If BP owned his career it would cost you $9.95 a line

Hello to all who have surely missed me in my time of absence (Although, from what I can read and hear, there hasn't been a lack of excitement, or at least controversy, on this thread). I assure you that I will never again leave you to helplessly roam the overwhelming expanse of literary criticism in search of a glimmer of wry sarcasm, an inkling a priggish intellectualism, or even a soupçon of what can only be rightly described as all things Stregean without my services as academic ombudsman . . . that is until the next time I'm not scheduled to blog for a while. Nevertheless, I am with you now, and our short amount of time together must be appreciated. I have been working on a socially destructive amount of papers recently which, as usual, has been preceded by an even more unfathomable number of hours spent researching. (For the record I love writing papers and even researching them, don't get me wrong, but sometimes when it takes you away from tasting a vintage year of Château Lafite Rothschild, I, unlike the seductively aromatic acescence of the Lafite, become temporarily bitter)

Thank you for allowing me this minor digression, but I find that even my tangents have the potential for elucidation, so why deprive you? Anyhow, I came across a quote by one of my personal favorite theorists, William H. Gass. The quote reads as follows:

"The expression 'to write something down' suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it"

I was inexplicably moved by this statement, and found myself possessed with the fervor to share this with you. As you may or may not know (and what my fellow colleagues know all to well) is that I have an inexhaustible theoretic preoccupation with Carl Jung and his psychiatric models and how they aid in the analysis of our most seminal literary works. So, in the spirit of your new-found understanding of a portion of what makes "yours truly" tick, and this delicious quote from Gass, I am making an intellectual call to arms! Is our field of endeavor, that is, writing, fundamentally flawed? And if so, what does this mean for our understanding of truth? Now I don't want banal discussions of language as arbitrary, I want real discussion!

Thank you all for taking the time to consider this blog and for your magnanimous efforts in supporting this blog and magazine. As always, read, discuss, comment, and for god's sake, leave your knives at home,because I would like to say on behalf of some of the editorial staff, there are enough knives in our backs already.

Knowingly Poignant,

Eric W. Strege