Date: Tue, 16 Mar 93 21:54:25 EST
To: chriscd@jhuvm.hcf.jhu.edu
From: DFOSS%SBCCVM.bitnet@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
Comment: CROSSNET mail via SMTP@INTERBIT
 
======================================================================== 115
Date:         Tue, 16 Mar 93 20:30:43 EST
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@ccvm.sunysb.edu>
Subject:      meditations on page fifteen of the required readings
To:           World Systems Network <wsn@csf.Colorado.edu>
 
   In the Epistles of foss to the Anthropologists, currently under contract
for editorial services at a somewhat higher rate of remuneration than the same
victim of abridgment of XIII Amendment rights is currently also paid for doing
exactly the same thing for intellectual legacy of Albert Szymanski (but this
cozy arrangement - for me that is - lasts only till my ex-co-author Ralph W.
Larkin, CEO, Student Consulting Services, finds out about Szymanski's passing
if he hasn't already and offers ten times my bid which is still practically
nothing so thing of Szymanskl in Waldenbooks, Szymanski in Dalton's, a
hitherto undiscerned creatively flexible, caring, athletically supportive of
feminism without a classanalysis, poet, writer of children's books, lover of
life, liver to love. The Szymanski we want to have *was*, behold it is Written:
 
      "Computers and philosophers have boolean truth values. Cultures have
   boolean truth values for for special purposes only; and ordinarily exhibit
   an incredible variety of Thingies...."
     Also: "The most important part of the folktale is the Moral, not the
   historicity."
 
   "A folktale" and "folklore" are not merely (a) a story-form and
(b) piled-up oral vestiges of bad jokes, cynical advice, naive advice
(that is, where you find a proverb, you will likely find an equal and
opposite proverb like "better got rich quick than never got rich at all"
"slow and steady wins the race"). They are truth-values. But we also have
truth-values corresponding to narritive sequences of the "story" form which
are indubitably without historicity. These include, for instance, fiction
not withstanding its nominally imaginary character may represent the
authentically seamy spilling of that which in all decency should have
been the tediousest story never told; whilst the nominally veritible
autobiography is more than quite often the grandiosely self-deceptive
authohype, else the sucker-deceptive fakery-hype, no less imaginary than
fiction.
   Fiction is a subset of the fictitious. The fictitious is all whereto is
attributed deliberate falsity, yet not lies in that what the customer pays
for is is the presumed falsity as opposed to the presumed veracity of the
NONFICTION-GENERAL, that is, war books.
   We have, then, the fictitious, fiction, and, perhaps, the *delusion* which,
in story-cum-digrssive form tells a false story of imagined doings of assorted
people some of whom exist, others not, and the teller's own existence is of no
consequence, really.
   Once upon a time...I wrote a Thingie called, A Civilization Decades in
Advance of Our Own: or, Where Contact! by Carl Sagan Meets The Modern World
System by Immanuel Wallerstein. The idea was, Earth was by the overwhelming
probability of things within the spatial frontiers of a semiperipheral state
bearing noncoincidental resemblance to Mexico. ("Why should they care enough
to send the very best?") One one side is the "Division of Applied Antrhopology"
which implements the PRI Party Doctrine, which nobody believes, anent "the
tendency of all life towards socialism." On the other is a PAN front, making
piles of money to finance its gameplan for frustrating the PRI, called the
Indo-European Corporation. The latter owns the rights to English, the Toyota
(formerly Chevrolet) of languages; and all the spoken or classical I-E. Shalars
of Old Tocharian have got to pay their pence, even. The address of of the thing
was given as 60 Broad Street, NYC 10003; where else for a tentacular conspiracy
of vast Evil: Till 1986 it was the ITT Building ("Global Communications"); sold
then to become the HQ of Drexel Burnham Lambert, who sold the bonds which paid
for the 1980s *and* Michael Milken.
   One day I showed the story to a Shrink who said, Gotcha! producing the
Manhattan phone book where no Indo-European Corporation was listed; certainly
not at 60 Broad. Proof by documentation of psycho delusion for sure. Thsi is
what the psychologists call an *attribution*, in Social Judgment Theory. To
get your story accepted by Shrinkdom as Fiction, you must (a) look Normal;
(b) have sold it to a large corporation which owns many shares in Dalton's
and Waldenbooks; (c) or at minimum have grades consistently above B in
Creative Writing.
  ****
  [Note: Last night, I sent letters to social scientists of miscellaneous
disciplines and tenurations so I could wonder whether each took it as a joke
or a Delusion. Each letter had stuck in it somewhere the lines: "Samir Amin
said to Daniel, Prophet, In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful,
who created World Systems from clots of blood, Recite!" Islam as taught by
Salman Rushdie, got it?]
  ****
  NEVER AGAIN! I inwardly exploded in Kahanistic rage, writing sequel after
sequel until November 9, 1989 when, aw, hell, whatsauseaanythingatall. Now,
I had determined that, from a strictly scientific, objective standpoint, the
stories were *imaginative* and in places *funny*. What was wrong, that I could
not would not even TRY to make money, which is the sine qua non of effort,
already expended, not going *wasted*? Would I waste toilet paper?
   The thing of it was, I could not write dirty parts. To write fiction, at
this period of our culture if not since the novel attained its stature as both
literature and mass consumer goods in the eighteenth century, is to write the
story of a sexual relationship.
 
   All you guys know how *weird* women are. This is what they're paid for in
the aggregate species praxis. So the guy who most convincingly exhibits his
intimate acquaintance with the weirdness of women is your great novelist. This
neat and tidy system lasted a very long time.
 
   Now, back to the aftermath of my posting on the Fatimid Revolution which was
a brief letter from the Listowner in upper case plus a query, have I done the
required reading? I asked Carlo, history grad student, what the irate upper
case textual fragment meant. The answer came back, "He means, you're
disrupting his class."
 
   Which is why I am doing the required reading which reads like "something
written by a sociologist." It is NOT(T), but not fictitious, ether; it is not
fiction; certainly not *literature*. And requires the additional purchase of
annual supplements; the World System is too multivariate to be very much with
us for very long. So, if you bought the book, our library rarely has books in
it, which makes the location of the Barnes & Noble store *inside* the library
so strategic, you'll just have to suffer or you'll have wasted your money. This
way, you only waste your time, but the fetishism of commodities being what it
still is, you come out psychically ahead. It's like not wasting toilet paper.
   Those not yet doing the assignment can get in the mood with a pile of back
issues of the Economist and the Financial Times.
 
   Practically, though, look where Chris Chase-Dunn ended up and where I Ended
Up, let that be a lesson to ya.
 
Daniel A. Foss
to be continued