Saturday, October 20, 2007

Indefatigable Leo Marx ... and a Brainiac reboot

Leo Marx, an octogenarian emeritus professor of American culture at M.I.T., author of the landmark book "The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America," took Louis Menand to school in the Oct. 22 issue of the New Yorker.

Menand, a Harvard professor of English and New Yorker book critic, had recently reviewed the latest edition of "On the Road," based on Kerouac's famous "scroll" manuscript.

In the letters section, Marx wrote:

Kerouac surely does not deserve credit for [making] America a subject for literary fiction," and thus "de-Europeaniz[ing] the novel for American writers," as Menand writes. That honor, as Ernest Hemingway famously observed, belongs to Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," and Menand actually helps us recognize the extent to which Kerouac's novel is an automotive-era update of Twain's masterwork -- with the highway in the role of the river. He notes that the Beats' car (like Huck and Jim's raft) is a distinctively "male space" -- a conveyance that permits its occupants "to be together without the need to answer questions about why they want to be together." Menand all but names the crucial affinity between the two novels when he describes Kerouac's excited discovery, in a letter written by his pal Neal Cassady, of just the style for a road novel -- a style maked by the "vernacular directness and narrative propulsion he was looking for." It is a version of the de-Europeanized style that Mark Twain created with one inspired stroke when he chose an illiterate fourteen-year-old boy, the son of the town drunk, as the narrator of his own road novel.

Makes you want to read more Marx, doesn't it? ("The Machine in the Garden" has been on my to-read list for too long.) As the New Yorker beefs up its books section, maybe the editors could throw an assignment or two Marx's way.

Home-front news: starting Monday, Brainiac will complete a shift that careful readers may have noticed has been in the works for a while. It will no longer be a group blog, but rather a "multimedia column" by Josh, bridging the print and online editions of the Globe.

Josh and Jan, it's been a pleasure and an honor; Evan Hughes deserves thanks and credit, too, for helping get Brainiac off the ground. (John Swansburg, too, the former deputy editor of Ideas and sometime Brainiac.) We're all looking forward to the new iteration, which I will not refer to as Brainiac 2.0, because that would be a ridiculous multimedia cliche.

Break a leg, Josh! Or, more appropriately, garble some html code ...

Posted by Christopher Shea at 10:29 AM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss