It is no coin­ci­dence that I’m read­ing Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alter­na­tive His­tory. Yes, I hap­pened to jog quickly into the Ann Arbor Dis­trict Library the other day to pick up my Mom’s eight weekly mys­ter­ies. And for no rea­son at all I stopped to browse, and there it was in the oft-​​regarded but under­pop­u­lated 000–002 shelf of New Acquisitions.

I’d never heard of it. Has a naked lady on it, which I admit is a plus. It’s a lovely crinkly brown, under its acetate. It’s got heft. The bas­ket was mostly empty.

So grab; into the bas­ket it went.

Yeah, that sounds like coin­ci­dence. It’s not. I insist.

Because I’ve been at the Bloom again lately. And the Rorty. And the Prag­ma­tists more gen­er­ally, and think­ing about that peren­nial soap­box of mine: What’s wrong with all those stu­pid smart peo­ple over on the other side of Divi­sion Street?

And that very self­same day, I crack this ink-​​stained mother open (fore edge stained no doubt by a prior New York Times sub­scriber, not the local fish­wrap folks; cov­ers shaken; cor­ners lightly bumped), and right there on page one (1) Moore launches right in and pro­vides more than an echo of the thumps my soap­box makes: a par­al­lel line of attack, as ’twere. His intro­duc­tion alone is worth your read­ing time, espe­cially if you are a lit­er­ate book­ish library-​​infected per­son like those I seem to accu­mu­late in my imme­di­ate social network.

[Aha: and here the point begins to gleam through the random-​​seeming chance.]

Because I’ve been think­ing about an eight-​​year-​​old project, one I framed but have been too bro­ken to imple­ment for near a decade. And it’s about crit­i­cal engi­neer­ing. Not crit­i­cal as in “cru­cial”, but more the wordy and lit­er­ate and com­mu­nica­tive reflec­tion that lit­er­a­ture has enjoyed and frit­tered away these last few years. Not more straight­for­ward or tele­graphic, but rather lit­er­ate itself, and inspir­ing and poetic.

Where is the lit­er­a­ture of engi­neer­ing? Where is the lit­er­a­ture of sci­ence? Why is it so stul­ti­fied, as if the cul­ture were a pack­age offered by the fuck­ing cable com­pany, and you had to buy those chan­nels of illit­er­acy with your Dis­cov­ery Network?

And why do we stom­ach that other antipa­thy, the I don’t do math crap that human­i­ties majors and Great Lit­er­ary Minds proclaim?

All right, all right. Don’t get me started.

Nah, fuck it.

It’s not a zero-​​sum game, peo­ple. How dare the human­i­ties go into closed ses­sion and block out all mak­ers of this stuff we have? How dare the mak­ers of this mess of stuff we wrap our­selves within ignore mil­len­nia of beauty and pro­mote their history-​​blind notion of con­text­less progress?

And here Moore traipses into my bath­room [What? Tell me you don’t read in the bath­room; if you don’t you don’t love it enough.] with his amus­ingly tar­geted argu­ments against the foun­da­tion­al­ism in lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, and I’m like, “Hey, this man he is the dude. He has afforded me a big brown acetate-​​wrapped brick of com­ple­men­tary insight into the self­same prob­lems I face in a vaster, more mal­formed lit­er­a­ture than even those expen­sive bottom-​​shelf lit­mags limn.” And then I’m like, “Hey, we should totally invite this dude to come to town and ride the teeter tot­ter!” and “I should totally throw a copy of this at Cosma Shal­izi and see if it sticks.”

And me, lik­ing all these things, I flip to a rear flap, and there he is.

In town.

A use­ful sen­si­tiv­ity to coin­ci­dence is not a trait engen­dered by a broad and rang­ing mind (which I dis­avow hav­ing one of, any­way, being nor­mal), nor of a super­nat­ural mys­ti­cal gulli­bil­ity, but rather it is a prac­ticed and tar­geted response to that web of social net­works in which we all walk. A fos­ter­ing of ben­e­fi­cial coin­ci­dence comes eas­i­est to those with feet in many cir­cles. From ignor­ing the bor­ders most other peo­ple sense as walls. From pass­ing notes between the brain and hands: He likes you.

One draws a cir­cle begin­ning any­where. But you also have to keep the pen mov­ing, is all I’m say­ing. Elliptically.

What? You want suc­cinct and tar­geted prose?

This is a book. He is a local author, this lit­tle bald man I expect to meet some­day soon. I had no idea he was a local author when I started tout­ing his book. But it’s good enough that I’ve started tout­ing it after read­ing three chap­ters. Thus, it’s a good book. Go and buy it and read it.

And me, I am going to invite this gen­tle­man to lunch.