#will glovinsky

Will Glovinsky: Basic income’s appeal today is similar to its roots in 18th‑century England – it’s a way to compensate people for a common good taken for private gain

As Flies to Whatless Boys is at its best when it dares to inspect that Benjaminian sunniness, the madness that haunts the precincts of rationalism. To do this it needs neither tangential videos nor ribald emails, only good storytelling and characters who won’t vanish when viewed from the side. If Antoni seeks to bring the obsolescent print novel into the terra nova of digital transmedia, then he would do well to heed the lesson of his ill-fated dupes in the Tropical Emigration Society: if you forsake home and hearth for the undiscovered country, you better have a damn good reason.

...the fictitious Etzler mixes strident moralizing with a cocksure belief in the redemptive power of rationality. “Zee problem wiss men since antiquity,” we hear him declare in his cartoony German accent, “is zat zey do not reason. Zey do not sink.” But Etzler, we learn, has something more than reason and sinking at his disposal. He claims to have developed an apparatus called the Satellite, a sort of perpetual-motion machine that draws its power from “Mother Nature” by utilizing “only the most rudimentary” of scientific principles. Once transported across the Atlantic, the Satellite promises to obviate the need for men and women to suffer the usual drudgeries of tropical settlement, such as clearing land and crystallizing sugar cane. Etzler’s machines are demonstrated several times during the novel; each trial is a farcical failure.

Borges could begin a thought about James Boswell’s biography of the 18th century critic Samuel Johnson and then effortlessly trace the idea back to Cervantes, and then, without a bead of sweat, to a little-known tenet of Hindu philosophy. His burrowings into literary history were never undertaken to challenge an author’s originality, but rather were motivated by his wonderful sensitivity to the paradox that every writer both forms, and is formed by, a particular constellation of precursors. For, as he reminds his students in one lecture, “There is no literary Adam.”