Monday, December 22, 2008

FTW

It's that time of year again for wacky internet awards. Andrew Sullivan has his "Daily Dish Awards" which includes a "Poseur Alert" award "for passages of prose that stand out for pretension, vanity and really bad writing designed to look like profundity." A great idea, but I can't figure out how he missed this classic from Pasty:

Which is why when I talk of Obama’s memoirs, I place “Barack Obama” as literary construct in quotation marks: there is, in any verbal recounting, necessary recourse to narrative technique and tropes — so it is hardly controversial to separate Barack Obama from “Barack Obama” as he exists in words alone.

Where the interest lies is at the point of agency and authorship. For if Bill Ayers has indeed ghostwritten at least portions of Barack Obama’s memoirs, as some are alleging, then it is fair to say that the “Barack Obama” of those memoirs is more even than a construct: he is at least partially a fictional character, given that it is “his” words that ostensibly create “him” — making it follow that, if the words creating him are not his own, then “he” is really a kind of living literary portmanteau, a blend of influences, an ontological hybrid insofar as he exists publicly.



The Editors at the Poorman Institute seem to have missed it for their "Golden Winger Awards for Excellence in Wingnuttery." Is everyone asleep at the wheel?

5 comments:

pansypoo said...

who is this pasty 'intellectual'? as if georgee wasn't
'constructed'.
ayers? REALLY?

Sinfonian said...

Hell, I'm just waiting for the results of the 2008 Dead Pool ... and the introduction of the 2009 version.

Anonymous said...

Barack is really whoever we want him to be. For me, a 21st century Shaft.

pansypoo said...

for republikans a BLACK whale.

res ipsa loquitur said...

It's that time of year again for ...

Your Dead Pool.