Posted on 06/03/2002 8:57:40 PM PDT by cornelis
Would be a good name for Keith Richards.
"some things are so stupid only intellectuals believe them"
That's very good, Drift. I hope you don't mind if I quote you.
I remember one college professor who was carried away by the sound of nuts and bolts jolted by a running motor. I think that was one of Cage's opera.
It also brings to mind the political opinions of so many "Liberal" academic "intellectuals".
Here's the start:
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) - A performance of an organ piece by American composer John Cage that is meant to last 639 years began in an eastern German church with 16 months of silence.
The project honoring Cage's avant-garde work started at midnight Tuesday in Halberstadt and foresees taking the composer at his word by stretching Organ2/ASLSP - the letters stand for As Slow As Possible - over centuries.
Yes, and comic books are influential literature. However, I suppose most people left them ages past and their libraries contain great books not comic books.
It would take a stiff monetary incentive for me to sit through Cage. I'd rather listen to a mosquito in a dark room.
Even after reading it twice I felt I only had an autistic glimpse of who the characters were.
I would be grateful if you could shed just a little light on this book for me.
It really is a wonderful and very rich book, and I love it (though I doubt that I would have liked Falkner if I had known him personally).
I guess one thing I like is Falkner's concepts of life, time, civilization, reality, et al. which are easier to grasp in Absalom! Absalom!. The entire book, I think, may be an expansion of the theme from MacBeth--whether life has any meaning or not. I think Falkner's answer is that life is deep and rich with meaning.
I love the way Benjy tells the whole story, even though he's an idiot and doesn't understand any of it, but it's all there. The meaning of everything is there before us all, though we may not have the capacity to understand it.
I love the way it jumps back and forth in time, like memory or dream, and raises questions about the difference, if there is any, between reality and illusion.
I love the way the form of his works is an inextricable part of the content. Maybe life's like that.
One of his prvailing ideas is that all of life, all of history, is paraded before everyone's eyes, whether we be in a small town in Mississippi or wherever, over and over again; it's all there for us to see. Falkner's concept may have influenced my own conviction that the cosmos is God's holy scripture and that Truth is there for all of us to read.
The plot of The Sound and the Fury, it seems to me, is subordinate to everything else Falkner has to say. The Compsons are decadent aristocracy. Quentin commits suicide. Caddie comes to a dismal end. Etc. I think the plot, such as it is, is a vehicle for everything else, and one might say that the stories--or plots--of our lives are similarly vehicles for everything else.
I hope I've done justice to this. Many people could answer the question a lot better than I can, Avg. Maybe someone here on FR will.
One of my most memorable experiences--ever--was a day in The National Museum in Athens. The guide had a B.S. in archeology and she had been conducting tours there for 20 years. The first thing she said was: "I'm not going to show you anything that is great. I'm going to show you what I like." She did. And she explained to me why she liked it! What she found in it. What it said to her and not to anyone else. Sometimes she explained why she didn't like something and why something was inferior, even though it might appeal to someone else. She absolutely blew my mind. I have never gotten over that experience. I wish I could thank her. --SB
Next note?
"The first three notes won't be played until Jan. 5, 2003. Until then, time will be marked by the sound of air rushing through the bellows."
Mark your calendars.
Couldn't you just give me a ring?
That's logical. Can art be analyzed with art?
Still, life is short and often works of profound complexity yield no reward. It just isn't worthwhile studying Derrida or Foucault, not to speak of the mountains of secondary literature responding to it (perhaps Levinas is a worthwhile exception). Modern art has been at first deliberately private (even in the case of Faulkner, Joyce, and imitators) and then even more so by being deliberately intended not to be understood. This last is part of the tendency toward a dehumanization which concerned Ortega.
All good things come through hard work.
Thanks for you thoughts. There's probably more to be said.
Yes, unless I've misunderstood what you mean. Is meaning self-referential? No.
Freeper Dakmar responds "These folks need to let about 100 pounds of air pressure out of their egos."
There is a good chapter on egotism in Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences
In the absence of truth there is no necessity, and this observation may serve as an index to the position of the modern egotist. Having become incapable of knowing, he becomes incapable of working, in the sense that all work is a bringing of the ideal from potentiality into actuality. We perceive this simply when his egotism prevents realization that he is an obligated creature, bound to rational employment. The modern worker does not, save in rare instances, respond to the ideal in the task.
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