Posts from — in the wee hours

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Below is a picture of the breadfruit plant, known scientifically as Artocarpus altilis.

It was this plant that led, through time, space, and media, to one of the true joys of my early teens: the leisurely viewing of a swimming flotilla of nubile, nude Polynesian girls. Thank you, HBO. I am speaking of the movie The Bounty, starring a pre-crazy Mel Gibson as Fletcher Christian and Anthony Hopkins as the infamous Captain Bligh. It would be an understatement of magnificent proportions to say that the movie scenes featuring beautiful naked young women were a welcome change for a teenage boy in a state of pubescent curiosity living before the glories of the Internet and relying upon National Geographic to answer the questions of nature.

Breadfruit is very much in the news again, having appeared most recently in a column by Daniel Stone in Newsweek as a solution to the world’s hunger crisis. Once impossible to export to areas with climates different than that of the South Pacific, breadfruit has finally been tamed by science and can be genetically altered to grow in Africa.

Let us hope that this use of the plant erases the historical miasma that clings to it. The HMS Bounty was to bring the plant to the Caribbean slaves as a source of cheap food to keep the labor force active. “Feed for Blacks” is how one member of the British admiralty praised the crop. Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers had more carnal thoughts on their mind, and so the Bounty’s crop was thrown overboard, a scene portrayed quite well in both the trilogy by Nordoff and Hall and the movie, though the botanical minutia were not on my mind upon the initial viewing.

The more lascivious moments of the expedition captured my attention, but so too did they effect the imagination of the populace of late eighteenth century England. Polynesia was looked upon as a sexual Eden, and stories quickly traveled back to Europe relating the ‘easy virtue’ of a people who would copulate in public, without any sense of shame, and of young women who would give their favors to sailors for a handful of iron nails.

The breadfruit was not only corralled to be given to slaves for food, but was sought to be extirpated from the islands, so that the natives would have to work for their food with more difficult crops and eat it ‘in the sweat of their own brows, hopefully (for the prudish) too tired for tireless fornication.

Will history be kinder to the breadfruit this time around?

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To a handful of fellow academics, undergraduates, former students, and aspiring intellectuals,

Please stop writing like Jacques Derrida. It is verbose, passé, boring, and painful. The hours I have spent reading articles that have somehow meandered into refereed journals and term papers that have flopped like a postmodern dying fish upon my desk are gone, and I shall never be able to recover them. Mumblings of ‘privileging masculine ontological concerns’ and ‘the hermeneutics of dialectic desituationism’ haunt my dreams. And don’t reply that I simply do not understand the point of the work, that this is mere post-modern ‘game-playing,’ that these little word games, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing, reveal the understanding of a relativist interpretation in which nothing in the humanities is more important than anything else. To put my reply to such insistences in a five-word word game / of my very own: bullshit!

Profundity is rarely expressed in such an inchoate manner, though there are profound ideas that must, by the quality and quantity of their erudite nature, require care in both expression and interpretation. The job of the writer in almost every instance, even the academic author who is writing to a specialized audience, is to be clear, vigorous, and intellectually challenging. Intentional obscurity regularly masks intellectual uncertainty, and often inanity. Peter Medawar, who was neither inane nor uncertain, once commented that
“a writer on structuralism …suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea.”

Silly indeed.
For great fun, visit: http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/

for a new piece of, hmm, postmodernism at every visit. This site generates bullshit papers that are as deeply profound as the works of Derrida, as full of meaning and integrity, only more enjoyable to read.

Keywords for writing such drivel: transgress, Lacanian, semiotic, hegemony, feminist distopia, etc. etc. etc.