack of fame.