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an accidental essay

Delson’s reading of Going Rogue for The Awl is a wonder.

Agreed:

Palin speaks only in rhetoric; which is to say, she speaks only in words she heard somewhere else; which is to say coherence cannot be expected.

Hence the quotes from Pascal, from Napoleon.

Which reminds me of another who speaks only in words heard from somewhere else, from whom coherence cannot be expected. From J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country:

240. The voices speak to me out of machines that fly in the sky. They speak to me in Spanish.

241. I know no Spanish whatsoever. However, it is characteristic of the Spanish that is spoken to me out of the flying machines that I find it immediately comprehensible. […]

242. How can I be deluded when I think so clearly?

[…]

247. I am not deluded; or if I am, my delusions are privileged. I could not make up such words as are spoken to me. […]

248. The voices speak: Lacking all external enemies and resistances, confined within an oppressive narrowness and regularity, man has no choice but to turn himself into an adventure. They accuse me, if I understand them, of turning my life into a fiction, out of boredom. They accuse me, however tactfully, of making myself more violent, more various, more racked with torment than I really am, as though I were reading myself like a book, and found the book dull, and put it aside and began to make myself up instead. That is how I understand their accusation. It is not in rebellion against true oppression that I have made my history, they say…

Like Coetzee’s batshit-crazy Magda, Palin is in the heart of nowhere and simultaneously at the very heart of the country. Her literary (rhetorical, philosophical, political) references are utterly unhinged from their referents. Her signs signify nothing. I’ve written on Palin and Engfish before (I should maybe get that back online somewhere, since I killed that blog), but I like this take. Maybe Palin’s memoir is an American Volkerpsychologie, an essay on [though at seems like the better preposition] our national identity.