Written in 1944, Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man begins: “There was a time when people were in the habit of addressing themselves frequently and felt no shame at making a record of their inward transactions. But to keep a journal nowadays is considered a kind of self-indulgence, a weakness, and in poor taste. For this is an era of hardboiled-dom.”
The irony of writing this on a blog, glancing at a stream of Twitter posts. What would we call the opposite of hardboiled-dom, an apt term for the era of digital self-display?
At the time of writing his first novel, Bellow could not have foreseen winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. His Nobel lecture includes this reflection: “Characters, Elizabeth Bowen once said, are not created by writers. They pre-exist and they have to be found. If we do not find them, if we fail to represent them, the fault is ours. It must be admitted, however, that finding them is not easy. The condition of human beings has perhaps never been more difficult to define.”
>Fishbowled-dom? I'll watch you if you watch me – on FB, Twitter, elsewhere.A kind of communal voyeurism.I tried looking up hardboiled-dom. No clue what it means.Cheers,Kevin
>Hardboiled-dom=Mickey Spillane or Sam Spade like.Fishbowled-dom works, though kinder than where my thoughts were leading.