Revisiting a good joke on pretentious literary modernism:
“In a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised (‘not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others’), they rapidly wrote the sixteen poems that constitute Ern Malley’s ‘tragic lifework.’ They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped ‘confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning’ in place of a coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French means bad. He was Ernest because they were not.”
Related:
* “Pavel Jordanowitch and the Disumbrationist School of Art”: “Los Angeles resident Paul Jordan Smith was, by profession, a novelist (author of Nomad and Cables of Cobweb) and a Latin scholar. But in 1924, having never painted before, he picked up a brush and drew a picture of a South Seas islander holding a banana over her head. So began his double identity as brooding Russian artist Pavel Jordanowitch.”
* The Sokal Hoax on pomo-on-science pretenses: “In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal’s intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether a leading North American journal of cultural studies – whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross – [would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”
* “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” on pomo feminism: “The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.”