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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Dec 14, 2017 - 08:01pm PT
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A veritable geyser of culture, the likes of which is rarely seen on the Taco.
It's good Sycorax finally understands ellipses.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 15, 2017 - 06:22am PT
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sempervirens: My point is that religion is blind faith and that is a problem for humanity. You are bringing up my beliefs but I have not been arguing about my personal beliefs. I'm using definitions of words.
DICTIONARIES?
Well, if that’s all there is to knowledge—knowing what words mean—then everyone must be full up. I can’t begin to say how shallow it is to claim that one knows something because they can use a dictionary fruitfully. Indeed, why would anyone want or need to take any course of study when the world and its libraries are full of dictionaries. Buy the OED, read it, and you’d be done.
VISIONS
Science is also a kind of blind faith if you accepts the assumptions, belief systems, and values of that science holds dear. Religion is also a kind of blind faith if one does the same thing. Almost everyone holds some set of values, beliefs, and norms of behavior dear.
Science’s ability to replicate and predict what occurs within boundaries are not final arbiters of what is true and what is false. Humanities’ ability to subjectively describe does not hold the final judgment of what is subjectively truthful, . . . and on and on. Disciplines are all different forms of socialization and institutionalization. They all present ruts.
BTW, are you quite clear on what science claims it is and how to do it? It’s an approach; nothing gets proven. What happens is that theories get pitted against each other, and the ones that seem to describe or fit data better within a set of created constructs and stable conditions are deemed “winners,” for a while.
Hold no vision sacrosanct.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 15, 2017 - 10:34am PT
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I watched the video of Act 3, Scene 3 of Othello. The Iago rendition is new to me. He doesn't seem to be evil at all!
Jim: . . . your ilk professionally pummels the enjoyment of reading out of those who enjoy reading in the first place.
It’s been said that good writing is rewriting, . . . again and again and again until words sing. Good reading seems the same to me. I don’t know how many times Louis L’amour can be re-read, but I have seen that Shakespeare can—and needs to be—reread over and over until it plumbs one’s soul. There is a point to studying literature in humanities that does not appear to show up in the sciences (unless one appreciates the style in which a scientific article is written).
I’ll take that Lafite, Paul.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Dec 15, 2017 - 11:11am PT
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Louis L’amour (Louie) listed some dos and don't and I use them when teaching writing symposiums.
Genre fiction has largely replaced "literature" as the go-to medium in this age of sound bites and Tweets. It's also prompted stylistic changes for those still chasing "literature," namely, losing rambling exposition, evaluating and commentary - basically supplying readers with an official take on the narrative.
Such intrusions reach back to the Chorus' trotted out by Greek dramatists, who eventually added a chief spokesman to narrate some simple dramatic story, interlarded by riffs from the Chorus. "Two speakers were later used, then three, in the works of the Attic tragedians. The Athenian audience looked on the Chorus as an essential unity of the play to insure unity of time, place, and action in the ongoing narrative."
Shakespeare used the Chorus (usually in the person of a single speaker) to explain before each act what had happened since the events portrayed in the last act, and/or primed the audience for what was ahead. In cinematic terms (as seen in documentaries), the Chorus is the equivalent of a "talking head" interview, giving us the low-down.
Louis L’amour and others pretty much dumped all traces of the chorus and rendered most of the narrative "in-scene," propelled by action and dialogue, with a minimum of telling. This yields relentless forward propulsion in keeping with the modern yin for a quick read. It also nixes the richness of many timeless passages that nowadays readers tend to surf past, looking for people.
If Moby Dick was given to a present day editor it would run 120 pages, max. And James Fenimore Cooper ... which we all suffered though as undergrads? Probably wouldn't make the cut. Find me a person who's actually read the Deerslayer, word for word, cover to cover.
Presentation style is morphing as we speak so adventures in literature continue, as they always have. But I still love the old stuff.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Dec 15, 2017 - 03:00pm PT
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Excellent post, John. Very informative!
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Dec 15, 2017 - 04:43pm PT
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James Fenimore Cooper, holy crap! He's the Eric Clapton of a certain kind of literature that, for the life of me, I can't remember the name of right now.
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Dec 15, 2017 - 04:47pm PT
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Moore’s defeat...one small step forward for secularism, one small step back for religion...at least the Evangelical version. And so it goes.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Dec 15, 2017 - 05:09pm PT
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eeyonkee, Cooper was champion of "Historical Fiction," which was later styled, Romantic Fiction, and several other names. He had a jam packed, varied and fascinating life and wrote his ass off. Crazy amount of books, novels, and articles.
And Sycorax, that O'Neil riff is a classic but I wish he's skipped the metaphorical language. His boundary experience on the beach didn't have to be "like" anything else to make it more better. But the guy nailed it, fo sho.
Sorry for the thread drift but this is a running conversation I reckon.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 15, 2017 - 05:30pm PT
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^^^^^
Indeed. WHERE IS THE SCIENCE?!
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Dec 15, 2017 - 05:53pm PT
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It gets wearing reading the religion bashing on one hand and the science bashing on the other. At least to me. I welcome the literature drift.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Dec 15, 2017 - 07:19pm PT
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Dec 15, 2017 - 08:30pm PT
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"Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is--Stanley Kowalski--survivor of the stone age!"
Eerie that this should appear on a climbing forum, so close is the resemblance to our own BURT BRONSON. Strange times.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 16, 2017 - 06:44am PT
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"Two speakers were later used, then three, in the works of the Attic tragedians. The Athenian audience looked on the Chorus as an essential unity of the play to insure unity of time, place, and action in the ongoing narrative."
I appreciate Largo’s technical exposition about the differences in writing conventions from the times of early recorded storytelling. There might be more to say about it phylogenetically.
Scholars argue that the consciousness of man has developed over time. Jaynes, for example, argued that early Man was not conscious of volition, intentions, planning, initiative. It occurred without consciousness, being “told” from one hemisphere to the other in an authoritative voice (viola! “God”). “Theology is anthropology” was an 1850s notion that Freud expanded with the idea of “projection.” Jung and his followers (e.g., Campbell, Neumann, Von Franz, and many others) saw the process of projection differently, of course (but we could take that up elsewhere).
It’s been argued that the Chorus was a necessary means to present stories of human interest with what the gods and the Fates offered to Man culturally / narratively. One dominant narrative about the evolution of consciousness is that its trajectory has been towards autonomy and independence through a full development of will—will to challenge what one’s parents, one’s communities, and one’s nation established. One could say that the entire history of the species has been towards standing on one’s own feet physically, spiritually, mentally, and socially. Hence, the chorus and high levels of narration (please also see literary conversations by Gerard Genette, Seymour Chatman, Mieke Bal, and other new-age and postmodern theorists) were needed because the prevailing notions of human free will were constrained culturally (and factually). When the gods, the Fates, and other authorities dictate what is possible, then quite simply man could not only not decide for him or herself, he and she could not show himself to be fully human in action. Being fully human in ancient times meant being a cog in a very big drama of super beings and super forces. It is the chorus that worked with that notion so that an audience could understand its place in its culture comfortably.
I submit it would have been nigh impossible to have watched a relatively contemporary story in classical Greek cultures (or even more ancient). What people believed is what they could see.
Supposedly, the leading-edge, taproot of men and women have finally developed to a point where they *can* think and feel for themselves. Now (we are sometimes told) those men and women are taking the next step forward in consciousness by learning to reintegrate back into the specie collective in its environment, but now with an understanding from an autonomous self. Some say the push towards autonomy through will might have gone a bit too far in its assumptions of independence (see also Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”)
For this thread, the conversations about what the humanities and literature has to offer is not a thread drift, I’d say.
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 16, 2017 - 07:47am PT
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LOL .......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 16, 2017 - 09:55am PT
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From Dant's Divine Comedy, Inferno:
I haven't read much Dant.
Taking a break from grading?
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Dec 16, 2017 - 09:56am PT
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sycorax, I don't usually follow this thread and I usually enjoy your comments
on literature so I am wondering what axe you seem to be grinding here.
For the record I never willingly read a fictional work until I took a
required English course in college. Then I came over from the dark side
although, to be honest, I still read non-fiction for the most part.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 16, 2017 - 10:00am PT
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It's a "sons of Abraham" sort of thing.
But then, I'm a patriarchal science sausage, what do I know.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
Many of sycorax's implied and explicit criticisms are apt. Not that they need my affirmation...
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Lennox
climber
in the land of the blind
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Dec 16, 2017 - 11:15am PT
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Not that they need my affirmation...
And you probably put that ellipsis at the end there just to torment her.
. )
Full on strike against long-winded dominating science/engeneering males and their with poor writing skills.
. )
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Dec 16, 2017 - 11:19am PT
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I don't think Sycorax is "grinding an ax," per se, anymore than a math geek will stand tall and firm in his/her equations, trotting out same not so much to prove a point but to confirm the glory of a particular line of thought. That's called passion and conviction.
What's more, the quotes cited are not knocks against science, anymore than Ed's wonderful photos of Yosemite etc. are knocks against the abacus in his trunk. It's only when one perspective is artificially given "favored nation" status over all others that we pratfall into fundamentalist science and religion, made worse and pathetic by those furnishing reasons for a fundamentalist perspective. My sense of it is that behind any stanuch view lurks fear, most of it unconscious.
Stuck in my mind are two quips in this regards: Feynman saying, "If you think you understand it (QM), you don't," and Maezumi Roshi jumping up during a retreat I was at 20 some years ago and yelling, "It's ungraspable." Quite possibly, both men were essentially saying the same thing from different perspectives.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 16, 2017 - 11:39am PT
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sycorax: ...narrative...
Perhaps a bit more conversation might be useful here than one word.
“Narrative” may well be term that one might use to parade vogue dilettantism, but it is also code for a complaint from more postmodern literary theorists. Their complaint? Too much narration, or at least that narration is a third-person point of view that tends to be intellectually hegemonic.
If a person can think and feel for themselves, there may be far less need to be told what to see and from what vantage point.
We don’t need no sticking badges, we don’t need no pompous experts, we don’t need no authorities to tell us what to see, what to pay attention to, how to think, or what to value.
(I thought I’d just add a little substance to what could be a knee-jerk reaction.)
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