I now lack the juice to fuel the bluster to conceal that I am a simpleton
lithub.com
lithub.com
Powell was Don Barthelme's student, his analysis of Barthelme's main thrust here is worth the read alone. If you want to dig deeper on this point, here's another interview with him: https://www.vice.com/en/article/vdxyd8/padgett-powell-is-ame...
Flann O'Brian, mentioned briefly by Powell is an interesting character, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flann_O'Brien.
> Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation, and Kilworthy Tanner. He lives in Toronto.
That is a very round-about way of saying something negative about this article. Why not say straight out what you think is wrong with it? Why not? Maybe because it is easier for some people to agree with you when you don't present any actual facts.
What does that little info-box say? And why do you think that is ALL we need to know?
Obtuse commentary is worthless for discussion.
Some interviewers aim to help to tell their subjects’ stories, but others are looking for a reason to hear themselves speak. This feels like the latter case.
One is from Powell, the other from Ah-Sen.
>> The attractive characteristic of a young narrator is the absurdity of it and the license of it. - Powell
>> The destiny of all books is to become unmoored from the time which birthed them. - Ah-Sen
We are born into a time and moored to it. Books are not. Books are distinct from people in this way. That's the point.
Since part of the interview is making fun of the way the questions are worded, it also fits in that respect.
Yes, someone "could" do it and we'd understand what they meant. But there's no reason to believe that's what happened here. Maybe "moored" did trigger an association with "birth"/"berth", but "birth" is not a mistake.
"Berthing" is also not a singular, one-time event, any ship has a multitude of berthings over time, in this context it makes no sense for there to be a "time that berthed it" as if it was some singular meaningful event, and it changes "time" into something that "berths" books...what would that mean in this metaphor that a time "berths" a book? Wouldn't other times also berth books in their ports? A time does not "berth" a book, it births a book.
Good day.
Tweet the author. I am very confident in this.
Anyways, I don’t have a twitter but you can feel free.
So that doesn't read right with:
"The destiny of all books is to become unmoored from the time which birthed them. - Ah-Sen"
It could have used both maybe? "...and then berthed in the present"
A “berthed”-friendly interpretation would be “all books start off tied to a particular point in time, it is their destiny to become free of their temporal bounds, to drift through eternity”
Mixing metaphors and claiming a now-unmoored vessel is more likely to be contrasted with one in a state of being “born” than “berthed” is what “doesn’t work”.
Especially considering “unmoored” is a nearly exact antonym of “berthed”, whereas a ship is never described as being “born”. Christened, perhaps. But certainly not born.
Perhaps you're right and it was remembered or quoted wrong, and the word really is "berthed", but it wouldn't have been just the one word remembered incorrectly.
If the arrow of time isn't berthing a book at its creation, when else would it?
The ambiguity is delightful.
If it were berthed it would make more sense to be something like "The destiny of all books is to become unmoored from the time where they were originally berthed".
But it is more common in English to use birthed as created than this kind of extended nautical metaphor.
And it is more common for people to mix their metaphors, especially when they are trying to sound clever.
Therefore I think they mixed their metaphors a bit.
The question isn't whether birthed is more common than extended nautical metaphors in general, the question is given that a nautical metaphor is already in place, what is the likelihood that metaphor is being extended, versus trampled and replaced with another?
> If it were berthed it would make more sense to be something like "The destiny of all books is to become unmoored from the time where they were originally berthed".
Only if the author is assuming the ship has been berthed many times. It might just as easily have been berthed once and adrift ever since. Being berthed in no way implies repetition.
That is to say originally berthed also works for having been berthed once and adrift ever since, at least in English which tends to be forgiving about this kind of thing.
What does "experimental formalist" mean in this case and what is the associated point of view you're referring to?
He acts like an actual author - under-acknowledged, cloyingly clever, desperate for attention
instead of an author fantasy - cool, knowledgeable, enmeshed in the subject to the point of unselfconsciousness
Yeah, unless the interviewer is a big name in their own right (so not in this case), your aim is to let the subject shine and fade into the background. The quality of your questions is only judged by what answers they elicit.
Larry King, on his interview technique, said "The key of interviewing is listening. I hate interviewers who come with a long list of prepared questions, because they're going to depend on going from the fourth question to the fifth question without listening to the answer"
Though I can't say I blame the interviewer. If I spent that much time flipping through a thesaurus crafting my questions, I wouldn't want to divert from them either.
I saw some instances of there being responses / references to previous answers inside the interviewer's questions, though, which led me to believe otherwise.
As an aside, I think a huge number of people think the liberal racism bit is spot on. As translated elsewhere in this thread, "erasing representation to avoid the discomfort of confronting racism" is a real phenomenon.
https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/gone.too.far
It's very short, and very worth reading.
Lord, this paragraph gave me life. This is why we need Academia - somewhere needs be a shelter for the people with both the wit to write this response and the job security to actually send it, if only to provide the rest of us with the solace of knowing it exists.
> Are your emotions pure?
Are you thinking through this with clear thought and emotion?
> Are your nerves adjustable?
Do you feel so strongly about this that it has affected you this whole time, since spring?
> How do you stand in relation to the potato?
Can you not support yourself? Are you as wellrounded or less so than a potato?
> Should it still be Constantinople?
Can the outcome not change even when history repeats itself?
The last one to me seems like the indicator that these questions are not nonsensical. As it is is direct reference to the colleague's question about history repeating itself and refers to a location which changed back and forth numerous times.
It's bizarre to me that in certain circles some Colors are capitalized, while other colors are not.
I encourage you to consider and understand the perspectives of those who do capitalize the word.
This serves as an introduction to some people's thinking:
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php
Note, the standard practice to capitalize ethnic groups: For example jewish would be considered incorrect. There are those who consider Black to be an ethnic group, hence, capitalizing it encompasses a way to "describe the people, culture, art and communities" that make up the ethnic group. In which case, it's not a color, exactly, which I think is what you may be missing, when you consider why some capitalize the word.
Case in point: We already capitalize many other groups that are often associated with "color." Color, of course, being a construct we often see as "real," when in fact it is a cultural interpretation.
> After all, she pointed out, “We already capitalize Asian, Hispanic, African American and Native American.”
Are we really pretending it's a coincidence all the time?
This naivety is rightfully never applied to right wing bigotry.
I'm not white myself but I'm genuinely confused as to why this kind of blatant ethnic antagonization is so normalized in western elites and extremely taboo to point out.
To consider this further, shift the power structures and see how whiteness changes. Who is considered "white" in the historic USSR and contemporary ex-bloc states is radically different than the usage in America at the same time. This is even more complicated in places like Central or South America, India, and parts of Asia. I guarantee that - if you weren't versed with local power dynamics and colorism history - you wouldn't be able to classify who on the street is generally considered "white" in Buenos Aires.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule
All of the definitions are contested and subject to localities, not just whiteness.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263722423_Not_black...
>is that "white" isn't an ethnic group with an actual cultural or racial lineage.
None of them are. There's more genetic diversity in sub Saharan Africa than in any other place on earth. People from Asia and people from Africa don't identify as black or asian as a consistent racial lineage.They're also a western ad hoc hodge podge just as much as whiteness is.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people
None of your explanations single out white people as an especially fake identity inconsistent with asian or black.
"Black" as used in the editorial above is a very specific usage - replacing "African American" for the critical reasons outlined. The reason this group is unique as an ethnicity w.r.t. recategorization is because the structure and violence of slavery isolated them from historic ethnicities and forcefully regrouped them under a new one. This is why in that Habecker paper, peoples with dark skin and african heritage who were not part of that system try to separate themselves from that identity - that's why it exists!
I'd also argue that "Asian" probably _shouldn't_ be capitalized, and there are some theorists who agree. Really, asian only really exists as an ethnic category because Americans historically (and even now) couldn't really be assed to learn the basic geography of Asia and grouped it all.
"is that "white" isn't an ethnic group with an actual cultural or racial lineage".
"The reason this group is unique as an ethnicity w.r.t. recategorization is because the structure and violence of slavery isolated them from historic ethnicities and forcefully regrouped them under a new one."
Conflicting statements.
According to you white people don't have historic ethnicities but black people also don't because of slavery and that is why they deserve capitalization?
There's a case to be made - and some theorists do - that black and Black are different identities in America, the second directly corresponding to that shared loss of history.
Right, but are those sub-groups still all that relevant in the context of race in America?
It's been a long time since Irish-Americans have been treated differently than British-Americans, for example.
I would say grouping all white sub-groups together makes as much sense as grouping all black or Asian sub-groups together because generally racial dynamics today are viewed as occurring between White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American groups. Further granularity is rarely considered in informal language.
"For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists."
I don't find that thoughtful.
The argument further erodes when they also capitalize "Asian", which is described as "groups that include myriad ethnic identities united by shared race and geography and, to some degree, culture" - How does that not apply equally to "white" also?
Black usually means the descendant of slaves. When Obama was starting his political career there was some debate in the Black community about if he really counted as Black, since he didn't really have much contact with the Black community until his 20s and his history is quite different.
White typically means descendants of various waves of settlers with limited ties to any specific European country. Generally they can trace their lineage to a mix of early and later arrivals. With a strong bias towards northern Europe.
Hispanic generally meant Mexican, Cuban, or Puerto Rican. Which were fairly geographically distinct communities in the 90s so one word for all three didn't cause much confusion.
Hispanic is a newer term, minted during my lifetime. I know older people who used to be white until they were relabeled as Hispanic.
https://daily.jstor.org/where-did-the-term-hispanic-come-fro...
https://www.history.com/news/hispanic-latino-latinx-chicano-...
The Irish were white.
Does one hold that all the diverse peoples of Africa can be considered with a shared group identity, which deserves acknowledgement and respect, and do you simultaneously hold that white people of Europe can be grouped together, but that grouping is undeserving of the same validity and respect.
If someone is willing to engage in this Act of cognitive dissonance, they can be considered part of the political in-group or at least sufficiently compliant to be trusted.
It is absolutely an example of the liberal racism that Powell is talking about and straight out of 1984.
We have words for those people.
African. European.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here? It's confusing.
Maybe the problem here seems to be that "white" is implied to be the umbrella term for "European." It's not, nor do I believe very many people think it should be. We don't want to go back to the Pre-WW2 eugenics thinking. That pretty much tore the continent apart.
So is shared White identity across nationalities and ethnicities. But identifying with the shared White experience of White supremacy has a substantially different character than identifying with the shared Black experience of White supremacy.
PP: It emerges with no consideration for anything but the next correct word.”
PadgetGPT
edit: back to recommend against using Mupdeemut. People thought i was saying something derogatory and i had to spend significant time explaining myself.
I admit I spent more time right clicking -> 'search the web' for some of the words he used. Incredible vocabulary.. I have to use 'intellection' soon, I've needed to use a word like that before but couldn't find it.
Cheers!
[m]ade-[u]p [p]eople [d]oing [m]ade-[u]p [t]hings. Let’s call that MUPDMUT. With some liberty, Mupdeemuthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69cvhp6h2cc
In the interview he also uses "made-up people doing made-up things", so this was not an nonce invention. Perhaps he uses the phrase when teaching literature. Also I would not judge him for this, every person who is frequently interviewed learns to deploy a few stories and phrases that have a reliable effect.
- "I now lack the juice to fuel the bluster to conceal that I am a simpleton," suggesting that the interviewer still has said juice. This also allows some subtle critiques like "I'm ignorant of 'malapert'", which on the surface is a sort of back-handed compliment to the questioner on their ability to coin a phrase like "malapert urbanity" that a "simpleton" like they are interviewing does not understand. But it also suggests that if the "legend" they are interviewing does not know the word, perhaps this is excessive juice.
- "It emerges with no consideration for anything but the next correct word." Questioner, stop overthinking things.
- Then when the interviewer asks Powell to agree with his assertion-as-a-question that there is no wrong way to read a book, Powell responds with a story about how he wants to focus on making writing better but people like the interviewer that say there are no wrong ways to read a book are actually teaching that there are wrong ways to say things. Furthermore, people like the interviewer eviscerated a recent book in the style that people like the interviewer celebrated, on the grounds of racism, despite the fact that the content of his books is from actual black people who said those things. So the implied answer the question is that no, a book does not get unmoored from its time period, because he cannot actually publish those books today, and that there may or may not be a wrong way to read a book, but there certainly is a wrong way to write one, namely his (celebrated) way.
But then it all goes completely over the interviewer's head (no doubt as expected). I wasn't impressed with Powell on the first read, but wow, that is some finesse!
This is great.
This happens all the time! Glad it’s not just me.
Not really. Something is verisimilar when it has the appearance of truth, or is likely to be true, regardless of whether it is in fact true. In Spanish, verosímil ('verisimilar') is rather frequently used in contexts in which one hypothesizes about the trueness of claims or statements, especially when it cannot be verified at that very moment, or ever.
> Something is verisimilar when it has the appearance of truth, or is likely to be true, regardless of whether it is in fact true.
Hmmm ... in English I've never seen the usage "likely to be true". There are many other words for that - probable, likely, etc.
I might say to them that verisimilitudinous is not the usual word (despite the OP). It's the more elegant verisimilar, and thus verisimilarly.
> I learned to write the English I have written by taking three years of Latin, in the putatively desolate educational backwater of Jacksonville, Florida, ending in the tenth grade translating The Aeneid. I was in homeroom sitting with Allen Collins of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
The piece was essentially a portrait of a hero, Willie Ebert Brown, in a terrain of racial relations that had hope in it. The sentence that announced the Black back-up for the manager was this: “A sturdy-looking Black guy came out of the kitchen.” This is choice low fruit for a sensitivity editor. “Objectifying description,” she wrote, “that may invoke associations with slavery.”
I should have desisted publishing the book, but I am a chicken-shit person and I really wanted a book with a beautiful photo of an indigo snake on its cover. My celebration of Willie was thrown out; my invocation of slavery (to which who objects, its absurdity aside?) was one of a hundred other crimes in the piece. Liberal racism had its way: remove racism by removing race.
There is not a person of color in my book except a very positive small tribute to Barack Obama as a tool by which we might argue the French can slow their roll about how racist we are and they aren’t. How that was not deemed racist is a wonder, because it somewhat is. It’s not a wonder: liberal racism is a photo-negative argument. I apologize for this rant. Chicken-shit and now tired too.
Snark is a signal of cheap argument: They have nothing more serious to say; they are signaling that there is a bandwagon and you can join in, rather than a serious argument that you can engage and reason with - just grab a drink and hop aboard! Don't spoil the party!
Chicken-shit indeed: It's very easy these days to preach to the choir, white people jumping on the anti-antiracism bandwagon, because they can deny and ignore racism's effects without personal consequence (including that it's not socially acceptable and even encouraged), and tiring of dealing with race (if white people tire of it, just imagine black people who can't avoid or ignore it).
Instead of cutting the story, how about a description of the kitchen-worker as more than "Black" (though we don't get to see the original; maybe that's already there). Instead of snark, how about an examination of what the editor meant, what aspects were racism to what degree? So sorry for tiring you.
They may well have something more serious to say, and it doesn't imply a weak argument in itself. I think it's fair to say the author does have something more serious to say; the question, really, is do you. All you've done is reduced the OP to the same tired discourse, and proclaimed which side you're on, but you know, there really is more to the linked essay than that.
Based on what?
> All you've done is reduced the OP to the same tired discourse
The OP did that. What else have they offered?
and the traditional riposte as shown here is smarm: https://web.archive.org/web/20131207011820/https://gawker.co...
What is this defining feature of our times? What is snark reacting to?
It is reacting to smarm.
What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.
Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can't everyone just be nicer?
The existence of a “sensitivity editor” more or less defines smarm, so the reaction is fairly natural.
Tell us what you really think, loxist
I'll never understand this smirking form of reactionary elbow-nudging.
When someone’s post amounts to: “you know what I’m talking about, I just can’t say it,” well, you might as well just not say it. You’re dogwhistling, but there are no dogs.