My savior, unfortunately has been pushin' up daisies for some time but his work lives on, or at least the work that has shown me the way of the true and enduring writer. The sage, the seer, the wise elder was none other than the sex symbol of the University of Chicago Professor Wayne C. Booth, and his gift is The Rhetoric of Proctology.
(long uncomfortable silence goes here)
Ha Ha no it wasn't really The Rhetoric of Proctology, thought I think a similar study of the canal zone would be welcome in our scatological society. But what would probably be more valuable would be The Rhetoric of Virtual Violence, (also not Mr. Booth's focus) where we could all learn how the dark lord is manipulating the muggles into killing each other by allowing us to mimick murder in a realistic 5-thousand bit 10-dimensional video killing field. Yes I wish Wayne C Booth was still around to write the Rhetoric of Violence to figure out the system by which the dark lord has programmed the human mind to believe that blowing a 2 foot wide hole through your friend on the other end of the network - even if he is a zombie avatar - is fun. I honestly don't believe humans are born with this desire to kill, but after we've squashed our first bluebelly lizard with a rock and see the blood and guts the killing transistor is activated. With a little help from Electronic Arts, Sony, Dreamworks and the rest of the dark lord's minions we can be blowin' holes in heads with Glock semi-automatics, then we can watch the blood gushing out of the poor sucker's skull and watch him take his last virtual breath. Isn't that fucking great? Hey don't get me wrong I think death is super it's killing I have a problem with.
So here's the connection: Back to Wayne that crazy dead son of a bitch he was one thinking dude and even though reading The Rhetoric of Fiction is evil torture of the worst kind (not nearly as fun as real virtual torture which you can buy), once you get past the arcane language and the references to authors that nobody born past 1955 has ever heard of unless they were a lit major - once you get past all those academic hurdles and really get the whole rhetoric thing, lights start going on. Lights, alarms, barking sea lions, hooting barn owls - a veritable cacophony of epiphanies start blasting forth from the font of wisdom.
Simply put, Booth studied and wrote about how "rhetoric illuminated the means by which authors seduce, cajole and more than occasionally lie to their readers in the service of narrative." Well now is this seduction, cajolement, and out 'n out lying limited to the authorial sphere? Fuck no! I mean...obviously not! Isn't rhetoric then the crux of all communication?
(short pause likely leading to clicking the hell out of here...)
This is juicy thought, and the paths through it and around it are well worn by just about everybody who has ever pondered both personal and mass communications, and I have nothing new to add. Beside a lot of barking spiders.
Indeed I would be better off checking up on the Lap Doggy and seeing what's become of our hairy girlfriend Asha Rajaratnam. Yes, back to Limboland, I say, where the men are tall and stately as they sun their dusty tallywhackers in the shadow of Kilimanjaro. We will leave the heavy lifting to dead Mr. Booth and his dead buddies, long may they theorize!
Hey whaddya think of an ADVENTURES IN LIMBOLAND T-shirt? Cap? Coffee cup? Undies? When people ask you what the hell it is, you can tell them it's a lame front for this guy that is trying to sell his stupid novel, but you liked the name and have always wondered "how low can you go?" Yeah? You like? I should make?
Oh, also, if you get 5 of your friends to buy Hack and can prove it you get the Limboland shirt for free! Now whaddya say, eh? Is that some serious rhetoric or what?
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