The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal): Subhead Frustrates Understanding

November 04, 2010

Subhead Frustrates Understanding

No, You Go Crazy

I get why these two guys are joyously embracing. They're teammates, San Francisco Giants, 2010 World Series Champions, and this page from the San Jose Mercury News is the front of a whole special section on the Series and its deciding game, the line score of which is printed above the picture of the two guys hugging. Fine.

But what's all this about 58 years of frustration? What frustration, and who held it all these years and for what exactly? I'm sure commenters have somewhere gnawed this question to rags and I'll add this:

The subhead reads, GIANTS END 58 YEARS OF FRUSTRATION, but of course the Giants won the World Series 56 years ago, in 1954, meaning that the frustration referred to in the subhead that is now ended must lie two years further in the past than that, not to be resolved by a mere World Series Championship in the meantime, but going back as far as some pivotal moment in 1952 in fact, 58 years ago, just as DeLillo would have us believe in Underworld, some irksome something persisting until this year's historic season put an end to it.

The precise nature of this frustration is left as an exerise for the reader.

No comments:

Post a Comment

For some years now I've travelled bumptiously about the internet commenting on other people's blogs under the pseudonym "peter ramus," pointedly and I regret to say at times heatedly disclosing the general shape my own intricately devised misapprehension of current events in contradistinction to the remarkable torrent of misapprehensions made known daily on that medium by everyone else.

Nominally I associate myself as much as possible with the views of those who seem to know what they're talking about, but often enough I find myself obliged, like so many others, to go on about things I'm not in the least qualified to address simply because it is my way when the opportunity presents itself. I find this shortcoming as personally irritating as it is to those I've favored it with over the years, an as yet irrepressible feature of my discourse. Thus the admittedly defensive assumption of the nom de blog, "peter ramus."

"peter ramus" isn't to be confused with Peter Ramus, another fellow entirely, who lived and died a long time ago around the sad times leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, an event which saw his own undoing in the chaotic days that followed.

He was a zeolot, Peter Ramus was. He had a particular bone to pick with Aristotle over the stuff and substance of rhetoric, which led him to propose revolutionary changes in the subject and manner of teaching which prevailed in higher education in those times. A quaestio was convened, a solemn gathering of all the branches of civil society, to see what was to be done about him. The King sent a man, and the Church sent a man, and of course the University of Paris couldn't help but send one, too. Unsurprisingly, they found overwhelmingly in favor of Aristotle and against Peter Ramus. In addition, it pleased the members of the assembled body to pronounce Peter Ramus personally disagreeable and notably ugly to boot. Strictly as an aside.

©2007-2019

The ideas expressed here, and the words used to express them here, are the ideas and words of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), which is to say "peter ramus," which is to say, me. Naturally, given their ultimate source, the ideas are half-formed at times, provisional always, and subject on mature reflection to substantial revision and, often enough, to outright repudiation by the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), by "peter ramus," and by me.

The words themselves, however, in the precise carnival train order in which they appear, and such original images which may from time to time be displayed here, excepting of course for those attributed materials the provenance of which, as duly noted, originate elsewhere, are owned by and are the property of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), "peter ramus," or me, and are subject to the terms of Creative Commons License 2.5 , by which license (in the unlikely event that such words and original images appearing here are taken up and displayed elsewhere) clear attribution must be attached to those words or images indicating their ownership, to wit: the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), "peter ramus," but not me.

November 04, 2010

Subhead Frustrates Understanding

No comments:

Blog Archive

©2007-2019

Labels