TheBanyanTree: Literary pretensions and me. one of these things not like the other (Kitty Park)

[peter macinnis]

On 12/06/2015 01:36, Tom Smith wrote:
>> are you speaking gibberish or presenting facts that are new to me?
>
> I like your honesty, Kitty. The subtleties of combat wit are difficult to understand for those not mean-spirited.

OK, Kitty gave me this context:
"You write of the effect the conversation with novelists and naturalist 
had on the interviewer.  What about the reaction from the audience? 
With raised eyebrows, puzzled, or grinning because they, hopefully most, 
grasp the intent/content?  I am never sure -- are you speaking gibberish 
or presenting facts that are new to me?"

When I speak gibberish, it will not Google.  That isn't often.  I hope 
the concept of autorical serendipity does not Google, and I have been 
using "the coexistentialism of Macbeth, as exemplified by the witches" 
since 1960, when I coined it to satirise the claptrap being spoken by a 
pretentious "English teacher".  Those parts were gibberish.

Tom is correct to call it combat wit, though I would call it stuffing 
Bathurst burrs up their jacksie, an image I got from an Australian poet, 
who described koalas doing that to tourists.

For the most part, what I said was straight English, though I went at 
right angles to the host, most of the time, during the panel session, 
simply because his chosen track wasn't mine.  It was still English.

This trick of going at right angles was part of my success as a 
bureaucrat, because I would choose my mark and dance rings around him 
(my marks were always male), but gibberish was never a part of it.

Somebody once warned a foolish person that I would blind him with 
science, and he replied that it was worse: I had already blinded him 
with words.  The somebody then rushed around to tell me, and I went 
gently on the fool after that.

I have rarely, if ever, gone to full gibberish mode, because I am not as 
good as Alan Sokal, with his "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a 
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity".  Can't match that, so I 
don't try.

Now the audience: they didn't need to know what game we were playing, 
because aside from playing up, we threw in lots of good stuff which 
wasn't amusing in a tale, and most of the playing up was probably seen 
as good farce.

When I asked "if a tree fell in your forest, you couldn't post it on 
Instagram?", the audience was the sort that would have got the reference 
to Bishop Berkeley, who asked "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is 
around to hear it, does it make a sound?"  In short, they weren't dumb.

Does that help?

peter

-- 
Peter Macinnis       petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au
Principal, Seurat School of Train Spotting,
Formation Karaoke Diving Costumes for hire.
http://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com/