I’ve been mar­i­nat­ing a post on Ron Rosenbaum’s latest cri de crap­hole at Slate, won­der­ing if it was really worth the effort to attack an arti­cle that man­ages to be igno­rant about nearly every sub­ject it touches. I was glad, then, to see Michael swoop in and save me half the trou­ble. As he points out, and as the cover above makes plain,* Rosenbaum’s “troubling new revelations” are nei­ther new nor reveal­ing. Yes, they’re trou­bling, but I’m reg­u­larly amazed at how many people refuse to con­sider that it is not only pos­si­ble but might even be philo­soph­i­cally instruc­tive that Martin Hei­deg­ger was both a Nazi and one of the most impor­tant philoso­phers of the 20th century.

But Michael left out the most offen­sive part of Rosenbaum’s arti­cle, which is his attempt to tar Hannah Arendt with the same anti-​Heideggerian brush. Because, you know, they slept together.

An odd locu­tion that’s puz­zled me since I first noticed it last summer. Markedly dis­so­nant, but seman­ti­cally, not son­i­cally. At one and the same time it man­ages to dis­credit and rein­force the author­ity of the words that are being (have been?) said. On the one hand it splits the speaker against him­self, forces him to quote him­self: I am saying, now, what I said before. Why, then, am I saying it? But on the other hand it deliv­ers us into the middle of things, allows the speaker to quote him­self: These words have a his­tory, see, they pre­cede you. Listen up.

Like Heidegger’s “always already” it names a tense that life knows well but gram­mar has been slow to rec­og­nize. It opens a world where the saying is the said, and it invites you in. (This is not how the plu­per­fect is sup­posed to work.) But/and it evokes the professor’s pointed politesse in doing so. In fact Obama’s “also” is not much more than a gen­er­ous ver­sion of “already”: You didn’t do your home­work? Here, let me tell you again. This time, write it down.

Mostly, it shows us a politi­cian chaf­ing against the demands of his pro­fes­sion: “I’ve also said” is Obama trying not to bore him­self, not allow­ing him­self to pre­tend that this is the first time he’s said this thing that we will ask him to say over and over again until the record­ing equip­ment gets it just right.

By the time that hap­pens, of course, it will almost cer­tainly be wrong.

I’ve been wait­ing for some­one to write a good long piece about the phe­nom­e­non that some have named the New Athe­ism: i.e. the rash of books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christo­pher Hitchens, Daniel Den­nett, and others whose express intent has been to hasten the dis­ap­pear­ance of reli­gion as a cul­tural force. The arti­cle I wanted to read would have less to do with push­ing back against the argu­ments in these books than it would with trying to explain the phe­nom­e­non of their col­lec­tive appearance.

The most obvi­ous ques­tion that this imag­i­nary inquiry would tackle would be the ques­tion of timing: why did so many of these books appear all at once?

Yesterday Ron Sil­li­man jumped into the dis­cus­sion of Charles Simic’s review of Robert Creeley’s Col­lected Poems. Not sur­pris­ingly, Sil­li­man comes down firmly on the side of those who saw the review as an attack on a whole tra­di­tion of poetry. Echo­ing Mark Weiss’s orig­i­nal sen­ti­ment, Sil­li­man writes “[Simic] uses Cree­ley to make a larger—and much more pernicious—argument. His real target is the post-avant.”

Noth­ing in the dis­cus­sion on the POET­ICS list­serv that fol­lowed my orig­i­nal post con­vinced me on that point, though Simic’s hand in this year’s National Book Award nom­i­na­tions has cer­tainly made me recon­sider it. But since no one seemed espe­cially inter­ested in the point I was actu­ally con­cerned with—the effect of Creeley’s social stand­ing in cer­tain cir­cles on the recep­tion of his work—it didn’t seem worth car­ry­ing on, espe­cially since I wasn’t much in the mood to defend a poet (Simic) whose work I don’t par­tic­u­larly care for and whose idea of good poetry seems blink­ered at best.

Silliman’s post takes apart the Simic review para­graph by para­graph,