silly pedantic question re: "qua"

anything is possible if momus is around!

ppl = music writers i guess, but maybe writers on film? book critics?

i spose i mean what route did it arrive by...

(eg a suggestion based on wild ungrounded guesswork: someone like P.F. STRAWSON or GREENBERG wrote an essay on aesthetics which some bigwig semi-underground v.voice writer like Mailer or Jonas Mekas or whomever co-opted to talk abt stuff a bit closer to rock in spirit, which meltzer being a well-read chap started using himself, as a sorta kinda joke which became a habit)

(maybe it does come from translation of aristotle, but that's a bit TOO much of a leap really: i think there wd have been in-between usage to ferry it out of Hardcore Classical Philosophy into Crawdaddy... )

mark, I don't think it's much a leap, if you've read some philosophy, or just been influenced by, say, a philsophy professor, from using it in an aesthetic context.

meltzer read aristotle sure, and was indeed writing a conscious, deliberate contribution to it, in his fuck-w-yr-mind way, but i'm pretty sure most crawdaddy readers probbly DIDN'T read aristotle, let alone essays in the philosophy of aesthetics, but probably did – some of em — read the voice or manny farber or well, what other route might it have comne from?

none of this would have bothered RM much, who just like the incogruity of it when discussing eg Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick and tich, but it means that - even if to HIM this was easy language to parse - to others it wd be just semi-gobbledygook, so why wd they borrow it and carry on the tradition? Unless permission had already semi been given in the cultureworld round them?

I'm really not sure that there's a path to trace - it seems more viable to me that any subsequent uses of it in that context were either a) sponged from Meltzer/Christgau and propagated thusly or b) introduced without perceived precedence, a la Rockist Scientist...

But as for Mark S's question, I don't think "qua" is in much rock-critic use. Meltz and Xgau probably got it independently from their Stony Brook/Dartmouth reading, and qua's few dribbles into rockwrite are probably either via those two or are equally independent, as the next Mark suggests. I don't remember seeing it in Farber, who didn't think much about qua qua qua (or think much about the qualities of qua at all).

Not a prank, even if he chats about it in that Re-Search book about pranks. I imagine he was kicked out of Yale grad school because his advisors/professors were baffled by him. But he'd earlier been encouraged by his Stony Brook profs to do the very things that ended up baffling the Yalies.

1420 1420 1420
we shall achieve ALL

cc: Professor Wells

A photostat of this letter was included in Fusion No. 82, January 1973 (David Bowie on the cover), with excerpts from Caned Out: The Autobiography of Richard Meltzer.

And thus Zauchenberger and Wells enter history.

When one encounters "qua" in Meltzer or Aristotle or whatever, it just means "insofar as". So "song-qua-song" is just song insofar as it's a song. As something else, the implications are different...

It's Latin, yes, but I can't remember what the exact Greek term is. Qua is a useful tool for having nerdish arguments and wanting gain the upper-hand. Or maybe not.

i invoked this thread last night on the ILX Yahoo! Literati tourney after one of the players played qua and there was discussion of the etymology. just so you know.