Premature Intellectual Ejaculation (PIE)
If you're a narcissistic charismatic writer prone to spontaneous blogging emissions requiring you to immediately follow up in comments with six (6) or more corrective NFR's to make your original point compelling or even intelligible, maybe because your reader isn't reading you closely enough, perhaps because they're low in openness, or maybe just because you yourself are guilty of disingenuously
[e]liding so basic a fact about your own beliefs and work with an accusation against his reading comprehension, you may be suffering from a chronic case of Premature Intellectual Ejaculation, or PIE.
When your brain spontaneously starts that windup toward "uuunnnNNHHH!!!" and your hands get itchy on the keypad envisioning how Downton Abbey is really a metaphor for a French cassoulet which is really a metaphor for Dante's Divine Comedy which is really a metaphor for your own gluttonous eating like pigs in shit - STOP.
Just stop. Stop, run some cold water over your head, and see if it is possible to use it for some semblance of systematic rational processing for a change rather than just as a warehouse for your limbic, Komodo dragon-like carnal appetites.
Premature Intellectual Ejaculation is curable, but it requires a specific, disciplined regular exercise we commonly call thinking.
However, if you do these thinking exercises faithfully, you will find yourself far less likely to impetuously and embarrassingly blurt out something like how The Apostles were the original Smurfs and your writing as a result will probably require far fewer panicked NFRs to correct someone else's alleged failure to read your professional writing closely enough.
Premature Intellectual Ejaculation (PIE). It is curable, but you must first put your reader's satisfaction ahead of your own spontaneous urges to emit.
Premature Intellectual Ejaculation is curable, but it requires a specific, disciplined regular exercise we commonly call thinking.
ReplyDeleteYup.
Re: NFRs: I think he swiped this habit from THE ANCHORESS who was the first person I saw do this online. Instead of using the comment boxes like the plebians with whom they grace the right to comment, they enter italic notes directly on the comments they wish to critique. It always put me in mind of the teacher writing with red pen on your homework, usually something like YOU MISUNDERSTOOD THE ASSIGNMENT. PLEASE SEE ME AFTER CLASS.
Because Dreher not only does what you describe, committing italicized comment frottage on his readers but also signs his assaults "-RD", what, then, is the purpose of that "NFR" at the beginning? Isn't it redundant?
DeleteWhy, no, it's just that little extra touch of heraldic trumpet fanfare alerting the universe to prepare itself for the wonders soon to come.
[Ta-da-da-Da-da-da-DA!: Keith will now have just commented on your comment, Pauli - KH]
Maybe he might read this, but here is my prescription for putting RD on the road to recovery:
ReplyDelete(1) Before all else, stop making yourself the centerpiece of everything you write.
(2) Pick some topic that has nothing to do with you. I could think of some topics. For example, the persecution of xtians overseas, or the revival of monasticism in Russia, or the price of tea in China, or rare earth mining in Mongolia. Anything, just so long as it is not about you.
(3) Research the topic thoroughly. I mean completely. Find out everything there is to know. That means doing serious library work, combined with basic gumshoe stuff you should have learned in journalism class, combined with taking extensive notes. If it means traveling overseas, great, just so long as it is not France. I mean do the serious research that works up a sweat. Make sure you put in an eight hour work day.
(3) Next, organize the huge mountain of materials you have accumulated. Write an outline that encompasses all the possible subtopics related to the subject.
(4) Now begin writing a book on the subject, explaining it as clearly and succinctly as you possibly can, using all the precision of the English language that you can muster. Your book should also have a bibliography and an appendix full of footnotes.
(5) You are still not done. You need to revise what you have written to eliminate any superfluity or needless repetitions, and especially eliminate anything that is even remotely connected with you. If anything, every single paragraph should have been revised at least once.
(6) Hopefully you will also have a good but merciless editor. Pay attention to what he says and don't squabble when he tells you that some of the stuff you wrote was garbage. Revise things when he tells you that revision is needed.
(7) Don't expect to win the Pulitzer overnight for your efforts. Be content that your book makes modest but decent sales that might help to support family. Don't expect to strike it rich. Maybe someday, after you have done the grueling work of writing several such books (none of which are about you), then maybe you might get some kind of recognition. But you are going to have to do it the hard way by earning it.
I may be the only one who thinks that RD still has potential to be a fair writer who can produce some passable work, not a "great writer" mind you, but decent enough to be modestly successful and to produce some readable books. But I often have doubts whether even that much is possible. The guy just refuses to show any seriousness or discipline at all. Finally ...
(8) Lay off eating the raw oysters. It's like playing Russian roulette with your life, because one day you'll eat one contaminated with vibrio vulnificus and that could end up killing you.
Oengus, when you have to protest [NFR: I'm not at all embracing a belief in sympathetic magic. -- RD], you're probably already in over your head.
DeleteFor someone with nothing more than a BA in journalism from LSU, Mircea Eliade is probably just such a drowning pool. Anyone who's encountered Eliade in college knows how turgid and impenetrable his writing style is, so there's every reason to think Dreher in one of his lunges to randomly connect dots in new and exciting ways gets everything wrong and finds himself inadvertently endorsing ancient pagan perspectives as normative for modern Christians.
But this itself is illustrative of the congenital Dreher fraud: he doesn't have to understand the props he wields on stage anymore than a magician has to know how to make a top hat, he only has to suggestively convince his readers that he understands them and that they underwrite his point of the moment. 90% of his readers have probably never heard of this guy Eliade, but their reaction will be "Gaw-aw-LEE! This sure sounds important and all scholasticky and academic-like. How 'bout that Rod Dreher? He sure knows everything and how it all fits together, too!"
I had meant before to second Jonathan Carpenter's comment somewhere down below where he compares Dreher to Jimmy Swaggart, and it's true. There's just something in the air or water down there that breeds these middle class hucksters like Swaggart and Dreher who end up romping with hookers or beating their dead sister with a velvet sap glove, or like in this comical mash-up I posted about here, name-dropping and pratfalling their way through history's bookshelves.
Keith
Ruh-roh, another big slice 'o PIE.
ReplyDeleteProfessional writer Dreher is forced to Cliff Notes his his entire post:
[NFR: I'm saying a couple of things: 1) in a culture with an authentically Christian ethos, this sort of thing passing itself off as Christian wouldn't be seen, or would barely be seen; and 2) saying that our civilization is "post-Christian" doesn't mean there aren't Christians in it, and plenty of us, but that Christianity is no longer at the center of our cultural self-understanding. By the way, I make no judgment on whether or not anyone is going to be saved; only God knows that. Similarly, I have no idea what the state of anyone's heart is. I'm talking only about the public teaching and witness, which strikes me as alien to the spirit of Christianity in all its historic manifestations (e.g., Catholic, Orthodox, Reformation Protestant). -- RD]
Commenter Fran Macadam is far more elegantly succinct than Her Working Boy:
Fran Macadam says:
December 1, 2013 at 3:28 pm
“Post-Christian” is nothing new. It’s the real “old-time religion,” more akin to the ancient “worship of Aphrodite, in her see-through nightie.” Arguably, anything post-Constantinian is credibly post-Christian, in a similar hijacking and distortion of Christ’s message – which fortunately, is timeless. The more accurate evaluation is that mankind has been living thus far in a pre-Christian era.
Fran Macadam says:
December 1, 2013 at 3:32 pm
To quote G.K. Chesterton, it isn’t that Christianity has been tried and found wanting; it’s that it hasn’t been tried.
Keith
What a lazy post the Dallas one was. Snip a chunk from "FDluxe", which is the "fashion magazine" of Dreher's old newspaper, add a one sentence extrapolation that it reflects the entire city, and let the trained seals start the chorus of "Dallas sucks" and "Texas sucks". Wick'll love it.
DeleteIf only he hadn't tripped on it by adding the pseudo-intellectual-theological comment. But no one was reading anymore by that time.