Miscast—again

I should be nonplussed, I suppose, to have been cast as Garth Knight in Elberry’s remake of Robin of Sherwood. But it is refreshing to learn that Garth Knight is also a bondage artist and the father of Bristol Palin’s baby. These are cultural roles that suit my unique abilities to a farthing!

Rather than the picture that Elberry posted, I prefer this self-portrait from my pre-Raphaelite or hippie days. (I can’t decide which.) Coated with cobwebs and dust, indeed!

By the way, I shall be online only sporadically over the next three or four days, since I am on deadline with an article for a magazine. Periphrastic insults, not banal, should be forwarded to Nigel Beale, Frank Wilson, Patrick Kurp, or any other Old Boy with a blog. Although, let’s face it, none of them can touch me when it comes to being “knowing to the point of arrogance.”

Update: In the comments section, Lee Lowe accuses me of a “certain dogmatism.” I reply to the accusation there.

But her accusation got me to thinking. What are the dogmas that I have enunciated so far on this Commonplace Blog? Here are ten.

( 1) Literature is good writing, where “good” by definition yields no fixed definition.

( 2) Literature is a title of prestige bestowed by critics (who mean to distinguish good writing from, say, John Banfield’s Banville’s).

( 3) Literary persuasion is of a different order from political persuasion, because it is mediated by style—that is, the concern to write well.

( 4) English literature is a discipline of knowledge rather than a fine sensibility.

( 5) There are some works of literature that every civilized American should be familiar with, although there will be much disagreement over what they are.

( 6) The sciences are not the court of last rational resort, because the claim that they are is not itself a scientific claim, leaving other courts to conduct at least some rational business.

( 7) Fiction’s truth may only be secured extrinsically—that is, it must also be contained in the community where the fiction was originally written. More than the fictional world alone must exist for fiction to enter the service of truth.

( 8) Academic boycotts of Israel are terrorism by other means.

( 9) Meaning is produced not by the material aspects of writing, but by its intellectual conditions.

(10) Literature does not come from groups, marginalized or otherwise, but from individual men and women; and it is a product, not of the immutable racial and sexual identities they receive at birth, but of innumerable choices. Literature is a realm of freedom, including the freedom to dissociate yourself from antipathetic ideas, even those espoused by a group with which you otherwise identify.