Absquatch Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Since you've already declared victory and decided that
> you're talking to yourself
No, I've wondered it, not decided it. I've also wondered not so much whether English is your mother-tongue as whether you had a mother rather than a manufacturer. But I think the banal truth is that you're just not very bright: not magisterial mega-mind, but munchkin Mencken
manqué. If I were you or Calonlan or Li'l Gill, I'd leave it at that. But I like to show as well as say. Here's my claim about poetry and prose:
Quote:Poetry is akin to music. Dickens and, say, Wordsworth are both literary giants, but Dickens is far more creative and profound in what he creates. Which is not to dismiss or disrespect poetry: aesthetically and emotionally it is hugely important to Hom sap, including me. I just think prose is a more complex and interesting phenomenon (and evolutionarily, neurologically and algorithmically related to poetry anyway).
Here's your response:
Quote:Finally, here's some advice for you from Byron (sorry I couldn't find a quotation from a novelist for you, maybe Thackeray or Zola, since they are infinitely more profound and creative in your eyes than poets):
Quote:
In this world of bustle and broil, and especially in the career of writing, a man should calculate upon his powers of resistance before he goes into the arena.
I'm sure your study of literature has been much more profound than mine, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but that advice looks a lot like prose to me. Your fascination with language, nuance, etc apparently didn't help you to understand the difference between "poetry" and "poets". To sneer at my claim and then quote Byron's prose at me is not what I'd have done, in your place. Or rather, it IS what I'd have done. See why I start to wonder about sock-puppets? As I said, your grasp of logic is risible. N.B. This is not to say one can't find poetry that makes the same point. It's not a particularly profound one, after all.
BTW, A.E. Housman is another poet who wrote significant prose. His poetry has been dismissed by some as "adolescent", "fake", "dangerously thin", etc. His prose has never attracted the same labels and never will. Housman's formidable intellect is much more easily discernible in his prose. His heart, on the other hand, is rarely discernible there at all. One Hom sap, two quite distinct forms of literary activity. See above for what I say about poetry vs prose. And see below for some literary creativity at Housman's expense:
What still alive at twenty-two,
A clean, upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat 'tis hard to slit,
Slit your girl's, and swing for it.
Like enough, you won't be glad,
When they come to hang you, lad:
But bacon's not the only thing
That's cured by hanging from a string.
So, when the spilt ink of the night
Spreads o'er the blotting-pad of light,
Lads whose job is still to do
Shall whet their knives, and think of you.
Hugh Kingsmill.
I don't think anyone could ever mock Housman the scholar so effectively.
See how one says AND shows? You ought to try it some time, though perhaps it's a case of "Those who can, do; those who can't, snipe."
> since they [novelists] are infinitely more profound and creative
> in your eyes than poets
Again, the distinction between "prose" and "prose-writers" seems to have escaped you. The "infinitely" is either clumsily sarcastic or dishonest, but I'd hate to see you change your spots at this late stage of our interlocution. And your fascination with language etc again failed to help you understand what I meant by "profound". The
Iliad and
Odyssey are poems composed in a pre-alphabetic oral tradition. And I hope you're not surprised to learn that I think they are very profound and important works of art -- arguably the most important in European literature. But I still think they are less complex and interesting than the prose that followed them at a more advanced, i.e. post-alphabetic, stage of culture. And I mean the prose both as a strictly linguistic phenomenon and for its semantics (e.g. Euclid, Aristotle).
> Has it occurred to you that perhaps the reason why I and
> others haven't gone to great length to discuss your
> misplaced essay with you is because we feel it simply isn't
> important, interesting, or worth our time?
You and Calonlan have both dismissed the essay. Fine. So I invited you to address CAS's creation of simple-seeming names like Voum with complex names like Zothique. If, as you claim, you're fascinated by language, why no interest in CAS's onomastics? The question doesn't become unworthy simply because a little essayist like me has raised it. But my unworthiness is, I suspect, not the issue.
> It isn't up to others to prove a negative
Yes, but it can be effective as polemic.
> As a musician and composer with several CDs to his
> credit, and a published poem, I have already
> survived the dire forecast you inaccurately
> predict, but many thanks for your kind advice and
> concern.
I didn't predict a forecast: I made one. And if you've survived a forecast of doom, it was indeed inaccurate. So, for weary
de haut en bas dismissal, I'd suggest "...I have already survived your dire forecast, but..." would have been more effective. Like your return of serve, your grasp of nuance and logic is in dire need of improvement. Or rather: the former is weak precisely because of your deficiencies in the latter.
> I actually find language in general, and nuances, etymology,
> etc. fascinating--
Glad to hear it. However, though you may indeed be fascinated by language, nuance, etymology, etc, whether you're intellectually equipped for them is another matter.
> --and that's precisely why I found your own efforts so uninteresting.
So you say. I have other explanations. See above for some of them. The rest I will leave as an exercise for the psychologically interested reader.
> P.S. For all your (too loudly) self-proclaimed language interest
> and knowledge, I doubt you have even the slightest idea of the
> actual derivation of my screen name.
No, no, Absquatch:
you proclaim;
I prove. See above. Reading comprehension:
Quote:I'm not a "master" of any body of knowledge (a better term), but I've demonstrated more knowledge of, say, etymology than you've shown so far.
That isn't a loud proclamation of expertise. In fact, as the essay suggested to you, I am an inter-disciplinary butterfly (
Styxygos narcissoides), flitting from bloom to epistemic bloom and dipping my proboscis to my own satisfaction, if no-one else's. But I'm sure that, from whatever profound well of "information" you drew your
nom de guerre for this little arena, it represents your powers of intellect, creation and nuance entirely as they deserve.