To Hell Without the Dignity of a Handbasket, Even

In the words of a famous colonel: "War is infolonel."

I often think that Dijon Is France's most beautiful rijon. And it's nice to tour the Midi With your swidi. But head for Beaune If you want to be aleaune, Because in Bourgogne They won't quit annogne.

A mere fragment of a sentence, yet I could criticize it for days. It's from a review of some contemporary poetry that, for all I know, may be very good. But this twelve-word clause is corrigible out of all proportion to its length! What is uncanny about the extruded fragment is that it contrives to be patronizing toward Pliny while, at the same time, overrating him. You couldn't have done this if you knew what you were doing -- to quote a great poet. 1. Patronizing. Why "wonderfully"? Is it matter for surprise that Pliny should be inquisitive and incisive? Is the implication that inquiry and incision are recent inventions? Or is it (rather) implied that they are traits seldom met with in classic literature? -- or seldom met with among the Romans specifically? I fear I'm being reassured that Pliny, Rome, and the ancient world aren't as boring as it is presumed I expect them to be. And hereby a man may learn that it's not only Pliny the Elder who is bein...

Narrative Drift in Oral Culture and Scripted Theatre * Copyright © 2007 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Volume 37, Issue 4 (2006): 725–38. 1. Jack Students of British popular culture have often collected valuable evidence in North America. Broadly speaking, there are two attitudes that may be taken toward such a provenance. On the one hand, the American environment may be seen as a preservative: the Appalachian mountains, for example, are isolated enough that a transplanted folk-tale gathered there may be seen as more authentic than if it had been gathered in Britain: insulated from agents of change in its place of origin, the tale is as if sealed in a time capsule; it has not had to adapt to the altering circumstances of industrial society, mass culture, and so forth. Another line of thinking, however, would say that the American environment, be it never so “isolated,” is distant — in space and in culture — from the British Is...

Deafness in High School: When he explained the binomial theorem I couldn't heorem. Murder on Everest: The perpetrator Was a sherpetrator. Initiation: When they admitted me to the inner sanctum I politely thanctum. An Emergency Bris: We couldn't find a mohel So we had to use Father Dohel. You seldom meet a Mormon But in Utah they're simply Swormon. Why not come over for gnocchi Followed by karaocchi?

[This was brought forth by, but isn't really a response to, the very perceptive article "The Death of the Editor" by J. Stephen Murphy.] My own feeling is that the New Criticism, reader-response theory, and deconstruction were each responding to something that is just true: that is, the fact that, whatever it is that creates a text's meaning, the author's intention just isn't it. In our experience of reading, authorial intention is a complete non-event except in unusual moments -- as when we become positively stymied ("What can the author mean?"). (Now the reasons why deconstruction arrived at this conclusion seem to me quite unnecessary -- we don't need structuralism's semiotics OR deconstruction's counter-revolution to see that authorial intention is always imputed, never actual, even when it is the author who imputes it to the author.) The author's intention is, in all cases, properly phrased as "the intention someone impute...

Certainly, my heresy is not that I deny Mahler. I love Mahler, but I am not sold on his entire output. Possibly these notes will encourage those who have been dismayed by some unfortunate encounter with the less rewarding parts of his output. For declining to go absolutely ape over the entire corpus, I make no apologies; still, it can't hurt for me to adduce the testimony of Otto Klemperer, who knew Mahler, worked with him, and is one of the greatest conductors of his music. Interviewed toward the end of his life, Klemperer said of his mentor: Today I like his Kindertotenlieder and the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and some of the symphonies. But not all of them. I mean, I am not a stupid, enthusiastic boy: I don't like everything he wrote. Another opinion from which I have drawn some support is my father's. He said long ago, when I was starting to get interested in classical music, that a good deal of it is what he called "sawing around." He meant the many p...