PrettyFakes

I’ve been doing some research and re-reading on Jack Butler in preparation for a big honkin’ project due in less than a month (that timeline is why I always seem to have just been crying whenever you see me). But there’s abundant good stuff to share. Any lover of language who has finally had to stop listening to Bush speak lest your body get stuck into a permanent cringe might appreciate this bit of wishful thinking (which is not to say that it’s impossible thinking) from Butler’s 1989 metafictional futuristic sci-fi western martian vampire extravaganza Nightshade:

One of the consequences of the cybernetic revolution had been the revival of eloquence. When programming reached the same-language level, suddenly the best programmers were precisely those people who could articulate most clearly and to the greatest purpose.[...] You do not remember what it was like before, when heroes were mute and chairmen were illiterate, when fluency was seen as the stigma of impractical dreamers and coherence was transmogrified in the mouths of Communications Experts. But suddenly, astonishingly, all those veek mulladoids who had been incapabale of a complete sentence could talk. They could write. In fact, as it developed, any un-brain-damaged human was capable of linguistic precision, power, and elegance, so long as there was something in it for him, like say the chance to make a buck.

It was serendipitous, perhaps, that the first true CEO of the U.S. had had his Ll.D., that he had battled his way to the top not in spite of, but with the aid of, Shakespeare and Yeats and Gandy. It became expedient to quote Harington and the No Poet, as it had once been expedient, in other circles, to be conversant with the Bible, or the sayings of Chairman Mao. Now that you can’t get anywhere in the business world without a firm grasp of rhetoric, good English teachers can make hundreds of thousands a year, and there is still, after three-quarters of a century, a drastic shortage of them. No, you can’t imagine now the way that it used to be. I am sure you do not believe my description of the past. You might believe this is written by a vampire, but you could not possibly believe that.

Butler lovers and longtime PrettyFakers will note that, in the future, Marcus Gandy’s star glows as brightly as Shakespeare’s. As vampire narrator John Shade (and Marcus’ former fellow writing student) notes, Marcus was famous “for the crazed and semiautobiographical fiction that finally made his reputation—Jujitsu for Christ, My Own Story, I Was a White Nigger for the FBI.” And “Harington,” of course, refers to Donald Harington, recent winner of the Oxford American’s Lifetime Award for Contributions to Southern Literature.

Here’s the very positive New York Times review of Nightshade (which I think Ed posted a link to a while back).

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 9:57 am and is filed under Books, In the Nation, In the South, Jack, Professor Fury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.