I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!

I was just about to post a link here, but I was wavering over which of several paragraphs to excerpt. I was leaning toward “In this respect, of course, the Class of 1943 University Professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University is following the lead of David Hume – who, after writing A Treatise of Human Nature, published numerous very popular essays with the help of a writer from Entertainment Weekly.”

It should be said that the whole thing is so much more than just a snarkfest — it’s a great piece of critical writing.

This was my favorite paragraph:

“Legend has it that the blues guitarist Robert Johnson acquired his haunting style by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads. West, as a “bluesman of the life of the mind,” has clearly also been to the crossroads. The devil gave him a team of publicists. I don’t think this was a good bargain on West’s part. It left him unable to recognize that self-respect is often the enemy of self-esteem.”

Like Jesus H. Christ in the Garden of Gethsemenae, I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!

I’m now curious about Summers’ particular beef with Mansfield that would lead him to say such a dumbass thing– or even the moderately dumbass thing that could get inflated in West’s retelling into this dumbass thing. Universities are sufficiently full of friendships that one wouldn’t expect on the basis of discipline or ideology that you *never* just go right out there and assume that the person you’re talking to has the same enemies list that you do.

12 is spot on – so disturbingly accurate that I now wonder if West has been writing the Smoove column all along.
It’s the parenthetical “(D.960)” that makes that sentence, I reckon. It’s like graffiti with diacritical marks.

So, if “sublime and funky love” is a flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, what are the ingredients?

I’ve got a sneaking feeling that what West actually wrote was

Like Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship or the themes in Schubert’s last Sonatas,

or something similar. That sentence has got red biro and post-its all over it. (The shorter version would still be pretty dickish, admittedly.)

Wow, classy: from a putatively race-neutral critique of a scholar’s work to racist caricature in 13 moves. Nice.

oh, my bad — the original critique was *already* racist (“popping a cap in a fellow faculty member’s ass”). Carry on.

Kathleen: your comment implies that the intervening 12 moves discussing West’s widely-known and well-documented academic buffoonery since the publication of Race Matters and The American Evasion of Philosophy were all in the direction of Smoove B.

Prove. Especially the ‘putatively’ part.

Kathleen,

One assumes by racist carcicature you mean Smoove B. OK; but how would *you* respond to this passage?

The basic problem with my love relationships with women is that my standards are so high — and they apply equally to both of us. I seek full-blast mutual intensity, fully fledged mutual acceptance, full-blown mutual flourishing, and fully felt peace and joy with each other. This requires a level of physical attraction, personal adoration, and moral admiration that is hard to find. And it shares a depth of trust and openness for a genuine soul-sharing with a mutual respect for a calling to each other and to others. Does such a woman exist for me? Only God knows and I eagerly await this divine unfolding. Like Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship in Emily Bronte’s remarkable novel Wuthering Heights or Franz Schubert’s tempestuous piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat (D.960) I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!

(Contra Phil at 17, the original — and perfectly comprehensible, tho dickish — sentence must have referred to Heathcliff and Catherine, with “‘s relation” a late addition. What the Sonata in B falt is doing there, tho, only God knows.)

Me, I thought the operative line was “West had recently released his first hip hop CD, so perhaps Summers thought this would put him at ease.” As if Summers was trying to speak the lingo, and Scott was riffing on the entire exchange. But perhaps I misread this.

In defense of David Ritz, Brother Ray is a fine piece of work.

Ben: because the possibility always exists that there is racism behind a white academic’s critique of a black academic (assuming Scott is white). Thus it’s a charge worth considering; but it’s also critical to get your ducks in a row before you make it. So as far as I’m concerned it’s not just legitimate but important to point out when someone making the charge doesn’t have a webbed foot to stand on.

Maurice, I read Scott’s column and the comments up to Kathleen’s. Thus, when I read Kathleen’s comments, I already had all the information I needed to determine that it wasn’t a charge worth considering, in this case.

I resist any suggestion that the Bronte/Schubert sentence is the result of editing. It’s just too perfect the way it is.

Wait a second, I have a forest-for-trees question. Is West actually saying he will continue to pursue this sublime and funky love after he dies? Because I think I missed that on the first read.

he is at least claiming that he intends to pursue it after his own death–otherwise, what’s the catherine-and-heathcliff reference for?

The pool of dead ladies is substantially larger than the pool of live ones. It may also be substantially funkier.

When it’s played properly, the performer dies.

I wondered if it might be something like that, mds. Since I neither comment on blogs nor read blog comments, I tend to be unfamiliar with issues of trans-blog identity.

but at least opus 232 was undeniably sublime and funky.

An excerpt.

When I tried playing that Schubert sonata as a teenager, I’m pretty sure my piano teacher died a little bit. Does that count?

Good God, Substance, that excerpt is terrifying. Are we absolutely certain that someone with a grudge against West didn’t get this thing published under his name to make him look bad?

I saw not too long ago the video of Bernard Williams’s talk ‘The Human Prejudice’ at Princeton in 2002. West was in the audience and asked Williams this great question about ‘haunted humanism’, Sophocles, and Nietzsche. It’s just hard to believe this is the same person who wrote (or allowed someone to write on his behalf) something as tone-deaf as ‘Like the peerless Russian writer Anton Chekhov and the matchless Irish author Samuel Beckett …’, or ‘The plane’s landing in Sacramento and, praise God, I am one grateful Negro!’

And, sorry, that book jacket … it resembles the covers of titles in those Xlibris ads in the NYRB. And West looks like he’s about to tear out some undergraduate’s throat with his bare teeth. Yeesh. Like I said: are we sure this isn’t a joke? Or maybe it’s code: if you line all the letters up in a series of 16 x 16 grids, you get the intellectual biography he promised.

Oops, forgot to say that in my experience Kathleen has always been a perfectly reasonable and engaging interlocutor, both on my blog (including today!) and in response to my various posts on this fine blog. I mean, it’s just churlish of me to defend David Ritz and not say that too. I do think she misread that passage, yes, and responded hastily. But in all my internets interactions with her, she’s been thoughtful and gracious. Just for the record.

I don’t know, I haven’t been following West since the early 1980s, but from I’ve seen of him I get the impression that buffoonery is his normal M.O. (not that anything is wrong with that). All these “brother Larry [Summers]”, “sister Hillary [Clinton]”, what’s the deal with the Uncle Remus act?

Please credit my fine friend J— who found it at West’s Facebook page.

Substance McGee (if I may), I’d get rid of that feeling right away — all you’ll get for it here is a chorus of angry “I am so not racist!!!!!! you’re the real racist”. The gallant attempts at defense: “usually she’s not like this, I don’t know *what’s* gotten into her”, I know they are well-meant but it’s hard to find them gratifying in the atmosphere of genial solidarity specific to a comment thread that went direct to Smoove B and began in praise of a critique that all but mailed Professor West a box of fried chicken.

Before everyone goes for it: yeah, yeah — *I’m* the real racist.

what’s the deal with the Uncle Remus act?

Dunno. But here’s an interesting observation: abb1 (remember him?) made his last comment on Crooked Timber on March 29 of this year. Henri Vieuxtemps, who wrote the above, made his first comment on March 30. Just sayin’.

the uncle remus accusation would have more point if west had called him “brer summers”.

which, come to think of it, would have been funny in any case, for reasons more related to summers than to west.

Double down on nasty accusations!

Well, I’m not a ‘fellow CTer’. I defend Scott because the charge that his review is racist is unsupported by a fair and not even particularly nuanced reading of said review, and also because I share his assessment of West’s scholarship.

J@70: “McLemee operates within a worst-of-both-worlds zone where he’s a journalist who writes about academics.”

How true! I would say “the worst of both worlds” is not just a fair description, but the perfect one. For example, if I make a reference to Hume, it is bound to provoke somebody on the academic side (for any of various reasons, good or bad) while an editor at a newspaper, for example, will probably want it cut out. If I write a column for five years — trying to keep it various in topic and somewhat loose-limbed in style — with an eye to making it something I’d actually want to read myself…well, a good thing if I manage the latter part, because clearly those very qualities are going to annoy somebody. (Perhaps J has reason to doubt that I know what I’m talking about on any particular matter? Okay, let’s hear it. But then, it sound like particulars are not really the issue.)

What drove the piece was great disappointment — something only possible when you have real expectations to begin with. I did not say that West should go back to turning out monographs. Maybe he should, but there are other things he could write that would do him credit. If anything, his health makes it all the sadder that he turned out a piece of junk rather than a real, searching, genuinely written account of his own life and work. He has such a book in him, and many another besides. Instead, he is producing self-help and as-told-to volumes. This is depressing.

On that note, it is time to leave the internet, and to attend instead to the sublime and funky broccoli that I crave.

No, Michael, that is not true. I am never fair and just to people who say “Trotskyite” instead of “Trotskyist.” This is when the popping of a cap in the ass becomes obligatory. I did not go to cadre school for nothing.

Kind of mind-boggling that anyone doubts the “pop a cap” reference was a joke at Summers’s expense. Sheesh.

Yes, J., you are right. I should have used a special symbol to make that very, very clear, just as one ought always to signal irony by making quotation marks in the air with one’s fingers. Otherwise there are quite horrible consequences.

Okay, now the broccoli. It is getting cold.

J, it looks to me like you’re arguing in good faith, so I’ll try not to snark. But it does seem awfully pedantic to have to point out that good writing (as, among others, Christopher Lasch argued) doesn’t have to or even usually or even often follow the mechanical example of the five-paragraph essay. You don’t have to call the reader’s attention to every point you’re making with a light and a siren. And in this case it would be especially foolish of Scott to try, since he had just mocked Summers for his suggestion that West help him ‘fuck Mansfield up’ and implied that racial insensitivity had greased its skids: ‘West had recently released his first hip hop CD, so perhaps Summers thought this would put him at ease.’

No, Michael, that is not true. I am never fair and just to people who say “Trotskyite” instead of “Trotskyist.” This is when the popping of a cap in the ass becomes obligatory. I did not go to cadre school for nothing.

Splitter.

I hope you are enjoying your cold and clammy and totally unfunky broccoli now.

I look forward to “the sublime and funky * that I crave” becoming the hottest new meme on the internets.

Why not mix and match? Like so: I am aware of all sublime and funky internet traditions that I crave.

Unfunky kind of UFO says, “Give up the sublime and the funk, you punk!”

This all leaves me feeling a bit sad. What Scott says about great hope leading to disappointment leading to a fun and snarky review sounds very human. However. My experience of Cornell West (almost always as an audience member) is of a man who is one of the most intellectually generous people around the academy and the wider public. He takes half-formed questions, translates them into well-formed ones, and gives a serious answer. He does not talk down to his interlocutors, and when he disagrees with someone not in the room, emphasizes first that the disagreement is based on respect. When someone gets too critical, he prefaces his answer with a quiet “Well now, Brother Rawls doesn’t say that ___” in defense. It was unmistakenly an assertion of community and collegiality – an anti-snark. Precisely the way he gently rebuffed Summers: not a mismatched enemies list, a rejection of the idea of an enemies list.
Now, I love snark as much as anyone, and I too have a list of books I wish other folks would write, but lots of y’all seem to have taken away the message that Larry Summers is redeemed for believing that excellence = weighty publications, while West is shallow for not living up to Scott’s or his wife’s hopes. That is truly fucked up.

I doubt that anyone here thinks that Larry Summers is redeemed by West’s genuine lack of scholarly production, or that West’s work is ‘too black’. (Well, maybe Paul C and Henri do on that last one.)

And I don’t speak for Scott’s wife, but I’m pretty sure from the way Scott reported her response that the problem she had with West’s ‘sublime and funky’ passage was not that he had dashed her hopes, still less that he used the word ‘funky’, but that he comes across as flaky, melodramatic, and self-aggrandizing (Does such a woman exist for me?), and someone who loves to listen to his own voice.

That he is by vivian’s report (and J’s too) much better in person as a teacher and colleague is to his credit, and we all have met folks who make us cringe when we hear them ask or respond to a question, so we understand how valuable a quality that is in academia. But judging from what I’ve read from the book so far, this quality in West does not seem to have made much of an impression on Paul Ritz, and its absence from the text of his memoir does not seem to have disturbed West enough to insist on a rewrite.

For example, I think he has some good points about West, but the snark kind of distracts from them.

Good God, man. That article without the snark would be like serving up apple pie without the filling. Are you aware of no internet traditions at all?

“Trotskyite” instead of “Trotskyist.”
Since both terms were used by Stalinists as terms of insult, the distinction doesn’t matter much.
And in my experience ‘Trotskyite’ is the only term I’ve ever heard as half-ironic self-identification. And does any such doctrine deserve more then that now?
But I’m responding to someone who seems to be proud of his participation in absolutely marginalist sectarianism as late as the 1970’s and anyone I’ve ever known, or wanted to, gave up on that no later than the mid 1950’s.

Still, West’s been a sap since day one. The G rated black hipster it was safe to take to the cocktail party. The liberal intellectual’s house negro.
He’s an embarrassment and always has been.

I want some sublime and funky snark too.

This is entirely off topic, but seeing as I have endured way too many typography rants, I hereby present the greatest font ever made:

http://i.imgur.com/VI7Yv.jpg

Anyone feel like hacking the RNC website and doing a quick reformat?

My sense is that if West had decided to become a public intellectual and abandoned philosophical work, McLemee might have been dissapointed, but not in a way that would have inspired a critique this acerbic. Clearly, he’s primarily distressed (as I am, and many fans of much of his work are) that West has been swallowed alive by his own ego.

(I do think McLemee going well out of his way to let the reader know he knows all about the obscure philosopher Royce and how important he is was a bit much, but there’s enough to like here that I can overlook it)

Let me out myself as the US Intellectual History blogger (so rare that I get to call myself a blogger!) who made the Trotskyite-for-Trotskyist substitution in question.

I’ll be honest: I know the distinction. I should have written more carefully. In my semi-defense, I had just been reading Lawrence Peter King and Iván Szelényi, Theories of the New Class (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), which in part inspired the post in question and which uses the terms “Trostkyist” and “Trostkyite” interchangeably.

McLemee, whatever his other virtues (and I very much enjoyed the review that inspired this thread), was being a dick about my usage (I didn’t mind his calling me on it; I minded his tone, which I really didn’t deserve). I thank J for saying so upthread….though I must say that I cringe a bit at getting linked in the context of this discussion. One never likes (semi-)public beatdowns of oneself by respected famous people to get re-aired, even if one feels that one was in the right.

Frankly the other thing I took away from the experience was: thank God my work doesn’t focus on the sectarian left!

Now that I’ve gotten McLemee’s finding blood on my hands out of the way…two disconnected thoughts:

1) As Maurice Meilleur notes upthread, West asks truly fantastic questions at academic talks. My first experience of him in person was at some talk at Princeton in the late 1980s (during his first stint there). Two decades later, I cannot remember the specifics of the talk or the question. But I remember being extraordinarily impressed not only by how learned West’s intervention was, but by how much it opened up truly interesting issues that the speaker was then able to explore in interesting ways. I felt that I’d just witnessed a real model of academic behavior, a brilliant and knowledgeable person, applying things that he knew to the talk we’d all just heard and really adding to everyone’s understanding, including that of the speaker herself. And I share McLemee’s disappointment with West’s recent output precisely because at his best, he’s truly something.

2) It is a wonder that Kate Bush was ever able to find a large audience for her work.

It’s commonplace for some species of male arachnids not to let life or death stand in the way of the love they crave. While conceding its funkiness, one might question its sublimity.

Late to the party, but… “pop an ice-axe in their ass….” Ur doin THAT rong!

No offense to CT members, but if the main criticism of West is that he is not producing incredibly important academic monographs, but chooses to do something else instead, then in turn I have to ask if I missed some earth-shattering work by CT members recently and if their employers could not chide them for hanging around blogs too much.

104- oh, he’s black! – that surely makes him more or less half as ridiculous as Oprah!

(but he’s still somewhat lucky; he could have been a non-dry AND non-native english speaker)

‘if their employers could not chide them for hanging around blogs too much.’

It’s a funny thing, but in many ways, I feel that this little clause sums up everything that has gone wrong in industrial relations since about 1979.

To those who say I’m going overboard on this, I would retort that I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky truth.

vivian’s comment really gave me pause — partly because I’ve learned to respect her judgment a great deal, and partly because although I’ve never seen West in person, I realised that I have heard similar things from other people. So I went back to look at Scott’s piece again, and also at the excerpt.

Here’s the thing. Like Scott, I know West only through his writing. I’ve never admired it as much as Scott does, and I read a fair bit of it in the 90’s: even back then it seemed to me to have more flair than substance. But in this particular case he seems to have made a very seriously bad judgment, or several of them — getting a ghost, and either baring his inner life in a way that is not at all appealing or making up an inner life that isn’t really his (hence my enjoyment of “someone trying to sound like him”). When you write something for a potentially popular audience you cannot rely on the character that comes through in personal encounters to protect you from criticism/skewering, and you should know that. [1]

The text bears a lot of the marks of an academic (or editor) trying to get access to a popular audience by suppressing their authentic voice. (Compare with authentic popularisers like Simon Schama or, god help him, Richard Dawkins, both of whom connect with their audience by being themselves).

I think that makes what he has done fair game, and one reason that Scott’s skewering is so entertaining is that Scott is erudite in the way that West in fact is, but his text makes him sound not to be.

This is not to say that we should all be producing important academic tomes, or even that West should. Communicating important ideas to a broader audience than academics and even students is incredibly important: too few academics do it well, and too few try, and doing it well is much more valuable than most of what most of us do (and is part of the purpose of the university). If West were doing that, or even seeming to try to do that, I would want Scott to applaud the attempt and fairly and constructively evaluate how successful it was. But that does not seem to be what is going on here. I guess I ought to read the book in full to find out for sure, but nothing I’ve seen makes me want to do that.

Finally, on Summers. The excerpt from West, and Scott’s reporting of it, is incredibly damning. It makes it appear that he singled out people to go after, and West became one of these people. Its not in his job description to do that, and it reveals that he really had no idea what his job was. Jacob’s bemusement upthread, though, is appropriate, because the excerpt also makes it seem that Summers was incompetent at doing what he should have known he shouldn’t be doing. I didn’t think West came off badly from that, or from what Scott said about it, but I do see that’s a matter of interpretation (knowing Scott in this rather odd way that I do assures me of my interpretation in the same way as vivian’s in-person encounters with West give her information that makes her sad about this thread and Scott’s piece).

[1] I think my personality comes through pretty accurately in what I write. That’s because, basically, I’m a fairly uncomplicated person (the very occasional out of character comment sometimes gets noticed, but everyone says things that are out of character sometimes). But if I were more complicated I would be aware that I needed to control my writing in a way that, in fact, I don’t, if I wanted to be spared criticism.

Which reminds me. Could people please stop speaking about Wuthering Heights as if it were a romance novel, and about Heathcliff as if he were some dark Byronic hero? The book and its central character are profoundly creepy and unsettling and all-around chthonic. And I mean that as high praise (indeed, I hear the book is “remarkable”). But I’m tired of people glossing over Heathcliff’s intense emotional and physical cruelty (look again, e.g., at the passage in which he suggests he’s been beating Isabella regularly and that she likes it), and whenever someone cites the book as a paradigm for Intense Love, I think, hmmm, maybe this person is a bit too intense.

Apart from the cultural references and the slightly over the top last sentence at the end, I honestly fail to see what’s so embarrassing or weird about West’s statement. I used to think that way and on occasion was even able to realize such an ambition, though we were unable to sustain the relationships for long periods of time, but that probably lies in the nature of such high-strung affairs. I’ve chilled out a bit since, but am still miles away from middle-aged contentedness or resignation and hope it stays that way.

If there is one thing this entire thread has done for me, it’s clarified what exactly West must deal with every damn day as a scholar. Even mentioning the kind of casual, back-handed racist “humor” or display in McLemee’s critique and the thread here has gotten, in the main, the following two reactions:

(1) complete losing of shit (hello Henry how are ya?)

(2) parsing of the “popping a cap” comment, as if it matters toward whom it was directed, when it never would have come up in context of, say, Summers’ dispute with women scientists at Harvard because it wouldn’t have been “funny” in that context (oh, black men. With their rapping and their violence, the scamps!). (M Bérubé, from you in particular I would have expected vastly better).

What I have not heard is a single white dude (and that’s who is here, in the main) who maybe did laugh at first at “popping a cap in someone’s ass” of “ooh, West, he’ s so like that scampy caricature Smoove B” actually own that laughter and say, hey, you know, now that you mention it that’s really not appropriate — racially-marked jokes about black male violence and black male sexuality and playing on the scary-funny tititillation they invoke: not cool, not cool at all, and beneath a discussion among scholars of the work of a peer and colleague.

In a lefty academic confab — that’s soul crushing.

M Bérubé, from you in particular I would have expected vastly better

I say thank you even to backhanded compliments. But as for Summers and women, I had that covered. Had Summers attempted some version of hip-hop lingo back then, I surely would have mocked it. And yes, it does matter at whom the cap-popping remark was directed, because that’s how you tell what the joke means.

Summers’ dispute with women scientists at Harvard because it wouldn’t have been “funny” in that context

What’s “funny” is specifically that Summers is apparently enough of a buffoon to think black academics must talk like whatever caricature of black rappers was present in his mind, and addressed West accordingly, and that McLemee drubs the hell out of Summers for it, and it’s always funny to see someone get verbally drubbed who deserves it.

I guess McLemee’s statement at #75 (when the popping of a cap in the ass becomes obligatory) undoes this mockery just a little, because the mockery of Summers is empowered by the principle that saying such things, in an attempt to be hip and funny, is problematic and wrong (surely Summers was trying to be hip and funny, and the original point was to mock his utter tone-deafness).

119: that’s echt trollery right there, saying “I’m amazed that you guys are so thin-skinned; all I did was call you all racists, and you completely lose your shit, there must be something wrong with you.”

120: fair enough. I agree that does seem on the face of it unlikely that a sane, intelligent man could write something like that and expect it to be taken seriously. But against that hypothesis is the fact that Scott McLemee, who is a fairly bright chap and was apparently well-disposed towards West, read the entire book and didn’t think it was a joke at all.

121: did you notice she called you “M Bérubé”? I think she just called you French, dude. You gonna just blog there and take that?

I don’t think you should let racism and genocide stand in the way of the sublime and funky love that you crave.

This is to thank Kathleen for her rousing rendition of “You Act Like It’s Just Symbolic, But If You Aren’t Willing to Consider Defending the Anti-Apartheid Shanty With the Use of Firearms, You Are Just as Much a Racist as the Fratboys Who Burned It Down!” which I last saw performed in 1985.

This bold new version preserves much of the flavor of the original, but with fresh variations that only make it the more timeless. I look forward to covering the 25th anniversary road-show for The New Trotskyite Times, and will post a link once the article appears.

You are quite right, Richard, though I am the real victim here. By law, every article about BHL must mention either his haircut or his very expensive shirts. This is why GATT must be renegotiated.

Scott McL @ 75—

Kind of mind-boggling that anyone doubts the “pop a cap” reference was a joke at Summers’s expense.

The problem, possibly, is that the subject of the sentence at issue is “the exchange”, and so it doesn’t obviously refer only to one of the participants in the exchange. Had the sentence gone something like:

With popping a cap in a fellow faculty member’s ass now off the table, Summers then steered the exchange in the direction that has now become famous

— then no such confusion could have arisen.

McLemee ridiculing a Frenchman’s haircut

Zut alors, those funny Frenchmen and their, ow-you-say, ‘eelarious ‘aircuts!

Naah. As offensive national stereotypes go, it’s not really… one. It’s something everybody comments on wrt BHL, but I don’t recall any other Frenchman’s haircut getting the snark.

Twenty years ago, who would have predicted that Cornel West and Andre Agassi would have co-authored “autobiographies” coming out in the same month, and that Agassi’s would be *better*?

Perhaps I’m missing something, but for what possible reason does a professor of humanities need a specialist in celebrity as-told-tos to write a book? Isn’t writing supposed to be a large portion of his job?

‘I don’t think you should let racism and genocide stand in the way of the sublime and funky love that you crave.’

Let’s face it, if West doesn’t get the sublime and funky love he craves, the terrorists have won.

“Naah. As offensive national stereotypes go, it’s not really… one. It’s something everybody comments on wrt BHL, but I don’t recall any other Frenchman’s haircut getting the snark.”

Guess you missed the 2004 campaign, where Sen Kerry was ridiculed for his haircut
that made him “look French”.

It’s not a hanging offence, but a review that hands out ad-hominem wisecracks bordering
on national or ethnic stereotypes seems a bit off to me, and calls into question its
judgment of the substantive work. YMMV.

Sen Kerry was ridiculed for his haircut that made him “look French”.

The same folks are now up in arms over Obama’s blatant Marxism.

And I’d like to see an example of a review that mocks an author for being a
totally conventional middle-aged white male academic. Aren’t we savvy enough
about culture to know that mockery can be a way to diminish and belittle the
“other”. Is it ok to mock Hillary’s pantsuits ? And call Obama “boy” ?

Guess you missed the 2004 campaign, where Sen Kerry was ridiculed for his haircut
that made him “look French”.

Point of information: this is not true. An anonymous Bush advisor told the NYT in 2004 that he “looks French”. His haircut was mocked for costing $1000. So he was ridiculed for his haircut and for looking French, but these were two separate avenues of attack.
Anyway, Kerry’s hair doesn’t look particularly French. It’s generic American Hairspray Senatorial.

#144–

henry, i think you are confusing ‘marc’ (116, 140) with ‘kmack’ (136).

why, why, must people insist on using these ridiculous pseudonyms?

“Richard, the point is that “French” to the set of people who would mock Kerry means “bad” in the same way that “Marxist” does. Has no connection to reality.”

Indeed. And does a crack about Henri-Levy’s haircuts have any connection to the
“reality” of his work ? Mockery functions to diminish the “other” *without* engaging
with the substance. That is precisely what’s dangerous about it.

why, why, must people insist on using these ridiculous pseudonyms?

Beats me.

What beats me is either:

1) Why there is a system that numbers comments, but then inserts delayed/moderated comments that mess up the numbering of comments they displace, or

2) why, given the system described in 1), people use numbers to refer to other comments at all, rather than, say, name and time. (Not that I haven’t done it myself on the rare occasions when I comment here.)

;)

ajay: your comment is as brief as your pseudonym is obtuse.

“Unless it engages with the substance, which is precisely what’s valuable about it. ”

Agreed. Mocking the substance – or the lack of it – is ok. It’s mocking BHL’s
haircuts and West’s wardrobe and diction that seems questionable.

I’m not defending West’s work: I haven’t read it, and have only seen him speak once.
But I’m not at all freaked out by the idea that a scholar might choose to engage
with popular culture in non-scholarly ways, or speak with some vernacular idioms.
Just how ivory does the ivory tower need to be ?

I’m not at all freaked out by the idea that a scholar might choose to engage
with popular culture in non-scholarly ways, or speak with some vernacular idioms.

Do you think Scott McLemee is?

“BHL puts a lot of effort into superficial things like his image – for example, his haircuts – and his books – which are where his intellectual effort should be going – are pretty superficial themselves”

Taking away the elegant phrasing, and you get “his hair looks good but his books suck” –
which combines a personal crack with, well, nothing at all substantive about the work.
I’m all for elegant phrasing, but an elegantly phrased cheap crack is still a cheap crack.

I have noticed various young French intellos on TV from time to time [in France, this is], and some of them have terrific hair. More than enough to cover two normal academics’ heads

Is this some sort of anti-Foucault back-lash that’s built up in France over time?

I’m not at all freaked out by the idea that a scholar might choose to engage
with popular culture in non-scholarly ways, or speak with some vernacular idioms.
Just how ivory does the ivory tower need to be ?

If you’re trying to write so as to connect to a popular audience, then the kind of big ego that the extract from West’s book suggests is a serious problem. You want to stress what you and the audience have in common and show them how they too can appreciate the culture you love. If you’re constantly pointing out what a superstar you are and how you are admired on several different continents, it’s hard then to claim that you’re still just an ordinary guy at heart. It’s admirable for an academic to write a good popular book; it’s simply embarassing to see someone fail at the task because they haven’t thought enough about their audience.

“You want to stress what you and the audience have in common and show them how they too can appreciate the culture you love”

Well, the one occasion I saw West speak was at Berklee College of Music, and it
was a rousing performance which hit that nail on the head in talking about black
popular music, to an audience mostly heavily involved in music.

While this particular book may miss the mark, I’m not in sympathy with the general
mockery of Prof West. It seems that he’s an excellent teacher and a model of
academic collegiality. If he chooses to have fun appearing in movies and dabbling
in music, good for him. And if he never got round to writing a book about Royce,
so what ? Lots of people suffer declining productivity in their 50’s without being
mocked for it.

While this particular book may miss the mark

In fairness it may be that David Ritz ruined everything.

kmack:

West was already an academic star by the time he arrived at Harvard

But, as I’m sayin’, he’s apparently decided to be a star, instead of an academic. Academics write their own books.

I think we’re all Michel Foucault now. I sat at the next table from him at a Chinese restaurant a few weeks ago.

Yikes.

So what would an acceptable review have looked like? “I thought the prose was not so good, but popular audiences: horses for courses. I will not compare it to the standard West has typically set for himself with previous work, because he is a great academic and an engaging speaker. The End.”

Richard in 178- I don’t think the cases are comparable, and the Ambrose case doesn’t really make your point. For one, there was a lot of criticism of Ambrose at the time. He wasn’t let off. For two, he wasn’t really an academic at the time- he’d been retired for several years from his university position and just writing (or “writing”) popular history books, ones that most academic historians were pretty critical of, if I recall correctly. Finally, no one here is accusing West of plagiarism. They are saying that an “as told by” “autobiography” isn’t plausibly a scholarly project (and is a bit goofy, even beyond the actual goofiness of this project.) Given all of this I just don’t see that the Ambrose situation, as bad as it was, is in any way relevant here.

“Given all of this I just don’t see that the Ambrose situation, as bad as it was, is in any way relevant here.”

The Ambrose situation is extreme (and seems to occur throughout his work, long before
his retirement). But isn’t there a pretty wide spectrum of collaborations
and use of research assistants and reliance on secondary materials and editing that makes a
blanket statement like “academics write their own books” an over-simplification at best ?
Trying to get at precisely what came from whom isn’t trivial: after revision and discussion
and editing, not all the ideas originate from the author, and not all the words originate from
the author. So “authorship” is a little elusive, no ?

Anyhow, whoever said West’s book was “plausibly a scholarly project” ?

179- sounds fair enough actually – or you might indulge in a bit of fun without pointing all of your Trotskyist wrath on one single individual. In which way is it material to this being a rather good rant that it is critical of a specific person/book? Or is it not a case, plausibly, of a rather good rant looking for a controversy to whip up extra attention in the hope of becoming The Really Memorable Rant?

PS: I heard the ‘BHL one’ on numerous occasions, only once was it about BHL – I mean it’s good fun and all but it’s not like the words ‘Cornel’ & ‘West’ make a lot of difference to the funniness of the quote, he just happened to be around when people started their bit of fun

the most personal
passage, on West’s romantic aspirations

Available in bookstores everywhere.

steven @133: “The problem, possibly, is that the subject of the sentence at issue is “the exchange””

Popping a cap is clearly an extrapolation of “f___ up”, which was introduced by Summers. Given that West dismissed the possibility of anyone getting f____ up, I don’t see how the cap-popping in the later sentence, or any desire for cap-popping, could reasonably be imputed to West.

I’ll repeat that since I heard family and friends (politically active on both coasts since well before Scott McLemee or I were born) refer to themselves self-deprecatingly as “Trotskyites,”
the issue itself is more symptomatic of the old sectarianism, now academic infighting, than either political action or intellectual discussion.
Kinda like arguments over Cornell West.

1) Why there is a system that numbers comments, but then inserts delayed/moderated comments that mess up the numbering of comments they displace

Finally, finally, someone has raised the critical issue.

Is there some reason that comments removed from moderation couldn’t be given fractional numbers (71.5, etc.), or else simply placed at the end of the thread? Renumbering existing comments is Bad.

On the other hand, looking at the source tells me I’m full of it. Never mind.

Each comment does, however, seem to have a unique ID attached…

he’s apparently decided to be a star, instead of an academic

Oh, okay, well, then, in that case, his reviewers should be even harsher on him. I mean, he’s using cultural capital that belongs to the academic community for purposes of his own ego. And what kind of person wants to be a star anyway? Better come down hard on him until he gets back into line. He can go back to school and train for a new, real career. There isn’t any profession named “star.”

But if, as kmack says, the white male academic establishment was behind him, that’s an other question altogether. Isn’t it? (Obviously, if he were white, male, etc., that would be a given.)

@bianca I can’t speak to everyone else’s purported hypocrisy, only mine; and because I am but a philistine, what I found mockworthy in the excerpts SM presented wasn’t the notion that West wanted to come down from the ivory tower – it was the buttock-clenching tone in those excerpts. (Non-sequitur: that clarifier as to which “Wuthering Heights” West was referring to, should really have been taken out by someone, author or editor, along the way. And the deliberate repetition of “full” just kept making me think of the word “fulsome”, which presumably wasn’t the intention.)

For me at least, WMAE doesn’t come into it; and the few analogous British examples I can think of get regularly chopped off at the knees, sometimes unfairly and sometimes not.

kmack @136,

For those who are especially critical of West now as compared to his “golden era,” what were you thinking in the first place? His lofty professional career is, after all, largely the creation of a white liberal academic establishment, for relatively non-scholarly reasons

Shorter kmack:

Cornell West = Donovan McNabb

Cornell West = Stanford, maybe.

“As opposed to which economics?”

Fair enough.

“Or, define efficient? etc.”

Well, I had in mind the job market for humanities PhDs: you can’t always count on the most talented teachers and researchers being the ones landing tenure-track jobs. (And, of course, being in a “temporary” high-teaching-load position raises all sorts of obstacles to both teaching and researching at the very highest level one can; which can hinder one on the job market; lather, rinse, repeat.) Furthermore, there are more excellent scholars/teachers than there are “superstar” positions. (And more competent scholars/teachers than there are positions, period.) The end result is that, over all, academic employment in the humanities is not perfectly meritocratic.

kmack insinuated that West didn’t get his position on academic merit but by being the favorite black man of the white establishment, and he cited as evidence the claim that there are plenty of African-American scholars just as academically worthy as West.

This, though, is true of just about *any* scholar in a superstar position, black, white, green or purple–there are scholars who are just as academically talented who aren’t in superstar positions. It has nothing to do with race, but with the structure of employment in the humanities. So it’s not, as kmack supposes, any sort of evidence that West is unworthy of his position.

Mrs Tilton, 210: You’re joking , right?

Or perhaps you feel insulted because others don’t share the extent of your regard for West as scholar–namely, as compared to any number of *highly accomplished black scholars*, including those who work in areas related to his.

Or maybe you stopped reading after “white liberal academic establishment…”–since what follows is plainly incompatible with your attempt at snark. (You might also bother to spell West’s first name correctly.)

For those not in the know, Rush Limbaugh’s point was that any black quarterback, and McNabb in particular, is bound to be overrated by anxious white liberals. Of course, that was exactly not my point, and Limbaugh’s point was demonstrably absurd.

I might have been offended, but comparing me to Limbaugh is so vividly bizarre as to be almost…sublime and funky?

My point was more like Cornel West = George Benson. _Breezin’_, of all jazz albums, went triple platinum–which isn’t to deny that “This Masquerade” is a great jazz-pop tune and that Benson is an extraordinary talent.

If you happen to believe that Benson is one of the jazz greats of his era, to each his or her own. But others could reasonably doubt your judgment about jazz as an art.

“That’s why the comment is followed by 1,779 additional words.”

It’s a nice rhetorical trick. You belittle and diminish the subject with a somewhat
cruel joke about his appearance. Then you get down to the serious business of
the hatchet job with the audience already on your side.

Now what I get clearly from the review of West is

1) McLemee hates the book

2) He wishes West had written a scholarly tome about Josiah Royce

3) Failing that, he wishes West had written about the intellectual process involved
in writing a book about Josiah Royce

4) … or else a book about how the ideas of Josiah Royce have influenced West’s
life and intellectual development.

5) He thinks there’s too much of West in a book called “Brother West: Living and
Loving Out Loud”.

The conclusion I come to is that McLemee, left to his own devices, probably wouldn’t –
and shouldn’t – buy this book. But that people who are fans of West as a character and
a performer, rather than as a pure scholar, might well have a different opinion. At least we
should note that the title isn’t misleading anyone.

As for the question of whether the excerpted passages are terrible, I think you have to
make allowances for the difference between speech and conventional written prose.
West’s oratory has its own rhythm and music, and if you can’t hear a little of that in
your head you’re not going to get it.

Doctor Slack, 208: I guess you missed the “jazz as an art” part. So I would say, if you insist on a literal rendering, that Benson’s sales were driven by ‘relatively non-jazz-as-an-art factors’. I believe you’re a character (e.g., @170) who has no conception of Gricean implicature.

I’m not really sure why the “white liberal academic establishment” remark caused such a reaction among some. Doesn’t this describe most of (high) academia? For the uncharitable, literal-minded, or anxious reader: the point of that remark was that if a class of gatekeepers generally doesn’t know much about or have much feel for certain topics, their corresponding judgments about standards and quality are likely to be distorted.

In this case, the gatekeepers, along with impressionable students and some academics who ought to have known better, significantly overestimated the scholarly value of the work while being dazzled and entertained by a brilliant academic performance artist. You’re free to disagree with this assessment, and I feel no need to bs about it. That said, some people listen to, care about, and have taste in jazz, and some don’t.

What I’ve usually read from Mrs. Tilton has led me to believe that she is clever and sensible. Doctor Slack, you are no Mrs. Tilton.

Also nice music.

kmack is clearly an expert on “the white academic liberal establishment” who determine success in academia and the “highly accomplished black scholars” who would succeed in a truly race-neutral environment. I can tell because he uses those phrases over and over again.

@Richard Cownie: if you find those passages of interest or poetry, then I won’t try to argue against that. I find them hollow, but perhaps that’s just what I grew up reading and what I spend my time reading now. The sentiments expressed just seem like romanticism as egoism to me.

Sometimes the sublime tips into the ridiculous, or sometimes one person’s sublime is ridiculous to another. And sometimes, unmoved by righteous idiom, owned or given free rein, the image of Swiss Toni comes to mind.

(I was going to post a link to the “Dear Clive” parody of Clive James’ tendency towards infatuation with the greats, and with himself as un homme qui les connait bien, but I can’t seem to find a copy and have forgotten the author. Anyone else remember?)

OK, will shut up now, but yes, that last sentence of mine in #217 is broken (subject/object/clause screwup). That’s what happens when you improvise, I guess…

So I would say, if you insist on a literal rendering, that Benson’s sales were driven by ‘relatively non-jazz-as-an-art factors’.

I insist on a rendering that makes sense of the comparison. Benson transitioned into the territories of pop and R&B music — did he somehow “dazzle” people into thinking he wasn’t doing this, as you claim (still bizarrely) that West bamboozled people into thinking he was doing (sufficiently significant) scholarship? West took his Harvard post in ’94 — so you’re arguing that nothing he did up to that point was significant enough to warrant it on merit? Because that’s a sufficiently eccentric judgment to warrant a tad more explanation than you’ve provided so far.

I believe you’re a character (e.g., @170) who has no conception of Gricean implicature. . . I don’t want whatever you’re drinking or smoking. . .

Your credibility as a judge of cleverness, sensibility or scholarly substance wanes with each of these attempted zingers. You know that, right? No wait, you probably don’t. Barbar, too, looks to me to be on the money. Do you think you’re going to dispel that impression with fatuous insults?

I think the point about “This Masquerade” is that the tune was actually written by Leon Russell, from his album Carney, the hit tune of which was “Tight Rope”. George Benson was at that point an established and well-respected artist, but “Masquerade” was a major hit, which jazz musicians almost never get. To view Benson as a pop vocalist is to miss nearly everything about him.

I think if McLemee wrote a review of a Sonny Rollins CD, he would very probably express disappointment at the absence of an orchestra and the failure to adhere to the form of a classical concerto

I think perhaps you’re reaching.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. The point was that Benson and West are not true jazz men, which is trivially true of nearly everyone.

Disculpame, por favor. Entschuldigen sie mir, bitte. The TV was blaring Miles Davis (PBS pledge week) and it brought to mind a wind quartet (the flutist had just given birth) in which the nearly as gravid bassoonist, constantly grinning, played the bass line to Freddie Hubbard’s “Red Clay”. I wish the horn and sax players’ performances had been as memorable.

Or maybe just refrain from disguising the jokes as some serious poking fun at others. & if it’s unavoidable that way not post hoc claiming that it was ‘just for a couple of laughs’.

Ah, that was just a sorry excuse for a joke! Me sorry then.

“You’re clearly not a musician (let alone “a jazzman in the world of ideas”) if you think improvisation is just throwing in “what comes to the top of your mind.””

It’s not “just” that. But sometimes – in the heat of the moment – it falls back to that.
And if you want to mark West down a grade for those moments, that’s fine with me.
All I’m saying is that speech – and especially improvised speech – can’t usefully be
judged by the standards of written prose, as most here have been doing.

And yes, I am a musician, though a poor one and sorely in need of a few months
of woodshedding (http://www.elh.org, FWIW). So nuts to you.

Your “listen to” link doesn’t work, Richard.

A jazzman speaks

This is the late Rahsaan Roland Kirk, transcribed from his “Bright Moments” album.

You know it’s good to be in a place that feels like you’re in your house, you know? Yeah. Yeah, it’s a beaufiful thing, we’re glad you people’re assembled here with us on this Saturday night. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. You don’t feel like Saturday night people. Some Saturday night people, that’s the only night they get out, an’ they act like it. (shouts and applause from audience) You know, like when you cage somethin’ up and when it gets out, they act like it. That’s th’ way most Saturday night people act.
Now we would like to think of some very beautiful bright moments — yeah, yeah, yeah — you know what I mean?
Bright moments.
Bright moments.
Bright moments is like (chuckle) eat’n your last pork chop in London England, because you ain’t gonna git no mo . . . (laughter) cooked from home.
Bright moments! (laughter).
Bright moments is like bein’ with your favorite love’n you all share’n’ the same ice cream dish. (laughter) And you git mad when she gets the last drop. (laughter) Bright moments! And you have to take her in your arms and git it the other way. Whoo (laughter)
Bright moments!
That’s too heavy for most of you all ’cause most of you all don’t know nothin’ ’bout that kind of love. The love you all have been taught about is the love in those magazines. And I am fortunate that I didn’t have to look in magazines. (laughter, clapping) (Rahsaan chuckles)
Bright moments!
Bright moments is like see’n’ something that you ain’t ever seen in you life and you don’t have to see it but you know how it looks. (Yeah, clapping, woo hooo, etc. bright moments)
Bright moments is like hearin’ some music that ain’t nobody else heard, and if they heard it they wouldn’t even recognize that they heard it ’cause they been hearin’ it all their life but they nutted on it so, when you hear it and you start poppin’ your feet and jumpin’ up and down they get mad because you’re enjoying yourself but those are bright moments that they can’t share with you ’cause they don’t even know how to go about listening to what you’re listening to and when you try to tell them about it they don’t know a damn thing about what your’re talking about!
(Whistles, clapping, exclamations, etc.)
Is there any other bright moments before we proceed on? Testify! Testify! Bright moments, bright moments. Bright moments is being at the Keystone Korners — beautiful — listening to geniuses like Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Beautiful. Bright moments. Bright moments is like hav’n brothers ‘n sisters and sisterettes and brotheretts like you all here listenin’ to us. (Applause etc.)

Alas, some of the formatting that was there in the preview got stripped out upon being uploaded. All that “yeah yeah” stuff should be underlined, some “bright moments,” and other stuff as well. It’s audience response to Rahsaan.

“I think we should probably stop having jokes on CT; we’ve tried this experiment a number of times and it just doesn’t work.”

Whoa.

Wait a minute.

dsquared, please reassure us that your funny and cutting posts (The Budweiser Sequence, “Rules for contrarians”, leching in the lab, reviewing books he hasn’t read, etc) don’t come under this “joke” umbrella. CT without those would be a drier and less interesting place.

“His first major riff – suggesting that attacking BHL for being a physically vain intellectual poseur and media hog is a coded attack on All Frenchmen – is very well done.”

Well, go back and check the thread. The excellent Berube made the (IMO) less-than-excellent
suggestion that McLemee’s lack of prejudice could be proved by the fact that he snarks
against the (non-black) BHL as well as the (black) West. I’m open to the idea that McLemee
snarks equally against all groups , but an example of snark aimed at a member of another
out-group doesn’t, and couldn’t possibly, prove that point. Regardless of the merits of BHL’s
work (or hairstyle).

Self-denying ordnance: putting a land mine in your own slit trench…

@hellblazer:

Gosh. I didn’t mean to suggest you ought to be bashed about the head and shoulders because your comment was incoherent and impossible for me to read as a response to what I had written, though I could come up with about half a dozen ways it could have been meant as an insult to me. Nor did I mean to suggest you need psychiatric help, or anything else bad about you. I feel so guilty about your comment, and so reluctant to upset you further, that I won’t say any more.

Have you heard the one about two Irishmen, an Irishwoman, two Englishmen, a Welshman ….

oh never mind!

To remark on spelling/typographical errors is obnoxious unless done cleverly. Ajay at 249 is extremely clever. *claps*

I had intended to add another category of commenters to the list when the original Henry posted it a week or so ago: people who comment solely so that they can slip in a reference to Myles na gCopaleen. Brian/Flann/Myles would have kept Blather running for years if he had only had Cornell West as a contributor.

If Cornel West is a jazz musician in the world of ideas, then this mp3 is John Coltrane.

So Henry, Kieran, Michael, Scott, Daniel and Chris; is this what Roberto Bolaño meant with “por los seis conductos”?

Henry, 245: “trollish stylings”?

Maybe you’re right. You and like-minded folks seem unable to imagine that some reasonable academics who work in and around African American Studies long ago tired of the West phenomenon, wonder why high academia has enabled it (making him a University Professor, not just a professor, at Harvard, for what exactly?), have distinctively personal fears about its impact on the reception and the practice of Af Am-related scholarship, and experience up close its negative impact in academic role modeling.

You certainly seem unable to imagine that such academics might hang around CT. Wherever you are, I guess–whether joining (by pointing) in mocking West, or mocking those who express reservations about the possible racial overtones of this mocking, or mocking those who would call into question West’s scholarly merits vis-a-vis his virtually unparalleled academic reception–is where it’s at. Perhaps you missed West’s poignant discourses on “white privilege” in his earlier work.

I can take my fly, “trollish stylings” elsewhere.

@kmack: Perhaps you missed West’s poignant discourses on “white privilege” in his earlier work.

Those discourses had no scholarly value, remember? Cf. “why did anyone ever make Cornel West a University professor”? They were just “performance” by an elaborate stepinfetchit conning a gullible white establishment, an argument which of course is not redolent of white privilege, because… well, because you keep telling the rest of us (whom you blithely assume are all white, intriguingly) that it isn’t.

I can take my fly, “trollish stylings” elsewhere.

Heavens, no! I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m actually curious to see if you can work your foot all the way down into your lower intestinal tract.

“prose should be judged by the standards of a poetry slam in a coffee shop”

There’s a tradition of American oratory, and specifically African-American oratory,
and my uneducated impression is that West is working consciously within that
tradition, and that the critical apparatus associated with that tradition might yield
more insights than just applying a “clunky prose” label. YMMV.

oh, for pete’s sake, people! i have, with mounting disbelief, wasted a good chunk of my morning reading this thread, and for perhaps the millionth time thanked the FSM that my grades and temperament long ago rendered me unfit for academia. mclemee wrote a funny essay to the effect that Cornel West, once a scholar of considerable achievement and great promise, has sunk into a swamp of self-regard. full stop.

i have never before witnessed so many people chew so much more than they bit off.

Damn, I wish I knew how to malign Cornel West while slamming the white academy that overvalues his work and simultaneously fails to appreciate his critiques of white privilege. It would have spared me a lot of grief 15 years ago.

I was going to make a joke about how dsquared had been serious this whole time, but Doctor Slack beat me to it. Why, DS, why? I have so few pleasures in life that you must steal one from me.

Btw, if you’re looking for some seriously racist bullshit in re West, check out the closing lines of Andrew O’Hehir’s review of the film.

Very nifty, by way of comparison. O’Hehir does the exact thing that Kathleen accuses McLemee of doing.

“Help me f___ him up,” said Summers (according to West, says his quasi-ghostwriter).

West had recently released his first hip hop CD, so perhaps Summers thought this would put him at ease. Not so. West says he made clear to Summers that his feeling for Mansfield was collegial.

With popping a cap in a fellow faculty member’s ass now off the table, the exchange then took the form that has now become famous, culminating in Summers’ demand that West make himself available for fortnightly meetings to evaluate his grades and publication plans.

Having read the whole thread, I now feel completely disinhibited about saying something foolish (Moynihan would say that this thread defines foolishness down). I’m going to quibble with McLemee when he says that his comment wasn’t aimed at West, but at Summers.

In fact, it’s aimed at whoever came up with the language “Help me f___ him up.” McLemee pretty clearly has some kepticism as to whether that’s Summers, West or West’s writer.

“those who are outside the group of poor slobs who have to work for a living.”

Which makes him “other” to the not-very-well-paid ranks of academics in the
humanities.

Richard Cownie: “So no-one else is concerned that a style of review which laments that the book is not what the reviewer hoped it would be, and then dissects it as something that it isn’t (carefully edited prose vs “Out Loud”), might be lacking in some way, no matter how fine the snark. Glad we cleared that up.”

Clear this up: your argument that the book represents oral improvisation holds no water because many of us have heard West speak extemporaneously and he didn’t sound like this. This isn’t like the sublime and funky voice we used to get before the war.

I’m sorry that I assumed you weren’t a musician. The point I was trying to make is that “what comes to the top your head” when improvising is not random. I always tell my students that jazz improvisation is an excellent illustration of what Bourdieu means by the habitus: the musician notionally has complete freedom, can play any note in any order, but this freedom is actually constrained by an incredible array of factors–factors that start with the personal history of the musician (his or her training as a musician, the other musicians that have influenced him or her, the stylistic paradigms he or she follows or rejects, etc.) but stretch out into considerations of the dynamic structure of the field of jazz, and the position that this musician has in that field.

You’re correct about one thing, certainly: West’s book, based on these excerpts, doesn’t sound right to an academic audience, and that’s the source of a lot of the snark. But it’s not because academics are too buttoned down to appreciate extravagant orature. It’s because when it doesn’t sound bombastic and tone-deaf it sounds hackneyed and stale. (Actually, to stay with the theme, it’s depressingly like hearing Miles Davis cover Cyndi Lauper.) He doesn’t seem to be listening to himself. Hence McLemmee’s “woodshed” metaphor, which is where this whole line of discussion got its start.

Also, my apologies to Tom Hurka, who noted the strange cravings of the sonata right at the top of this thread.

Surely this thread has crashed and burned long before now. I never read boundary 2 or Social Text, and of West’s writing I’ve only read parts of Race Matters and his anthology of Post-Analytical Philosophy. A lot of people on this thread have said things I wouldn’t expect to get away with myself in any crowd I might find myself in.

That said, I agree with Scott’s wife about that passage. I also agree with Novakant, though. In another context, in the third person, say, this sentiment would not be that strange. It seems to me like an odd mix of the therapeutic and the spiritual. Also, part of it is something I most memorably heard from one of West’s Harvard colleagues in a seminar, fwtw, and it’s probably not worth much, but this strikes me as odd too. What is weird is the sense that this was addressed to his ex-wives and future ex-wife or ex-wives. I don’t know what’s creepier, to imagine a man telling me the thing is he has such high standards for physical attractiveness, or to imagine his therapist or minister telling me to realize he has high standards and spiritual needs that I might not be able to meet. The point of view seems so totally devoted to one side of the male/female divide that there’s no visible possibility of any way forward other than for women to become just as aggressive about refusing to see men’s point of view.

And besides, didn’t you know Michael Bérubé is richly compensated? In fact, he makes over $930,000 a year, which is three times what David Horowitz makes!

The review gives us two paragraphs verbatim

If the review had quoted the whole book we could come to some conclusions.

This one is also relevant, I think (switch Brontë for Austen).

Which makes him “other” to the not-very-well-paid ranks of academics in the
humanities.

This thread just keeps getting better. Here we have a perfect reductio ad absurdum of the analysis of oppression in terms of ‘othering’! I’ll have to bookmark this comment so people won’t think I’m making up my example.

The thing is, Richard Cownie, some of us in this discussion have read 100s of pages written by West, and some of us have also even heard at least a bit of his hip-hop CD–not an inspiring experience. Given that acquaintence with his work, the idea that West has become hopelessly entangled in his self-regard makes sense. If you want to argue that McLemee has misrepresented the book, you’re going to have to do more that make that suggestion. You’re going to have to read the book and present your evidence.

You’re going to have to read the book and present your evidence.

The book club has a new reading assignment!

Michael: I was indeed; thanks for the correct link!

There’s a T-shirt of the Bronte sisters for sale on Beaton’s site as well now – Anne sitting off to the side being all reasonable and annoyed. It would take an insane amount of explaining every time you wore it, but I love it regardless.

Dave – thank you; that’s fantastic.

I’m not ok with a woman who habitually snarks men, nor a black who habitually snarks whites.

I’m not ok with this usage of “snark”, which isn’t grammatical in my idiolect. It would be “woman who snarks on men”, etc.

At the risk of violating internet etiquette, I am reproducing an entire comment from the IHE comment thread on McLemee’s review:

West as Public Intellectual
Posted by Mara Holt , Associate Professor at Ohio University on December 3, 2009 at 12:45pm EST

The new book certainly sounds disappointing, and I’m not likely to read it after your compelling review. However, I think Teresa is onto something. For all his faults, West has made his mark in ways are often invisible to your average white academic (like me).

Yes, I miss West on philosophy. American Evasion was my introduction to West, and at a time when I sorely needed a critique of Dewey that made sense to me (as opposed to the social engineering stuff that didn’t jibe with my extensive reading of Dewey). I got my critique, and something even more powerful: West’s method of analyzing the strengths of a philosopher and then analyzing his failures of vision within the context of the material and historical conditions in which he operated, particularly in regard to race. This is especially stunning in his treatment of Emerson. His compassionate model of intellectual analysis has influenced me to address intellectual issues in much more depth and complexity than I had thought possible, given the attack and destroy methods in which I had been trained. In Race Matters, particularly the chapter on the nihilism of ghetto life, I saw the same method at work. Just as he earlier was not willing to kick U.S. philosophical pragmatism to the curb because of its racism, in Race Matters he was not willing to give African Americans a free pass.

Over 20 years later, I have been bowled over a second time by West’s methods. Yes, I knew he was dabbling in hip hop and Matrix culture, I knew he was trying to reach a young black audience, but I didn’t have a clue about his influence in that arena until I started getting first-year grad students in my classes who were familiar with West and excited about reading his work in my classes. It turned out that West is deep into hip hop culture and his work (and that of other African American intellectuals) is being referenced by hip hop artists in such a way that their audience is being educated and intellectually stimulated by their work.

One of my students, a white Appalachian male, said that West’s influence on hip hop provided him with hope, and was the beginning of his determination to go to college rather than accept the status quo–a life as a coal miner. He’s now writing a dissertation geared toward the influence of pedagogy and pop culture in providing options for Appalachian students whose only other option is the mine, and the isolation of a stigmatized group of people whose most pervasive representation in media culture is the Beverly Hillbillies.

If West is self-congratulatory, it must be said that in the bulk of his work, he has congratulated others when it took courage to do so. If he describes himself as a performer, he is right, and you have to attend a performance to understand what all the fuss is about. Scott’s article seems on target in many ways, and I find it compelling. But as middle-class, white university employees, “we” are seeing only the tip of the iceberg when we view him as a traditional philosopher with a twist or as a disappointment.

He is reaching the people who need his philosophy the most. He has stepped away from the ivory tower and is providing hope and and alternatives to the nihilism of the people whom he describes in Race Matters. Who knows what effect that will have on the Ivory tower in the long run? I miss the “old” Cornel West, but I completely respect his decision to side-step me in favor of the young oppressed African American and Appalachian students who will help determine the future.

McLemee’s review reads to me as painfully colorblind, at best. The defensive comments here on the subject of race do that one, or two better. At the risk of teaching such a learned group to suck eggs, so to speak, I offer the following link: : http://www.derailingfordummies.com/. The tactics it describes are perhaps a tad more overt, but I trust that that folks have sufficient intellectual capacity to draw the analogy out.

Mocking folks who take offense is a fun game, but only if you’ve got the privilege to begin with. I don’t recall whom it was that made the useful distinction between the humor of reaction and the humor of rebellion, but I’m sure it’s been independently discovered more than once.

Now that I’ve finally made it through all the comments, I’ll get back to my point, which as far as I can tell has not been addressed, much.

West’s job involves, among other things, writing. A politician, a musician, an actor, an athlete, an entrepreneur — all these people may, without loss of respect, produce as-told-to autobiographies. For a writer, an editor, a wordsmith to come out with an as-told-to is intrinsically mockworthy. On what possible grounds can I respect a professional intellectual who doesn’t tell the story of his own life? Especially when his life’s work has involved getting other intellectuals to pay attention to lives they used to overlook?

The fact that the book has an eminently sporkable style just makes the reviewer’s task easier: the basic approach Scott took, to mock, was dictated by the fact that West himself apparently doesn’t take his book seriously. The only conclusion I’ve been able to reach is that West has been hanging out with the kind of performers who (legitimately) don’t write their own autobiographies, and has fallen into a logical fallacy:

a. star performers don’t write their own autobiographies
b. I am an academic star performer
c. therefore I shouldn’t write my own story, either

This is, as the kids say, FAIL.

“On what possible grounds can I respect a professional intellectual who doesn’t tell the story of his own life?”

The book isn’t for you. It’s for the people who bought his CD. So he chose a collaborator
with experience in writing books targeted at fans of music or other pop culture. And he
tried to find a style accessible to that audience. If you grant West’s whole outreach project
any validity (and the reproduced comment by Mara Holt suggests it has had some effect),
then the choice is logical. Either way, West probably isn’t looking for your respect.

>It’s for the people who bought his CD.

Ok. But Wuthering Heights and Schubert?

“The book isn’t for you. It’s for the people who bought his CD. ”

Whether or not that excuses the quality of the book’s prose it might be worth pointing out that, following a similar line of reasoning, an Inside Higher Ed review is written with the thought that academics might be the main audience.

Well, this has all been fun, and I think I can speak for all sides when I echo the sentiments of Schiller, that “against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain”. Where lies the stupid, as it were, I leave to personal taste, which is, as ever, the only final arbiter.

Cornel West speaking at Bergen Community College, Part 1 of 7:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwEE4SaJNqk

There’s the oratory, in context, with some audience response as well.

More generally, Cornel West on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Cornel+West&search_type=&aq=f

His official website:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Cornel+West&search_type=&aq=f

Facebook page for Brother West (almost 15,000 fans):

http://www.facebook.com/drcornelwest?ref=search&sid=539197915.362728043..1

“an Inside Higher Ed review is written with the thought that academics might be the main audience.”

Fair comment. In future I’ll stick to UFC and avoid Inside Higher Ed :-)

Ah, lest you’ve not read my earlier comments, Maurice Meilleur, I believe McLemee’s review was a reasonable one. My questions still stand.

Reading all the “Cornel West makes his living with words” comments at the beginning of this thread, I forgot he was in philosophy rather than English. Do academics use writing the same way as memoirists, journalists, etc.? I’d think the acts of both composing and reading are very different in the two cases.

Perhaps there’s an argument to be made by someone–I’d like to see them make it, if so–that if scientists and philosophers use language differently than people whose training was in English departments to become journalists and write for a mass audience, that is EXACTLY what’s wrong with modern society, and they should be encouraged to join the program. But that’s an empirical question, as the saying goes. Or maybe I’m thinking too much about it.

@Sam Robinsta (303) and D. Slack (310) I don’t really get the ‘derailingfordummies.com’ site. I mean, it is good to document forms of derailment, but the tone of the site condescends to those who could most use an awareness of derailment. Imagine someone who commits these tropes. Do you think that site will raise their consciousness? Sorry for the derailment on derailment.

“McLemee’s review reads to me as painfully colorblind, at best.”

I don’t think this is what you meant to say? Colorblind is what the review is supposed to be. I think you’re confusing “colorblind” and “tone-deaf.”

After delivering his final bons mots, West gets out of the car at Union Square to head for the subway, and about three seconds later is accosted by a young and attractive blond woman who wants to say hello. Like pimpin’, philosophizin’ ain’t easy.

Racism? It just makes no sense at all to me. If West was actually dressed like a pimp, or like what we imagine a pimp to be dressed like, then it would be racist, and maybe even funny, depending on your tastes, but West is dressed like a college prof (see Youtube).

A better guess is either someone hacked into the Salon archives and stuck this in or else O’Hehir suffered a sudden, massive brain injury as he was finishing his review. Or maybe his editor has a beef with West and insisted on the reference.

In other words, if only McLemee, Henry, or others had just acknowledged from the get-go that this book might seem (at the very least) *less* ridiculous within a different set of conventions than the ones they are used to applying to writing by academics…

@327: This being a film, maybe O’Hehir thought he detected a reference to Hustle and Flow, raised it a Blonde Faith, and considered prostitution to be “like” pandering because they are complements. You’ve seen/read those so you know what he’s getting at.

“Richard Cownie’s suggestion that one is only allowed to make fun of work by people ‘like you’ for very specific values”.

I thought I made it 110% clear that I have no objection to making fun of people “unlike you”
as long as you make fun of people “like you” with a similar level of snark and with roughly similar
frequency. Now resume your mockery of my other comments :-)

On the African-American intellectual tradition: The reason I posted the Rahsaan Roland Kirk rap is that it is a bit of oral improvisation well within a certain African-American oral tradition. As for written African-American intellectual traditions, Amiria Baraka does not write like the West I’ve seen from this book, Skip Gates doesn’t write like that, Gerald Early doesn’t write like that, W E B Du Bois doesn’t write like that, Nelson George doesn’t write like that, Arthur Murray doesn’t write like that, nor does Stanley Crouch, or Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, John McWhorter, Martin Luther King, Zora Neal Hurston, etc. Among jazz musicians, Duke Ellington doesn’t write like that, nor Louis Armstrong (who published two autobiographies, both somewhat edited, and wrote scads of letters), nor Charles Mingus, or Dizzy Gillespie and Miles
Davis (the last two with as-told-to autobiographies).

The defense of West’s self-important bombast as ineluctably African-American and therefore opaque to whites is a non-starter.

though i understand that arthur murray had a great sense of rhythm, and was quite a dancer.

. . . his willingness to show emotion . . .

1) This is an autobiography, not an expository argument. I would imagine that, whatever the tradition, autobiographies are likely to show personal feeling.

2) Why do you think West, or his ghost-writer, is actually showing emotion in this prose? Maybe it’s just words.

@341

Right. That’s what I’m saying. It’s silly to make fun of West for apparently (you’re right, maybe it’s insincere) showing emotion. I think what people have supposed to be a big reason why the book got torn up so is not just *how* West is expressing emotion, but *that* he is (apparently) being so openly emotional. That was not me, it was Henry (and others I think) who (presumably by way of hyperbole) criticized West’s book for lack of intellectual content, for not clearly expressing serious ideas.

I, for one, cannot wait for D-squared’s review of Paul Krugman’s upcoming country music and spoken-word CD “Bushwhackin’! A Tale of Me and My Awesomeness.”

I don’t know Cornel West or his work, but the first thing that strikes me (and Scott McLemee’s wife, I would guess) about the sublime and funky sentence is its self-regard. Does he have children? West is declaring their interests to be less important than the pursuit of his own emotional goals. It is the rationale of many famous men: that their own sublime sensibilities and talents are so extraordinary as to demand realization, regardless of the cost to those around them. With an admittedly similar level of ignorance about the person, stuff I have read about Conor Cruise O’Brien suggests a similar attitude, as one example.

Mockery seems like an appropriate and feminist response to the passage; defence of the text comes across to me as anti-women.

So with children you loose the option of self-regard! I didn’t know I didn’t love mine. I guess I should tell my wife to kick me out. All zero sum this children business, glad that I know it – even if a tad too late.

In post number 60, Bill wrote “Cornel West, keepin’ it real, the real grill!” Is that supposed to be a parody of how Cornell West talks? Is that supposed to be a parody of how black people talk? Did I miss the excerpt where he discusses his grill? What is gained by linking a prominent Black academic, albeit one now addressing a popular audience, to language which is not his, but is also stereotypically Black, but lower-class, “gangsta” Black?

And why has it taken ~300 posts for anybody else to point this out?

And then, in 337, Bill goes out of his way to list a bunch of people who are yes, famous and Black, to demonstrate his “credentials” in judging West. Well, Bill, I’ve read Gertrude Stein, William Shakespeare, Hitler, and the autobiography of Mae West. None of them read like you, and so I suppose I can conclude that you’re not coming from any tradition either.

And to cap it off, we now have a discussion, taking place admittedly ignorant of facts, castigating West for supposedly, perhaps, it doesn’t matter because the insinuation matters more than the reality, being a poor father. Parenting is something that white people sure like to complain about black people being bad at, even, especially, when there’s no particular evidence in the offing.

Some of these comments are about two steps removed from email forwards with watermelons photoshopped onto the White House lawn.

This thread is rife with such casual racism and exercise of privilege. Whatever the views of individual commentators, and with some exceptions, the overall effect is a bunch of white people getting their backs up in defense of the inalienable right of white people to mock prominent black people for not being academic (read: white) enough.

So you read West as saying that he puts his need for romantic fulfillment ahead of any obligations he might have to anyone else, including his children? He’d be prepared to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of New York, say, if he thought it would help him attain his grand amour?

tom s: I wrote about the text and its meaning, and did not castigate West’s parenting about which I know nothing.

You wrote that West “is declaring [his children’s] interests to be less important than the pursuit of his own emotional goals” which is certainly a statement about the text, but it also calls into question the man’s love for his family. You followed up with a swipe at Conor Cruise O’Brien based on “stuff” you have read. So I suppose West can count himself lucky, since in his case we at least get to see the text you are relying on.

which is certainly a statement about the text, but it also calls into question the man’s love for his family.

How? As far as I can see Tom is saying that West is writing like a jerk, not that he is a jerk.

I mean, I think it’s reasonable to assume that, if someone says they won’t let life or death stand in the way of something, they don’t have a separate list of things that they would allow to stand in the way. So anyone who pronounced That Line seriously & with forethought would thereby reveal hirself to be monstrously narcissistic. I don’t think Cornel West is a monster of narcissism; I don’t think he was writing seriously & with forethought, either. That’s actually what makes it a funny line.

Aside from my last snarky comment, which I will stand by, this one’s for Dr. Slack, with no disrespect to him [or her. But I’d place money on the former]

So why is it that your comments are so much better than the posts they comment on?
It has a lot to do with the fact that you’re sharp as a tack. But on this site and in the context of academia, and its pretensions, it also has something to do with race, and a lot to do with why I’m responding to #359.
Clarence Thomas isn’t the only man who owes his position more to affirmative action than to his abilities. But if someone wants to joke about this sh-t they should think about it very seriously. More seriously than most people here do.
It’s all very very heavy. More heavy than Scott McLemee. proud ex-sectarian teenage wannabe leftist, or H. Farrell take it to be.

Doctor Slack: You raise “kmack’s earlier and quite stupid assumption that all parties to the thread are white.” Kmack actually made no such assumption ( I just double checked). But then when you’re bashing so-called PC, getting your own facts straight hardly matters, does it?

As for what kmack actually was attempting to discuss, there have been real and important discussions of the problems surrounding prestige Af-Am departments at the Ivys. Black Scholar v. 31 # 1 is one issue that I recall being devoted to the topic.

The problem demonstrated in this thread is that everyone wants to agree with Larry Summers on West, while distancing themselves from what Summers’ attack meant at the time. The two remain inseparable, and on this thread it is rather striking that the only people who have attempted to call out clear, obvious, racism are those who draw fire from all around for “political correctness gone mad” (even if as, in the case of Dr. Slack and kmack, the “evidence” is somewhat-to-entirely lacking).

This thread (and McLemee’s article) isn’t about “good fun” with some clunky sentences. The book on the whole is brisk, engaging, but neither particularly deep nor particularly outrageous. There’s a very creepy subtext both in McLemee singling out an example of absurdist rhetorical flourish as typical of West’s style, and in the glee with which this has been seized on and grotesquely magnified on this thread.

Kmack actually made no such assumption ( I just double checked).

Really? What exactly do you suppose “”Perhaps you missed West’s poignant discourses on “white privilege” in his earlier work” was an attempt to imply?

But then when you’re bashing so-called PC . . . “political correctness gone mad”

Speaking of getting your facts straight, the only person in this thread to use the latter phrase is you. Exactly one other person, not me, has used the term PC in exactly one comment. And as far as I can see, it’s you who’s engaged in “grotesque magnification” here or in the defense of it — cf. your bizarre attempt to portray kmack, the only person on this thread to seize on McLemee’s review as an excuse to call West a fraud entire in the most insulting possible terms (albeit leavened with the odd weasel-phrase), as some sort of particularly brave questioner.

Wax Banks at 364:

Indeed. On the other hand, if you want to see how badly things can go, and in what ways, it’s instructive.

This is not to say that Derailing for Dummies isn’t pretty funny/painful/funny.

Well, Henry (after taking away my entre parenthèses on the responses you didn’t take away whilst maintaining that, all in all, it would have been a good idea to have done so), let me respond to your challenge: the sentence in question is of good writing because it links in a very telling way the tradition of funk and that of sublime. If you disregard the Bronte and Schubert inessentials at the beginning it is quite probably a sentence that’ll last a little longer than most other sentences, and, quite possibly, any sentence uttered by anyone on this blog.

The funkiness of that sentence is almost sublime.

“So the sentence is good, despite the horribly sloppy metaphors, because it links together the funky and the sublime?”

Read salient’s review: “big-hearted comedic performance … glorious fun”. The sentence
is *meant* to be funny. And it is. Though also poignant IMO, and the yin-and-yang of
sublime and funky has some resonance.

FWIW, if you google “sublime and funky” you’ll find that that specific phase has been around since at least 1999. West-Ritz didn’t invent that particular coupling, or they aren’t the first to invent it.

Wax Banks: Slack, you goddamn bastard –

I did not provide enough warning. Mea culpa.

West’s book lets World Nut Daily freak out at Summers and West at once.

I like the way Richard finds it necessary to assert that salient was a) serious and b) authoritative in making that claim. It says a lot, really it does.

This thread is all about providing straws to clutch at.

I view it as an exercise in tribalism – case in point: Henry’s update.

He didn’t say West was a ‘fraud’. He just said there were other African-American scholars who have produced better quality work, who haven’t had anything like his renown. Is this really so outrageous? I’m sure you could say the same thing about Larry Summers (compared to other economists), or Steven Pinker (o cognitive scientists)… And yes, Virginia, high-flying academic careers aren’t generally attained on the basis of ‘scholarly merit’, but, in a nutshell, by being held in high regard by people whose opinions on such things matter. In the US such people tend to white and liberal.

And the main point was that even though many African-American scholars have felt underwhelmed by the ‘West phenomenon’ for some time they will still be very uncomfortable with the kind of all-out ridicule you see in this piece, because it easily comes across as ridicule of African-Americans.

For the record, I know very little about Cornel West’s work and wouldn’t want to judge him one way or the other. Just saying that imo there is nothing outrageous about the above, especially if it comes from someone who evidently has some familiarity with West’s field.

@383: What kmack said is that the white guys wanted a token black and chose West because he has attributes that made him suitable for his purposes. Granted, he didn’t say West actually lacked scholarly merits, though it was strongly implied. He did say that we don’t hear much about younger African-American scholars, which I think is true, and which actually has nothing to do with the other point about whether West is a good scholar and was hired for his scholarly accomplishments. He implied, I thought, that “we” aren’t worried about opportunities for good African American scholars because we can point to West as supposed proof they exist. (Of course, this assumes his good will, and his first point makes it difficult to ascribe good faith to him, as does the fact that he blames younger African American scholars for failing to attack him. So, actually, you can think he meant what I’m suggesting he may have meant to imply, only if you ignore the first and last sentences of his post.)

engels: He didn’t say West was a ‘fraud’.

Oh, of course not. Just strongly implied it: “In this case, the gatekeepers, along with impressionable students and some academics who ought to have known better, significantly overestimated the scholarly value of the work while being dazzled and entertained by a brilliant academic performance artist.”

It’s pretty much unmissable that that’s a description of a fraud, an Uncle Tom. All that’s missing is the actual epithets. And if the main point was supposed to be that even West’s anonymous hordes of black scholarly detractors would gape in horror at McLemee’s “all-out ridicule,” one might think that one-upping the so-called “ridicule” in question as a means of demonstrating that some of you “white liberals” protest too much is a rather odd way to go about it.

And there is no particular reason to believe that the anonymous “they” of the black scholarly world would buy the characterization (yours, not kmack’s) of McLemee’s piece as “all-out-ridicule,” nor that it “easily comes across as ridicule of African-Americans.”

@387: You’re right, “, significantly overestimated the scholarly value of the work,” does accuse Cornel West’s scholarship of having been valued improperly highly. “Some academics” presumably refers to the ones who hired him.

I can understand McLemee’s frustration that a fellow leftist, whose work is already disliked by the right, appears to him to have made himself a poster boy for rightwingers to attack all leftleaning humanities scholars as postmodern. I can understand, though I don’t totally share, McLemee’s frustration that identity group politics have more standing on the left than he would like. However: I wonder whether a white left leaning scholar who wrote a similar book, ghostwritten by, say, Dave Eggers, would have been attacked that way.

Yay! Paragraph tags do nothing.

Doctor Slack, we cross-posted. kmack wrote: … relatively non-scholarly reasons. Black scholars with any sense and integrity have known that. Presumably, their concern was that since so few have made it so high, and his politics are generally progressive, better to protect him …. Challenged, he replied: If scholarly considerations were mainly the reason for West-type reception and success, it’s not too hard to come up with other black academics whose scholarly work warrants at least as much attention and reward. I am not suggesting that West’s brand of success actually crowded out the work of such others.

If kmack really means West did not crowd out other scholars, then he must mean to say there are other black academics whose scholarly work warrants AND CONSEQUENTLY GARNERS at least as much attention and reward, and if he intends to imply there are more than a handful, this is not true. If he meant to imply there were significant numbers of black scholars in the academy at the time West got tenure, scholars who could have spoken out against him if they’d resented it, this is again untrue.

As to whether he’s in good faith or not, I don’t profess to know what’s in his mind, and my secret decoder ring has been misplaced. Maybe he’s wrong on the facts. Maybe he writes very poorly or even is not fluent in English. He’s not the only poor writer on these threads.

393: All well said.

Oh dear.

Well, give me a better word then for what’s been going on in this thread. Lemee actually made some valid points, but went way over the top and let his own prejudices shine through. Henry came to the rescue of a friend and fellow CT poster and in the course of that lost all objectivity, which is crystal clear when you read both his update and the blog post it’s referring to, the latter pointing out some shortcomings of Lemee’s post which are immediately obvious to any neutral observer. The rest is mudslinging and one-upmanship.

“a man who doesn’t even possess a bachelor’s degree”

Some of the old boys in British history would make a concerted effort to write “Mr. Thompson” whenever they referred to E.P. Thompson. He didn’t have a doctoral degree, you see. They sure showed him!

“somehow supports any of the points he has been”

More that I was abandoning my interpretation in favor of what I mistakenly thought was
yours … But I’m still of the opinion – as you suggested far more elegantly than I could
in your earlier comments – that a much-divorced man writing about “the sublime and funky
love that I crave” has a strong element of deliberate self-mocking humor.

Yeah, yeah. Clutching at straws.

effects link per regions retrieved [url=http://www.adpc.net]limits relatively trends burning states[/url] http://www.nicholas.duke.edu

373 – so you think it’s such a good meme that it was picked up by West’s crew ;-)

Novakant – you are ducking the question. You have not made a claim that the text is unproblematic at the point of _reading_ but at the point of _writing_ -i.e. your claim that it reveals Scott’s prejudices. So too with Kathleen Lowrey – who suggested that it revealed that Scott was a racist, and that it was equivalent to sending West fried chicken. I do not know whether you agree with Kathleen – I asked you to specify what you meant by Scott’s prejudices – you have so far declined to do so. If Kathleen had said that the text _could be read_ (as one among many possible readings) as problematic, I would have treated her quite differently than I did when she made the claim that she had made – which was that Scott was unambiguously a racist. It is not me who is claiming an interpretative monopoly here – and I am disappointed that you should wriggle away from trying to answer the questions that I asked.

Which are – again – (1) what are the prejudices that you claim have been revealed by Scott’s writing, and (2) why is it that an interpretative charity should be applied to you when you use terms like ‘tribalism, ‘ that you appear unwilling to extend to Scott. At the moment, your interpretative position appears to be a variety of ‘Yes Minister’ hermeneutics – _I_ use possibly loaded terms without any taint of racism, because they are the only ones that describe what is going on, _you_ use terms that you should really be a bit more careful with in case you are misinterpreted, _he_ uses terms that reveal his unacknowledged prejudices.

Henry- I’m pretty sure that if you read the comments on Leiter’s blog you’ll have a hard time describing them as “a Heavenly Chorus of handpicked slavish sycophants.” At the very least that’s a bit offensive to the large number of professional philosophers who regularly post there, many, perhaps most, of whom disagree with Leiter on all sorts of topics, including the topics of the posts with comments. It’s fine, of course, to disagree with Leiter on all sorts of things, including the sort of comment policies that are best for a blog, but this remark is just silly and, being so obviously misguided, makes your points weaker.

HF “fwiw I imagine that Scott would agree with everything this letter”

From the letter:
“Had the issue been mainly about West’s scholarly output and its quality, and whether this ever merited appointment as a University Professor at Harvard, I am fairly confident that many of these sympathetic academics, at least those with some knowledge of areas closely related to his work, would not have been nearly as sympathetic. ”

So the question remains: what has made West so successful in the [white] academy?
The answer would seem to be his g-rated unthreatening but shallow “funkiness.” He’s seen as “authentically” but safely black.
And here we’re back to where I started: describing why it was predicable that this thread would as long as it is.
I’m not interested in defending or attacking McLemee or West (Leiter is in another category) There’s a lot of defensiveness in this debate. I’m trying to describe why.
And if I’m willing to call West shallow, it doesn’t imply I’m calling anyone else deep.
Since when has shallowness ever been anything but helpful, in the academy as elsewhere? He’s not a fraud.

Fair enough.

Henry, I don’t know McLemee and I haven’t read anything by him except the “review” in question, so the only thing I can base my judgment on is the text in front of me. This is why I didn’t say “McLemee is x”, but instead referred to the text and what it conveyed to me. And based on this limited amount of information, I can say that in this case McLemee is at best tone-deaf when it comes to race and seems to have very narrow-minded views regarding love and relationships. These things “shine through” the text, they don’t come out of nowhere and have been noticed by others.

As a professional journalist McLemee should be aware of how his writing can be perceived by intelligent and educated readers and if there is a big discrepancy between the intentio auctoris and the perception of a sizable part of his readership, then this constitutes a failure to communicate on his part and not the part of the latter. I have a circle of friends who come from all sorts of backgrounds, nations, races, sexual orientations and we often take the piss out of each other based on those attributes, but even with them you have to be careful not to cross the line and say something that could be perceived as hurtful, even if it wasn’t meant that way. Sometimes that does happen and since we’re friends the damage can generally be undone quite quickly.

A professional writer should be even more mindful of what he is saying and how he is saying it, since he is catering to a large, anonymous readership and rifts aren’t so easily mended. Simply blaming the audience is a bit weak.

Just checking in and…merciful heavens, it’s an Old School Unfogged thread, right here on Crooked Timber. Wonders never cease.

Henry, how am I supposed to look into McLemee’s head, all I have is a text which allows me to draw certain inferences, especially since the writer is an experienced professional who should be expected to know what he’s doing.

I’m not going to rehash debates about racism conducted ad nauseam above, suffice it to say that I think Kaveh made some very valuable points in this regard. As for McLemee’s views on love and relationships as expressed in the text, I think they are narrow-minded and lacking in imagination and tolerance.

Both these aspects can be found “in the text” by simply reading it with open eyes and as is proven by the rather mixed response it has received both here and on the site of original publication. If you don’t detect them, if you claim that everybody who has taken issue with the text is arguing in bad faith, looking for trouble or has an axe to grind, then I’m afraid you might be a bit tone-deaf as well.

How exactly these elements got in there – I don’t know, and if you’re trying to lure me into saying terrible things about your friend so as to be able to dismiss me as a crank with an agenda, look elsewhere.

Generally speaking, binary logic will not get you very far in the interpretation of texts.

“Denying them” above should be “denying that you are making them.”

Henry, muffin, *stop digging*. Honestly. This hole is already more than 400 leagues deep. Jumping on novakant for using the term “tribalism” — oh, poor lamb. Do you not see that this says something about *you*, not about him/her? There is only one reason you can have seized on this as a line of attack, and it’s because of a mental association series that looks transparently like this: tribalism! darkies! who’s a racist NOW?.

God, it’s beyond satire and inspires pity.

engels: Slack, what your third para boils down is that if I say ‘A’, and you respond with ‘B’, then you’ve won

Ummm, no it doesn’t. What? What my third para boils down to is that not all interpretations of a text are equally compelling, and “reasonable people” should be able to supply reasons to prefer their interpretation of a text.

Kathleen: Henry, muffin, stop digging . . . God, it’s beyond satire and inspires pity.

I’m sorry, but you should consider taking your own advice, since your own case has not been compelling at any point on this thread and you appear to have rather painfully missed the point of the “tribalism” digression into the bargain.

@Kathleen Lowrey:

Henry wasn’t ‘attacking’ novakant for using the word ‘tribalism’ as a last defense. He was making a point about how the participants in this thread have selectively applied the principle of interpretative charity. Of course, to practice charity, one usually has a surfeit of the good in question, so I understand why your interpretations of this thread are so mean. In all senses of the word.

I understand why your interpretations of this thread are so mean. In all senses of the word.

What? Even in the sense of

2 math, statistics a mathematical average, in particular: a the average value of a set of n numbers, equal to the sum of the numbers divided by n. Also called arithmetic mean; b the average value of a set of n numbers, also taking into account their frequency, by multiplying each number by the number of times it occurs, summing the resulting values and dividing them by n. Also called weighted mean; c the nth root of the product of n quantities or numbers, eg the geometric mean of 2 and 3 is the second (square) root of 6, ie Ã6. Also called geometric mean. Compare median, mode.

I wasn’t involved in the conversation with Kaveh. But naturally I do indeed think that Novakant should offer something further to the counter-arguments already supplied to Kaveh if he wants to bring that thread of discussion back up. (He doesn’t have to, of course, but it would make his contribution substantial and interesting. What he’s done thus far is the basic equivalent of voting up a YouTube comment.)

Greg, that’s just not true. Henry was saying, we could symmetrically attack you, novokant, for using the word tribalism – but we are refraining from doing so, cause we’re just charitable that way.

Now, what kind of symmetrical attack did he have in mind? In context, it could only have been attack-via-a-charge-of-racism. How would such an attack be possible? Why, if use of the word tribalism = racism. Does this make sense in context of an overwhelmingly white boy gabfest? Only if you think “tribal” is inherently marked as “non-white”. This is quite revealing, and in ways I that think don’t serve Henry’s overall stance in this thread very well.

Dr. Slack — the use of condescending endearments was indeed uncharitable on my part, and I am sorry for it.

in contexts like this — a long thread devoted almost entirely to defending the deployment by a a white critic of gangsta phraseology to “comic” effect in his blistering critique of the work of a black scholar, and in which said black scholar is compared to Smoove B and no-one present so much as blinks — the prospect of making myself agreeable is quite repugnant.

WOW: No interpretational charity needed as you can look the word up in the dictionary . . . As for what happened here, maybe you should ask Michael Berube to give you an introduction to the basic tools of textual analysis and literary theory . . .

My irony-meter just exploded in my hands. I’m off to dig out the shrapnel. Have fun, everyone.

@Kathleen Lowrey

If you recognize that ‘tribal’, within particular contexts (though as you say, not inherently), is unfortunately marked as ‘non-white’, you might recognize that its use in this discussion is tone-deaf, revealing latent racial insensitivity on the part of the speaker. How is that not homologous to what’s going on in this thread? For clarity, it’s not that the use of the word ‘tribalism’ is racist, it’s that such an interpretation is uncharitable in the very same way as some of the interpretations of McLemee’s piece.

I might as well say your charge of ‘racist caricature’ make sense only if you think ‘popping a cap’ is inherently marked as non-white. Or that for your fried chicken comment to make sense, you must have a mental association series that looks like ‘black person – fried chicken.’ How revealing about you and your psyche!

As for what happened here, maybe you should ask Michael Berube to give you an introduction to the basic tools of textual analysis and literary theory

I was going to mail Henry a box of this, but he already had one.

Well, speaking as someone who has been chastised for (1) overpraising West, (2) criticizing West, and (3) pretending that West was the First Black American Intellectual Ever, all in the same essay, I have to say I’ve seen a lot of this kind of behavior before. And I’m not surprised that some of the most vociferous critics of this review acknowledge that they are unfamiliar not only with McLemee’s work but with West’s as well.

As for Kaveh. Although I take Kaveh’s general point @ 328, I think the attribution of “awkwardness” to Henry and Scott is a tad disingenuous:

@326: I was surprised by that too, it’s as if McLemee was worrying about whether people would think the pop a cap remark was directed at West. Kind of a guilty, defensive, thing to say. And I don’t see how you could read the comment as entirely directed at Summers, it seems like it has to be more about the situation, the whole interaction between them. And really, I don’t think it’s that racially tone-deaf a remark anyway, by itself, making the denial that it was about West all the more awkward. It’s funny to me how the review and appreciation of the review immediately created this awkwardness that persists into the 300th-plus comment because people tried to avoid acknowledging that awkwardness in the first place.

Scott stepped into this thread to confirm that Summers was the target of the cap-popping line (because of his alleged mode of address to West in re Mansfield) well after he’d been accused of sending West a box of fried chicken. So saying, as Kaveh effectively does, “why did McLemee have to clarify a remark that wasn’t racially tone-deaf? Maybe he’s anxious about something, hmmmmm? feeling guilty, perhaps?” strikes me as unfair. You want to provoke social awkwardness about writing and race? Just lob a “fried chicken” charge at a reviewer who’s written about an African-American writer even when the review itself said nothing about race. Then, when the reviewer replies in disbelief, insinuate that he’s in denial. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’ll work every time.

Kathleen:

The problem is — as I pointed out to Sam Robinsta upthread — ‘formulas’ can be a useful signpost, but they don’t actually make the argument for you. The ‘over-sensitivity’ defense is overused… but that doesn’t mean over-sensitivity doesn’t actually happen. It can be and often is derailing behavior to tell critics about how ‘this time, it’s different’… but that doesn’t make every aspiring critique of either racism or derailing automatically correct. Indignation about being called a racist can be, and often is, a response use to choke off honest discussion… but that doesn’t make every instance invalid. We still have to think and put some work in. You can’t say “Aha! I detect a formal resemblance to a possibly-annoying trope!” and wait for the other party to fall at your feet. It isn’t going to happen, and with good reason.

Responding to this with melodrama and attempts to stuff words in others’ mouths (“men & women of goodwill have nobly stood by” blah blah blah) isn’t going to get you over this hurdle. What my point more or less reduces to is simple, not a chain of grandiose statements: you are, in this case, mistaken. Henry is, in this case, not mistaken. His interpretation of the text is more convincing than yours. That’s it. That’s a thing that can happen. You should never go into a conversation assuming that that is not a thing that can happen.

When you consider that many of the original objections to the West excerpt went along the lines of ‘piano sonatas can’t crave love, they are not sentient beings!’ maybe you’d concede that interpretative charity hasn’t really been in abundance at any point in this discussion. The original review was arguably not what you would call model of sympathetic engagement…

(That last to Kathleen, not engels.)

… an introduction to the basic tools of textual analysis and literary theory …

Well, there’s something known as the hermeneutic circle. You can’t understand the meaning of a whole except by reference to the meaning of its parts. And you can’t understand the meaning of any part except by reference to the whole. This principle applies to fixed texts.

This comment thread seems to just grow and grow. It might, in fact, be constituted of what Ishmael Reed called Jes Grew (both a phenomenon and a character) in Mumbo Jumbo. Whatever.

In view of this growth I don’t think the hermeneutic circle will cut it. Perhaps a hermeneutic helix, maybe even a double-helix. Better yet, the Hermeneutic Spiral of Death.

sotto voce . . . yes, yes, the sublime and funky hermeneutic death spiral.
. . . .ain’t no mountain high enough . . . .

@Kathleen Lowrey

Thanks for the response. While, on this issue, I suppose I’m one of the wagon-circlers (I enjoyed McLemee’s review, and the scadenfreude it prompted), I want to say I’m sympathetic to at least much of your discomfort–the thread can’t help but seem at least a little disconcerting set in the context of the long history of genuinely racist responses to West’s work–responses that made similar (but, in those cases, much less justified) accusations of narcissism and unseriousness. I think it’s productive for many of us to ask ourselves whether we would take quite so much pleasure at a comparably scathing review of analogous work by a white scholar; the answer may be disquieting. (Then again–when I think of, say, Neil LaBute collaborating on the Life of Harvey Mansfield–the possibility may be at least as hilarious as horrifying; so perhaps not.)

Still, I do think the phenomenon is real, and deserves much more attention than it’s getting. In my discipline there are many eminent hacks, of whom some (almost certainly a minority) are women, but for some reason it’s still the women hacks who seem to get all the attention–often in more or less explicitly gendered terms. (I mention women because there are practically no eminent people of color in my discipline.) Needless to say this is very troubling!

From my perspective it’s a shame that we’re focussing so on the specifics of the review, and not its place in the (much more obviously problematic) broader pattern.

Kathleen: What I have said, over and over

And over. And over. But since you’ve been non-responsive to responses to this critique, other than to dismiss the mere fact of arguing-back as obvious “circling of the wagons” by “white academics” and to insist that your interpretations of the jokes in question are true by definition, does it surprise you that you’ve failed to convince? Because it shouldn’t.

However, since I’ve been back-and-forthing with you, I’ll explain more fully why I, specifically, don’t find you convincing here:

1. The “cap-popping” joke doesn’t trigger the outrage for me that it does for you because this kind of language has been part of mass culture for almost twenty years now (via the vector of hip-hop music, a multiracial art form since the Beasties at least) and no longer signifies as exclusively in all instances as you seem to think it does, nor belongs exclusively to black discourse. “Cheap racist laffs” is therefore neither sufficient nor particularly efficient as a characterization of it, and your insistence on reading it this way is not particularly compelling. (For similar reasons, Sam Robinsta’s indignation at Bill’s “keepin’ it real” joke fell flat.)

2. “Smoove B” was an uninteresting (sorry Paul) side joke from one commenter that attracted attention from maybe two or three others, whose originator has since tried to explain himself by prompting of your critique. You can make a case for “racist” or “clumsy” there in the initial instance, but what you can’t do is transfigure it into a remotely interesting indictment of all participants to the thread. (“Where is the outrage games?” like tendentious readings, can of course be played by more than one party. But as a noble, nay, saintly representative of Sweet Reason, I shall of course refrain from do so, which will obviously signify that I think I’m better than you.)

3. The above two points are therefore extremely thin reeds for supporting a claim about what the thread is supposed to mean about “white academics” or bode for “race consciousness in American academia in 2009.” Your attempts at portentous statements on this subject are therefore over-the-top and uninteresting AFAICS.

If you follow previous patterns, you’ll attempt to inflate this into a general defense of the white-privileged consensus of academia in general and a hostility to any critique of race politics. Which will be convenient, no doubt, but to be clear, what’s insufficient here is not the critique of race politics and discourse generally: it’s your arguments, specifically. That you think “formula” can stand in for specificity of critique is a big hint as to what’s steered you wrong in this thread. Maybe what you should think about doing is to “stop digging,” as you advised Henry, and learn from the experience.

And frankly, even if cultural/race issues were not invovled, I wouldn’t much care for it. Maybe I’m just incurious but I honestly could’nt really give a crap how many times Cornel West has been divorced.

@426: While I was, myself, mostly satisfied with the responses, and so didn’t post a lot of further replies, I think the issue I raised in #336, where I brought up Tavis Smiley, was not really resolved, it just kind of fizzled out.

Now that the thread has gone on for another 100 comments, I think Joaquin @362 did a great job of making a point I had wanted to make, when he brought up a hypothetical about Woody Allen’s “whiny voice”–and that is, it is totally predictable there should some indignant responses to a parody like the one McLemee wrote. Totally predictable.

Now, Michael Berube @451, if you don’t mind (or even if you do) I’m going to nitpick like crazy for a second: if you think my point about awkwardness @328 was wrong, and you disagree, that is one thing, but that doesn’t make it disingenuous! (That would mean I was misrepresenting my own intentions, right?) I submit to you that, if I did misattribute the origin of awkwardness in this thread, it was an honest mistake.

For the record, my intent was not to insinuate that I thought McLemee acted guilty because he is racist, it was that I thought he overcorrected, and that (the overcorrection) made it easier to imagine bad things about his inner life. I did not, as far as I remember (I’m not scrolling up again to reread my comment) speculate that the cause of his overcorrection was a justified feeling of guilt. Of course your point about the chronology is well-taken, and I’m not sure I would be any less awkward were I to find myself in the same position, but then I could just make the same point (about awkwardness) again about the original review by McLemee (actually I think I did, somewhere). And, then again, maybe the whole reason for overcorrecting is not racism, but an awareness that he (and the same goes for Henry) is just a little bit out of his depth, relative to people who are much more aware of the black cultural scene(s)–and they are out there–in other words awareness of his own inadequacy to the task, which is not surprising, because people are all products of their own particular histories, each carrying their own basket of privileges, making each of us an imperfect witness relying on limited information, like in the parable of the three blind men and the elephant BOOYA!

But seriously, again, and if this is the logical equivalent of reccing a youtube video, so be it, I think Joaquin @362 really hit the nail on the head re Woody Allen, you just can’t write something like McLemee’s review and expect not to take some heat (unless it’s about Islam or the Middle East) and that doesn’t even necessarily make it a bad thing to do, I just think, with my 20/20 hindsight, that the awkwardness (which, I think, wasn’t entirely due to a certain culinary reference) could be avoided by McLemee’s more explicitly acknowledging his own stake/position as a white person writing about a black person, a little self-deprecating humor, something like that. That burden is necessarily on the critic.

And, then again, maybe the whole reason for overcorrecting is not racism, but an awareness that he (and the same goes for Henry) is just a little bit out of his depth, relative to people who are much more aware of the black cultural scene(s)

Speaking as a card-carrying member of the “black cultural scene” (at least one of them), neither Scott nor Henry come across as particularly out of their depth in this thread, nor does the contra-McLemee “side” (to put it roughly) come off as especially knowledgeable about “black cultural scene(s).” (One reason why I find a faint ridiculousness in the spectacle of people fretting over, say, how across certain “cultural/racial divides” a certain sort of woman might not take issue with a demanding list of sublime qualities of which her relationships with West should be composed. Seriously, you haven’t known very many black women if you don’t know just how mild McLemee’s wife’s response to that shit really was.)

#469 I’d rather leave my own relationships out of this as well, thanks. I didn’t say, or imply, that a black woman couldn’t have the same, or a stronger reaction. (That would, in fact, be a very stupid thing to say.) My point, to be clear, was that it was an inherently subjective assessment and it certainly has nothing to do with West’s ‘intellectual merits’. (The original claim I was responding to.)

engels: Point taken. He should have said “intellectual or aesthetic merit.”

Substance: “Uh-oh.”

You’re right, what was I thinking? Add to that sentence: “… whereas I have known a statistically robust sample… laydeez.”

if you think the phenomenon of scholarly hacks who get too much praise who are either (a) female or (b) of color is a serious issue that doesn’t receive enough attention . . . and… scene.

Oh, and substituting failed sarcasm and deliberate misreading for effective arguments is also a bad idea. Future reference.

Kaveh @ 467: if you think my point about awkwardness @328 was wrong, and you disagree, that is one thing, but that doesn’t make it disingenuous! (That would mean I was misrepresenting my own intentions, right?) I submit to you that, if I did misattribute the origin of awkwardness in this thread, it was an honest mistake.

I hear you, Kaveh. That’s a good nitpick, and I’m glad that nit got picked. I withdraw both “disingenuous” and “tad.” I’m merely saying that things got awkward on this thread very early on, and the awkwardness had a great deal to do with the invocation of iedfray ickenchay. Scott was replying to that, and from what I can see was sincerely gobsmacked that he had to do so.

And I did mean it when I say I take your general point: it is always possible that mockery of an African-American man’s reference to a “sublime and funky love” is tinged (or perhaps even suffused) with racism. Speaking only for myself, I think there’s nothing mockable about the desire for a sublime and funky love; may we all have such loves at some point in our lives. Rather, what’s mockable in that utterance is the bit about Wuthering Heights licensing one to pursue that love even if life and death stand in the way. I have checked this with the International Center for Race-Neutral Standards for the Mockery of Awkward Prose, Inappropriate Allusions, and Unfortunate Solecisms in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and they confirm, so it’s not just my opinion.

As for Woody Allen, what Substance McGravitas said @ 468. Mockery of Woody Allen’s stupid words, OK; mockery of his “Jewish whine,” definitely not OK. That’s what I was trying to get at by citing Andrew O’Hehir’s review of Examined Life @ 176: McLemee’s use of “pop a cap in one’s ass” in the context of the Summers-West exchange, not palpably racist; O’Hehir’s utterly gratuitous use of “pimpin'” to refer to West greeting a “young and attractive blond woman” at the end of the film — straight up racist that sucker is, simple and plain. Motherfuck him and John Wayne. Again, check with the good people in Porto Alegre for confirmation — they’re the only reliable arbiters of these things.

And thanks for replying.

So I should have used scare quotes like you?

Those aren’t scare quotes, they quote you.

“Those aren’t scare quotes, they quote you.”
True… True.
But being a gentile I’d hope he’d put scare quotes around such a phrase.
Otherwise I might start to wonder.
((:-)
(smiley with a yarmulke)

454 To use [“popping a cap in someone’s ass”] to comic effect in relation to the work of a black scholar—well, sure, perhaps it is not racist, and perhaps rocks are delicious snacks. To attribute ‘cap popping’ to the white president of Harvard in a conversation with a black scholar for extra comic effect (the incongruity! hee hee!)—perhaps that isn’t racist either.

476 I didn’t like McLemee’s use of the phrase “popping a cap in a fellow faculty member’s ass” in the original review; I think his use of the phrase in comment #75 above indicates he thinks it’s an inherently funny phrase. That’s a little immature,1 perhaps, and possibly a little insensitive: at absolute worst, and I feel this is being uncharitable to McLemee, it’s equivalent to using “gay” as an epithet.

It would be one thing if McLemee threw in the “pop a cap” line out of nowhere – a la the Salon film critic’s “pimpin'”. But it is not McLemee, but West himself (apparently) who attributes gangsta phraseology (“Help me f___ him up”) “to the white president of Harvard in a conversation with a black scholar.” However poorly or offensively Summers may (or may not) have treated West, West, not McLemee, is responsible for any comic potential inherent in his portrayal of this encounter.

I suppose it’s true in general that the language of young male machismo culture, like the language of academia, should never be used as an excuse or occasion for mirth. This is my attitude towards”Jersey Shore” from now on.

Not so long ago I was wondering whether or not this rhetorical potlatch would hit 400 comments under its own steam. Now it’s closing on 500. In honor of that, shall we say, achievement, it’s time for another hit of Authentic African-American Rhetorical Stylings. This is from the stump speech Dizzy Gillespie developed for his 1964 run on the Presidency. You can find it in his as-told-to (Al Fraser) autobiography To Be or Not to Bop (Doubleday 1979 pp. 457-458). Think of Dizzy an idea man in the world of jazz.

When I am elected President of the United States, my first executive order will be to change the name of the White House! To the Blues House.

As Vice-President, I would like Ramona Crowell, a leader of the John Birks Society and a registered Sioux Indian.

And all that whilst he could have been theorizing on the influence of Royce on modern impro!

… campaign lyricist, LOL

Kathleen @ 454: “On the other hand, if someone uses the word “tribalism” to describe the clubbiness of mutual white dude defensiveness, probably they are making a racist joke! Isn’t that terrible of them? Also, up is the new down.”

I thought we were ready for a breakthrough here, Kathleen. If I understand your sarcasm correctly, you’re approving of this otherwise-offensive use of “tribalism” because it’s used to accuse the clubby white dudes of racism. But that’s roughly how I understood Scott’s use of the “pop a cap” expression (as several commenters have already argued): it was Summers’ white dude offensiveness being sent up. Clearly, Scott could have made this connection clearer — like others here, I re-read it a few times before moving on — but I don’t see any reason to take Kaveh’s view that the expression referred to the whole interaction.

Bill Benzon @ 486: Based on my years of experience working on software development, I think there is a bug in WordPress (or in CT’s enhancements to WordPress if there are any). Some necessary, security-related handing of your comments requires you to separate the paragraphs by extra stuff if you want them to appear correctly.