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Post by Reba on Jul 4, 2022 22:17:57 GMT -5
Just for the record, I did not mean you are a shambolic thug, merely naively influenced by them which is clear from the writing if you go back. I won’t find much of an audience here on a Lemony Snicket forum? I won’t find much of an audience anywhere to the extent that not many people read unfashionable literature but I should think people devoted to mock-gothic books where the leads are named after Baudelaire would be a fitting place. Literary criticism is literature. The fact that you would make a distinction is that of the poseur autodidact. You should drop that for your own good. What about stuff like Pound’s “Guide to Kulchur” or Hulme’s “Romanticism and Classicism”, Northrop Frye’s “Fearful Symmetry” which taught generations how to finally understand Blake? While those don’t stoke the passions as much as the height of imaginative work, they are no less “literature” and you undoubtedly read stuff of a similar sort. My accusation was not that you were plagiarizing any specific work of criticism but that you were a boring representation of a common hermeneutic in your post. The movements mentioned were referred to as “abstractions bandied about” because that is how you treated them. Even though I have no doubt you are vaguely aware what you meant. Mentioning names and saying they are good or bad is not a dismissal. When Pound would make aphoristic rejections of Milton which people like to throw around out of context, he was engaging in a tacit philosophical and philological argument. He was against his overly Latinate form of language which was against his preference for the developments in English prosody that incorporated French and Italian forms and language. He was not just going “Milton was a fraud, just read Chaucer instead”. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans are wonderful but not neglected by the youth. I can understand that if you are cloistered online then you would think that. But many of the young people who devote themselves to serious literature fetishize them. I see it in the online book circles I move in all the time. And anyway, as long as English is around, they will not die. No one actually needs to be directed to them. And anyway, I have my own idiosyncratic purposes which nonetheless can benefit others bu exposing them to fun books they might otherwise not find. And you keep insisting I’m cringe, and now putting airs. Why? For taking serious things seriously and engaging substantially with them? Because I’m on a children’s literature forum I should make blithe criticisms like people are “cringe” instead of substantially engaging with literature (which is one of the primary points of the Snicket books)? I actually think you could have potential if you would drop the shtick and try to engage properly with things instead of just gesturing to a boring pose. i have no shtick or pose. i merely expressed my opinion about fin de siècle literature as succinctly as i could, citing other, related, authors i prefer, in order to make the context for my opinion more transparent. fair enough if you think my opinion is boring, and you can feel free to argue against it or ignore it. but instead you've tried to completely invalidate it by making some grand assumptions and insinuations about me, that i'm a "poseur autodidact", that i'm "cloistered online" (although you then point to your "online book circles" to contradict my claim.....) and that i'm "naively influenced" by some totally unknown persons. you think that, because i used the word "cringe" on an online messageboard, i've never "substantially engaged with" literature, and you can't fathom that i might have formed my opinion solely from having actually read the authors in question. i'm sorry to awaken you to the fact of varying tastes and ideals, and i'm sorry you took my negative comment regarding your favorite books as a personal attack. my other comment, about you being cringe, in fact had nothing to do with your taste -- only your behavior, i.e. coming into a mid- to low-activity-level children's book forum, declaring yourself "Diggory Deathshead, Literary Expert" and expecting some people you don't know, and who don't know you, to become your strictly disciplined pupils. a couple of other things: - i believe there to be a reasonable distinction between: artists, who occasionally note down, systematize, or polemicize their beliefs about art; researchers, who concern themselves with the facts of literary or art history; and "critics" by profession, a near-subhuman species, who occupy the fields of "literary criticism" and "literary theory." if the English profs are teaching the chillins that Northrop Frye was an artist, then that explains why there was never a great artist with an English degree. - as a youth myself, who has lingered among other youths, many of whom liked to study quasi-old art occasionally, i can say that it is, in fact, none other than the fin de siècle which is most "fetishized" (which you did no small amount of in the OP yourself, Mr. Hell-Ghost). presumably because of the flamboyance and general "queerness" on display (for such an "old-timey" epoch!!!!!1!!), Wilde and Beardsley have been hipster celebrities since before the Smiths. i've seen t-shirts and posters. now, i don't know what the grad students are keeping themselves busy with, but i didn't mean "young people who devote themselves to serious literature" anyway, i meant average young readers.
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marigold
Reptile Researcher
Posts: 22
Likes: 4
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Post by marigold on Jul 4, 2022 23:28:39 GMT -5
I’ve made no grand assumptions. I’ve shown the vulgar hermeneutic which you unknowingly (hence, ‘naively’) perpetuated in a pavlovian way to me. It was very predictable based on what I knew of your tastes lurking around here. If you can’t see the connections, you need to read more. I’ve done a tiny bit of work here to illustrate some for you.
By the way, your mocking at my chosen nom de guerre invites some illumination: “Diggory Deathshead” comes from the wonderful mock-gothic novel Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock which is widely forgotten. This book is ultimately at the head of the lineage which the Snicket books belong to. Oh sure, the more sincere gothic works which were bestsellers in their day is some of the stuff people would gesture at to explain the Snicket lineage but it is Peacock more substantially. And Handler doesn’t even need to have read it to have entered into this tradition. Because the protagonist of Nightmare Abbey, a satire of the author’s friend- Percy Shelley- was named Scythrop. And that name is echoed in “Slothrop”, the protagonist of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a work, like all of Pynchon’s, that is fairly Peacockian. Pynch knew his satirical tradition. And anyway, the asoue books are, among other things, Pynchonian children books so to speak. They have prepared many a young reader for them. When I talk of neglected literature: I speak of stuff like Nightmare Abbey which you likely wouldn’t have heard of if not for me now.
Of course I know Wilde is a popular author and that some people will take up the stereotype of his public figure for mere fun. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Elizabethans will always have more attention, and rightfully so. People with reactionary sensibilities such as yourself are moving to them in droves if you know where to look. When I spoke of being cloistered online I meant because you clearly don’t know about the hundreds of upstart public intellectuals on social media with audiences of thousands of young people in delivering sophistries on Elizabethan lit all the time. The project of the “men of 1914” is alive and well.
There are some reasonable distinctions to be made about criticism but they are not relevant to this discussion and your attempts to do so are pitiful. The broad way we are speaking of criticism here is firmly literature. Poems are often essays in verse and the types of essays that are relevant to this discussion are poetic. Only poetry can critique poetry and this is a common function of it. As the (sometimes middling, sometimes wonderful) poet Robert Graves put it: “The new ideas troop quietly into his mind until suddenly every now and again two of them violently quarrel and drag into the fight a group of other ideas that have been loitering about at the back of his mind for years ; there is great excitement, noise and bloodshed, with finally a reconciliation and drinks all round. The poet writes a tactful police report on the affair and there is the poem”. This apples both to the poem and the type of criticism relevant to this discussion.
As for the charge of you being a poseur, that remains to be properly defended against. My replies are erudite, philosophically sound and helpful. Yours have been mere sneers. By the way, you dismiss Frye at your own peril. Many artists greater than you will ever be recognize his value. Unless you engage my interest better I will end the discussion here I think. I’m sure someone as petulant as you will want to get the last word but I will ignore it as you have nothing of substance to offer I guess.
Anyone else can PM me about where to download the book and I’ll see you next Sunday for discussion.
All the best,
Diggory Deathshead (resident literary expert).
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Post by Reba on Jul 4, 2022 23:55:03 GMT -5
if you then meant “cloistered online” to mean I’m cloistered in the part of the web that Doesn’t witness cockwaving pseudo-intellectual interactions like this on a regular basis, I think that’s tremendously in my favor.
and yes, I do need to have the last word, but it will be one of your favorites:
~ ~~b l i t h e l y~~~
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marigold
Reptile Researcher
Posts: 22
Likes: 4
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Post by marigold on Jul 4, 2022 23:57:05 GMT -5
if you then meant “cloistered online” to mean I’m cloistered in the part of the web that Doesn’t witness cockwaving pseudo-intellectual interactions like this on a regular basis, I think that’s tremendously in my favor. and yes, I do need to have the last word, but it will be one of your favorites: ~ ~~b l i t h e l y~~~ It is one of my favorite words, in fact, after Shelley (and to a much lesser extent of course, Updike). And you are right about those online circles too. This is your first decent post I’ve seen. I’m glad I was still logged in to see it.
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Post by B. on Jul 5, 2022 1:48:40 GMT -5
Wow I leave 667 for one weekend and this happens
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Post by Poe's Coats Host Toast on Jul 6, 2022 14:56:55 GMT -5
By that I mean that I was “descending to his level” . . . I’m sorry I hurt your feelings and stopped you from engaging with me which you were totally going to do otherwise, I’m sure. But the tone was set by Bear’s ignorant and amateurish reply. I’m simply correcting the tone. You're "correcting the tone" by "descending to his level", yup, makes sense. Don't worry, as a complete stranger to me, you have no opportunity to hurt my feelings. But just to correct another one of your wanton assumptions: I am not going to join anymore. You know what they say about assumptions.
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