CITATION HEEDED

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The book that I am currently reading has a title that makes me feel like I made it up.

It got me thinking about the section in this blog where I explain my rationale for doing this. Well, a rationale. There does not need to be more of a rationale than I like reading books and I like writing reviews, so when the opportunity arose to combine those things, I took it.

The funniest material is the most honest. And I do think it is honest. To the extent that it is not honest is my broad sense of interests getting in the way of having a definable specialty.¹ So if I then feel like I am not following its own established rules, it feels like I am cheating or violating my own rules somehow. I do not think that this is reasonable or fair. Or if anyone is reading this because of that singular definition of things, I would be surprised.

I find myself thinking about it because of that choice, and also because of doing some on-line dating recently, which requires similar acts of self-construction, of trying to be you in a coherent way, rather than Whitmaning and generally acting like the context-dependent summaries that we are.

It feels artificial, or feels like an invocation of the Just World fallacy where I want to believe that it is the sort of way in which that I am reaching people. I suspect that it is not. I cannot be sure, and this is the awfulness of social media in that there is no metric that could tell me the answer there.

I do not want it there anymore as I do not feel like it is representative, nor do I think it useful. But I do not want to trash it, so it is preserved here. Presumably I will replace it at some point.

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You know how every year or so there is a book like And Right is Wrong: A Sinister History of Left-handedness or Blowing on Some Other Guy’s Dice: Polyamory and the Downfall of Vaudeville or ****, ******, & *****: The (Edited) History of Bowdlerization?

They share a few characteristics:

1. It is usually lateral, discussing a singular thing across a span of time.
2. It is usually material, about a thing or a class of things, rather than an idea.
3. It is usually invisible, something so common as to be unexamined.
4. It is usually heretical, or mildly preposterous, if taken to its extreme.
5. It is popular, because there is no topic that is dull when discussed by someone with passion about it.²

That is you. That is what you are interested in. You probably looked to see if anyone had already written one of the examples. You are reading this because I help you find the ones that have yet to poke the eye of the marketing panopticon.

1. Alternately, that I lack any area of knowledge that I can call a speciality, but that amounts to circular logic. ↩︎
2. contra my dating history. ↩︎