Sci-fi is more the territory of the typical TeleBlog reader, but for some others, let me point to the Financial Times’ excellent profile of the aristocratic Louis Auchincloss, perhaps one of the most ungeekish authors in existence.
Genuine geeks inherently are Out. Louis Auchincloss, who comes from an old American family and spent decades as a Wall Street lawyer, has been forever In—socially, at least, even if his writings aren’t the most fashionable among either techies or the masses.
Anyone out there care to use the FT article to expand the perfunctory Wikipedia entry on Auchincloss? Ideally he’ll be one of the authors whom e-books can help reintroduce to a new generation—at least when the technology is friendlier to nongeeks. Auchincloss, who will celebrate his 90th birthday on September 27, may well have been the leading chronicler of America’s Wasp elite in the last half of the 20th century. Reading his works—among them The Headmaster’s Dilemma, a newly released novel—can help us understand it. You don’t have to love the elite (now mixed in with its share of Jewish and Catholic blood), but you’d be foolish to ignore it, even if you live outside the U.S. Just ask the Iraqis.
Wish fulfilled, unfortunately
“If my class at Yale ran this country,” Auchincloss remarked to his father, “we’d have no problems.”
Yalies, of course, were major bunglers in pushing the Vietnam War, and today the tradition continues with George Bush and the Iraq war. No prejudices, though. None other than William F. Buckley Jr., the Yaliest of them all, was writing favorably about TeleRead as far back as the ’90s.
Also on the literary front
I also enjoyed Another Side of Paradise in The New Criterion—Anthony Daniels’ essay cutting up Jack Kerouac‘s On the Road, with comments, too, on John Leland’s Why Kerouac Matters.
So when will On the Road be available as an e-book? And just how to present it? Perhaps with an elaborate series of hyperlinks so people can wander through Kerouac’s America more easily than with the P version?
It is not my kind of writing, at any rate, and I’m glad to see a contrarian view out there on the Web.
(FT profile spotted via Arts and Letters Daily.)
