The Mojave is a long horizon flush with broken roads and open for access at all points. As you drive it, you see your destination glittering miles up ahead along the ribbon of vanishing pavement. All landmarks are easy to identify, the grand sweep of the Mojave easy to take in. Time to reflect and see: the creosote, a stocky knotty shrub, waving in the wind; the desert trumpets, stems springing from inflated bulbs below; and plates of earth that lift the desert to an upward slant, causing vertigo. The affiliation of meditation with the desert perhaps is that the arid sightlines shrink the world despite their sprawling scope. In something like the Basin and Range area, a stretch of valleys and peaks with little vegetation, the reason for going on, for taking the next step, is not to unravel the mystery of where that next footstep leads; between points A and B there is no interruption.
For as long as our species can remember, even before Plato and Confucius, we were deploying two pairs of conceptual distinctions to carve up the world and make it understandable: the distinction between parts and wholes, and the distinction between particulars and universals.
A Honda engine is a part that — along with other parts, like the steering wheel, the gears, and the fan belt — composes the “whole” known as a Honda car. That very same engine, meanwhile, is also — along with Toyota engines, General Motors engines, and Ford engines — a particular that embodies or “instantiates” the universal idea of engine-ness.
These three women are at the heart of a story of tangled and repressed emotions, complex and shifting relationships, misunderstandings and enforced change. Its beauty is that it mirrors normal life and normal people (a term here used broadly) in all their messiness, casual unkindness, generosity and friendship.
Seen through the lens of our moment, Stephen Crane can appear wildly presumptuous, a writer chronically inclined toward cultural appropriation. His first novel, 1893’s “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” was an effort to get into the head of a young woman in the dirt-poor Bowery, written by a well-bred New Jerseyite not long out of his teens. His most famous work, 1895’s “The Red Badge of Courage,” was a Civil War novel produced decades after the fighting ended by a writer who’d never done military service. He conjured up a Wild West he’d only passed through, imagined a Black experience he hardly knew, wrote poetry unbeholden to any tradition. Incapable of staying in his lane, he weaved into all of them.
But one person’s presumptuousness is another’s winning audacity, and Crane’s overreach is among the many traits that fascinate Paul Auster, who himself has had a rich career as a novelist, poet, screenwriter and memoirist.
Eric S. Hintz’s new book, American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D, offers a persuasive counternarrative. His goal, achieved via case studies based on a wide array of historical sources, is straightforward: to show that independent inventors did not vanish. This is an important claim. The United States has long touted a certain pragmatic and inventive quality as endemic to its national character. So, who is actually doing this inventing? Is it individuals (white men only, or also women and people of color), or is it corporations? This matters for questions of identity, and obviously also for questions of economics. A historian at Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation (part of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History), Hintz explains that the road independent creative people traveled was neither smooth nor easily navigated, but it offered a pathway to fortune, if not always fame. Moreover, the community of individual inventors, long depicted as composed only of tenacious, practical, and resourceful white men, was much more diverse in terms of race and gender than is commonly understood.