Oh Academia...

I loved this excerpt from a Washington Post book review by Michael Dirda on The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies (as in "The Big Lebowski"):

In fact, many of these pages require real familiarity with the work of Fredric Jameson (on post-modernism) or of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francoise Lyotard, Luce Irgaray and other French cultural theorists. Be prepared, in other words, for sentences such as this one: "Just as the film undermines the preoccupation with the phallus and with castration, so it undermines the link between normative heterosexuality and reproduction on which patriarchal hegemony normally sustains itself." One also finds undefined terms like the Hegelian "Aufhebung" -- which means to both cancel and preserve -- and in-crowd nods such as "The Lebowski family tree...is decidedly not arborescent in the sense Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari criticize in A Thousand Plateaus." Still, could at least some of this volume's apparent excesses actually be intended as humor? Is the irony so finely cut that those in the know are rolling in the aisles? Quite possibly. [Though not likely. These people usually take themselves far too seriously]. But the ordinary reader sure isn't laughing. As the late and much missed critic Marvin Mudrick once said about deconstruction, "When the French get heavy, they make the Germans look like ballerinas...In sum, "The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies" floats somewhere between the earnest and the ironic, its contributors making serious points about the film but also overplaying, whether deliberately or not, the critical mumbo jumbo.

Also hilarious -- on the publisher's website they have excerpts from reviews on the book, and, naturally, they only have positive reviews. What was hilarious is that I noticed they had a quote from the Washington Post review; but I remembered that, overall, the WP review wasn't too positive of the book.

Here's what the publisher website had: "If you're a 'Big Lebowski' collector...you may want to acquire this...illuminating book." That's quite a bit of ellipses...

Here's what the actual review said: "If you're a 'Big Lebowski' collector -- and there is, by the way, an essay here on the very notion of collecting -- you may want to acquire this generally frustrating, if intermittently illuminating book." Haha!