I’ve been reading with great delight the just-published first volume of Mark Twain’s Autobiography. About a hundred pages in, there is this wonderful description of the man who suckered Twain out of many thousands of dollars over a decade and a half by getting him to invest in a never-to-be-functional typesetting machine.
I will remark, here, that James W. Paige, the little bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed inventor of the machine, is a most extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity; of cold calculation and jejune sentimentality; of veracity and falsehood; of fidelity and treachery; of nobility and baseness; of pluck and cowardice; of wasteful liberality and pitiful stinginess; of solid sense and weltering moonshine; of towering genius and trivial ambitions; of merciful bowels and a petrified heart; of colossal vanity and— But there the opposites stop. His vanity stands alone, sky-piercing, as sharp of outline as an Egyptian monolith.
This description put me in mind of a certain character—a novice poet, prolific penner of book reviews, and toiler in the trenches of academe. He drops names like confetti and enjoys touting the vast variety of his interests, the bulk of which exist in the pages of books favored by other denizens of the Ivoride Tower. His personal motto is a phrase borrowed from a famous Roman bisexual and which he prefers to flaunt in the original Latin: odi et amo. (It means “I hate and I love” and is sometimes mistaken for Catullus’s profoundest thought.) In a narrow sense it’s the perfect motto for this character I have in mind: He hates the talent other people possess and loves the sound of his own voice. The monolith mentioned by Twain is one this guy would recognize, if only he could sacrifice his desire to vanquish his opponents in favor of even a little self-scrutiny.
I would dearly love to name the fellow I’m talking about, but I think it best to follow Twain’s lead and leave it for my autobiography, which I expect to be published a hundred years after my death.
Good question, Chris. This guy just happens to be everywhere these days. He has a poem in a famous poetry publication (December issue, just released) that includes these remarkable lines: "You shouldn't drink diarrhea/unless you bring enough for everybody." My sense of it is that his name is the least important thing about him. ("Ye shall know them by their fruits," as
If it takes a guessing game to figure out who this mysterious character is, he can't be too important can he? Or at least it doesn't sound as if he's having much effect on anyone.<br /><br />That being said, I still think you should tell us who it is. Or skewer him in a poem. Or both.
Hey, Floyce! This is fun! Care to reveal your guess? I won't if you won't, though Facebook is at least as public as this here blog-o-mine….<br /><br />Very early on in this venue, by the way, I <a href="http://perpetualbird.blogspot.com/2008/06/hello-summer.html" rel="nofollow">posted an excerpt</a> from the version of Twain's autobio as edited by the guy whose name escaped you,
Awww, c'mon, Joe, say it ain't so. Would you admit it if someone figured out who you have in mind? I'll send you my guess via a Face Book message.<br /><br />Years and years ago I took a seminar from the late Hamlin Hill on the Later Mark Twain, from Connecticut Yankee to the end, and wrote a paper on what I could round up of the autobiography, all from sources like Albert Paine and