Your Humble Blogger has just come back from reading How to Write like a Liberal Sack of Garbage over at Wealth Bondage, having followed the link from Timothy Burke over at Easily Distracted. The good bit is the comments, which go on for an interesting while after the part where Prof. Burke blogs it. Some of my Gentle Readers, in particular, would (I think) enjoy the topic, and the commenters’ various takes on it.
Now, I won’t try to enter that particular conversation myself. I really just blog the whole thing to point out how now, in the particular region of Blogovia inhabited and frequented by academics, it’s common enough to have a conversation between PhDs and ABDs, each commenting not only on the subject, but on the mediating of each participant’s intellectual tradition, and the ways in which their mediated understanding of each other’s positions are open to further gloss. What I’m saying is, give them a few years to develop a vocabulary, and there will be gangs of semioticians and phenomenologists going after each other with knives after Michael Bérubé’s MLA keynote. The Night of the Short Knives. I have a vague sense that past immersion in literary theory is profoundly liberating to some people, in much the same sense that some people found massive doses of lysergic acid diethylamide profoundly liberating. Afterwards, nothing ever seems quite the same. I’m a nerd, myself, but I can’t help observing the conversations of the initiate with a kind of regret, like watching hasids dance, thinking ‘what would I be like if I were like that?’
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.