Can one speak about suffering if one hasn’t experienced it?
Kenneth Goldsmith has long been a figure of tension in the literary community: at once a savior for the conceptual intellectualists and avant-garde, and a malicious clown bent on provocation and appropriation. In a profile for the New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson dives into Goldsmith’s humble beginnings as a text-based artist and traces the line from there to the infamous Michael Brown reading, offering context to both sides of the controversy surrounding Goldsmith’s career in a surprisingly and refreshingly even-handed way.
2 responses
Even handed?????
No.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122985/new-movement-american-poetry-not-kenneth-goldsmith
Perhaps The Rumpus should provide dictionaries to people before they publish them trying to use big words they don’t know the meaning of. “Even-handed” would have required Wilkinson critiquing Goldsmith, not just acting like a simpering fan. “Even-handed” would have been not using loaded language and assumptions to describe the “tone” of critiques from POC writers who he choppily quoted. Williams, while you have your dictionary open, you should also familiarize yourself with the term “context” because that most certainly was not offered in Wilkinson’s piece either.
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