B. Traven
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Not only did John Huston direct, his father acted in it. One of the best characters.
I’m slowly making my way through 2666. The very dense, entirely descriptive prose is quite demanding but the story is quite interesting and meanders nicely. Definitely feels like drinking a large cup of very dense chocolate - delicious but must be done in small sips.
Omnibus did an episode on B Traven[0], but also did episodes on Baader Meinhof[1][2]!
[0] https://www.omnibusproject.com/317
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/b-traven-sierra-ma...
It was two years after that paper before I came across any other mentions of them.
The very next time anybody mentioned them to me it was in the frequency context and I'd had exactly the opposite experience of the "phenomenon." No frequency illusion at all.
I have no idea why we'd name a phenomenon after a thing that made some guy have a certain feeling this one time. It's a moronic name.
More seriously, I think it's more likely that we'll eventually find a bunch of high-profile cases were built with "parallel construction".
It's just incredibly hard for most people to never breathe a word of something that eats up so much of their mind like writing a book does. Especially when that work begins to recieve acclaim.
Writing has this in common with crime actually. A stunning number of people are made for a crime because they talk about it. Even to the point of many eventual exhiberstions coming when a perpetrator discusses the crime years later, believing themselves out of the woods.
I'm not sure Ferrante is an example of someone trying genuinely to remain anonymous.
There was also an infamous incident recently in which an editor used a pseudonym to hide their relation to various publishers who in turn helped bid up the price for the manuscript. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/11/a-suspense-nov...
This is where discussion of a historical topic often ends up however when facts are few. We end up carrying around a bunch of "widely held" beliefs among other odds and ends.
There is a movement that seeks to shelve any historical beliefs that aren't backed by some physical evidence. However, there are documented cases of these kinds of things turning out to be true.
i.e. this ancient author claims a civilization minted coins 200 years before any known coins in some area so no one buys it. But eventually someone digs up a pot of coins minted by such and such civilization.
Pursuit of these kinds of informal pieces of information have led to breakthrough discoveries. Sites of ancient cities have been discovered this way.
I think the general position of most historians now is to believe the fact oriented claims passed down, not too intensly, so long as they aren't outright fanciful or seem intended to inflate personal or ethnic or political glory. For example, most ancient historians believe that most accounts of battles actually corespond to a real battle but they are often skeptical of the seemingly inflated numbers of soldiers supposedly mustered.
People organize themselves in "capitalistic," "socialistic," and even "anarchistic" manners depending on the context, and level of scale (informal, local, global, etc.); many times even pushing one way, then the other; and finally ending with a mix that would be foolish to arbitrarily try and separate, much less "categorize" (what has that ever achieved, but some wishy-washy "more accurate communication?").
Politics is basically the human drama over power, in its rawest form. Everything else is a derivative of this drama.
An interesting aside: the "every programmer thinks every problem can be solved with more tech" extends to other areas, viz. economics, "political science"/geopolitics, etc.
All problems are people problems; and most people problems are power problems (which themselves are super-ordinate to ego problems).
I think people problems, to an extent, have to do with what we identify with. Am I a male, a national, a church member, a political partisan, a human, an animal, a piece of life, a body, a mind, etc.? All those identifications are fine if you can switch between them. Problems start when you're stuck with one, even if it's not useful anymore. It's that loss of freedom or flexibility that fascinates and perplexes me.
The Overton window has moved so far to the right that even criticising that is considered "left wing".