Kasey takes up Jeffery's qualifications on hot eclecticism, which I'm coming to think of as robust consensus.

Not much to add, except that I took Jeffery's point re Tate and Young, Capote and Mailer to be a fine distinction regarding intensities -- in this scenario, Tate developed a beguiling slacker syntax that Young fulfilled, redeemed, and exploded.

For this particular thought-boat to keep afloat, you have to disregard that Tate basically hijacked Ron Padgett's lifework -- established firmly in the firmament before dude was 30 -- and applied Padgett's zig-zag style without Padgett's almost impossibly high standards for brightness of detail, joke, and mood -- without the French-ness.

(I like Tate's work, whatever this liking business means. Somewhere I got the idea that Tate outstripped his contemporaries so early on that he never felt the need to develop what is commonly called ambition. This is a little like Mark Halliday's badass-theory of Tate -- I prefer to think of him as the gifted student in a district without a TAG program.)

So anyway, I took Jeffery's point to be: for hot eclecticism to work, you have to take the hottest point on a given vector. It may be a controversial choice, but if I have to take a caloric reading on Tate and Young, Young is hotter.

Now for the switcheroo -- if my reading of Jeffery is correct, I don't agree with it. Comparison is exactly what hot eclecticism might let us get away from. Reading for peak intensities -- an ideology Chris Stroffolino once referred to as neo-vitalism -- it just might turn a reader back from testing texts for familiar qualities, from looking for confirmation of one's own aesthetics, from policing one's prejudices. A nice dream, I know.