Language under duress

 Kenneth Goldsmith is a conceptual poet, a literary trickster whose books are found art of a sort. He mines the mundane. 

...To make “Seven American Deaths and Disasters,” Mr. Goldsmith has combed through archival radio and television broadcasts of painful events over the past six decades: there are chapters about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon; the explosion aboard the space shuttle Challenger; the shootings at Columbine High School; the attacks at the World Trade Center; and the death of Michael Jackson — and he has transcribed the reports as they unfurled on the air, live and unmediated.

To Mr. Goldsmith’s detractors this may seem like a cheap stunt, a snort of disaster porn. Or it may seem like proof that, in the author’s case, even a blind and snoutless pig will occasionally find a truffle. At times it made me uneasy.

But Mr. Goldsmith has also delivered a kind of found treasure of the American vernacular. His book is about the sounds our culture makes when the reassuring smooth jazz of much of our broadcast media breaks down, when disc jockeys and news anchors are forced to find words for events that are nearly impossible to describe. This book is about language under duress.

I don't get it.  At all.  And the review, with its excerpts not reprinted here, makes it no clearer.  Alas, perhaps I violate Wittgenstein's dictum: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."  Or the review does.  Or the book does.  Or the original broadcasts do.  Or we all do.