Esteban's Inestimable Joke

For at least the past four years, I have corresponded on Facebook with Esteban Trev, who lives in Monterrey, ‎Nuevo León, Mexico, not far from Universidad de Monterrey.

From time to time, I have been baffled by a curious style of writing that Esteban frequently adopts in conversations on Facebook.  He sometimes pens what, at first glance, appears to be a rapid-fire, unedited, stream-of-consciousness "brain dump" distinguished by fractured grammar, undiagrammable syntax, and occasional fill-in-the-blanks where some unspecified word presumably belongs.

The odd thing, however, is that Esteban can instantly switch in and out of that peculiar "word salad" mode and return to standard adult English at will.  That suggests that it's a conscious choice to intentionally construct such inscrutable "word salads."

One colleague of mine compares Esteban to John McGie, the Canadian playwright, and director of stage plays, some of which are constructed as absurdist word salad plays.  According to my colleague, he does it because he worked for years as a Youth Counsellor and Care Aid.  McGie's experiences told him that academia and research have rendered the field of psychology and counseling (especially as it concerns troubled youth) as completely absurd practicing forms of iatrogenic treatment. In short, he takes stories of trauma and turns them upside down, causing the audience to both laugh uproariously and feel slightly uncomfortable for having laughed.

My colleague goes on to say that his audiences are both amused and perplexed. The most intelligent ones walk away enlightened about "sacred" texts (in academia) that ought to be viewed as fictional as the Bible.

My colleague wonders if Esteban got his idea from a character like Yoda in Star Wars.

I have now learned that Esteban has a name for his practice of writing lengthy word salads. Apparently, he sees it as some kind of jocular send-up of serious academic writing.

Yesterday, I posted to Meta Theory a brief introduction to "Action Research" as it is employed in school settings when working with difficult or troubled students.

Esteban responded by offering to write "a phantom rendition that takes the linked article and transmutes it from problem solution to appropriate situational handlings" (followed by a lengthy munged adaptation entitled, "A Practitioner's Guide to Actionable Realizations Acts: Joint situational handling in academic business and communal cultures").

Now, if that's not the title of a vicious satirical send-up, I dunno what is.

So, if I'm reading him correctly, Esteban is intentionally crafting his idiosyncratic and jejune send-ups of serious think pieces, intentionally written in a childlike style.

And so one of the purposes of this review is to ask Esteban (in Meta Theory and/or elsewhere) where he came up with the idea of writing "phantom renditions" that "transmutes" academic pieces written in problem-solution mode to "appropriate situational handlings" mode, amounting to a jocular and jejune send-up, intentionally written in a child-like style.

Three years ago, Esteban wrote in a comment on my Facebook TimeLine, "To understand one has to perform a series of adaptations of made-up words… in just the appropriate way  "

Esteban has said on more than one occasion that he just wants to play (meaning he doesn't want to do anything involving serious or tedious academic study or homework).

So my current working hypothesis is that Esteban disdains scholarly academic writing and expressly demonstrates that by gleefully munging it into gibberish. But his munging is deliberate and intentional, not unlike me writing a satire or parody.

Another correspondent who is attending to this same issue suggests that the Dalai Lama would be less worried about appropriate action, and more about the understanding, because that would help steer the appropriate action.  I reckon this is why so many correspondents report being exasperated by their inability to understand Esteban's lengthy and inscrutable word salads.  They are looking for meaning when there really isn't any serious meaning to extract.  Esteban is evidently just doing it as a kind of leg-pulling satire or parody, the same way I go off and write song parodies and comic operas, and other bits of whimsy (fables, allegories, parables, satires, etc).

And so the question on the table is this:  Does Esteban execute his idiosyncratic "transmutation algorithm" by "performing a series of adaptations of made-up words" in what he perplexingly labels "just the appropriate way" (where 'appropriate' is a euphemism for 'inscrutable')?

And so, now it's time to put this tedious review before Esteban's eyes, to see whether he lampoons it or congenially endorses it.