Edward Said Remembered: The Style of Intellectual Celebrity

Dear Mr. Kostelanetz:

Time must weigh heavy on the hands of one who'd devote so much labor to mocking a few lines of  another writer.   It is best when doing so to be sure one's own prose is without flaw.  Sadly, there isn't much difference between your  language and the passage you would savage.  Is this the soul of wit?  "What should be made of such convoluted sentences whose style so egregiously undermines the purported thought of aspiring to write transparently?"    And what about  this clunker?  "Is this the clumsy irony of someone who admonishes others 'Never use a preposition to end a sentence with'.   That sounds like a question.  Where's your question mark?   I guess expert writers don't have to sweat the details.   And if you check closely, you'll find you too combine "high-falutin" language ('egregiously') with common lingo ('lingo').   One would almost suspect that your target author is someone you don't particularly care for, and that you are willing to seize any pretext to make him look bad.   But when folks behave that way, who winds up with egg on his face?  

Thank you Mr. Kostelanetz for your remarks about Edward Said. No one, while benefiting from living and teaching in the West, has done so much harm to the understanding of the Muslim World, as the late Said (pronounced, Sa'eed).. He lectured on English literature, but denied the right of Westen scholars the privilege to deal with topics of the East!.

This position was best described by Bishop Kenneth Cragg: "There is, it would seem, a degree of Palestinian nationalism in Edward Said:'s approach. He insists that all knowledge turns on power and there is no western orientalism not funded by political, commercial, or imperialist interests. It would seem, on this count, that only insiders to it can know a culture, seeing that all outsiders bring unsurmountable  prejudice. The dishonesty lies in propounding this view from within an eastern insidership, which has so eminentaly demonstrated a capacity to know the West and its etjhos and literature on the part of one, by origin an outsider. It would have been generous to acknowledge similar capacities in reverse on he part of those orientalists, e.g. Hamilton Gibb, whom he mostly castigates." P. 302

The Arab Christian: A History in the Middle East, by Kenneth Cragg. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991

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 unfortunately for himself, this man is disgusting. he will never know.

richard's writings are exhumed from a person shot with their own authority.

it is rare one reads a writer so rude about human conditioning. a bulldozer in a backyard. thats his space.