A Preacher in Search of a Choir

I do not want to discuss what a literary review is, although I should–discuss, not want to; I still do not want to discuss what one could be because I am only publishing this review for those who understand, and it would be lie in this context to say I am trying to convince anyone of the valency or validity of publishing a literary review. All Publishing-Editor-Authors of reviews such as this one are only ever preaching to the choir. In search of a choir? That should be the heading: a Preacher in search of a Choir.

I do not want to define what this review should be. I recoil from external shoulds; I have a good sense of what is necessary. I guess I have that American cultural prejudice against anything phrased as should–it used to be reserved for must, what we must do; however, we have been so overloaded with doubt, doubt and more doubt for what we know and not just what we know but what we can know and not just what we can know but what knowledge itself is that we have NO faith that we can know anything therefore no one else can know anything either and so we cannot be told what we must or should do except through coercion, never reason.  Ah, we continue to wonder why we have the combative society we do . . . ? Yes, in our collective delusion–and yes, our mutually extensive misapprehension . . . misconception? our societally idiosyncratic belief or impression (and we have many lesser ones filtered into each of our psychologies or refracted through the prism of the Self, its psychology ever linked with the culture’s mentality . . . firmly maintained in spite of being contradicted by Truth  . . . or rational argument [and we are anything but rational; we no longer have Reason as our guide . . . we are all of us political mystics like the Nazis or the Bolsheviks . . .] . . . ), thus a typical symptom of mentality disorder (note well that this is not mental disorder), thus affecting everyone’s psychology . . . so, of course, we are living in a mental institution . . . so yes,  we have been deluded about making things more democratic, socially and politically, by attacking the notion of Truth and then too many of the little ‘t’ truths . . . there is no Truth, there are no truths, there never has been a Western Civilization, all civilizations are alike unto each other in their aims, in their goals, any one of them as good as any other . . . we have only created a condition where the Will to Power has flourished.

It is interesting how so many under educated college kids with half baked notions come from semi-literate readings of Post Structuralist anti-humanist diatribes and polemics have themselves opted for conclusions bred of binary metaphysical conditioning . . . too many define themselves and their beliefs, read dogmas, not by any affirmation of what they are, but only by what they are not . . . for three or more decades we in America have heard too little concerning any affirmative idea of Blackness, but only a sense of blackness that is over-archingly and nearly unilaterally not-white . . . so African-Americans have no conclusive theory of blackness, only Anti-whiteness, to be Black firstly and lastly and mostly means to be not-white, which in turn breeds a more virulent sense of anti-blackness (not that fringe White people did not always have their White Power reactionary racist lunacies) as the more dominant sense of whiteness, now adopted by Caucasians that used to be Non-white and of a variety or variegation of different identities (I was not white first and last, but Italo-American, Franco-American, Catholic American, Irish-American–it was black persons who insisted that I was white, and a New York Jewish media [and let’s not pretend that Ashkenazi Americans do not play a predominant role in publishing and broadcast media in America, let alone New York City] that bent to this whim and projected me as White [Jews who used to be aligned with immigrant poor in forming unions abandoned their allegiances and opted for becoming both White and Not-Catholic to align themselves with Protestant Money in America]  . . . yes, they conveniently asserted Whiteness for Ashkenazi when it was beneficial, although principally because they were not black . . .) thus we have made of ourselves not a plurality or multiplicity of identities, but a binary framed checkerboard of  a culture, a yes/no, right/wrong, this/that, here/there doubling of a socio-political, socio-econoomic 01010101 . . .

I understand that a literary review must be committed to the highest quality in the writing, the highest quality in the thinking, the highest quality in the strength of its critique. I have said this before; I will repeat this again and again. There is no sense in asking me if I believe in hierarchies of value or of achievement. I do. I am not going to delineate what this literary review has been; any reviewing of the review by anyone sensitive and open will reach this end.

This literary journal is as I am–I am. What it was is better left to the historian of literary enterprises. Publishing has its history as does automotive manufacturing and sales. No editor wants his journal to be has been; if it were has been, so much the worse for those working toward publishing this has-been-magazine There is a debate over the merits of, as well as the implications between, editorials addressing readers from the point-of-view of we and those that address readers from the point-of-view of I. I do both; yes,  I am the editor thus the editorials, as I am also all the writing herein.

Do we have to ask if I believe an editorial can really be written from the pov of I? I am sure it can. I do know that one from the pov of I and another from the pov of we has a different rhetorical edge, each one sharpened by its separate rhetorical strategy, which is always a whet stone for every critical edge.

I relates to me, the actual person me and not only the inter grammatical reference of one pronomial case to another; yes, this me that I am is the principal writer of texts within the confines of this review. I am every word; every word is me, c’est moi, I could say. But this has little to do with the mask of we or I wear when I write social or political commentary, critical commentary, that employs we as part of its strategy. There is no more to say about the review except that what it is is what it is when it is how it is where it is for whomever it will be. Again, as elsewhere, I am the writing in search of which author me can be found among the selves inside my many selves Self.