Lady Gaga arrives for the 2013 Glamour Women of the Year Awards in NYC
Photo: Timothy Clary AFP / Getty Images.
In a recent article by Luke Lewis on pretentiousness, Lady Gaga may conceivably be disappointed only to come in at No. 16, but she is in entertainingly ostentatious company nonetheless.
Among a showcase of superlative conceits, the writer's implied lesson on the moral merits of humility features an exegesis on the comedic indebtedness of the custard pie to the English Harlequinade, a vaingloriously metaphysical advert for a replica All Blacks shirt (This is not a jersey. This is a portal through which men pass ...) and a photograph of Sting solemnly fingering a lute as his widely pitied wife Trudy assumes a preposterous yoga pose.
While many would readily draw the line at the notorious earnestness of The Police's former frontman, such a rush to judgement may unwittingly serve to highlight the begged question: who dares to distinguish the genuinely creative individuals from the frauds?
Step forward former poet laureate Andrew Motion, a man who seems more than happy to act in such a capacity. But whenever I think of his dissing the sequin-strewing Jeremy Reed as an effete little pseud - and without holding any specific brief for the latter's literary credentials - I suffer a nasty bout of Motion sickness.
Reed doesn't need Motion's stamp of approval. And besides, there's no fate more deleterious to an author than to be courted, feted, and finally authorised - to become, as in Prufrock's lepidopterist nightmare, 'formulated, sprawling on a pin / pinned and wriggling on a wall'.
Likewise, however delicious the passing irony might be of Lewis taking seriously enough those whom he accuses of taking themselves too seriously to spend his time writing about them, the premise of his piece will surely drive a splinter of dread into acolytes of the imagination everywhere.
Thomas Tritchler is a poet and critical theorist based in Calw, Germany. He has written and researched extensively on a wide range of authors, including Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Ted Hughes and Jean Baudrillard, and on topics including Romanticism, the Holocaust, and the politics of evil. He has recently worked with the Berlin-based art cooperative Testklang.
Thomas Tritchler appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for his kind submission of a lengthy text written especially for this blog; parts II and III will follow shortly.
