This is a re-post from 21 September 2011. I dust it off in dedication to my friend Dr. Vito Caiati, historian and old-school scholar who is excessively worried about typographical errors in his missives to me.
Don't get me wrong: love and respect for our alma mater, the English language, our dear mother, mistress and muse, demands that we try to avoid errors typographical and otherwise. But let's not obsess over them.
Transmission of sense is the name of the game, and if that has occurred, then communication has taken place.
…………………………..
An old friend from college, who has a Masters in English, regularly sends me stuff like this which I have no trouble understanding:
I trust that you ahve emelreis of going pacles with your presnts in cars before the days when the shapr devide came and deliniated clearly the music that our presnts like and the stuff that was aethetically unreachabable to many of thier generation. That was a haunting melody, The Waywared Wind, and it spoke of an experiencethat was really more coon to a ahlf generation away from the WWII generation. It was actually a toad bod for its time. Same year bourght us Fale Storms come Donw From YOur Ivorty Towe, the great pretender, and other romantic and innocent songs. But it also brought Hound Dog, which shocked the blazes out of my parents and all of their peers. It was even sexual. It was just animal. And, no it was not specificailly Negrol; it was worse it was p;oor white trash with side burns on a motocycle. It woldn't matterif the B Side of every platter ahd been one of those great gospel tunes those guys did; that stuff was not urban, mainline, Protestant stuff, but anekly backwoods stuff where there are stills and 13-year-olf brides, that the Northern boys had heard about in the WWII barracks and hoped that they would never have hear about again as they went back to either their Main Line P:rotestant or Catholic urban llive, whether they belonged to a country het or not or woudl have to wait a while, say until their GI Bill college educations started enabling them to play golf. But that was still a good summer of rthe last of the sweet songs that memebers of several gneratons could enjoy together
Talk about spontaneous prose! No grammatical or spelling hang-ups here. My friend is an old Kerouac aficionado too, and this is one of the more entertaining of his missives. Is it the approach of October that frees and inspires his pen? My friend's a strange bird, and the above just came straight out of his febrile pate; he didn't compose it that way to prove that typographical errors are compatible with transmission of sense.
A curious watershed era it was in which the sweet and tender was found cheek-by-jowl with the explicitly referenced raw hydraulics of sexual intercourse. Take Little Richard, perhaps the chief exponent, worse than old Swivel Hips, of the devil's music. "Good Golly Miss Molly," he screamed, "she sure likes to ball/When you're rockin' and a rollin' can't you hear yo mama call." That was actually played on the radio in the '50s. To ball is to have sex, and 'rock and roll' means the same thing. And so there were Southern rednecks who wanted the stuff banned claiming that R & R music was "was bringing the white man down to the level of the nigger."
I maintain that the best R & R manages to marry the Dionysian thrust with the tender embrace, the animalic with the sweetly romantic. The prime example? Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman. One thing I love about Orbison is that instead of saying 'Fuck!,' like some crude rap punk, he says, 'Mercy!' Another little indicator of how right my friend is in his analysis above.
Part of an uncommonly good thread. Here is the entry to which the thread attaches.
………………………………………………….
Anon,
My point was that many short comments are better than one long one.
One problem here is that I tossed out a word, 'tribalism,' but did not define it. What's worse is that I used it very loosely. Mea culpa. It is a stretch to think of women as a 'tribe.'
Perhaps we have a 'family' of tribalisms: racial, sexual, etc.
Now I'll take a stab at a definition:
I'm Caucasian as you may have guessed. But when I get up in the morning I don't look into the mirror and affirm: I am a white man! This is who I am most fundamentally. This is what makes me be ME. This fact is what constitutes my innermost identity and is that attribute upon which my value as a person primarily supervenes.
I am therefore not a racial tribalist by my definition. This is not to say that I am not white or that being white is not a part of WHAT I am, namely an animal, a bit of the world's fauna. Indeed, insofar as I am an animal, it is arguable that I am essentially (as opposed to accidentally) white if we grant Kripke's point about the essentiality of origin: if I could not have had parents other than the parents I in fact have, then, given that both are white, I could not have failed to be white. So I am essentially white.
But is it essential to WHO I am that I be white? (Related question: Are persons reducible to objects in the natural world?)
Now in my definition above there is the phrase "member of the race of which he happens to be a member" which suggests that it is a contingent fact about me that I am white. There is the animal that bears my name, an animal that is essentially white. But there is a sense, brought out by Thomas Nagel in various writings, in which I am contingently the animal I am. I am contingently an animal that is essentially white.
But now we are drifting towards some very deep waters.