I quite like this analysis of the current state of college-student writing. It was written by one Justin Ouimette in a surly 5:30 AM email diatribe, and I feel no qualms about putting it on this blog. I hope he sees it and comments on it, in fact.
Here it is.
Beyond that fact, there are two main reasons why I don’t communicate with you all through email. The first is that I cannot stand the way our generation writes (Yes, it’s in passive voice. Yes, it’s supposed to be “way in which”. There’s probably a misplaced or deleted modifier somewhere. Fuck you.). The entire process of composition has been Dave Eggered to death; I find the self-referential, tongue-in-cheek, and undeservedly arrogant prose that dominates print media such as the New Yorker, the editorials of The Washington Post and the New York Times, and especially hipster cum rags like The Believer, to be very irritating. It’s as if the shadow of critical theory scared everyone back into Plato’s cave and the only safe statements one can make are cynical and so highly personally contingent that it’s not worth others’ time to read them. Does it sound like I’m taking a cheap shot at Marantz and Sam? I’m not, because I implicate myself in this gruesome phenomenon as well. We are the product of a generation that was allowed to write “thought pieces” and do “creative presentations” instead of essays in school and a new generation of readers is currently paying the price because a group of intellectuals decided that children have feelings, which as those of you who have raped one are aware, is simply not true. In short, I don’t write for you because I don’t want to subject you to a bunch of crap.
mmm
that’s an appropriate post for this site, I’m sure. One should believe that as benefactor of this blog, I (or the self-referential subject that is created through a cultural interplay of roles, morals, and language which the shifter I, in this instant, may subsume - who’s next?!) would normally - or normalizedly - take offence, but I suppose that I’m too caught up in not knowing how to lexically express anything except a self-reflexive, tongue-in-cheek commentary on the verbal equivalent of fluid stool and how it, as the form and content of our lives, is both the means and end of an socialized, individualized, commodified, indoctrinated, patriarchalized, signified, historicized, and ultimately castrated existence.
The fucking end.
November 12th, 2005 | #
Oh yeah, and if anyone would like to help me produce my creative presentation for my Scandinavian Literature class, I’m filming the scene (well, the original is just a story told on stage, not actually dramatized) from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon where Ag. must choose between sacrificing his only daughter Iphigenia to the gods and save his fleet before they sail to sack Troy, or save his daughter and have his fleet destroyed in a horrible storm at sea. Evidently, he choose to sack Troy. Go figure.
November 12th, 2005 | #
It’s warmer in Plato’s cave. Let’s make smores.
November 13th, 2005 | #