The worst academic sentence ever...
You know, I try. I will read whatever there is on...whatever interests me at the moment. Right now, it's conspiracy. I will, so help me, even read postmodern critiques of culture because buried in the baby babble one can occasionally find, perhaps, something useful.
Not so with Patrick O'Donnell's Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary US Narrative. O'Donnell's book arrived yesterday in the middle of a big shipment from Amazon. Oh it was bliss. I also got Mark Fenster's Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, Timothy Melley's Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America, Robert Alan Goldberg's Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America, and Michael Barkun's A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, which is going to be my first read, now that I have wrought the unfortunate consequences of unbridled optimism.
Here is the sentence that made me put down O'Donnell's book:
First, I object to the nonce word "enscene," the use of which ought to entail mandatory caning. Second is the notion that "Even though nobody associated with the movie even gave a thought to Freud's completely overrated....everything...I'm still going to suggest with a straight face that one contains traces of the other." (Just because two completely seperate ideas can be forced into a gramatically correct sentence doesn't mean that they ought to fall under the jurisdiction of the same end punctuation!) It's not paranoia in Truman's case, it's just close observation. Random German word. Spelling out words you just wrote out to make a lame pun, Man-wombs. And then the symbolic asshole! Of all possible things, the last thing this sentence needed was a parenthetical symbolic asshole. Could we possibly see the parentheses as a contracting sphincter squeezing out especially ridiculous shit? Hell, why not?!
Maybe there is something useful in O'Donnell's book, but I'll never know. He lost me at page 4.
HJ
Not so with Patrick O'Donnell's Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary US Narrative. O'Donnell's book arrived yesterday in the middle of a big shipment from Amazon. Oh it was bliss. I also got Mark Fenster's Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, Timothy Melley's Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America, Robert Alan Goldberg's Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America, and Michael Barkun's A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, which is going to be my first read, now that I have wrought the unfortunate consequences of unbridled optimism.
Here is the sentence that made me put down O'Donnell's book:
"Indeed, The Truman Show enscenes the birth of paranoia, and although it is questionable whether Weir [the director] had the Schreber case in mind while assembling this Bildungsspiel in a bubble, certainly the film bears significant traces of Freud's classic study of paranoid personality: a son trapped in his father's 'womb'; a god-son on whom the world is entirely centered, convinced he must destroy the world in order to gain ascendency over it; a son (s-o-n) whose actions cause a change in the movements of the sun (s-u-n), and whose relation to the father is one of bondage and eventual release as he exits out the backdoor (the symbolic asshole) of the world whose purpose he has just sundered at film's end."The titanic inanity of this sentence is the stuff of legend.
First, I object to the nonce word "enscene," the use of which ought to entail mandatory caning. Second is the notion that "Even though nobody associated with the movie even gave a thought to Freud's completely overrated....everything...I'm still going to suggest with a straight face that one contains traces of the other." (Just because two completely seperate ideas can be forced into a gramatically correct sentence doesn't mean that they ought to fall under the jurisdiction of the same end punctuation!) It's not paranoia in Truman's case, it's just close observation. Random German word. Spelling out words you just wrote out to make a lame pun, Man-wombs. And then the symbolic asshole! Of all possible things, the last thing this sentence needed was a parenthetical symbolic asshole. Could we possibly see the parentheses as a contracting sphincter squeezing out especially ridiculous shit? Hell, why not?!
Maybe there is something useful in O'Donnell's book, but I'll never know. He lost me at page 4.
HJ
Seed Newsvine
1 comments:
I have always loved how subtexts are the Legos of literary intellectuals. It almost could justify the use of a phrase like "intellectual elitism". I COULD write a book on the metaphorical and metaphysical meanings of how my dogs eat various foods, but I'd be stymied by the thought that it wouldn't enhance anyone's life to read it, nor mine to create it. Besides, the act of feeding my dogs is, in and of itself, entirely meaningful and fulfilling.
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