Comments on: The five texts http://snarkmarket.com/2009/4593 The stomping grounds of Tim Carmody, Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson. It's a long-running conversation about media, journalism, technology, cities, culture, design, books, music, movies, the future and the past. Tue, 14 May 2013 15:49:32 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 By: Tim Carmody http://snarkmarket.com/2009/4593/comment-page-1#comment-7943 Tim Carmody Sun, 27 Dec 2009 22:03:05 +0000 http://snarkmarket.com/?p=4593#comment-7943 In "What Is An Author?" Michel Foucault writes that some authors' names go way beyond unifying and identifying the texts they wrote, and actually found a whole discipline. His examples were Freud and Marx -- particularly noteworthy because you could be a Marxist writing a book about Marx and offer an interpretation that was completely the opposite of what Marx said and believed, and that answer would still be within the horizon of Marxism. These author's names contained multitudes. What's noteworthy about these five guys is that their books served the same foundational function, while (with the exception of Smith) effacing their names. Calling someone a Samuelsonian economist is just redundant. Even Keynes is contested enough to make it a distinction. Samuelson is just assumed. * Muriel Rukeyser has got the goods. I remember looking at her <a href="http://www.justaboutwrite.com/MurielRukeyser_ovalframe.jpg" rel="nofollow">picture in the back of an Oscar Williams poetry anthology</a>, this twenty-year-old, elegant, modern, Jewish woman at the end of a gallery of old graybeards. She started out as a talented establishment poet, kind of like early Plath, and then got much looser and political. I'm hokey, but I've always liked her "<a href="http://www.justsomelyrics.com/1744374/Muriel-Rukeyser-The-Ballad-of-Orange-and-Grape-Lyrics" rel="nofollow">Ballad of Orange and Grape</a>." In “What Is An Author?” Michel Foucault writes that some authors’ names go way beyond unifying and identifying the texts they wrote, and actually found a whole discipline. His examples were Freud and Marx — particularly noteworthy because you could be a Marxist writing a book about Marx and offer an interpretation that was completely the opposite of what Marx said and believed, and that answer would still be within the horizon of Marxism. These author’s names contained multitudes.

What’s noteworthy about these five guys is that their books served the same foundational function, while (with the exception of Smith) effacing their names. Calling someone a Samuelsonian economist is just redundant. Even Keynes is contested enough to make it a distinction. Samuelson is just assumed.

*

Muriel Rukeyser has got the goods. I remember looking at her picture in the back of an Oscar Williams poetry anthology, this twenty-year-old, elegant, modern, Jewish woman at the end of a gallery of old graybeards. She started out as a talented establishment poet, kind of like early Plath, and then got much looser and political. I’m hokey, but I’ve always liked her “Ballad of Orange and Grape.”

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