September 13, 2004
congratulations to all and sorry I missed it. I'm not sure where to begin. The Penn State RUINS show perhaps. There is so much new to say. While your whole project surely refers to the Benjamin essay (but how, and why?) and would try to update [and successfully improve!] Pop and become even part of the continuing evolution of the Readymade, I also wonder if you are not referring to ordinary language criticism (which I know nothing about.) Even if you are not referring to it, probably it still informs, could inform, your thinking. But my friend Walter Jost in the English Dept. here just published a book in the field called Rhetorical Investigations and is always talking to me about this. His book mostly talks about Frost's poems. everyone this of Frost as a poet of the people. Jost uses those poems to talk about ordinary language as a trope [disguise?] Frost (not the only one) uses tropes of ordinary language, plain spokenness, the everyday, Everyman, the folk…but it is all a mask it seems to me for the most sophisticated kinds of thinking about, about art. So why the appeal to the ordinary in the first place? Among many other questions best talked about not indirectly.
…De Man quotes Nietzsche famously in this regard [in trans.}: What is therefore Truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms…
…a long way of not just saying that I wish I had been there. Best wishes - Dean