This morn­ing John Latta quoted a bit out of Jed Rasula’s new Mod­ernism and Poetic Inspiration:

In lieu of its “voca­tion of dis­or­der,” Blan­chot won­ders what qual­i­fies as Roman­ti­cism: “Where it man­i­fests itself, rich in projects, or where it dies out, poor in works?” The answer: equiv­o­ca­tion. Or, to use a term the Roman­tics them­selves were fond of, the arabesque, the abil­ity to wrig­gle simul­ta­ne­ously toward con­trary poles. Although such wrig­gling can remain intran­si­tive, and the work uncom­pleted, “‘this supe­ri­or­ity of intel­li­gence over the power of exe­cu­tion’ is the very sign of authen­tic­ity” as Blan­chot puts it by way of Valéry. Exe­cu­tion is tac­itly the domain of the arti­san, so the artist asserts author­ity in a sov­er­eign ges­ture of dis­dain, as if the poet, con­ceiv­ing the mas­ter­piece, says to the reader, you do it, where doing amounts to a labo­ri­ous tem­po­ral extrac­tion of the divine Idea from a patent muddle (in which James Joyce sets his hen peck­ing at a sus­pi­ciously sodden letter in Finnegans Wake). Resist­ing com­ple­tion can also be deci­sive in its pre­var­i­ca­tion between avail­able means; ter­mi­nal inde­ci­sion is hard to dis­tin­guish from poly­va­lent cre­ative options.

John calls the above “another instance of Paul Valéry’s assert­ing form / invention’s supe­ri­or­ity (the par­tic­u­lar words hardly matter),” and “incredibly spark-throwing,” and a sug­ges­tion of “the mantra of the Lan­guage boys,” which strikes me as thrice true.

But there’s some­thing else in there, too, isn’t there?

Brad Paisley’s ter­rific new record, Amer­i­can Sat­ur­day Night, arrives freighted with con­tra­dic­tions. So does all good pop music. But they’re rarely announced as starkly as they are on “Welcome to the Future,” a song seem­ingly designed to illus­trate the prim­i­tiv­ity of the tra­di­tional model of licens­ing pop­u­lar songs for use in adver­tis­ing described by Greil Marcus in Lip­stick Traces:

At first, [Michael Jackson's] will­ing­ness to imme­di­ately trans­form ["Billie Jean"] into an adver­tis­ing jingle seemed like a slap in the face to every­one who loved it. But months later, when the con­stant air­play bought for the com­mer­cial allowed it not just to replace but almost to erase the orig­i­nal, one could hear “You’re a Whole New Generation” [the Pepsi anthem that reworked "Billie Jean"] as a new piece of music…. When he sang the line, “That choice is up to you,” dra­ma­tiz­ing the consumer’s option of Pepsi versus Coke, he made it sound like a moral choice.

“Welcome to the Future” ren­ders this entire process super­flu­ous. The song arrives already trans­formed into an adver­tis­ing jingle,