perfidy

The Weekly Standard harrumphing its way through the "meaning" of Hunter Thompson's suicide is good for a few howls if you're into that kind of thrill.

If you don't feel like reading the whoooole thing, here it is in a nutshell:

"Your "revolution" is over, Mr. Lebowski! Condolences! The bums lost!

[wik] I really hate to harvest the low-hanging fruit, but this is a weblog, for pity's sake, and if we can't have the low fruit we may as well go hungry! Peep this quotation from the linked article

It has long been argued that lasting literature is an impossibility without imitation and emulation, and that although young authors often produce works ridiculously imitative of their idols, real writers grow out of such mimesis to gain recognition for their own, individual abilities. But who can imagine a youthful talent beginning with an exercise in the gonzo style? Thompson produced no others like him, for the same reason Burroughs and Ginsberg generated no schools of novel-writing or verse. One may go further and say they had nothing to teach the young, except to emit a cacophony.

If the tone of the piece weren't so stuffily self-satisfied, I'd be tempted to ask if Stephen Schwartz is high. William S. Burroughs an irrelevant writer? Sure, except for his enduring influence on the American literary scene. Granted, Pynchon, Roth, Eggers, Wallace, Franzen etcetera have their shortcomings and their detractors, but Bill Burroughs hardly represents a dead end in letters, unless you categorically dismiss all the major writers and trends of the last forty years as a dead end.

(This is not to mention the larger cultural influences that the Beats and Thompson have had. I surmise the Weekly Standard would also dismiss the film, art, music, poetry, and enduring references that their work generated as "cacophony," which would only prove my point. I assume moreover that this means that stream-of-consciousness writing a la Kerouac is right out, since he was a beat too, which means that blogging as a practice leaps directly from Pepys to Power Line with no stops twixt the two. And then there's poetry. Was Ginsburg really that irrelevant if amateur poets perform their own first-person primal screams at "poetry slams" nationwide, rather than their own reworked versions of "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" over snifters? QED)

Leaving all this aside, this argument suffers from terminal laziness. To argue from this: "although young authors often produce works ridiculously imitative of their idols, real writers grow out of such mimesis to gain recognition for their own, individual abilities," this conclusion, "Thompson produced no others like him, for the same reason Burroughs and Ginsberg generated no schools of novel-writing or verse" is self-negating. If to become an author in one's own right one must reject one's influences, then both the following are true: Thompson et. al. were successful authors, ; and any writers descended from Thompson et. al. have also successfully moved beyond mere imitation. You can't use the absence of successful Thompson clones as evidence of his irrelevance any more than you can't use the absence of successful Noel Coward clones as evidence of his!

But it's unseemly to pick on the weak. I will sit tight and wait for the Standard to take down that awful jungle clatter the children call "hip hop." How do you even call that guttural gibberish singing?!