Though my command of the English language is not perfect I am fluent enough to understand the wrath of my good friend David Schoffman.
His latest grievance is the impact of "posting" and texting on what he calls "the slightly educated class." He sees the developing American vernacular as a grim whirligig of empty idioms, arbitrary diminutives and indiscriminate military-type abbreviations.
As he bloviated to me the other day in an email, oblivious to the ironies implicit in this method of transmission: "The argot of the Internet is an effeminate linguistic afterthought that would have Shakespeare, or for that matter Walter Winchell, hermetically arc-welding their own crypts shut."
:(
Cranky reactionary that he is, David has come up with a suitable, personal antidote to this fretful cultural decline.
Every few months Schoffman rearranges his considerable library and lugs a stack of randomly selected books clear across town planting them in his studio in small precarious ziggurats. He then proceeds, as per Nabakov, to reread these often dog-eared dust heaps and mildewed spider traps. The brittle piss-yellow pages of second-hand paperbacks practically crumble to the touch. And yet, on any given day, David might revisit The Birth of Tragedy, Huis Clos or Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.
The idea is to suffocate any possibility of low-brow philological philandering.
So for example if he finds himself listening to National Public Radio for any significant length of time he'll need to gargle, so to speak, with To The Lighthouse or
Swann's Way. If a telephone solicitor succeeds in penetrating his gauntlet of filters and screens and catches him unawares he'll feel the desperate need to cold shower under a reproachful downpour of Dickinson and Pound. And if, on the odd chance he happens upon the lapidary platitudes of the Huffington Post, nothing short of Wittgenstein's Tractatus will chase the bitter aftertaste of that oily AOL .
And of course, one never needs an excuse to revisit good old Walter Benjamin...
His latest grievance is the impact of "posting" and texting on what he calls "the slightly educated class." He sees the developing American vernacular as a grim whirligig of empty idioms, arbitrary diminutives and indiscriminate military-type abbreviations.
As he bloviated to me the other day in an email, oblivious to the ironies implicit in this method of transmission: "The argot of the Internet is an effeminate linguistic afterthought that would have Shakespeare, or for that matter Walter Winchell, hermetically arc-welding their own crypts shut."
:(
Cranky reactionary that he is, David has come up with a suitable, personal antidote to this fretful cultural decline.
The idea is to suffocate any possibility of low-brow philological philandering.
So for example if he finds himself listening to National Public Radio for any significant length of time he'll need to gargle, so to speak, with To The Lighthouse or
Swann's Way. If a telephone solicitor succeeds in penetrating his gauntlet of filters and screens and catches him unawares he'll feel the desperate need to cold shower under a reproachful downpour of Dickinson and Pound. And if, on the odd chance he happens upon the lapidary platitudes of the Huffington Post, nothing short of Wittgenstein's Tractatus will chase the bitter aftertaste of that oily AOL .
And of course, one never needs an excuse to revisit good old Walter Benjamin...
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