{"id":10578,"date":"2007-08-03T11:57:23","date_gmt":"2007-08-03T15:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/08\/03\/10578.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:56:55","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:56:55","slug":"book-report-the-wreckage-of-ag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/08\/03\/book-report-the-wreckage-of-ag\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Wreckage of Agathon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I am aware that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.johngardner.org\/\">John Gardner<\/a> was a bit of an asshole. That doesn&#8217;t bother me much. I can like John Gardner <I>and<\/I> John Barth. I&#8217;m postmodern that way. Also, when somebody puts on his business card <blockquote>Prof. John C. Gardner, Jr.<br>A.B., M.A., Ph.D., D.V.P.<br>Medievalist, Novelist, Banjoist, Epic and Lyric Poet<br>Consultant on all Subjects<br>Occasional Poems for All Occasions<br>Lectures for Ladies&#8217; Clubs, etc., &amp; general good advice<\/blockquote>it&#8217;s both an indication that the person is an asshole and that I am likely to like him anyway. Again, Your Humble Blogger is postmodern. Not postmodernist, just postmodern.\n<p>Anyway, I am fond of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldcatlibraries.org\/oclc\/96332\">The Wreckage of Agathon<\/a>, despite its unrelenting nastiness. It was written in the late sixties, and it&#8217;s a book of its time, but then there are odd and unpleasant resonances with our own time, too. Mr. Gardner&#8217;s Sparta is rotten through and through, and the nonconformism that it seems to espouse also is the hammer tap on the crack that shatters the city. And Lycurgos! What would Mr. Gardner say if he knew that Sparta was being held up as a shining example in a popular movie? The Nazis, of course, loved Sparta. I&#8217;m just saying.\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am aware that John Gardner was a bit of an asshole. That doesn\u2019t bother me much. I can like John Gardner and John Barth. I\u2019m postmodern that way. Also, when somebody puts on his business card Prof. John C&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18075,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10578\/revisions\/18075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}