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Monday, January 16, 2006

This Mark Knows You’re A Snider

Posted by John Holbo on 01/16/06 at 08:58 PM

More light diversion from serious Moretti. Mark Kaplan muses on Kafka’s “The Cares of A Family Man” and a passage by Benjamin on Abraham. Very apposite. Yet I fail to see how one can get one’s Odradek house in order without first considering the antepenultimate epistle of Harry Mathew’s novel, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium:

This chump never blowed you were turned out to hopscotch. You let him find the leather, and he copped you for the pure quill, when you’re nothing but a crow. It took a long time to bobble him but now you’ve knocked him good and he feels like a heavy gee had slipped him a shiv. Well, no twist will ever beat this savage again, not if she hands over her bottom bumblebee - it’s cheaper loaning cush to Pogy O’Brien. Don’t you play the hinge but stick to the big con. You’re a class raggle with a grand future, even if this mark knows you’re a snider.

For as Kafka writes:

Some people assume that in addition to the great original betrayal a small particular betrayal has been contrived in every case exclusively for them, that, in other words, when a love drama is being performed on the stage the leading actress has not only a pretended smile for her lover, but also a special crafty smile for one particular spectator at the back of the gallery. This is going too far.

I had no idea Zizek had written on the subject. I am skeptical, as about all things Lacanian, and can only hope Harry Mathews will suffice to block the pipes for a time. “Screw one’s courage to the sticking point” and vice versa. (This line seems ripe for appropriation by one of our own, however: “the horrible palpitation of the “acephal” drive which persists beyond ordinary death, nomadic, outside the scope of paternal authority, with no fixed domicile ...")

Comments

I am a bit like picking your nose, aren’t I?

By Scott Eric Kaufman on 01/17/06 at 02:47 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Gracious, I really couldn’t say. Is it some sort of ‘cutting off one’s head to spite your nose’ maneuver?

By John Holbo on 01/17/06 at 02:56 AM | Permanent link to this comment

The passage about Abraham is in fact Kafka, as quoted by Benjamin. I’m unable fully to decipher Mathew’s argot, btw - I thought a ‘snider’ was a type of rifle. Perhaps such errant guesses are part of the point??

By on 01/17/06 at 09:00 AM | Permanent link to this comment

LS floats unguents on troubled waters, wherein:

“In this time, an age of incommensurability, when the bond of my ethnic belonging is supposed to be the limit of my world, there really is no public to fracture into multiplicity. The ship’s been splint to splinters; it’s sinking fast."

Seems to me Odradek has relevance to development of critical discourse, however contrived ...

By nnyhav on 01/17/06 at 10:34 AM | Permanent link to this comment

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Monday, January 16, 2006

This Mark Knows You’re A Snider

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