which was named 1997 best book in anthropology/sociology by the Association of American Publishers.
Miller applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Outrageous Fortune: Gloomy Reflections on Luck and Life, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Outrageous Fortune at the Oxford University Press website.The inauthenticities of [such] movements dedicated to seeking authenticity generated new hypocrisies and phoniness that made the old hypocrisies of false piety look respectable. I must confess this: when it comes to pathetic pretentiousness, no Parisian avant-gardiste, no poète maudit could outdo me in June 1969 reading the Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1868), in French no less, while on a bus loaded with young boys/men heading down from Green Bay to the Milwaukee induction center for our draft physical as a preliminary to being shipped off to Vietnam. I had just graduated from college (the draft notice beat my diploma home by a week); the other eighty or so had mostly finished high school if that. The army discovered I had a slipped disc, two it turned out; thus, I avoided death in the jungle along with one overweight Oneida Indian, but how I managed to avoid being rightly murdered on that bus still mystifies me.What luck, my page 99 is not bad; it is in a chapter in which I ridicule various forms of authenticity and the quest for it, so I am ridiculing the pretentiousness of various quests, Brook Farm, Blut und Boden, hippy communes, and the poètes maudits I blasted on page 98.
The Page 99 Test: Losing It.
--Marshal Zeringue
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