I was a-thinking about what you said
about Mel Brooks on the Bill Maher show the other day, about how just
his "spit-take" with the coffee was funny, and then we thought
about how something like that brings back all of the funny stuff Mel Brooks
has done over his whole life. That made me think of the "memetic
nexus" stuff I've been talking about and how pretendians and "born-againdians" in the poetry and literary community,
even though they're mediocre and posers, may have agglomerated, accreted,
agglutinated a bunch of "rep" and "cred" in the form of memes about
stuff they've done in the past (or bluster they managed to get past the Bullshit Filters at the time, which is probably more important)....
...anyway, my idea is that Mel Brooks
himself has become a MIAO, an anchoring point for his own memes,
so that him just doing anything, even if it's not particularly funny, triggers
it all and brings it all back at once. It's just like a network,
with Mel or the pretendians at the center of a web of memetic references
that all pop to life again at the slightest provocation, whether that web
was constructed by a long life of brilliance or a life of determined slogging
and consistent cheating, it's there.
That give a theory of memetic nexuses
in which they are:
1. constructed (as opposed to innate,
pre-existing)
2. durable, accretative, i.e., they
tend to persist over time without further input from their occupant
Questions remain:
1. are there "innate" memetic
nexuses, i.e., that just exist whether they are occupied and that one
may simply "drop into", e.g., "authority on fake native american spirit animal experimental poetry of the Great Plains"?
2. can a nexus occupant undermine and
dissipate a nexus, i.e., "destroy their own fame" and if so, how?
PS: Henny Youngman, later in life, was a consummate example of having built a constructed memetic nexus that he inhabited thereafter. His "take my wife....please!" schtick was all he ever said, it seemed, at the end of his career, for example, at a roast, I think, of Mel Brooks himself.
"Take my yolk...please!"
-- Henny Youngman Jesus Chicken
No comments:
Post a Comment