An attack of Laphamism

One person's backscratching is another person's homage, I suppose. Whatever, the editor of The Walrus, Ken Alexander, writes in the magazine's October 2007 issue a column about the forthcoming publication of Lapham's Quarterly. This is the retirement project of longtime Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham.

In praising its prospectus Alexander, consciously or unconsciously, takes on Lapham's occasionally mannered and complicated writing style, resulting in extraordinarily convoluted paragraphs such as:

To an arch-patriot like Lapham, for the experiment of democracy to be something other than a hollow casket brimming with falsehoods and missed opportunities, polities must discover in stone tablets, illustrated manuscripts, poems, novels, and plays; in angry letters from wounded soldiers and song sheets from the Mississippi Delta; and in rising oratories declaiming the brutality of man, the wisdom that history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And then the newly informed must move on, must see to it that such a deterministic and unfortunate fate does not befall one’s own particular state, whether emergent or struggling with itself. However sublimated by the mannered brushstrokes of a northeastern sensibility, there is both Marx and Nietzsche in Lewis Lapham.

Perhaps it is my own failing, but when I got to the end, including the 67-word opening sentence, I had to start over, having taken in almost none of what he was driving at.