Ad Interim

Off tomorrow morning to spend some quality time waiting in airport lines – er, that is, off for a wee Thanksgiving break, to give my students a respite from my increasingly incoherent teaching, to get a breath of the autumn in latitudes with actual seasons.

And not a moment too soon. I find myself (as the charismatics say) "convicted" by John Latta's burst of blog-loathing (prompted by his reading Virgil Thomson's letters):

Do it ever come down that—full of bullion and bumptious—one of you prints out a passle of such bloggery talk, essential “stuff” come down out of the zone blogique, harry’d by its muchness, “happy at the thought,” though gummed out taut on tenterhooks to read it all, and you—oh, The World itself gets its gumption up to demand something of you and that revery-look you wear so affably, and, well, you don’t get back to them pages blogeoises for, oh, a few days? It does me, and it undoes me. I find myself full of kittle and contempt, bilious at the perusal, fanning through the pages like a sneer-wind, worse it is than yesterday’s news in yesterday’s newspapers. (For those, the common consent is, can at least serve for the wrapping up of the post-repast fish bones . . . or the pre-prandial fish guts . . . or the lousy book by Stanley Fish you.) Is it sensible to write junk day after day? Or pour over the books of wayward saints for pre-chewables, quotes and queries for th’international short attention span? Maybe it’s not.

Haven't met a harangue like that since the last time I cracked an Edward Dahlberg book. Glad Stan Brakhage comes to the rescue & saves our reading pleasure. "BEAM 4," ARK, nicht wahr?