I Saw My Ghost Dragged By Carpet
Here's a piece I did for The Good Men Project about what I like to call "sports criticism". That would be the intersection of sports and criticism. I wrote it a while ago but couldn't get it published until now. You can tell that from how heavily it leans on a long-ago Simmons column. Enjo!
UPDATE: This video is new to me. Thanks, Extra Large!
Labels: charles oakley, jayson williams, links, literary criticism, music, sun
posted by Bethlehem Shoals @ 2/01/2011 04:58:00 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
I have always been a huge fan of FD, and when you are mocked over at Blogabull try to attempt to defend you; but your recent Rose hack jobs make it difficult to do.
You are demonstrating, as far as I am concerned, the danger of deconstruction and the whole reason why we need to get away from it as a critical tool.
Where the deconstructionists treat any object as having within itself an infinite allegorical appearance, Deleuze says that the actual (or any appearance of the same) is really an indication of the internal differential value at bottom of the object. Now what is the difference between these two propositions? For deconstruction when reading any object, it is always caught in mediation--that is anything can be anything, essentially, but at the same time everything is nothing; whereas with Deleuze, even though we are seeing the opposite thing, this is only possible through the intensity of that which creates the difference. In other words though a plane of immanence or Derridean abyss seem similar, they inhere opposite principles in reading aesthetics--one is just plurality, while the other is a plurality that grounds its contingency as its universality.
What I think is important about this point is that when writing about Joy Division, or making statements on purely aesthetic grounds as you have on twitter recently about Rose, you essentially say that all criticism is so contingent that it is simply perspective: why then read anything at all? You are dressing aesthetic judgments as something other than what they are. We all have the ability to make a judgment about aesthetics; but for it to be interesting you have to at least propose why, materially, Derrick Rose appears as such an antinomy or why his popular sense is actually false. This is simply a challenge to say more than you have, to make a more substantive argument. I know you all are busy, but hopefully you will answer the call in some way.
Will everyone who likes Derrick Rose explain to me, in their own words, why he is awesome. Thank you.
You are purposely missing the point. Replace Rose with any player, if you aren't making a theoretical argument, your faux-apparatus makes you a fluffy JA Adande--who I believe referenced semiotics once in his articles. You are a bad writer, you demonstrate it when you openly make half statements while doing Derridean cabaret. Though at this point I am pretty sure your theoretical side is just posturing. But congratulations on making a career out of it.
I really have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
"You are dressing aesthetic judgments as something other than what they are. We all have the ability to make a judgment about aesthetics; but for it to be interesting you have to at least propose why, materially, Derrick Rose appears as such an antinomy or why his popular sense is actually false."
Okay, here's the thing. I agree that a purely aesthetic critique of Rose is different than what, in the past, we've done with aesthetics here. But I don't think it's necessarily such a terrible thing, is it? And if nothing else, wouldn't any argument I make about aesthetics implicitly bring into play all the other shit we've written about what aesthetics means in basketball?
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