Sunday, 08 February 2009

Dear Acolytes and Enemies of the late Samuel Huntington,

I understand that a search for the author of this article leads here.  That doesn't mean I'm its author.  You want this guy.  Please learn how to use Google.

That is all.
Feb 8, 2009 5:51:29 PM

2 Comments

The Modesto Kid

No need for false modesty, Scott...

Posted by: The Modesto Kid | Sunday, 08 February 2009 at 05:55 PM

Scott Eric Kaufman

If I had his CV, I'd strut like a proud cock for all the world to see.

Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Sunday, 08 February 2009 at 06:01 PM

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Laugh in your natural manner. Do not be excessive. All the crying and crowing over the death of Pajamas Media overshadowed the birth of the awesomeness that is Pajamas Television. Just today I watched Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, and the Artisan Formerly Known as Joe the Plumber discuss the first weeks of the Obama administration. They showed behind-the-scenes footage of the Daschle debacle: They laughed ha ha while the tape ran. Then Reynolds showed it again ha ha. Malkin said it was distracting ha ha. Reynolds asked how that got in there again ha ha. Is that the Obama administration or a car full of clowns ha ha. Who can tell ha ha. Because being on the cutting edge of political commentary entails airing footage of a clown car while the contemporary equivalent of “Bag of Rags” blares. I couldn’t watch much more than the first five minutes—I kept waiting for Reynolds to pull a full Saget and show Obama getting beaned in the privates by a baseball. But I saw enough to capture the new face of serious journalism in all its seriousness: Pajamas Television: where you can watch a middle-aged man put every ounce of the fiber of his being into nailing a lick on his air guitar. Serious journalism for serious people ha ha.
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The rubble of a prolonged catharsis. Checking up that “proud cock” is two words, not one, so that I might strut it out, I came across the entry for “beast language“ in the Dictionary of Poetic Terms. The diction of the entry is either unconscionably vague or deliciously derisive: Theoretically, it seems the language of the poem moves backward from conceptual words to an intelligence of pure sound utterance that calls attention to the form, meaning, and derivation of the word. The form is probably meant to be experienced more than intellectually understood, an experience that presumably links the reader with his own senses and the animal origins of language. Since my knowledge of post-1940 American literature amounts to what I’ve read for pleasure and the Lord set Sunday aside for whimsical researches, I decided to find out whether the entry ought to be applauded or condemned. First up, according to Google Book Search, was a work I inadvertantly committed to the memory hole: William Gass’s The World Within the Word. In “Food and Beast Language,” Gass talks about something else entirely; namely, the forced materiality of Henry Miller’s prose. Of its effect on Miller’s signature subject, Gass concludes: Alas, the penis is such a ridiculous petitioner. It is so unreliable, though everything depends on it—the world is balanced on it like a ball on a seal’s nose. It is so easily teased, insulted, betrayed, abandoned; yet it must pretend to be invulnerable, a weapon which confers magical powers upon its possessor; consequently this muscleless inchworm must try to swagger through temples and pull apart thighs like the hairiest Samson, the mightiest ram. Because of this, Gass argues, Miller’s works traffic in compensation: They are not written, and do not belong on a page like Pynchon’s; nor are they spoken as Gaddis’s are; nor do they employ the formal oral eloquence of Sir Thomas Browne; they are talked, yarned like a sailor, endlessly gabbed; and his male readers at last must be reminded of the bluff good-fellow voice of the locker-room brag . . . well let me tell you when I saw her huge X, my! it was so Y that I nearly Z’d. The formulaic nature of Gass’s final clause typifies Miller’s mode of repetition without recursion. Miller endlessly repeats himself because he has reduced the world to things and the human body to meat. For Gass, embracing this reduction signals the lamentable end of a great talent gone stale—though it renders Miller quite easy to anthologize, as one can find the most suitable iteration of a thought without worrying that it might have been developed more carefully elsewhere. Michael McClure, the poet who schooled American literature in the niceties of “beast language,” thought differently. In The San Francisco Renaissance, Michael Davidson quotes McClure as saying: Every man has his treasure. It’s inside him. It’s called meat. I’m tempted to quibble with his formulation: if “it” equals “meat,” then “it” isn’t “inside him,” it is him. That aside, it’s not entirely clear how meat...

Scott Eric Kaufman

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