They Will Rise Again From the Tundra

In keeping with my tradition of insulting, degrading, and otherwise doubting the humanities, that slimy, little den in which I’ve been mired for the duration of my academic “career,” I want to point my reader’s attention to a post by Kenneth Anderson at The Volokh Conspiracy, especially his conclusion:

It means, for another thing, that the humanities as disciplines, while they might still (barely) be a way of teaching certain forms of reasoning, don’t provide “content” in the intellectual reproduction of commercial culture – at least, not at the fundamental level, at the level of science and applied science. They are not part of the production of new knowledge. Success and advance for society lie in the innovations of technical and applied sciences alone – and the humanities lose a place in the production of these innovations, and become relegated to the status of mere items of consumption. Literature,

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I was rummaging through my electronic files last night, looking for inspiring crumbs—a chance thought hammered out during a spare minute, already crystalline in form and fully realized yet scribbled in some nebulous personal code I was sure at the time I would be able to decrypt upon later viewing—when I found a file called “Bullshit Criticisms.doc.”  In it, I had written this:

Always fear the reader who accuses smugness or arrogance simply upon coming across a quiver of big words or inaccessible references.

Is being cerebral a bad thing in writing?  Presumably this is a Master’s course and we should be aspiring to the intelligent.  If your primary criticism is that the author of whatever you’re reading is smarter than you, go pick up a fucking book, or a dictionary, and get cracking.

Are the points these people want our writers to make simply arguments to reinforce the points

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Hitchens at The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas, NV (January 2007)*

This will be as useless and banal as any obituary or tribute, not only because memorializing a person’s life is, in its own way, an act of barbarism, but because I am limited in what I’ve read of Hitchens’s work to his last eight or so years’ worth of essays.  I’ve not read God is Not Great, nor have I read Arguably.  I will, but that’s not the point.  Reading one Christopher Hitchens essay should be enough for any reader to realize, without doubt, that they are drinking deep the work of a virtuoso, a true master of written English, and a wit unparalleled by any of his contemporaries.  When he died last night, the world lost perhaps its finest living prose writer.

I have always marveled at Hitchens’s fearlessness.  A person can be born with intelligence, … Read more

I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Algier . . . a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.  Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

(This post is very closely related to this post, but it takes a bit of a different tack.  I may get some shit if any of my classmates happen across this thing, but it’s meant to open an honest, reflective dialogue about what the fuck we’re doing here.  Most of this advice, while addressed to “you,” is also addressed to me, and to be sure, there are classmates of mine who would not be included, like I would be, as “part of the problem.”)

I have spent most of my scholastic life studying English—writing, literature, pretense, ego—and, mostly, it’s all garbage.  The English degree should not impress (not that most people consider us English … Read more

Simon Read. War of Words: A Tale of Newsprint and Murder. Union Square Press, 2009. 320 pages. ISBN-10: 1402756127

“Journalism [is]… a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.” — Hunter S. Thompson

Simon Read begins War of Words: A Tale of Newsprint and Murder with two quotations, the first an excerpt from the Daily Dramatic Chronicle (later the San Francisco Chronicle) comparing the marksmanship of American journalists to that of their French counterparts and the second a fitting quote from Thompson’s indelible The Great Shark Hunt, a landmark collection of essays and articles that chronicle Thompson’s slog through the mid- to late-1960s and 1970s.

It is hard to imagine anything (journalistically, at least) that rivals the depravity Thompson encountered and, in some cases, perpetuated during the Hippie movement, the 1972 presidential campaign, and Richard Nixon with … Read more

The boy’s weird, Channon. You should trade him in. Or sell him for salvage. Spider Jerusalem

I awoke in a pissy mood today, and that sentiment has only been augmented since I rambled by WritingUp to pull down something like 250-pages worth of my blogs before the site went on a permanent fritz. Well, looks like I missed the boat and those lurid, depressive ramblings will be lost forever, or at least until I am able to recover what I can from the bowels of Google’s HTML cache, which is a task I am not overly anxious to undertake, nor am I expecting it to yield much in the way of positive returns. If I can salvage some of the more pertinent inanities I spewed forth in those tumultuous and confused times, the whole thing might be worth the effort. Barely.

I am getting what I deserved, though. Faith in … Read more