Oh I don’t know, scientific achievements and breakthroughs that overall make people live longer, better and more functional lives in every conceivable way? This would include developments in biology, chemistry and physics? Fucking electricity? Being stuck in this awful and cold fucking country, I’m rather happy about the engineering that made is such that I can walk around in shorts in my condo when its minus fucking fourty outside without the wind chill.
Perhaps because that really is your overriding concern. In your posts, you consistently use art to divide the world into opposing groups classified as superior or inferior. These groups are always depicted as completely homogeneous, and if a group contains your favourite art, it becomes uniformly superior to all others in every way. Then the sole purpose of art becomes to justify everything the superior groups might do to the inferior ones. It’s like exonerating Alex in <i>A Clockwork Orange</i> on the grounds that he likes Beethoven.
And the actual content of the art, everything that it says and expresses, becomes totally irrelevant in this process, a mere sidenote to the main event. Thus, the only time you bring up the beauty of the Amiens Cathedral, you do it solely to defend policies towards American Indians, which occurred 500 years later on a different continent. But you don’t really want to talk about the cathedral itself, much as you don’t want to talk about Joyce and Wilde. They’re names that you use to assert “Western” superiority, which really means <i>your</i> superiority. Nothing more.
The “enterprise,” whatever it is, is not a justification for annihilating other peoples and making money, either. Andrew Jackson’s policy toward the Indians is not justified by the fact that William Shakespeare spoke English 200 years earlier in another country. Actually the two are irrelevant to each other. To say nothing of the fact that many artists were directly <i>opposed</i> to policies of this type, thereby going directly <i>against</i> the “enterprise” of Western society at the time. Like Byron:
Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant!
Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin’s gore,
And thus for wider carnage taught to pant,
Transferr’d to gorge upon a sister shore,
The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want,
With just enough of talent, and no more,
To lengthen fetters by another fix’d,
And offer poison long already mix’d.
Of course, British society in Byron’s time had no shortage of court poets who wrote huge epics extolling the British Empire and its noble “enterprise.” Like Southey, whose works are now largely forgotten, and whose memory survives mostly because Byron attacked him:
Europe has slaves, allies, kings, armies still,
And Southey lives to sing them very ill.
If you want to talk about Shakespeare, please, be my guest. Let’s make another thread about his plays and talk about their content, by which I mean what is actually written in them, rather than how superior they are. If you want to attack the idea of modern “guilt” over the massacres of American Indians, like The 984 did above, that’s fine too. But don’t use great artists as props to justify your own advocacy of those “slaves, allies, kings, armies,” ignoring everything the artists said.
Perhaps that it’s not a straight self-portrait, that Joyce was less self-absorbed than Dedalus, and able to exaggerate and make fun of some aspect of his own character. Consider the end of Chapter 3. Dedalus makes the most dense intellectual soliloquy in the book, and then is shown picking his nose, after looking around to make sure no one sees him.
Yes, read it. Then you will know if you like it or not, for certain. As far as I’ve gathered, people usually lose patience because it’s long, based more on thoughts than action (it isn’t always clear whose thoughts they are) and doesn’t seem to have a “point”. You could of course find it “pretty easy”, as Arac did. Anyway, the point is I found it extremely rewarding.
The book describes a kind-of normal day in the life, so its point is equal to that an ordinary day has. You get to decide what it is. Your opinion on the book will also depend on the type of books you enjoy. I’m more interested in the raw pleasure I get out of a book and Ulysses delivers on that aspect. It can also be thought-provoking (as all books IMO are) and it has a last chapter I quite enjoy. You may want to give it a try.
I would love to talk about Joyce’s and Wilde’s works, which I basically think about all day, except for that the thread was started about Thanksgiving and quickly devolved into nihilism which I was responding to. If your oversimple mischaracterization of Bloom and Dedalus were the genesis of the discussion, you can be sure I would have replied accordingly, rather than talk about buildings.
To say nothing of the fact that many artists were directly opposed to policies of this type, thereby going directly against the “enterprise” of Western society at the time. Like Byron
I wish dear Arac were about to call you on your flaws of logic. How can a born member of a society “go against” that same society and not be somehow part of a greater whole? “Western civilization”–or any civilization-- is not simply the political manifestations of the current ruling party or class. I already alluded to the supremely antithetical nature of European civilization, of which Bryon and his ilk (whom I vastly appreciate) are good examples.
Andrew Jackson’s policy toward the Indians is not justified by the fact that William Shakespeare spoke English 200 years earlier in another country.
It certainly isn’t, which would be absurd in more ways than I care to imagine. But what about in the other direction? Do the lives and careers of innumberable Americans (not just artists, but scientists, climate control engineers–not to mention most of us)… does their existence owe something to the destruction and removal of the Indians? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it seems we’re mentioning the ghosts of people who never were as if they live among us. Which maybe the Indians believe, I really don’t know. So far, my argument has been rather too … Schopenhauerian for my tastes, in depending on art to justify existence. I suppose I really feel that the mere fact of my existence validates all past suffering of manking. Which I’m certain is only more taboo than my previously outrageous claims.
P.S. on the reading of Ulysses: It’s important you give the book time. There are passages of stunning lyrical beauty, but also a lot more apparently mundane, even boring description. I often found that I did not have an appreciation of a chapter or part of the book until I was done reading it, when you suddenly realize–after its too late–you’ve been being slowly swallowed by a whale. The novel as a whole works in this way in to some degree. You may find yourself feeling ambivalent towards Bloom until he disappears for a few pages and suddenly, unexpectedly reappears and appears somehow transfigured. Ulysses more than anything else I’ve read is a “grower”.
Intellectual barbeque more like Sil burnfest amirite
Yeah, silly me, actually describing a book’s content, rather than simply proclaiming it to be great and then proceeding to call every other culture inferior.
I was going for a Hollywood-script quality in my description. But there’s truth in the oversimplification. Bloom <i>is</i> a much more attractive character than Dedalus, mostly because he is compassionate and Dedalus is not. Dedalus is unpleasant not because of his ideas, which are taken seriously, but because of his self-absorption. This latter quality can be seen in how they talk to each other in the last chapters. Bloom views Dedalus as a son, but Dedalus basically looks down on him.
British imperialism played a dominant role in all of British society, and did much more, alas, to shape world history than all of Byron’s writings. The empire is dead, but the mentality is not: Imperial apologism is fashionable nowadays, and not just in your posts. By attacking Britain’s actions in Ireland, Byron was, in fact, going against the British imperialist project, the biggest of its time. So, using great art to justify or excuse the genocide of the Indians (although you’ve backed away from that now) is not only bizarre nonsense, it’s a perversion much like taking Byron’s attack on Castlereagh and arguing that those very lines imply that Castlereagh was right in everything he did.
In the sense that all present events are shaped by past ones, yes. But that still doesn’t <i>justify</i> the destruction of the Indians. For one thing, writing off past misdeeds is just an excuse to do the same with present ones. Which is why, for example, some political commentators are now trying to rehabilitate the Vietnam War, when what they’re really agitating for is more war in the present. But as far as great culture goes, it’s entirely possible to view the destruction of the Indians as criminal without in any way detracting from great European art. Much like it is possible to condemn Jefferson’s slaveownership while venerating his contributions to political philosophy.
Don’t get your hopes up, it’s too widespread to be taboo. But that statement certainly explains why you enjoy classifying people into superiors or inferiors so much. And since you yourself are in no danger of suffering in some historical catastrophe, it’s even easier to write them off. Any young man with a superiority complex thinks that way, but there’s certainly nothing of James Joyce in it.
So… did anyone enjoy Thanksgiving? 
Yeah. I did. A MONTH AGO.
In the sense that all present events are shaped by past ones, yes. But that still doesn’t <i>justify</i> the destruction of the Indians. For one thing, writing off past misdeeds is just an excuse to do the same with present ones. Which is why, for example, some political commentators are now trying to rehabilitate the Vietnam War, when what they’re really agitating for is more war in the present. But as far as great culture goes, it’s entirely possible to view the destruction of the Indians as criminal without in any way detracting from great European art. Much like it is possible to condemn Jefferson’s slaveownership while venerating his contributions to political philosophy.
I suppose it’s been a big mistake to go on like this without bringing up another point, I guess you could call it the “historiosity” of morals. Well, I think its utterly important for us to understand the actions of the invading Europeans and later, Andrew Jackson, closer to as they must have. To go back in time and indict the conquistadors with our modern morals is something that has never appealed to me. I think the best justification one can probably make for the original eradication of the Indians is that the world–nature–has been a fundamentally dangerous place even for rich white people, until relatively recently in Western countries. We’re viewing the actions of people 500 years ago as if they lived in the same comfortable world as we, when really they were looking death in the face all the time.
Don’t get your hopes up, it’s too widespread to be taboo. But that statement certainly explains why you enjoy classifying people into superiors or inferiors so much. And since you yourself are in no danger of suffering in some historical catastrophe, it’s even easier to write them off. Any young man with a superiority complex thinks that way, but there’s certainly nothing of James Joyce in it.
You’ve simplified by statement too much to write it off as a superiority complex. In my book, it’s simply the concession of the conscience everyone has to make to go on living, although it seems innappropriate. It’s a bit of a twist to what you mean, but I’ll also point out that Joyce was an immense egomaniac, one of the biggest, and its what allowed him to undertake his vision of representing the entirety of existence.
This sentiment which I attempt to share with Joyce is also my reply to your bit about Byron. While if I lived in his time (and probably as a poor Irishman) I would have undoubtedly been a partisan on the same side, from the distance of history, at least, I can appreciate both sides of the conflict and the conflict itself. I have a tendency to want to view things as if looking down and seeing the greater whole, which you might call a superiority or god-complex, but before you judge, could it be that the role of the artist is closer to the role of god than people are willing to admit?
This is much harder thing to do with something like the Vietnam War, for much more recent, however, it is saved from total callousness in large degree by the fact that the Irish (and Vietnamese) continue to exist… and have in fact done quite well for themselves.
And I did enjoy Thanksgiving. First family party I’ve been able to get smashed at.
You can try to understand how Jackson thought without making excuses for him, much less turning the other way around to argue that his policies were actually good just because of his cultural origin. For one thing, even in Jackson’s time there were surely some people who thought differently. Therefore, Jackson shouldn’t get a free pass for his viciousness just because his time was also vicious. Jackson’s policy was a product of Jackson’s own limitations as much as of those of his time. Similarly, Jefferson lived in the time of slavery, but even then there were some people who freed their slaves or opposed slavery. This doesn’t take away from Jefferson’s genius – however, even his own accomplishments, much less accomplishments by great artists from other countries and times, don’t automatically turn all of his sins into virtues.
Probably. What counts, however, is that <i>Ulysses</i> is very compassionately written. The very scope of the allegory makes it compassionate, because all of the characters really are absolutely ordinary – and that’s part of what made the novel original at the time. There is nothing “great” about Bloom’s life. It is very mundane and complacent, it won’t affect history in any way, and Bloom himself certainly won’t make any contributions to art or philosophy, to the extent that he is familiar with them at all. He’s not “superior” by any aesthetic standard. And <i>yet</i>, Joyce draws tenable parallels between him and Odysseus, without contradicting his ordinariness. His life is thus shown to have value, even equal value to the life of a great epic hero. And it’s not just Bloom who gets treated in this way, it’s everybody.
But when you engage in this kind of reasoning, group terms like “Irish” and “Vietnamese” become meaningless. Because even if all Vietnamese now living get rich tomorrow, first of all, that would happen despite the Vietnam War rather than because of it, and second, it would be no consolation to millions of Vietnamese who were horrifically killed in the war without having been consulted on the matter. It’s like saying that, as long as Bill Gates is rich, it doesn’t matter how many Americans get killed in Iraq, just because Bill Gates is also an American. Such an argument dehumanizes the people who die, because it totally dismisses their lives on arbitrary grounds. Which is why I say there’s nothing of Joyce in that, because <i>Ulysses</i> doesn’t dismiss anybody’s life, it does the exact opposite.
There is also the fact that if the Oscar referred to bears the surname Wilde, that Oscar wouldn’t be walking with Sil. He would punch Sil in the fucking jaw.
GAP: I’d read Ulysses. It, much like Heart of Darkness and Jude the obscure, is a “love it or hate it” book, from my experience. By those I know who have read it, it is adored and lambasted in equal measure.
Sil: I was trying to avoid reading your posts themselves, but the bolded Nihilism drew me in. How, precisely, does actually giving a shit about what has been done in the past constitute nihilism? Pray tell, what does so-called-guilt (a term I find quite inaccurate to describe my own feelings on the subject) have in common with a philosophy which bears the central conceit of not giving a shit or believing any form of communication is feasible.
As for correcting SK’s logic, he’s actually on sound ground, from the stance he is arguing. He isn’t saying Byron went against European Culture, to my understanding, he’s saying using the great figures of European Culture like Byron to justify actions they would have looked upon with utter derision (in a more extreme example, justify the Nazis’ actions by waxing poetic about the greatness of Adam Weishaupt’s anarchist political theory pieces) is inane. Less logically sound are most of the arguments you have made; The fact that life was difficult = it is okay to kill them because nature might’ve done it anyway? The part of your most recent post beginning with “You’ve simplified by statement too much to write it off as a superiority complex” simply does not make sense. At all. None of the ideas really follow, you give no example or precedent to any of your claims, and no sensible explanation of what you’re even trying to make as a point.
Oh, yes, all us fucking primitive indians are psychologically dependant and culturally based in the idea of fucking ghosts. I think audio recordings are the ghosts of dead singers talking to me. Because I, along with everyone else on the tribal registry, am an ignorant fucking savage. Honestly, your condmenation of SK’s so-called “over-simplification” (which is actually a sensical argument from the point he is making; defending an argument in specfics but not in its more general, or simplified, rarely stands to reason. No, none of the arguments you’ve made have been one of those rare occasions.), yet you seem to thrive upon, indeed, to require misinterpretations of others’ statements, so that you can find something in them that does not make sense. Because people believe that the wrongs of history should not be forgotten (or worse yet, written off on the basis of a bullshit “thank you for not murdering us back then so we got a chance to do it to you later on” holiday) so that they are not repeated (the same reason a Swasticka should be displayed in history museums over pictures of what the nazis did so that such evil is never forgetten and the mere image of that flag brings bile into the throats of any who look upon it an its evil is never, ever forgotten) is not, logically, even close to, how did you put it, refering to the dead as though they still walked the land among us. Well, the dead may not, but their children’s children’s children walk along it and look at one side of their family riddled by alcoholism; trapped on Reservations like fucking animals; half-expected to say “Me am Injun” and asked, endlessly, if they are Cherokee or Sioux (they were Pawnee); assailed for centuries as primitive then drafted when the Big, Great Europeans need somebody to talk in a language to complex to get translated and forgotten about within a few years save for a shitty Nick Cage movie; their cultural centers and communions reduced fucking sick, shitty near carnivals where little elementary school kids go and watch the funny indians dance, while the other side of my heritage got off with the allowance to lead a normal life. When you look at it like that, maybe it is almost like the dead are walking around with us, but the dead people who walk around didn’t exist; they’re the big-feather wearing, square jawed warrior chiefs of stereotype lore that people still superimpose over the features of any “Indian” they see until it is a dehumanized caricature.
I have fought SK to a stalemate, which I can tell because my mind is no longer frazzled in preparing a response to him. So let me reply mostly to you, sweet Arac.
There is also the fact that if the Oscar referred to bears the surname Wilde, that Oscar wouldn’t be walking with Sil. He would punch Sil in the fucking jaw.
Interesting! You would probably find it a most enlightening experience to be confronted with my actual personality rather than the various characters I play and masks I wear here, and I can partly understand your prediction, if I were to play the quasi-fascist contarian I so often do here in front of Mr. Wilde (himself one of the great contrarians of history.) But please, explain furthur.
Sil: I was trying to avoid reading your posts themselves, but the bolded Nihilism drew me in. How, precisely, does actually giving a shit about what has been done in the past constitute nihilism? Pray tell, what does so-called-guilt (a term I find quite inaccurate to describe my own feelings on the subject) have in common with a philosophy which bears the central conceit of not giving a shit or believing any form of communication is feasible.
It feels like I’ve explained this many times before, but the usage of the word “nihilism” is fraught with complexities… Libraries have been written in explicating these concepts, but don’t think I’m trying to feel superior for attempting to do so now. If you were to call Nietzsche a nihilist, you would be both right and wrong. I suppose the fundamental, barebones quality of nihilism is a belief that there is no ultimate or at least, transcendant authority for human moral/value judgments, etc. This would describe Nietzsche adequately enough, but! if you take nihilism to mean that he doesn’t believe that anything has value or meaning, you’re not just wrong but immensely so. Both terms are correct in different contexts. When I said I was replying to nihilism, I was somewhat facetiously and perhaps less accurately suggesting the nature of remarks like Nulani’s in posting #2, which if taken at face value function as a sort of denial of life.
As for my remark about Indians believing in ghosts, that was a completely conscious gesture, not so much to outrage as to amuse… I suppose it was a concession to the image you folks must have of me. Staying in character, in other words.
It was an illustration of arguing against you, more than an actual supposition; Oscar Wilde prided himself on being able to counter assaults with wittier, verbal comebacks. He abhorred, in general, physical violence. At least any he was involved in, certainly. My point is that to Wilde, you wouldn’t even be worth a clever comeback; the way he ceased humour entirely after his time in prison because “The Human Race does not deserve laughter.” You don’t deserve wit.
Although, it’s good to know you hide behind a mask, although this is getting dangerously close to “you are all chesspieces” time again.
Nietzsche was not addressed whatsoever in my reply, I don’t believe. If he was, I can’t imagine why. Anyway; so far, your interpretation of nihilism as given above still does not explain how our post qualifies.
Ah, then I misunderstood the posts being referred to. My apologies.
When I made that hideously racist comment, I was only kidding, guys! Just amusing myself!
Well, as an anarchist (although I subscribe to the Anarcho-Syndicism practiced in Spain hardly identifiable with the base, majority concept of anarchy, but technically anarchy nonetheless) I am expected to riot at the slightest provocation, hurl moltov cocktails, and try and bomb shit every Guy Fawkes day. I think I’m also supposed to rob old ladies and rape young girls. I was once asked by someone if I sewed fields with salt when I passed when anarchy was mentioned, but I believe they were mocking the trend rather than being a part of it. Anyway, the point is, if people think that of me, should I go out and do all of those things to stay in character? And that just makes it “okay”? I go break a bottle over a man’s head because I disagree with his politics then slit his throat for his boots, and it’s okay because I’m just “in character”?
So…I think the redskins could go all the way and win the world series this year.
The Redskins are a football team.
REDSKINS?? You racist. You disgusting pig of a racist.
You sons of bitches. I hate you. Now I have to back and write an Alternate History short story where Andrew Jackson goes up against the Redskins, as in the football team.
I have so fucking much school work due tomorrow, and thanks to your off-topic drivel, not I have to do this.
I just want it on the record that I am unhappy with this development.
If Andrew Jackson vs. the Washington Redskins is the final product of this argument, I am well pleased.
Just for the record, wearing the mask of being a dick doesn’t make you any less of a dick. In fact, it makes you more of one, as you actually work at it, rather than simply being one (which is bad enough).
Not that i want to restart this thread. >.> Stay dead!
The Redskins suck. Ignoring the wrong sport aspect, the Redskins won’t make the playoffs this year.
The only offensive sports teams that can win the World Series are the Braves and Indians. Let’s go Bravos. 
About a year ago, though, the NCAA unilaterally and out-of-the-blue banned all NCAA schools from having “offensive Native American” mascots. If schools didn’t abide, they would be banned from post-season tournaments. Some schools went on to appeal the ban, and those which had the backing of the local tribes (such as the Florida State Seminoles or Utah Utes) were allowed to keep their mascots.