Submitted with love and esteem for Henry:
Henry's Modus Ippydandy:
1. Choose ancient text and/or writer (usually writer)
2. And/Or Choose canonical text and/or writer (usually writer)
3. Create hazy term for unspecified quality
4. Attribute hazy term for unspecified quality to canonical and/or ancient
writer and/or text (usually writer)
5. Pretend to define hazy term for unspecified quality
6. Belittle current writers for not possessing unspecified quality
Gabe
At 10:49 PM 1/14/2003 -0500, Henry Gould wrote:
>Geraldine Monk published some fairy tales in Nedge # 9 because I solicited
>them. This is the sort of aleatoric event which avaunt-po-biz would try
>to anthologize, if it cared about Nedge, which it doesn't. Snubbery
>reigns in the posed avunc-god.
>
>The notion of avant-garde serves the literary wannabees in exactly the
>same shibboleth-fashion that "freedom" serves George Double-You Shrub.
>
>Gudd asks, where is the avant-garde of now? I would suggest reading the
>Hebrew prophets. They are rank amateurs when it comes to poetics but they
>have the gift of utterance. So did Auden & Brodksy sometimes. What is
>utterance? Utterance is the dialectical opposite of postmodern
>mannerism. It is the political expression of virtu or character or vicy
>versy, it is the politic expression of eccentric personality. Blake was
>an utterer. It is often the real substance of poetry - something not seen
>in America for several decades.
>
>It is the poet expressing the form & pressure of the time in public
>language as under duress. It is the odd situation of the Everyperson
>being asked while constructing an outhouse her opinion on the forgiveness
>of debt. It is Langland being interviewed while starving to death.
>
>It is the point of conjunction between the necessary and the beautiful -
>the obsession of Simone Weil, the eternal avant-gardiste, dying of hunger
>in London, Paris, and hovels in between.
>
>Henry
Gabriel Gudding
Department of English
Illinois State University
Normal, IL 61790
office 309.438.5284
home 309.828.8377
http://www.pitt.edu/~press/2002/gudding.html
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