Thursday
13Apr2006
Ern Malley and The LeRoy Legacy
04.13.2006 
The acceptance and effusive praise of these poems was supposed to embarrass all hoodwinked readers and editors, proving that the School of Obscurity read meaning into randomness. More important, it was meant to expose how destitute in meaning modern poetry had become. But it didn’t. Despite the considerable sensation created by the hoaxers’ unveiling, the Ern Malley poems did not lose legitimacy. For many sophisticated readers discovering the nonsense-intentions of the authors didn’t undermine the art at all. Nobody stopped drinking champagne from the glass slipper, and Malley remains at least as compelling as LeRoy. For in the effort of critiquing modern poetry, McAuley and Stewart had in fact created it.
Me Books are distinguished by the fact that the first-person voice is the only voice in the text, and “I-I-I” is tacitly believed to be the only seat of authority from which to report the world. That serial memoirists own this seat of authority is perfectly harmless until the touching letters from readers, the millions of dollars, the Bestseller mantles and the cover medallions aren’t enough. They want to pretend that what they publish is more than eloquent journal writing; that it’s cultural commentary; that their accidental adventures in addiction, divorce, death, and disease can be activated into episodes of accidental ethnography.
Before Taki set up The American Conservative it seems that he met with Katrina Van den Heuvel about investing in The Nation. (Perhaps that was the point at which the far-left and far-right literally met up.) Stranger still, this self-described "soi-disant anti-Semite" almost invested in Seth Lipsky’s strongly pro-Israel New York Sun. This isn’t to say that Taki doesn’t have genuine right-wing anti-Semitic views. But it does raise the question of whether Taki’s main interest is in his views or merely in seeing his name in print.