DON'T KNOW MUCH

     Terence Trent d'Arby(Terence Trent of roast beef sandwich) was
on Letterman(an A&E rerun) and he was singing that Sam Cooke song,
'Wonderful World'.  But I had just downed about 16 ounces of
Robitussin and I swear this is what he sang:

    "Don't know much about history,
     Don't know much biology,
     Don't know no science book,
     Don't know much about the French I took

    "But I do know that I love you,
     And I know that if you love me too,
     What a wonderful, wonderful world this could be--"

    "Don't know much about deconstruction, except of course       
     Derrida's famous phrase, "Il n'y a pas dehors du texte,"     
     which means "There is nothing outside of the text," but, and 
     this is important--he is not simply restating the project of 
     the New Critics, reducing, let's say, a poem, to the words of 
     the poem, and *only* that, but rather, I take it to mean that 
     Derrida is textualizing *everything*, history, the author's  
     biography, all of it, and opening the text up to the free play

     of meaning.

     But I do know--(Chorus)
  
    "Don't know much about Soren Kierkegaard, the founder of      
     religious epistemology, having never even finished his       
     _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_.
     Don't know much about transformational epistemology.
     Don't know the difference between a pithy maxim and an       
     apothegm."

    "Don't know much about nothing at all...(Chorus)

    "Don't know much about the Protestant Reformation and         
     certainly nothing about Martin Luther's role in it, aside    
     from the 95 theses he tacked to the wall of that church in   
     Wittenburg.  But that's all.
     And I don't know how to make a souffle, at least not what to 
     do after you separate your eggs, make your cream sauce, melt 
     your cheese in the sauce, beat the whites until stiff but not,

     not dry, fold them in, careful, careful, move the bowl as you 
     do this or you're stirring and not folding, and then bake the 
    whole thing for about half an hour. That's it.  You can eat it 
     now, go ahead, it's good.

     "And I don't know much about superstring theory, n-dimensional

      algebras, or non-Euclidian geometries."

     (Chorus)

     And I *swear* he ended by saying, "Fine.  So call me stupid."