Saturday, 27 June 2009

I do believe it all makes sense now (and if you don't agree with that you're a pretentious Martian from Venus).

Via The Guardian, a testament to my taste making sense:

Joe-Strummers-reference-l-001
Jun 27, 2009 10:50:54 PM | Bruce Springsteen, Music

6 Comments

Ahistoricality

That does it: I'm deleting my recommendations file with my dying keystroke.

Posted by: Ahistoricality | Saturday, 27 June 2009 at 11:10 PM

WhereWolf

Please, SEK, I beg you-- have a look at the new shilling for cash being done by Jack Cashill, and his new "evidence" that Ayers wrote "dreams of my father".

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/breakthrough_on_the_authorship_1.html

The world needs your smackdown of him.

Posted by: WhereWolf | Sunday, 28 June 2009 at 08:22 AM

Ahistoricality

I'm not SEK, but I say it's SSDD. My blogging is very different from my professional writing: doesn't mean two different people wrote them. Hell, my history blogging is very different from my political blogging: am I three people, now? Is the ghost of my (not dead yet) advisor at my keyboard this minute, shaping my research (actually, that sounds pretty good, not having to write my own stuff up!)?

Posted by: Ahistoricality | Sunday, 28 June 2009 at 09:35 AM

WhereWolf

I'm not SEK, but I say it's SSDD. My blogging is very different from my professional writing: doesn't mean two different people wrote them. Hell, my history blogging is very different from my political blogging: am I three people, now? Is the ghost of my (not dead yet) advisor at my keyboard this minute, shaping my research (actually, that sounds pretty good, not having to write my own stuff up!)?

I know, but SEK did the definitive smackdown of Cashill's earlier crazy posts about this, and I crave more. More, more!
It was a joy to read.

Posted by: WhereWolf | Sunday, 28 June 2009 at 03:28 PM

SEK

Your wish is my command.

Posted by: SEK | Sunday, 28 June 2009 at 05:18 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
The escape valve of the exotic Negro* A friend forwards this old solicitation from writers to readers about what they want to see more of in comics: Pure ridiculousness. Everybody knows that "City Problems" are "Black People" . . . *Via Lorraine Hansberry in The New Negro.
PREVIOUS POST
“Polygraph-level scholarship may suffice for harmless speculation about the authorship of Midsummer’s Night Dream, but not for Dreams From My Father. Too much is at stake.” (by request.) As all actual, practicing literary critics know, few sentences in critical works scream tendentiousness louder than: What should be transparent to any literary critic is that . . . Literary matters are only "transparent" when they're not properly literary. If something is transparent, you don't need a literary critic to ponder the depths it doesn't have—any old idiot will suffice. And that's exactly why Jack Cashill, author of the above and an idiot of long-standing, is just the man to prove that Bill Ayers wrote Obama's autobiography, Dreams From My Father. For Cashill and his mysterious contributors ("[t]he media punishment that Joe the Plumber received" requires they remain anonymous), the case against Obama is a compelling one: What Mr. Midwest noticed recently is that both Ayers in [A Kind and Just Parent] and Obama in [Dreams From My Father] make reference to the poet Carl Sandburg. In itself, this is not a grand revelation. Let us call it a C-level match. Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library in any case . . . Ayers and Obama, however, go beyond citing Sandburg. Each quotes the opening line of his poem "Chicago" . . . This I would call a B-level match. What raises it up a notch to an A-level match is the fact that both misquote "Chicago," and they do so in exactly the same way. So both Ayers and Obama misquote the opening line of Carl Sandburg's "Chicago," substituting "hog butcher to the world" for "hog butcher for the world." This mutual error would be significant (an "A-level match") if Ayers and Obama were the only two people who ever made it, but according to Google Book Search—a secret search engine to which only I have access—the same mistake has been made by Nelson Algren, Alan Lomax, Andrei Codrescu, H.L. Mencken, Paul Krugman, Perry Miller, Donald Hall, Ed McBain, Saul Bellow, S.J. Perelman, Nathanaël West, Ezra Pound, Wright Morris, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, and the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological Progress. (To name but a few.) According to Cashill, I have now proven that Dreams From My Father was written by many a dead man of American letters, a living mystery writer, a New York Times columnist and the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological Progress. That bears repeating: I have an "A-level match" that proves that Obama's autobiography was written by a "study of the economic and social effects of automation and other technological changes on industry, commerce, agriculture, education, manpower, and society in Illinois" when Obama was only six years old. If that somehow fails to convey to the dubious merits of Cashill's argument, perhaps this will: Returning to the exotic, in his Indonesian backyard Obama discovered two "birds of paradise" running wild as well as chickens, ducks, and a "yellow dog with a baleful howl." In [Ayers'] Fugitive Days, there is even more "howling" than there is in Dreams . . . In [A Kind and Just...

Scott Eric Kaufman

The Typepad Team

Search

Become a Fan

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments