Trevor Paglen’s book I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me examines the secret history of America’s military-industrial complex by examining the different patches worn by military intelligence officers who work in covert operations. I Could Tell You is out in a new paperback edition from Melville House this November. See Paglen on Colbert below.
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Issue 6 of the online literary journal Wag’s Revue is out now, and features interviews with Stephen Colbert and Reality Hunger author David Shields. They’re calling it the “Truthiness” issue, which I guess is appropriate. Here’s Colbert actually talking about Shields:
WG: Despite your professed aversion to books, you often have guests on the show from the world of literature. In fact, David Shields, who we recently interviewed, was on your show shortly after we spoke with him.
SC: Yeah, you guys should get a nice Colbert bump out of that.
WG: How do you reconcile that, though?
SC: Reconcile what? Having Shields on the show? I nailed Shields. You can go to the tape and see that. I mean, the guy’s book is the equivalent of you guys putting clips from my show on your website and calling it “The Wag-bert Report.” It’s—basically, it’s Wikipedia. A bunch of unattributed, slapped-together quotes. Mostly taken from Britannica.
“A bunch of unattributed, slapped-together quotes”–that’s about right, although it’s always a precarious position to agree with Colbert’s persona. As for the Shield’s interview, well, he manages to say a number of embarrassing things. Here he is explaining why he’s too busy to actually read the novels he’d love to see extinct:
What I find tedious are works that genuflect at the altar of narrative. What happens with so many books by supposedly intelligent writers is that the intelligence gets tamped down: ‘I’ll tell this story and the meaning will crawl through the cracks of the narrative at six crucial points.’ That’s not worth it. Part of my conversion, you could say, resulted of becoming aware of mortality. This is what I focused on in my previous book [The Thing About Life is One Day You’ll Be Dead]. This is it. This is my entire life. We are mortal beings watching the earth for a short time. I don’t have time for a 600-page novel that tells me that crime doesn’t pay.
Interviewer Sandra Allen has the intelligence to call Shields out on this. Observe:
SA: But doesn’t this dismissal also potentially dismiss art? Dismiss a reader experiencing the glorious immersion in the art that is Crime and Punishment, or for that matter Swann’s Way or Ulysses or 2666?
DS: First of all, most of the books that you mentioned were written a long time ago. I love Proust above all else pretty much. Of course if you want to read Crime and Punishment, Swann’s Way, these glacially-paced novels that have no place in a 21st century universe, you can. Even the Bolaño was written ten or so years ago. I’m trying to figure out how we’re going to write now.
Shields then blathers about how Reality Hunger, like Monet or Ulysses or Beethoven’s 5th (!) is really renewing art, claims that all of the critics who hated on Reality Hunger merely proved his point (Shields offers no support for this argument), and generally poses as a would-be revolutionary/college sophomore who just read half of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. The interview is basically great ammunition for anyone who saw through Reality Hunger.
Okay well so, we’re more or less “off” this week, because we love America sooooooooo much that we’re going on vacation. Still, because we are totally American, which is to say totally industrious, and because “the U.S. is the greatest, best country god has ever given man on the face of the Earth,” we’ll be leaving you with a series of fantastic images of great American heroes over the next week, starting with this stunning portrait of Superman himself, Christopher Reeve, by talented painter Adam Brooks. Great stuff.
From the OED:
“A writer of satires or lampoons; applied to Timon of Phlius (268 BC).
1845 LEWES Hist. Philos. I. 77 His state of mind is finely described by Timon the sillograph. 1849 GROTE Hist. Greece II. xxxvii. IV. 526 The sillograph Timon of the third century B.C.
So sillographer, sillographist.
1656 BLOUNT Glossogr., Sillographer, a writer of scoffs, taunts and revilings; such was Timon. 1775 ASH, Sillographist. 1845 Encycl. Metrop. X. 393/1 Menippus indeed, in common with the Sillographers, seems to have introduced much more parody than even the earliest Roman Satirists.”
Famous sillographers include:
Timon of Philius (as noted above)
Hopefully you’ve had time to sift through and absorb some of the primer. So and well so now you’re probably saying to yourself: “Okay sure, Aristotle, fabulous, Occam’s razor, I’m down, cogito ergo sum, fine, I get it, but so what?”
“So what?” and “Who cares?” are the most fundamental questions in any intellectual pursuit. Asking difficult questions doesn’t necessarily put food on the table or make us more attractive to the opposite sex or give us ten extra years of life.
So what do we gain when we ask: “What is?” and “What is it to exist?” and “What is real?”
Watch the following clip of Deepak Chopra on The Colbert Report. What is Chopra’s ontological position? What applications (political, social, cultural, etc) might his position entail?
Biblioklept 