Abstruse Allusion

July 17, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

(A bit of pedantry, and you could find all this out from the Internet. But I couldn’t resist, and besides, what the hell, it’s my blog.)

The letters the Times published today were all about the Tesla.

How many people, I wondered, recognized the reference in the headline? It’s from the title of a 1964 novel, Drive, He Said, by Jeremy Larner. In 1970 it was made into a movie directed by Jack Nicholson. It’s about campus sports, sex, and politics. It has nothing to do with driving.

The title comes from a Robert Creeley poem, which serves as the epigraph for the novel. The poem too, I suspect, is not really about driving.

I Know a Man By Robert Creeley As I sd to my   friend, because I am   always talking,—John, I sd, which was not his   name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for   christ’s sake, look   out where yr going.

Which brings us full circle back to the Tesla. Can you say those last lines to a self-driving car?