Where have you gone, Johnny Carson?...

So I got a note from my editor yesterday telling me that he was very pleased with the results of my condense-and-focus job on the article…

[pause while those who know me well pick their jaws up from the floor]

…thank you. At any rate, his only major changes involved tweaking my idiosyncratic grammar into mass-magazine mode…which was kind of a peculiar experience. Not unpleasant, per se; believe me, nobody should be crushed at the discovery that the general public doesn’t share my stream of consciousness.

Just…well, by now I’ve got used to the thing having a certain rhythm and flow – my rhythm - and it feels decidedly odd to have it go off among strangers and come back sounding so carefully mature. [snif] My little article, all grown up and ready to stun the world…

Or something. I’ll know in about two-three weeks, he says, when the article goes up onsite. He also says there’s going to be a reference to this blog in the footer to the article…meaning I suddenly have a whole new set of literary anxieties.

This is after all a very classy magazine – I can tell, because a friend who holds a professorship in political science has heard of it. Which means these very classy readers are going to land @ Shoe Central expecting, like, reams of thoughtful, sensitive pop-culture critiquage, and you can’t just cheerily explain it was all a fluke, ha ha, and hope you like the Transformers review!

Thus I have only a fortnight or so to reinvent myself as a sophisticated, culturally-aware literati of whom same would not be wholly embarrassed to be seen engaging in discussion. Basically, I’m thinking of referring to the French Revolution a whole lot from here on in.

Ooh, and post-modernism. I have never had any clear idea what that means, except that Andy Warhol mocked it a lot, and boy howdy did that turn out to be the place where enthusiasm goes to die. However, it apparently has a lot to do with ‘theory’ and ‘irony’, so I figure I get the usage down pat enough to drop it into casual conversation (“The theoretical irony of robots philosophizing in Transformers is, like, mega-post-modernist, dude!”), and I’m totally covered in any discussion past 1952.

More immediately, this puts paid to my ambition to be the sole Oscar-free blog of 2008...

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