![]() It wasn't so much message from Fred, or even Sigmund Freud (but maybe Andrea Dworkin) that flashed through my mind when I read the recent news story that sales of Thomas Hardy's plangent, furious Tess of the d'Urbervilles has received a significant boost in sales thanks to, predictably, Fifty Shades of Grey. I've lost count of the number of times I've written "signal from Fred" in the margins of a book – a phrase my friend David Bishop first alerted me to, defined in the glorious Turkey City Lexicon as "a comic form of the 'Dischism' in which the author's subconscious, alarmed by the poor quality of the work, makes unwitting critical comments: 'This doesn't make sense.' 'This is really boring.' 'This sounds like a bad movie.'" It's practically lesson #1.01 in deconstruction and literary theory: the text tells you more than the author intends it to do.
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