She stood before Caffe Vivaldi.
She went inside.
Folk singers were performing.
The historical anachronicity of Caffe Vivaldi had increased after seven years of globalization.
Fern sat down. She ordered a cappuccino.
She realized that one of the folk singers performing historical anachronisms had also performed historical anachronisms on the night of Fern’s third date with Anthony.
In the Year of the Baroque Promise.
The same person.
Doing the same thing.
Singing the same songs.
James wasn’t there.
He’d taken his filthy mouth back to Columbus.
The advisor’d said that Anthony’s dissertation was one of the best that he’d ever read, that Anthony was a star pupil, that Anthony had conquered everything he’d set out to conquer, that if Anthony had lived he would have made an immeasurable mark on the field, and even if Fern couldn’t understand Anthony’s abstract depiction of three-dimensional reality, she should take pride in it. The advisor was working on posthumous publication. The advisor would write an introduction that served as an in memoriam.
One of the folk singers sang a song by the Carter Family. It was called “Can’t Feel at Home.”
Part of it went like this:
You could be like Anthony and go out into the wide world and chase the only thing that was worth chasing, which was neither money nor power, nor love or comfort, but knowledge.
Escape the suburbs, rise through the social ranks, read more philosophy than is good for anyone, achieve a practical application in 263 pages.
How does the world work?
The thought was trapped like methane in tar, rising up, until she heard the folksinger, until she’d spoken to the advisor, until she’d read the dissertation and understood nothing.
You could figure out how the world worked.
Anthony had.
You could develop a working model of how everything fit together.
Anthony had.
And it would mean nothing.
Knowledge was not power.
One person learning how the world worked had zero impact on how the world worked.
The boy who escaped his island only to be poisoned by the girl who’d escaped hers.
Years of fleeing Long Island.
Centuries of visiting the mortal world.
And he died six miles from the house in which he’d been raised.
The folk singer did one more verse:
Fern left New York City.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Full Throat of Christian Virtue
Back in the Twentieth Century AD, there was a genre of writing called Science Fiction.
The writers of Science Fiction speculated about many possible futures.
A great deal of these possible futures involved robots, which were machines that emulated the bodies and practices of humans.
In some books of Science Fiction, the robots were friendly.
In some books of Science Fiction, the robots were mean.
In some books of Science Fiction, the robots replaced the humans.
In some books of Science Fiction, the robots were designed for pleasure.
But the writers of Science Fiction got the robots wrong.
In the whole history of Science Fiction, across all those tedious narratives bound in paper, not a single writer predicted the actual world in which we live.
No one ever suggested that the robots would be total fucking jerks controlled by Russia, or that the robots would use social media platforms to inflame emotions around the hot-button issues facing the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial, and that this use of social media would be part of a campaign to ensure that liberal democracy ate itself from within, and that in using these social media platforms, the robots would enrich a transnational class of oligarchs.
And no one ever suggested that the robots’ use of social media would be quoted in articles written by actual journalists.
And no one ever suggested that these robots, in their mean spirit, would be indistinguishable from a plurality of the actual humans who used social media.
And, yes, reader, I know what happens to any writer who makes the mistake of mentioning Russia: instant Twitter accusations of working for the Russian government!
Let me state for the record that I don’t work for Vladimir Putin, who is the President of the Russian Federation, or the FSB, who are the state security agency of the Russian Federation.
But I would!
Do you think I want to write hack bullshit about Fairy Land?
Buy me, Vladimir Vladimirovich, buy me!
If you want to understand the Hell in which we live, I suggest taking a look at changes in the American publishing industry throughout the Twentieth Century AD and Twenty-First Century AD.
At the beginning of the Twentieth Century AD, publishing was a father-and-son business. People had a press, they published writers they liked, and hopefully it worked out.
In the 1960s AD, the industry faced existential challenges of distribution, cost, and the sudden realization that the people no longer had to read trash for their numbing dose of daily entertainment.
These challenges resulted in in a wave of consolidation and mergers.
Where there had been, say, a hundred publishers, there were now about thirty.
The mergers continued throughout the 1970s AD, decelerated for a little while, and then kicked off again during the 1980s AD.
The latter decade introduced a new element: the presence of multinational conglomerates.
After the Democratic President William Jefferson Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 AD, which deregulated rules of ownership, there was a wave of mega-media mergers that extended well beyond publishing.
Long before this happened, most of the United States’ major publishers had been bought up by mega-corporations. In the new mergers, publishing was an afterthought. It was garnish on the meal.
By the mid-2010s AD, this was the state of the publishing industry: there were five major publishers, all owned by mega-companies, with three of the five owned by corporations not based in the United States.
The Big Five were Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan.
Macmillan was owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which was based in Germany.
Penguin Random House was owned by Bertelsmann, which was based in Germany, and which I’ve insulted enough to ensure that I’ll be banished from American publishing for the foreseeable future.
Hachette was owned by Lagardère, which was based in France and was, for most of its history, powered by the manufacture and sales of weapons.
Simon & Schuster was owned by CBS, which was based in the United States.
HarperCollins was owned by Rupert Murdoch, and about whom I will soon say enough bad things to ensure that I’m banished from American publishing for the rest of eternity.