Category: Poseur Alert

"Alas, as always, the duty of the Right is to manfully endure, to survive the defeat and stubbornly oppose the vaunting foe, and so this brutal shock, this electoral catastrophe, must be absorbed and digested. At some point next week or next month or next year, then, we shall recover our morale and plot some new stratagem for the future. In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's debacle, however, it is difficult to see any glimmer of light amid the encroaching gloom. Surely, there are many Americans who now sympathize with that New York infantryman who, in the bleak winter of 1862, when the Union's Army of the Potomac was under the incompetent command of Gen. Ambrose Burnside, wrote home in forlorn complaint: 'Mother, do not wonder that my loyalty is growing weak.… I am sick and tired of the disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us'" - Robert Stacy McCain.

For those who have forgotten, the Poseur Alert is awarded "for passages of prose that stand out for pretension, vanity and really bad writing designed to look like profundity."

"The experienced porn star philosopher starts off among the pack and works to elevate the quotidian to the realm of the exquisite. Jenaveve Jolie has the tattoo equivalent of a rough draft. Across her upper right bicep, a tribal tattoo swirls like the feminine form of barbed wire. Two large feathers from a dream catcher design dangle in the middle, making it just different enough to avoid banality. As with any student’s work, the audience must wonder how much is intentional and how much is random, albeit striking, juxtaposition. Did she understand the ties between the tattoos of ancient tribal cultures? Did Ms. Jolie realize the connection between the speculated migrations of early Asian peoples that populated the Pacific islands as well as North America? The way her tattoo wanders suggests a parallel to the wandering of an entire culture throughout history—sharp turns and dead ends culminating in a web of dreams. Even her stark coloring, all in grayscale, hints at a philosophy still in development," – John Dwyer.

Barton Swaim reviews Helen Storm's new style guide for the writers of academia. The problem:

Academics in the humanities and the social sciences, it’s sometimes suggested, too often wish to give their fields the legitimacy and public authority of science, and so write in highly technical, jargon-laced prose. Academics in the hard sciences, for their part, are too concerned with factual correctness to worry about making their productions agreeable, even to co-specialists. Then, of course, there is the really uncharitable interpretation: Many academics simply haven’t got anything useful to say, but if they say it in a sufficiently complicated fashion and use all the vogue terms, they’ll get credit for having said something without saying anything worth defending. The really troublesome thing about all this is that many academic writers, even in the humanities, have legitimate and important insights to convey. Yet they genuinely believe, whether for one of the aforementioned reasons or for some other, that it doesn’t serve their interests to write straightforward English sentences.

"Drive … cannot be a subject of film criticism specifically, let alone of a review, the convention of identification already stands in the way, since it claims a film from a film and a director as an auteur. The author is the screen itself: God sive Screen, Screen sive Nature. It is not about coup de maître, but about par excellence. Is Drive a film, i.e. what is (such) a film today? What is the interest, the singularity of its emptiness? It seems to be more crystalline, more polished, more subtracted, more self-reflexive, more paradigmatic, consciously and conscientiously committed to "the consciousness industry." Winding Refn is very straightforward: "I am a fetish filmmaker." Drive is pop, absolute advertising as information, "a complete combinatorial, which is that of the superficial transparency of everything," a video, where differentiating between art-experimental and commercial appears as mere moralizing; it is a fashion/designer video, which continues to be, and is ever more so, the cultural dominant," – Marko Bauer.

"The destabilizing nature of Foucauldian genealogies, while potentially frightening, is ultimately beneficial if it allows for military planning and thinking to predict with greater accuracy the potential conflicts and situations that modern militaries might find themselves in. The genealogical focus on discontinuities and breaks with accepted narratives provides an outlet for creativity and innovation that the structured current thinking in military history and strategy does not provide. Rather then emphasizing study and inquiry that upholds accepted norms and standards, Foucauldian genealogies provide a greater scope of inquiry that encourages the study of deviations and discontinuities within these accepted narratives. Given the clear failings of the accepted narratives in the recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, where intricate insurgencies appeared to surprise the military establishment and proved difficult to suppress, a new approach appears worthy of investigation. That is not to say that a Foucauldian ideology or outlook could have prevented the costly counterinsurgency campaigns that the U.S. has waged in Afghanistan and Iraq," – Alex Verschoor-Kirss, Small Wars Journal.

"Massumi is giving us an alternative line of thought which defines existence as event and event as complex and multiple becoming. He has chosen a mode of presentation that communicates this as straightforwardly as possible, but with risks of paradoxical conjunctions such as a rich descriptive language based in the present that describes events that cannot be simply present or simply located at a particular space-time," – James Williams, Notre Dame Philosophical Review. Even one of NDPR's editorial board members had to scoff.

"To capture sound is to isolate a moment, canonize it, enter it into the historical register. The genius of vinyl is that it allows – commands! – us to put our fingerprints all over that history: to blend and chop and reconfigure it, mock and muse upon it, backspin and skip through it. Vinyl spins like the earth on its axis, the planets around the sun, the hands of a clock. Unspools like time itself. Our ability to control it symbolizes a power greater than any we have over our own lives," – Adam Mansbach, Salon.

"For the longest time, we've been reaching for a typeface that wasn't there. We knew it was something spare and tranquil, its letterforms reaching ambitiously outward, and we could hear it speaking in hushed but captivating tones. We imagined it as industrious, combining space-age optimism with the confidence and composure of a master craftsman. We could see the typeface among the realm of satisfying things, objects designed not merely to be used but to be enjoyed: a well-balanced knife, a performance engine; the tool that fits the hand just so," – Typography.com, reviewing the new Idlewild font. Update from a reader:

I don't know if you realize this, but Typography.com is the seller of that font, not a reviewer. It's marketing copy. And it seems in the ballpark of normal marketing copy to me – especially when you consider its audience is typographers, not laypeople.

"Remember when everybody was reading "The Sound and the Fury" in their gingham dresses and wife-beaters? (Take that, Steinbeck, you hack screenwriter.) But now that Faulkner Ultra-Lite "The Help" fever has morphed into "Hunger Games" Young Adult zeal, now is as good a time as any to remind folks of what may be the greatest winning streak in literature. The six works represented—eight if you count "Snopes" as a trilogy—is quite simply an unassailable fortress of literary perfection, positively reeking with excellence, and shining like a beacon of human enlightenment into the icy cosmos. That one can rightfully proclaim this without a twinge of doubt raises the question: Why is Faulkner so underread?" – D.H., The Economist.