{"id":1094,"date":"2005-03-28T10:11:12","date_gmt":"2005-03-28T18:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2005\/03\/miranda_warning\/"},"modified":"2005-03-28T10:11:12","modified_gmt":"2005-03-28T18:11:12","slug":"miranda_warning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2005\/03\/miranda_warning.html","title":{"rendered":"MIRANDA WARNING"},"content":{"rendered":"

The item ALL RED ALL THE TIME<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>,
\nabout a peculiar essay by Portugese writer Paulo Jos\u00e9 Miranda<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>, drew this response from John Keene:
\n

<\/P>
\n


\n

I read your blog regularly and have faith in your critical powers, so I’m a bit
\ndismayed that you didn’t see the sharp and obvious irony in Jos\u00e9 Miranda’s “America”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> project. It’s a joke, shot through with sarcasm
\nand parody. How do I know this? I guess I figured it out by reading some of the linked material,
\nincluding Miranda’s poems and the critical articles on his work, which present a highly ironic,
\npessimistic artistic vision. Of course I could be completely wrong, but Miranda and the others
\ninvolved with this site (Huguenin, Sim\u00f5es, Felino, etc.) hardly appear to be right-wing
\ntriumphalists. Again, I could be wrong, but….
\n

<\/P>
\n

PS: Check out Jose Felino’s
\nsite<\/B><\/FONT><\/STRONG><\/A>. Not a big fan of American advertising and culture if you
\nask me!<\/P>
\n

PS2: Beware of Alves’s and Parada’s sites, set up, it appears, by Huguenin, which both shut
\ndown my Mozilla Firefox browser!<\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n

<\/P>
\n

Dear John Keene —<\/P>
\n

You may be right. I was fairly puzzled by the whole thing and not really sure what Miranda
\nwas after. But I posted my thoughts anyway, probably with too much haste. I’m still not sure
\nwhat’s going on. Miranda’s comments about the text, which he separates from his own intentions,
\ndo make it sound like the text is a joke, as you say. But Miranda wants to have things both ways,
\nor all ways. And his insistence on metameaning, if that’s what it is, confuses the hell out of me. I
\nhadn’t seen the ad gallery, which does change the context. You’re definitely right about that ad gallery<\/B><\/FONT><\/STRONG><\/A>.<\/P>
\n

For anyone who’s interested — and USA Today has already taken note<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> in its “Hot Sites”
\nWeb guide — here (from an “Ongoing Interview”) are some of Miranda’s comments about his
\ntext:<\/P>
\n


\n

To write about America without having been there, isn’t it a merely
\nrhetori<\/B>cal exercise?
<\/B>No! America, the text, can be read in several ways. That
\nis, and in the most obvious and least interesting way, it can be read as a political text. … [Lots
\nof pomo meta-sema-suma-something follows. — JH.]<\/I> …
\n

<\/P>
\n

So it may be understood that you reject the political stand associated to the
\ntext?
<\/B>I only wish to say that the text is not a political text, although it could be read that
\nway.<\/P>
\n

And in what way does the author of the text politically read it?
<\/B>I’m unable to
\nread it the political way, although I can see that the text could be read only in that way.<\/P>
\n

What is then your political position?<\/B>
My political position is irrelevant. The
\ntext is what matters, not its author. Let me give you an example: is the political position of the
\nauthor of “Animal Farm” relevant to the reading of the text?

Should I assume
\nthat you don’t wish to commit?
<\/B>You should assume that the political stand of the
\nauthor is not relevant to the reading of the text.<\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n

<\/P>
\n

<\/P>
\n

Oy. I’d say Orwell’s political position is relevant, wouldn’t you? It’s worth recalling his essay,
\n“Politics and the English
\nLanguage,”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> in which he speaks about meaningless words<\/I>. “In certain
\nkinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism,” Orwell says, “it is normal to
\ncome across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.” He refers to lots of
\nthem. But the sort of language he especially abhors — the flapdoodle of empty abstractions — is
\nprecisely the kind of language Miranda uses. I don’t read Portugese, but I’d be willing to bet
\n“America” in the original is no better than it is in English.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The item ALL RED ALL THE TIME, about a peculiar essay by Portugese writer Paulo Jos\u00e9 Miranda, drew this response from John Keene: I read your blog regularly and have faith in your critical powers, so I’m a bit dismayed that you didn’t see the sharp and obvious irony in Jos\u00e9 Miranda’s “America” project. It’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1094","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-hE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1094\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}