Personal Sh*t

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

So  I have to respond, right?  No way out now.  Have to be a continuing part of this 
pathetic spectacle.  Steely the wearying, like a biker's pit bull who's just licked up a gram 
of pure crank, hangs on foamingly, never gives up, never lets go.  Never says *basta* 
never says *peace.*  You sound like the knight in Monty Python's HOLY GRAIL, 
dismembered, strewn across the forest floor, asking your opponent if he's ready to cry 
uncle.  I sheepishly admit to those who've noticed it that my tone in my second post in 
this stupid unwinnable war smacked a little of pomposity.  Overcompensating for my 
descent into the scatological.  Not that it matters.  There's simply no way to deal with you 
sanely, Steely.  But a couple of things have to be put in place.

First, interesting that you are so concerned someone might miss your latest laser guided 
missive that I find no less than four copies of it in today's email box.  Had to read all four 
just to make sure I wasn't missing anything. I wasn't.
So, after you made your poor son (who apparently screens your mail for you) memorize 
all those bad words I'd called you, did you maybe, just maybe mention that I had called 
you those things because you barged into a conversation that had nothing to do with you 
and insulted me, who hadn't even been talking to you?   Probably you kind of left that 
part out, huh?  No full disclosure laws in this centrally-ruled household!  Do you teach 
your son that that's acceptable behavior?  Do you take him to the playground and set him 
on the other kids while you watch?  And when one of them hits back, do you explain how 
he, your son, had just been victimized by an aggressor?  Do you equate the other kid's 
self-defense with the appeasment of Hitler by Chamberlain?  (Now THERE was a loopy 
sequence of thoughts, Steelo).  Apparently you do, since your son's chip off the old block 
reaction is immediately to ask you if you want him to have me taken out.  Pat on the 
head: no, son, I'll just waste him with my steelyness.  As to that point anyway, I don't 
really need you to call off the boyz.  I have an uncle Vinnie,  still lives in South Philly, 
nice fella;  when I mentioned this to him, he kinda laughed and said it was not to worry 
about.
When you say you never want one of your kids to be my student, do you know what a 
relief that is?  Ask any teacher on this list--the saddest kind of student we have to deal 
with is the one, often a nice kid with a lot of potential,  who bears the scars of an 
insufferable father, a father who has never been wrong, who tolerates no deviation from 
his prescribed values ideas and beliefs.  Those kids really suffer trying to discover some 
independent identity. Some make it, some don't. Some of those who make it have their 
teachers to thank for it.
Let's do a little of the quote and snip game you journalists excel at:

>Mascaro, the Polonius of the P-List, expectorates:
If I'm Polonius, are you Malvolio?

>Ah, a conspiracy of private posts between Mascaro and redbug. Then there
>truly is a basis in fact for whatever paranoia one may or may not have felt
>the first tingling touches of...
You got it, Steely.  Be careful, or I'll quote some of the other private posts I received . . .

>Then you *do* disappoint, Mascaro. I thought you had come running to the
>defense of Diana and were exhibiting a rare act of chivalry. But it just
>comes down to a bruised ego afterall.
Well, I wondered when you'd get around to insulting your favorite target, who, as is 
usual with your targets, hasn't even taken part in the exchange.  I have learned one thing 
from Diana though: at some point everyone who crosses swords with you simply  has to 
give up in disgust.  It's so hard to argue with--perfection.

>I had a right to disabuse your opinion, because you casually smeared a film
>that I feel passionately about--that I can say changed my life somewhat
>when I saw it 25 years ago--
I didn't smear it, I questioned it, and admitted I needed to know more about Welles' 
oeuvre (actually hors d'oeuvre).  Are you so blinded by yourself that you didn't notice 
this?  B-but when are you going to get around to admitting that you had had plenty of 
opportunity to join in a--civil--discussion, but choose the terrorist route instead?

.> Whatever happened to academic critics like Jan Kott who could really write?
And here I say, back off, jocko.  Jon Kott was my friend, professor and mentor at Stony 
Brook.  I've sat with him for hours while he bummed cigarettes to  unroll into his old 
pipe and suck in with about a foot and a half of butane out of an old lighter that had *Kiss 
Me I'm Polish* written on the side, a lighter he'd wave salaciously at all the good looking 
women in our department, laughing like a wizened old trickster when people called him 
a sexist . And his political credentials were a lot more kosher than yours, Steely.  Kott 
actually hid from the Nazis (if you buy me that beer, I'll tell you the whole funny story, it 
involves a mistress and an old clothes trunk) and somehow he never mistook me for 
one.  Don't know what he would have made of you, but he was a tolerant man.  He also 
showed me something about how one can be in academia and still not of it.  He most 
assuredly does not need your imprimatur.

>" Normative? *Moi?* Gotta laugh at that.
Oh please please do, laugh loud and long,  A Rabelasian laugh, a deep soul-filling belly 
laugh.  Laugh at you, me, all the silly vain pretensions of human communication, 
human community.  It really is a spilled, a broken world, ain't it Steelette?  You really do 
enjoy this strife much better than you could any simple honest exchange.

> Talk about your N-Dimensional Mish-Mash. My obsessions are my own business. Why 
would I want anyone to share them? 
I imagine the rest of the list really enjoying the disingenuousness of this remark, but, just 
to be a sport, I'll bite:  tell me, why do you?

>You're the one that is "deeply
>attracted" to the "shared language" of the list. Shared language, another
>gem from the post-modernist hothouse--or is that hot tub?
I usually like this list a lot, and I even think of some of the people on it as friends.  By 
shared language I just mean that old code of civility the list seems to have constructed, a 
felt sense of commuinity standards, something every human community, from your 
son's homies to my uncle Vinnie's cronies, constructs.  The details of civility differ, but 
they always come into being (you can ask one of your anthropologist heroes about this) 
and most people in the community value them.  Sometimes those values require folks to 
suffer fools, which they do, some more gladly than others.  

>Did you ever meet Stanley Fish? Harold Bloom? Or, for that matter, Allan
>Bloom? Vendana Shiva? Garrett Hardin?  Robert Gottlieb (he's on your
>faculty)? the not late enough Paul LeMan (another Nazi)? Susan Griffin?
>That's a start.
Good point Steely.  My relationship to these people is identical to your relationship to 
William Safire, or A.M. Rosenthal.  Get it?

>John, most of the writers for Esquire, the New Yorker, et al  are far from
>"hungry." Hell, a single story in the New Yorker these days is worth
>$20,000 to $30,000. Nearly twice what I make in a year from writing. I make
>more money editing other people's dismal prose than I'll ever make writing
>original material. At least I hope. If I end up scribbling for the New
>Yorker you know I'm up to no good. God, it's creepy enough being in this
>month's Harper's.
Keep up those subtle plugs, Steely, and soon your dismal prose will be pulling in the big 
bucks like Janet Malcolm's does. (BTW, do you tell those folks who pay you some of their 
hard earned bread on the table that you hold their efforts in contempt? Or is that just 
another of those inconvenient facts you feel you have the right to leave out when you 
take their money?)  And again, please attend: you are to *those* journalists exactly as I am 
to those academics.

>I am far from ignorant about the academy. My father was a professor of law. My mother 
>remains chair of a health sciences department.
(<snip>, etc: summary of Steely's vita)
And at last the truth outs, as it will.  It's all an oedipal thing, eh? (Tortured memories of 
the Primal Scene: little Steely wakes up earlier than usual on a Saturday morning and 
creeps towards his parents' bedroom, as he approaches, he hears soft noises, rustlings, 
what might be a sigh.  Terrified, horrified, but mesmerized he nears, little steely step by 
little steely step, the door is open a crack, he peers in, and his hair turns white with the 
shock--his dad, a-and his MOM, are there, in bed, together, READING THEORY TO EACH 
OTHER!!  Oh, the horror, the shame, never to be erased from steely neural paths.)   
Explains a lot about your own behavior and parental tactics. But stop the vicious cycle of 
hate and blindness, Steely, before it's too late and yet another generation suffers the 
hand-me-down sins of its fathers.  My father was a mechanic; gave me a whole different 
set of complexes (among which, by the way, is never to own a hot tub).

>Then again I may be ignorant.
Uh Uh, no false humility from you!  Or are you contradicting yourself out of ignorance?

>Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader (Ralph's sister) calls that "coercive
>harmony."  No thanks.
Let me get this straight, I think I'm hallucinating.. So you are declining an offer of peace 
on the grounds of an--A-academic Theory!!!!!!!!!  Steely, the only honorable thing left for 
you is hari-kari.

BTW, I doubt that that offer of a beer was sincere, but if it is let me know; ought to make a 
nice tete-a-tete, but leave the boyz at home.


john m