Hands on the Bible
The first of many Notabilia in usum posts where I iterate quickly through important insights. This post deals with doorless Jeeping and Popeye's Chicken (among other topics).
Thursday, 2004-09-02 | Classic Gin, Cookbook, New Haven, Philosophy
It was a cool night in my New Haven cloister...
...when I decided that I owed the world certain certainties.
So, without further ado, I'd like to present those certainties in a new feature I call
...Deftones. The chorus lyrics and indeed much of the verses of the deftones classic My Own Summer (Shove it) are in fact what esteemed Oxford literary critic J.L. Austin called 'performative speech.' Just as a pair before the altar is married in the moment that the priest or judge pronounces them so, Moreno's invocation of the cloud ('cloud come!') makes the sky dark; the ritual is made complete by the utterance of a key phrase.
...Popeye's Chicken. For the first time in several years, I permitted myself a certain small indulgence. Having consumed my spicy po' boy and seasoned fries with the idea that I was doing valuable social-scientific work, I can conclude the following authoritatively: certain foods demand to be accompanied by menthol cigarettes. Forget what you may have heard at cocktail parties or in university lecture halls about phenotypical and genotypical attributes, fast-twitch muscle or the never-ending theomachia between dreadful Nature and fearsome Nurture.
...doorless Jeep-rides. No matter how much care one exercises when securing his belongings, he will eventually lose one to the aer invictus (the wrath of whom is incurred when one rides in a doorless Jeep).
This truth is centuries old but, New Criticism having wrought what destruction it has, the point demands reassertion.
...telling your friends about your weblog. It's still a bad idea--specious in the way that the sophistry of Protagoras or the Apostasy of Luther is--and is to be avoided at all costs. It's the sort of thing that results in the kind of discretion and pomposity that are anathema to productive expression and insightful essay writing.