Passing judgement or passing a stinking stone

Judgmental, yuk, phew, poh! Never our man!












Read this by the martial squarehead Heinlein: “It will be worth something later, so put it in file and my literary executor can use it to help settle the death duties. That’s the catch in all artistic pursuits; the best work is always worth most after the workman can’t be paid. The literary life – dreck! It consists in scratching the cat till it purrs.”



Mm, a few questions arise forthright.



How many fallacies can you include into a little paragraph? Is the brain a cat? Are literary executors in duty bound to death? Does always any work increase in worth or value once the workman is “gone”? Or is this the “catch” that applies only to the literary life? And is the literary life really shit, is it at any rate any shittier than any other sort of life?



I don’t know about literary life, but I see that what Heinlein – as what so many American “glories”, Hemingway and Mailer coming immediately to mind, but also Roth, Salinger, and so many “serious” scriveners of their moralistic ilk (not to name the bulk of their eponymous ancestors) – what Heinlein wrote, as I was saying, is really… dreck.



[Moralistic dreck and flimflam our man Reig, rest assured (by this accomplished cum reliable literary executor,) never throws up.]



He’s no stranger in a strange land. He’s just at home in the humdrum amorality of what is. Not for him, sagely enough, to mend the unmendable.