Plain and Simple

If Ruth Franklin thinks The Believer is "anti-intellectual," she shoud have a look at the Underground Literary Alliance's webpage. While "enthusiasm" for literature may not be, in itself, sufficient for the effort of coming to terms with its unavoidable complexities, the ULA approach substitutes fury and indignation, railing against writing, whether poetry or fiction, that can't be understood by a third-grader.

I have refrained from commenting on the Underground Literary Alliance, until now, because one of its complaints, that there exists a "literary establishment" that perpetuates itself less through talent and dedication to literature than through back-scratching and a subsequent smug satisfaction at its ability to maintain itself in this way, is completely justified. There does exist a club-like atmosphere among the insiders of the literary world whereby a collection of writers and editors who otherwise claim to be dissenters from mainstream American culture and critics of the socioeconomic system have roped off a place in this system all for themselves. Here they can feel proud of their relative noncomformity while at the same time enjoying some of the pecuniary benefits of that system. (Albeit at a somewhat reduced rate.) An "alliance" of the unclubbed that calls attention to this state of affairs is, in theory, a good thing.

But in looking at the ULA website in more detail, I was finally struck most by how simplistic and inadequate their alternative to officially sanctioned fiction actually is. Everything that's wrong with the ULA view of literature can be found in these two sentences (filed under "Further Explanation of Why the ULA is Agitating"): "As Jack Saunders says, writing should be about subjects that matter, in plain English. Literature is how a culture can know who it is and what its options are."

Subjects that matter to whom? To the ULA? Do they know, a priori, what constitutes a subject that matters? Where did they get this power? If many readers seem to prefer the subjects taken up by the writers of whom the ULA most heartily disapproves--they seem to especially hate Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen, and Dave Eggers--rather than those the ULA "members" write about, haven't these readers de facto judged which are the subjects that "matter"?

I realize that by this logic the readers of Clancy and Grisham have established these writers' subjects as the ones that count, but the ULA's fight is indeed with the literary establishment, not with the fiction equivalent of popular entertainment. Thus, we're implicitly concerned with the relatively modest numbers of readers and writers who take literature seriously in the first place. And besides, the "subjects" of the novels of Clancy and Grisham--war, the American legal system--are among the biggest subjects a writer might tackle, so presumably these writers, and others like them, are producing work that would meet the ULA test of approved content.

I have in a previous post addressed a version of the argument in support of "plain English," so I will try not to simply repeat what I said there. However, whereas the brief in that version was for "clarity" in prose style, the ULA wants "plain" English, which is not quite the same, either denotatively or connotatively. "Clear" writing can be elaborate, even complex, as long as it communicates what it wants to say. Sometimes meaning or implication, when themselves more complicated, can require a writer to employ more abstraction in word choice or intricacy in syntax. "Plain" writing, on the other hand, is deliberately unadorned, defiantly simple. Furthermore, to ask for "plain English" is to assume that all meaning can be expressed at that level of language, and the refusal to comply with the request is presumed to be bad faith, an effort to avoid saying what should be said without needless folderol. (At another point on its website, the ULA asks (sensibly) whether, for example, a writer like Melville could be published in today's literary environment. But has anyone there actually read Melville? A less plain stylist could not be found.)

Thus the ULA is the latest in a long line of advocates of the notion that literature is a matter of "saying something," preferably in the least embellished and ambiguous way, of using fiction or poetry for doing "something relevant to American people’s lives," as another of their pronouncements has it. But "saying something" almost always turns out to be itself a matter of saying something that's been said many times before, or something everybody already knows, or something of great interest to the writer but of no conceivable interest to any readers, or something with which those readers already agree, or something that seems of burning urgency today but tomorrow will seem as prosaic as the newspaper article it was taken from, or something as tedious and doctrinaire as almost all "revolutionary" statements ultimately are. Gilbert Sorrentino once wrote of the act of "saying something" in a work of literature that "A writer discovers what he knows as he knows it, i.e., as he makes it. No artist writes in order to objectify an 'idea' already formed. It is the poem or novel or story that quite precisely tells him what he didn't know he knew: he knows, that is, only in terms of his writing. This is, of course, simply another way of saying that literary composition is not the placing of a held idea into a waiting form." In this context, the ULA approach is, quite literally, an abandonment of art, a rejection of what makes literature literature.

This approach is further made "plain" in the claim that "Literature is how a culture can know who it is and what its options are." It's rather astonishing that a self-styled revolutionary movement in literature would look first to the needs of "culture" when explaining its view of what literature is good for. A culture can't know anything and doesn't have options, since it is itself an artificial construction, an abstraction, is in some ways merely a "literary" way of speaking about ourselves and our circumstances. A culture attempting to "know who it is"--if such a thing were possible--wouldn't have much use for art and literature anyway, except insofar as such art were to reinforce the most conformist and least threatening assumptions, the most positive image, that culture already embodies. Iconoclasts and troublemakers certainly would not be welcome. Literature is for readers, individual readers, and only indirectly through its influence on these readers does it ever affect culture at all. The ULA's presumably left-wing ideas about the ultimate purposes of literature are finally very compatible with equally strident right-wing notions of the place of the imagination--or about keeping it in its place. Both of them prefer the cultural and social utility of "literature" as an idea to real people reading actual books.

One looks further around the website to see some examples of the kind of writing the ULA would extol. This passage, from the aforementioned Jack Saunders, is provided.

Brew's books were unsuitable or inappropriate for general consumption.

He had to be kept at a distance, especially for students, in the schools.

It was good to have a subject, though.

What was Brew's subject? Distance learning?

No, it was what makes a book inappropriate, or unsuitable, and who says so? If it's simple and sincere.

Faulkner said he read "Shakespeare, the Greeks, and the Bible."

Again and again, he might have said.

That's what Brew read.

Walden. Moby-Dick. Leaves of Grass.

When Russell Crowe said, "Let fly," in Master and Commander, it reminded Brew of Whitman, as quoted in Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden. . .

A ULA commentary on this passage follows: "This excerpt offers a modest sense of Jack's strengths. The spare, spot-on prose. So easy, but just try to do it yourself. Not a word out of place, yet they're sometimes in new places. With a flow. With the references to old and new culture, bringing them both to life, to a wider kind of life." I can only judge Saunders based on this excerpt, since I'm unfamiliar with his work, but he seems to be as self-conscious in his literary references as any metafictionist, as obsessed with writing itself as any postmodernist. And I'll leave it to those of you reading it here to determine for yourselves how "spot-on" its prose seems, how well it "flows," how much of "life" is encompassed.

Apparently King Wenclas, the ULA's reigning royal, took an interest in the recent contretemps between Dale Peck and Sven Birkerts as discussed in Birkerts' recent essay in Bookforum. (Apparently as well the King has it in for Bookforum in general, describing it as a bastion of "pseudo-intellectual cultural snobbery.") The level of intellectual discourse of the ULA sovereign's analysis is captured well enough in this passage, attacking Birkerts: "The history of his writings has been a BOOKFORUM in miniature with a heavy dose of reviews of foreign authors no one was reading and after his reviews still no one was reading them. (Can one be more intentionally irrelevant to his own time and place?) What was important to the Birkerts career as establishment critic was not his unremarkable unmemorable essays, but the career itself, the pose of 'critic' formed after prep school by working in a bookstore egregiously sucking-up to Joseph Brodsky living in the woods reading a lot of books announcing in his life and the dry torpor of his words 'I am an intellectual!'" Anyone who has read some of my previous posts knows that I have some admiration for Birkerts as a critic, but even as someone inclined to defend him I find it hard to take this passage very seriously. One hardly knows what the King's real problem with Birkerts's criticism actually is, since here (and in the rest of the piece) all we get is petulance, fake iconoclasm ("sucking up to Joseph Brodsky living in the woods reading a lot of books"), and ad hominem attack. As an attempt to rabble rouse against the literary establishment, it's pathetic.

Some rabble rousing would probably do the literary establishment a lot of good. (I like to think the literary weblogs are doing this to an extent, in a much more effective and informed way.) But the ULA seems to think that this establishment consists of yuppies, prep schoolers, Yale English Professors, and editors of "snob" magazines like Bookforum. With the exception of the latter, none of these groups have any interest in literature, and railing against them as if they did care about it only makes the Underground Literary Alliance seem hopelessly beside the point. Intelligence and taste and concern for the aesthetic properties of literature are not the qualities that make the "establishment" the enemy. These are the things that too many who belong to that establishment precisely lack. It does no good for the writers and critics outside that establishment to leave the impression--as in my opinion the ULA does--they are mostly paranoid know-nothings. A literary revolution would properly be about rescuing the literary from the fashionable and the profit-driven, not about equating the literary with the merely loud and declarative, even if this is done in plain English.

Comments

[Jim Flannery]

Interesting that you sidle your way into a talk about the ULA past a reference to The Believer, given that one of their earliest issues (July 2003) featured a long evisceration of the ULA by Tom Bissell (unfortunately not on their website).

[birnbaum]

Apparently I am not one of those literary snobs that ULA rails against (or so I would l ike to think)as Jack Saunders regularly sends me packages of his oracular literary outpourings. So I am an, uh, Saunders expert:
re Jack Saunders
http://www.dreadclampitt.com/about/jack.htm

Anyway, every endeavor needs some bad boys and girls to provide a frame of reference, to shake things up, to give pundits and commentators materials and to keep deviants off the streets. In this day and age of writing factories and allegations of literature's marginality and perhaps irrelevance does it help to have straw adversaries? I don't know.

[arthur]

Dan,

As for the "collection of writers and editors who otherwise claim to be dissenters from mainstream American culture and critics of the socioeconomic system have roped off a place in this system all for themselves" -- I'm willing to believe you, but who are they? Can you specify a little more? Writers of fiction who criticize the socioeconomic system?

[Dan Green]

Some writers who directly criticize the system, others who convey an image of being disaffected from the system, many editors who brandish their credentials derived from publishing "anti-establishment" material, etc. Many of these editors especially do very well by the system.

[Stan Izen]

Well done, Dan. I particularly like the Sorrentino quote. I don't think that "plain" writing is very satisfying, it is usually just dull.

[kevin holtsberry]

I don't know anything about the ULA, but they seem caught between systems. They reject the academic theory ladden and obtuse discussions of literature but they lack an "old fashioned liberal" - if I may use that term - conception of literature centered around humanism or a defense of (or redemption of) Western Civilization. They rebel agains the status quo but have nothing to replace it with except empty words.

I will agree that both the left and the right often want to use literature and history as ideological weapons in the culture wars and that both devalue literature in the process.

[Dale Keiger]

I went to the ULA website and started to chuckle when I scrolled down to where they breathlessly announce that they've been mentioned in the NY Times. Some revolutionaries.

[King]

I think the main problem is that Dan, and we, are coming from very different perspectives on the literary world.

He seems to have centered on one sentence and one point about our campaign-- that we advocate, solely, "plain writing." I don't know how accurate it is to take this out of context and assume it represents everything about our group.

In fact, we represent underground writers from a variety of backgrounds, and with very different styles. Jack Saunders is just one of them. If you'll examine the writing we have up on our site, you'll see that it's widely different. (Most of it wouldn't be accepted in many generic writing programs.) Do I never use any complex sentences, for instance? If you believe that, you haven't read all of the writing of mine up on the ULA fan site.

What we're doing is merely using a different approach from everyone else. Our goal is for literature to break out of its safe niche. Most of us came from the zine scene, and we've had experience in selling our writings to non-literary people (those who don't read literary blogs). The ignored 80% of the society who largely haven't been reading anything at all. But when introduced to them, they do read zines. I would think this is something to be applauded.

Dan said that culture is an artificial construct. I see culture more as a natural phenomenon, organic, not imposed on people from above, but part of their everyday lives. This is the relationship zinesters and zine readers have to zines.

Are all kinds of writing being published today by the mainstream? In no way. Books like The Octopus by Frank Norris, or The Iron Heel by Jack London, or any of a number of books by Rex Beach, one hundred years ago were addressing important issues and were also popular. The Octopus, in fact, has more to say about corporate monopolization of this society than any novel being published today.

Is there room for "iconoclasts and troublemakers" in today's literary scene? That's the question.

[Jeff Potter]

Of course, Jack Saunders' plain English kind of writing offers far more than simplicity. He didn't say that was his goal, anyway. His work reflects the complexity of the world, of art, in an accessible way. Plainness is a robust enough tool to do anything in writing. --Anything besides preach down to your reader or narrow-up your audience. To try to get at the truth of one's life and to write about what matters. And to assert that 3 of the big things that matter---gender, race and libel---aren't written about truthfully today, but that you'll try to no matter what. Add those things to plain English and you get art that doesn't dodge. The fact that you guys don't catch a hint of what Jack is up to is dismaying, but I don't think it's Jack who is out of touch.

We of the ULA (I'm a member) have faith in the general public and are working to give them something worth reading. And we're making great strides in catching their attention and bringing literary concerns to the forefront for a change.

People in general are sensible and don't have time for wrong-headed convolution, but they can keep up with and appreciate any actually relevant art or fun literary tricks you throw at 'em as long as it relates in some way to their lives. Waste their time and they'll eventually give up and watch TV. One can think of the public as a mob...or not. It's up to you. We prefer to give them respect as well as to push them, and we will cause a ruckus on their behalf.

Well, that's our goal and our view. What's yours?

The essaying going on in this blog network seems to be introverted, twisting and turning in on itself, never touching down on the street. I don't know what its goals are. Criticism in general? For who? To what end?

I don't think its goals include relevance or outreach beyond MFA circles. Well, we'll see if the two worlds can do some bridging or if that's worthwhile.

Do we have any zinesters here? Any writers-for-the-street? (By that I don't necessarily mean the gutter. Shading, people!)

[doug]

Full disclosure: at one time I was involved with the ULA.

Just a few quick points:

1. Regarding "subject matter" and "plain writing". The original critique was borrowed from Kuhn's STRUCTURES OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS and related to paradigm shifts. Very briefly, the notion was that modernism/post-modernism, as a paradigm, was dead, and that the logical replacement was a return to realism and the virtues of the nineteenth century. Certainly there was to be some over-correction, but it was never intended that these principles were going to be right for all times, merely right for now.

2. Popular writers. There is a general sympathy towards popular writers (maybe not anymore, I don't know, I don't keep in touch with those guys anymore), but there was a secondary critique as well. Briefly, the argument is that modernism split the literary world into highbrow/lowbrow divisions, and that, in part, a reintegration is required. Popular writers are viewed more sympathetically than Rick Moody, sure, but nonetheless often fail because of their tendency towards their own kind of insurlarity and hackwork. In other words, a popular literature that has no highbrow intentions feeds off itself and ultimately waters down into thin gruel.

At the time I was very interested in writers like Robert Stone, who had managed to blend highbrow conceits to genre structures.

Another book that was influential at the time was Joe Carducci's ROCK AND THE POP NARCOTIC. Though obviously about rock music, the general cultural critique had relevance.

3. I'm sympathetic to your general points about the intersection of art/culture and "clear" writing, although I wouldn't overthink things here: some of this is obviously rabble-rousing rhetoric, some of this is simply, um, unclear writing (I'll betcha anything "plain" and "clear" were considered synonymous by those guys), some of it can be attributed to point #1. The notion was that literary culture had gotten itself into such a bog that a hard reverse was needed, just to get back on the road again. No matter what fine points were obscured along the way.

I ended up leaving the group partly because I agreed with your final point, that the rabble-rousing had gotten out of hand and that it was becoming counterproductive. (Partly because my own political opinions are quite conservative, and when I, at least, talked about "realism" I didn't mean didatic left wing prose. Partly because of the inevitable personality clashes.) Karl nonetheless deserves credit for getting as far as he got, with little or no money. Never mistake the promotional aspects in play -- it's a major factor, and Karl is talented at getting press.

As for the comments, I find the general level of sneering amusing, since it plays right into Karl's hands. Don't underestimate Karl's level of support -- yes, I quite agree, they're mostly crackpots, but he seems to have an inexhaustible supply of 'em. Kevin Holtsberry is closer to point, yes indeed, the intellectual content has not advanced much beyond the early basic ideas, which is the real problem. It was worthwhile to twit the establishment, but eventually you have to put up or shut up.

doug

[Dan Green]

The very notion of beginning with Kuhn and applying the idea of the paradigm shift to literature is part of the problem. It only encourages the view that literary history is a history of fashion--your paradigm is outdated so we're going to come up with another one. It accomplishes nothing, but does allow each new generation to feel self-righteous.

I have in other posts explained why I think the idea that the U.S. ever had a "highbrow culture" is absurd, so I won't repeat the analysis. But it is absurd.

I admit I "don't catch a hint" of what Jack Saunders is up to.

"People in general are sensible and don't have time for wrong-headed convolution, but they can keep up with and appreciate any actually relevant art or fun literary tricks you throw at 'em as long as it relates in some way to their lives. Waste their time and they'll eventually give up and watch TV."

TV is relevant to their lives?

I also admit to being completely irrelevant, even though I don't have an MFA. I earned my irrelevance the hard way, although not on "the street."

[doug]

"The very notion of beginning with Kuhn and applying the idea of the paradigm shift to literature is part of the problem. It only encourages the view that literary history is a history of fashion--your paradigm is outdated so we're going to come up with another one. It accomplishes nothing, but does allow each new generation to feel self-righteous."

Well, whether it encourages a fashionate view or not that wasn't my intention at the time, which was the only point of the above post -- to sketch out some of the original notions behind the group. I meant "paradigm shifts" in what (I at least thought at the time) was Kuhn's sense of the phrase -- historical shifts in ways of viewing the world, etc. Something beyond "fashion". One could fairly argue that I misread Kuhn, or that the attempt to impose a paradigm shift was silly, of course.

The notion that modernism/post-modernism is dead or played out is hardly a new idea nowadays, of course. I recently read through Peck's HATCHET JOBS and it's there, for instance.

"I have in other posts explained why I think the idea that the U.S. ever had a "highbrow culture" is absurd, so I won't repeat the analysis. But it is absurd."

*shrug* I don't read you consistently enough to know what you're talking about here. If you can cite a date I'll check the archives.

I think the roots of the "split" began in the late nineteenth century, with Howells arguments against the Romantics (like Haggard). It first came to the fruition with the modernists, and became established in America shortly after WW 2. It's now a fact of life -- whatever else David Foster Wallace, to pull a name off the top of my head, is, he's a "highbrow" writer: his work is aimed at a certain discerning audience that's *generally* split along class lines.

It's not a distinction as to merit, merely descriptive. I'll wait to see what kind of argument you have as to it's "absurdity": actually I regard it as a fact of life much akin to gravity.

(I once had an amusing discussion with the horror writer Nick Mamatas, who argued that guys like Moody were writing in their own specific genre, and that there were plenty of proles who read him for the vicarious pleasure of experiencing the lifestyle of the rich. I didn't buy it for one second.)

As for Saunders, he's not a good writer. A very nice guy, though.

doug

[Dan Green]

"High Culture?", April 14. I didn't mean to imply you should have been hanging on my every word, just that other readers might remember that post (it was part of a broader discussion around the blogosphere). Also: I'm not a great fan of Rick Moody, but I really don't think it is accurate to say his subject is the "lifestyle of the rich." Have you read Garden State?

[doug]

I read your "High Culture?" post, and it's a matter of definitions, as it often is. "Highbrow" or "high" culture seems to you to mean something roughly equivalent to "exceptional" or "aesthetically great" and of course it can mean those things, but it needn't. I'm using the term "highbrow" to simply indicate those writers who are writing for a discerning audience. Most published poetry is highbrow. Don Delillo is highbrow. Louis L'Amour is lowbrow, but Cormac MacCarthy is highbrow.

It generally is a class phenomenon, as you sort of indicate. (There may be some plumbers who've read THE RECOGNITIONS, but I'm pretty sure there's not many.) Occasionally, of course, highbrow works hit the bestseller lists -- LOLITA, for instance.

It's not a qualitative distinction, at least not in the sense I'm using the term. That doesn't mean it's not valuable. It's hard to explain John Barth, for instance, without understanding this highbrow/lowbrow divide.

As for the bit where you doubt that masses ever reach for highbrow culture, this will shock the participants in the Oprah Book Club, who are reading ANNA KARENINA this summer. "We're gonna get through it together" Oprah assured everybody at the opening bell.

As for Moody, I'm repeating Mamatas's point, not mine. I've read a few pages of his prose here and there (and sat through an interminably dull reading from LONG BLACK VEIL), nothing substantial.

doug

[Dan Green]

I'm afraid I just don't understand your use of the term "highbrow" at all. What writer wouldn't want to write for a discerning audience? Class has nothing to do with it. A plumber can be discerning and a CEO undiscerning--most CEOs are as uninterested in The Recognitions as most plumbers.

To say that most published poetry is highbrow or that John Barth is highbrow only means that in both cases a reader has to pay attention. (There's actually plenty of lowbrow stuff in Barth: pratfalls, silly puns, all kinds of theatricality.) If most people don't care to pay attention, that's hardly because they're lowbrows and poets and metafictionists are highbrows. They live in a culture where paying attention doesn't matter--something the ULA, in my opinion, only encourages in its calls for "plain English" and for fiction that panders to the tastes of a mass audience.

[doug]

After this I'm signing off, since we're obviously talking past each other. But one last time into the breach:

"I'm afraid I just don't understand your use of the term "highbrow" at all."

Well, I'm not wedded to the terms: if you want to substitute "serious literature" and "popular fiction", or "mainstream literature" and "genre fiction" or something else you can. I don't like those terms, though, since they connote value, which I'm trying to avoid here.

The division is pretty self-evident, though, IMHO, no matter how you want to label the groups. Danielle Steele vs. Alice Munro. Clive Cussler vs. Robert Stone.

"What writer wouldn't want to write for a discerning audience?"

Now it's my turn to be confused. Do you mean "what writer wouldn't want to be read and appreciated?" Everyone does, of course. Or do you mean "what writer wouldn't want to be read and appreciated by a small audience of cognosceti who appreciate subtle nuances etc. etc."? I meant choice two. I think it's pretty obvious that there are writers shooting for the masses, and writers shooting for a select audience, however you want to characterize them.

"Class has nothing to do with it. A plumber can be discerning and a CEO undiscerning--most CEOs are as uninterested in The Recognitions as most plumbers."

You are conflating value judgements (which I happen to agree with) with sociological judgements. It's not demeaning to the plumbers of the world to suggest that few of them read THE RECOGNITIONS. I never said CEOs did -- I never characterized the audience who did at all, except to suggest that the readership *generally* broke down along class lines. I think that, too, is a statement of fact.

Get it away from Gaddis. I think the audience for Wallace's latest is probably that segment of the audience that styles itself a literary/cultural elite, and I think that *generally* breaks down along class lines. Do you really question this? Never mind if it's right or fair or whatever. Do you question this is the sort of readership that's being sought?

Tomorrow morning I'm gonna get up, go to a nearby bakery and buy some scones from a hard working couple. Do you really think those guys are the putative audience for Wallace's latest? Is it aimed at them? Do they even know who he is? Saying this isn't a slam either at Wallace, or the couple, or Wallace's audience. It's just a statement of reality.

"To say that most published poetry is highbrow or that John Barth is highbrow only means that in both cases a reader has to pay attention."

See above.

"If most people don't care to pay attention, that's hardly because they're lowbrows and poets and metafictionists are highbrows. They live in a culture where paying attention doesn't matter--something the ULA, in my opinion, only encourages in its calls for "plain English" and for fiction that panders to the tastes of a mass audience."

Which is really were you and I break ranks. There's a kind of inverse snobbishness here, in my opinion: popular fiction is "pandering", an implication that popularity is de facto bad, the masses are sock puppets who are easily swayed by a culture "where paying attention doesn't matter" (and therefore aren't responsible for their own choices), etc.

I would say instead that the reason Barth and modern poetry and the other writers we've talked about aren't popular is simply that they're not writing for a popular audience. That doesn't make them bad, or good, or anything -- the size of one's audience does not correlate to quality. Similarily, Clive Cussler is never going to win the Pulitizer, either. That doesn't de facto make him bad, or good, or anything.

There are highbrow/elite audiences of culture in America, and mainstream popular audiences. Anguish about this as you will (and I've seen recent posts by you lamenting this), it's reality.

The ULA doesn't have the gravitas to encourage anyone to do anything, so don't fret on that account. Originally, though, the notion was to try and span the gap, to reintegrate the popular into the highbrow. Which is all I was trying to say. Whether you approve of that notion or not is your own affair; I read your blog haphazardly but am not suprised by your pov.

doug

[Dan Green]

I don't want to continue talking past you, so I'll try to encapsulate by focusing on one of your points. If David Foster Wallace is any good (I happen to believe he is), he doesn't think at all about what audience he's "aiming for." He writes what he does because it's what he wants to write, and if the majority of his readers turned out to be bakers and plumbers, I'm sure he'd be fine by it, as long as they "got" what he's trying to do. The same would be true of CEOs, although it's hard to imagine many CEOs would be capable of getting it, or they wouldn't be CEOs. A writer who targets a particular audience, whether high, low, or in-between, is only going to produce formula or propaganda.