Outlaws and geeks

From David Gates’ review of ‘The Outlaw Bible of American Literature’: The Rebel Establishment complete with great quote and weirdly out of place tech reference (extra points if you get it):

From Waylon Jennings’s autobiography, … the Platonic country-music anecdote, about Hank Williams:

“Faron Young brought Billie Jean, Hank’s last wife, to town for the first time. She was young and beautiful, and Hank liked her immediately. He took a loaded gun and pointed it to Faron’s temple, cocked it, and said, ‘Boy, I love that woman. Now you can either give her to me or I’m going to kill you.’

“Faron sat there and thought it over for a minute. ‘Wouldn’t that be great? To be killed by Hank Williams!’ “

I’m with the levelers on this one. That’s not literature? All right then, I’ll go to hell.

Maybe in a hundred years, assuming there’s anybody left around, people will be amused at their great-grandparents’ failure to grasp the self-evident idea that what was called literature was a niche-marketed intellectual property, and that the war between the outlaws and the canonicals was another dispute between Big-Endians and Small-Endians. (Half a dozen people with a taste for the recherché will even get the allusion.) You can already see the borders getting porous.

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5 responses to “Outlaws and geeks”

  1. Joe avatar
    Joe

    Aha – it may actually be a reference to the place that the terms little- and big-endian were originally taken from – Gulliver’s Travels. They were the two factions that disagreed about which end you should open a boiled egg from.

  2. NBQ avatar

    Outlaws and geeks

    Outlaws and geeks

  3. Becker Urs avatar

    Outlaws and geeks

    Outlaws and geeks

  4. Annika Hjelmgren avatar

    Outlaws and geeks

    Outlaws and geeks

  5. Backers Jung avatar

    Outlaws and geeks

    Outlaws and geeks