You may be pleased to learn how all those hours sweating over Kafka or old Gertrude Stein actually made you smarter. You were well served in the struggle, we see here. Just like hiking uphill makes you stronger, deep searching for connections among apparently unrelated objects keys understanding. The finding is that " learning of novel patterns of association would be enhanced in response to unrelated meaning threats."
I have for a long time been looking through the other end of that telescope and finding only innition behind foggy veils, or, as Hemingway said of Norman Mailer, "bad cheese pretensiouly wrapped," or, deep sea fishing in shallow ponds.
Let's begin with Mailer.
A long time ago, somewhere in the second act of teevee talk shows, there was a moderator who was erudite and prim and funny named Dick Cavett. He had on his show one evening the dapper sardonic and ubiquitouis Gore Vidal and Janet Flanner, aka "Genet," who lived in Paris some time before and wrote about it.
Filling out the card was Norman Mailer, and he was the reason the program was advertised all week long. You have to see this, we were told. Mailer goes off! It's a donnybrook!
It's pretty tame by Geraldo substandards, but what I see is Mailer's assigning himself a certain quality and is not challanged. (I remember the great line in "The Rivals," which might be edited here to: "It's good you tell us of your high intellect, for we would never have discovered it from this conversation.")
The point is very simple: Mailer. He wants it known he stabbed his wife. What rough beast is this? But more than that, he wants to be the center of attention, and as every unruly third grader knows, you do that by acting up. Before very long he is the only topic, which is how he likes it.
Cavett asks the pugnacious one if he would like a couple of extra chairs to contain his monster intellect, and Mailer uncleverly proposes the rest of them accept fingerbowls for the same purpose. Dick Cavett attempts to work out some sort of intricate reference which is not there. The simplest intent is the truest, in this case, as Mailer only intends a reference to capacity, not some deeper form of pollution as alluded to earlier.
I have seen resonance for this moment plenty of times. The Grandmasters are attempting to explore the secret of a simple pawn move which is not part of the Louis XIV Counter Defense Mechanism but is only a need to move the king out of hock like you do your first chess match. A retarded gardner is accepted as a sagacious guru on the basis of simpleton comments made by any idiot. The critic sees drippy paint on the canvas and extols the new school in art. Reagan.
And, finally, lest we forget, there is a multi-million dollar enterprise forming in a library to be built for the purpose and disably abetted by various other communication devices to create the illusion of some form of inellect or mastery or even knowledge out of this pitiful simp.