Storming the Castle?

David Biespiel is unimpressed by the now-infamous Kenneth Goldsmith tweet.

Our finest postmodernists have turned into purists and party base delegates. And that’s where things just get sad. The vigor and joy with which our best postmodernists attack any criticism of their aesthetic has all the hallmarks of the apparatchik.

He continues:

By adopting and tweeting the semantics of political shorthand for literary criticism (i.e., attacking Ange Mlinko as a ‘conservative’), it’s made the whole postmodernist movement jump the shark. This week Postmodern poetics is looking a lot like the Fonz in a leather jacket on skis.

Poseur Alert

"Boy oh boy. It's really scary to see how conservative poet Ange Mlinko has become. She used to be one of us."

Kenneth Goldsmith exposes the group-think the avant-garde are always at pains to deny, and confirms what "conservative" critics everywhere know to be their only sin: independent thought.

Better Thought About Than Read

Kenneth Goldsmith gets my goat. He also gets my full attention. I always come across things in his essays and interviews -- such as the exchange in October's The Believer -- I wish I hadn't read, but then can't stop thinking about. He really is poetry's Prince of Darkness.

My favorite books on my shelf are the ones that I can’t read, like Finnegans Wake, The Making of Americans, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, or The Arcades Project. I love the idea that these books exist. I love their size and scope; I adore their ambition; I love to pick them up, open them at random, and always be surprised; I love the fact that I will never know them. They’ll never go out of style; they’re timeless; they’re always new to me. I wanted to write books just like these.

More here.