Take 2

The Lifeline

By Edmundo Desnoes
('Memories of Underdevelopment')

Marshall Blonsky was born in Kansas City, Missouri. From the age of seven, he studied the violin and dreamt of a concert career. Those dreams were dashed when, in 1956, Ivan Galamian, at that time the greatest violin teacher in the world, told him he would “never be one of the immortals.” Blonsky, a 17-year-old, then moved his dreams into literary studies at Yale College, where he graduated Scholar of the House, magna cum laude, in 1959.

He acquired some life experience in show business of the 60s, working as an assistant to the Broadway and television producer Leland Hayward. His specific task was being the “buddy” to comedian Buck Henry, which meant doing anything Buck wanted, especially laughing at his jokes ("we were right at the building where my girlfriend was getting shrunk when Buck suddenly jumped to the landing of a second-story office, putting his ear to the window telling me 'You'll never BELIEVE what she's saying about you!'"). This helped the young sidekick understand the thin line between reality and fiction. In the late sixties he became assistant to one of America’s top journalists, Alfred G. Aronowitz, who was under contract to the Saturday Evening Post. In the capacity of researching for and writing with Aronowitz, Blonsky smoked weed with Bob Dylan and tried to date the singer Diahann Carroll.

Tiring of life experience and celebrities, he matriculated in 1970 at The Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University where he became intoxicated with structuralism and semiotics, which had just taken Hopkins by storm. Blonsky remembers his first party with Jacques Derrida, so different from partying with Dylan. Here, the only substance was words, not even the tiniest glass of whiskey set before him to wash down their boredom.

Google his Yale education. But don't expect to find the story of his delivery of dissertation. To whom? Paul de Man, not only chairman of comp lit at Yale, but himself the creator of cruel signs in the pages of 'Le Soir' in Second World War Belgium. Blonsky's dissertation was on Coleridge, Wordsworth and Mallarmé, and De Man, approving it one nice spring day in New Haven, said: “I could have deconstructed you ["It felt like a punch in the gut"]--but I won’t.”

Blonsky’s life was decided; since then, it has been ruled by an eagerness to be both in the world and decode its meanings. A satisfying but impossible task.

Blonsky has taught at The New School in New York (1973-1993), where he introduced semiotics to its first generation of students; at New York University (1988-1997); at SUNY Stony Brook (1990); at Vassar College (1990).

In 1994, he participated in the faculty of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In 1996 he became senior advisor to the director, New Directions for News, School of Journalism, University of Missouri. For too much of the 90s, he managed the treacherous life of Senior Fellow at The Wolfson Center for National Affairs, The New School, bringing scholarly and creative celebrities to be interviewed in public (the audience often in tumult) at the School. He currently teaches semiotics and the ism's in its wake at Critical Studies, Parsons School of Design, New School University.

In 1985, Blonsky published 'On Signs' (Johns Hopkins University Press/Basil Blackwell), the widely used text on semiotics, which became a VLS bestseller. In 1989 he wrote the introduction for 'Private Property' by the photographer Helmut Newton, published by Schirmer/Mosel in Munich and republished in the February ‘98 issue of Taiwan Playboy. In 1992 he published 'American Mythologies' (preface by Umberto Eco), which became a sort of succès d’estime, landing Blonsky on The Charlie Rose Show, Pozner & Donahue, Good Morning America, Oprah and others. He has also commented on NBC Nightly News, CNN News Hour, Hard Copy, National Public Radio, etc. on subjects as varied as shopping to Umberto Eco to O.J. Simpson. He’s often quoted in such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Financial Times and U.S. News & World Report on subjects as diverse and absurd as cowboy boots, the oily fluidity of Monica Lewinsky’s name, the meaning of Rudolph Giuliani's Nazi slur of Barack Obama ("I'm sorry that Barack Obama feels that her [Sarah Palin's] hometown isn't COSMOPOLITAN enough") and the portrayal of youth on Times Square buildings.

Among the many magazine articles he has written, he is reasonably proud of the Ted Koppel and Umberto Eco profiles, both published in The New York Times Magazine (1988, 1989), the Vanity Fair piece on Merv Griffin, Donald Trump and Atlantic City (1990), as well as the series “Marshall in Wonderland” written for The Washington Post/Outlook section (1988-’89), going from stumping with Pat Robertson in his bid for the presidency to spending six months with NBC Nightly News (he was barred from the morning 'line-up' where ideological decisions are made by allotting seconds to stories) to playing fly-on-the-wall backstage at numerous Hollywood game shows ("Look at that ass!," murmured one of the hosts, a Baptist reverend, pointing to an evangelical, poorly-dressed, young female contestant). Blonsky was a contributor (before Silvio Berlusconi shut it down) to the Roman magazine, called the Italian Wired, 'Telèma,' and to the cultural section 'mais!' (more!), of the Brazilian newspaper-of-record, Folha de S. Paulo, where editors without warning rewrote his stories to fit Brazilian political needs.

Marshall Blonsky has been profiled ("Each time it's like a palmist adding on to my life-no, my DEATHline") in venues including The New York Times (June 1996), The New York Press, alongside Benetton's Oliviero Toscani (December 1995), Smithsonian Magazine (September 1993), The Washington Post/Style (July 1992), and in Europe by such magazines as Europeo, Panorama and Pubblicità Italia--at whose 1995 awards ceremony for the top ads of Italy, our reasonably muscular picaro suddenly found himself out of his chair in air, lifted ("my legs kicking like a hanged man's") to a kind of throne by two impossibly tall Italian sub-goddesses.

In the course of researching 'American Mythologies,' he traveled profusely. In Tokyo he conversed with a mechanical dog; in Milan a thief stole his Armani interview tape, making our author summon the Master back from his weekend castle for an "I said and then you said" absurdity of a re-interview; outside of Moscow, in the sylvan artist's colony of Peridelkino, Yevtushenko treated Blonsky to a three-hour lunch of borscht and bathos; while, back at his Moscow KGB hotel, The Belgrade, Blonsky returned the favor by hosting a vodka-drenched dinner with Voisnesensky, fighting him for the check and, thank God, losing. As a social commentator on America he has traveled from the Bangor Maine of Stephen King (who told him about the time he saw a ghost) to the New York City of (once) master-of-the-universe John Sculley to the Cupertino, California caves of Apple Computer, where engineers pulled secret new prototypes out of their alcoves.

He is currently engaged in two book projects, 'Marshall Arts,' a very nasty memoir, and 'How Team Bush Hurled the Wrecking Ball at American democracy'--the latter if he dares.

Roland Barthes may have given him the key to the magic kingdom, but he never gave him the key to get out. Maybe someday I'll write a novel about this semiotic gladiator who cannot leave the ring. We'd start with the premise that Barthes and God made a non-human, all too inhuman semiotic killer, whose lifeline we'll watch for the next extension that we'll decode under my working title, 'The Clown Hitman of Signs.'

Comments

[susan meiselas]

marshall,
i've been trying to find you, can you email me or send me a tele to reach you...somewhat urgent...i need your permission to republish edmundo's essay ON DEATH in an ICP reader for this fall...called Edmundo, but no answer at all....sadly we've been out of touch

thank,
susan
212 431 3780

[dissertaion help]

Blogs are good for every one where we get lots of information for any topics nice job keep it up !!!