127300+ entries in 0.041s
mircea_popescu: the only reason they're not the best vacuum cleaner door to door salesmen is that selling vacuum cleaners door to door isn't all that great.
mircea_popescu: and no, you can't have a story of arbitrary length ; anything longer than a novel becomes a sludge of separate stories whether you want to or not.
mircea_popescu: diana_coman finer, i will wager, than anything to be found in the 50k lop (lines of pablum) here under consideration.
mircea_popescu: phf jkj particularly useful reference here ; and yes quite so.
mircea_popescu: diana_coman take the story of the whore who wanted to fuck the patriarch. it's a fine story.
mircea_popescu: yes fans. every generation has its thing, orwell tells the story of their infatuation with "a shrophsire lad" (which, for maximal lulz, is actually referenced in, say, a room with a view - old hag actually attempts to discuss florence in terms of a sort of shropshire.)
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo "they sunk instead of swam" << swimming. or alternatively, "instead of swan" i guess.
mircea_popescu: why the fuck does archive.is shot of bitfines come out blank o.O
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform this is how it works, now it can be theirs, so.
mircea_popescu: really, byzantine fiction (currently known as the vulgate) is much better. but i don't think much more of the people who regard the bible as "great writing" than of the tolkien fans.
mircea_popescu: hanbot i was referencing this with the baudelaire and whore story. but then again... absolutely nobody would have guessed as much, i figure, amirite.
mircea_popescu: this might be the first html document that starts with a </style> tag.
mircea_popescu: huxley said the same thing. to his misfortune, he chose to die the day they killed kennedy, and so...
mircea_popescu: as i said, we're not about to dispose of this matter here and now anywayz.
mircea_popescu: the thing flew "look, this thing almost like in carroll is in tolkien" "yes but here's deluged in crap" "oh, well this guy deluges things in crap" "that he does or that he doesn't has no bearing on crap and deluging."
mircea_popescu: we're talking of tolkien and hgis masteries. that he THINKS it's ok to disregard the brevity rule does not make it go away.
mircea_popescu: hanbot why would you place ~it in the actual work~ when it's a response to a meta-discussion you started with " i don't think tolkien had much mastery of economy of words" ?
mircea_popescu: it's the fundamental core of all bad literature, "what if the rules didn't apply". good literature is the work of "what if the rules applied differently", never a case of "let's all pretend britannia rules the seas."
mircea_popescu: hanbot it's a problem deeper than mere "economy of words".
mircea_popescu: which is why italian realism IS realism ; whereas ingsoc realism is just another sovietism, ie nonsense.
mircea_popescu: but that's light, the humour of a well fed mob. you recall the scene of the poor italian child with a bedridden mother and numerous siblings living in a hole, jumping to his death ? much more on point.
mircea_popescu: but, a blog differs from "a body of literary work" in this sense, that it's much more extensive. a blog is "all the literature i could write", a middle ground between "i did" and "i could have".
mircea_popescu: one of the shortest trilema articles, and tbh getting tedious about midway.
mircea_popescu: (and yes, faggotry is not merely sexuality, ie, homosexuality. it is also a certain sort of ineptitude. the man who stutters when addressing a woman is not merely short of the simple "strip" indication ; but actually a faggot by this measure.)
mircea_popescu: that he buries it under 5000 pages doesn't help. much of carroll's... lightiness, to call faggotry thus for now, is excused on the grounds of brevity.
mircea_popescu: yet the nigger plays enough womanhood to qualify the whole thing. nuts, huh.
mircea_popescu: mark twain being the best example as far as trouble goes - by "rights" you should add him, and yet he doesn't belong, at all.
mircea_popescu: (showing that it's not the air or water of oxford magically doing it, or somesuch. much like it's not the ethnic group per se.)
mircea_popescu: literally, the only point problems start, is when jay goes into shop and wants to buy an ipad because he thinks this is the only shop and therefore must be that apple concept store he's heard about.
mircea_popescu: or for that matter, woman shouldn't wear pink ? what if she's bonbon blonde ?
mircea_popescu: when i was a child i wore blue, and diana_coman wore pink. thanks god they didn't mix up the colors, lest i'd have grown tits ?
mircea_popescu: baudelaire, toulouse-lautrec and five others fucked the same one whore. this blessed woman made toulouse-lautrec a writer, baudelaire a painter, and five others nothing ?
mircea_popescu: i do not say any such thing. i say he is a competent smith, running as best he can a convenience shop, which for whatever reason is blessed with a wall where every jay and silent bob in the county is attracted to rest, and rap, and what they do.
mircea_popescu: and then she finished it. and was nonplussed by the end, much like... everyone ever.
mircea_popescu: she asked me if i ever read it, and i said oh god that thing was spooky.
mircea_popescu: re kipling, because this just came up in mp household : girly read his story, you know the one. the spooky one, with the people in the pit.
mircea_popescu: phf i couldn't tell you re stevenson. the only scott i ever read was shaw. anmd shaw is not in this.
mircea_popescu: diana_coman methinks you just explained what you asked of me.
mircea_popescu: doyle and dumas fo sho. kipling maybe, it's somewhat iffier.
mircea_popescu: but but whay! it's more cultural this way! like a play!
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo in another twenty years they'll catch up with the "book for practical activities of making puippets and imagining scenes", ie 1970s ro standard
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform so once its head rolls i'll take it off.
mircea_popescu: i can understand others can be, and have no beef with it. and i don't necessarily even pity the situation, a test's a test.
mircea_popescu: the reason i don't watch "Star wars" or "sex and the city" ; nor bother with "lords of the rings" or "jezebel" is exactly the same reason i don't go around sex stores to sniff used condoms and napkins from the bin in their video booths, like isabelle huppert's character in the piano teacher : i am not quite that hungry.
mircea_popescu: this doesn't make crackpots somehow inherit the empire of proper science, through the absenteism of everyhone else.
mircea_popescu: not quite. consider : "what would you call bullshit science ?" "anything that comes from a grant application".
mircea_popescu: look, a woman's still a whore if she gets married to some loser and keeps doing it.
mircea_popescu: "somewhere in the teens". ie, "when i disbecame a child".
mircea_popescu: it's not altogether clear the anglos even have a "life plan" that includes anything besides "how to be mme bovary's husband BUT AVOID the whole legbox incident & fallout thereof."
mircea_popescu: diana_coman you familiar with bouvard & pecuchet, the dicitonary readers ?
mircea_popescu: this passes unnoticed in english because no culture anyway.
mircea_popescu: nevertheless, tolkien is therefore part of english CIVILISATION. he is an artefact. he is pointedly NOT part of culture.
mircea_popescu: it is not literature, but copywriting. reading him can be interesting, like reading an instruction manual for any artefact can be interesting. i do it sometimes for "no reason" even.
mircea_popescu: i even loved him as a kid, and thought it great fiction. just don't seem to summon the interest these days.
mircea_popescu: what ever happened to make tolkien more acceptable than sadoveanu ?
mircea_popescu: what doth surprise me however, diana_coman , is that the allergy i presume in you for the works of "socialist realism" does not somehow extend to... this here OTHER, exactly the same, socialist realism.
mircea_popescu: i suppose it's not to be surprising. if one day you decide to pump the septic tank into the house, the only things still standing will be still standing because lower density than the shit, and so float, not other reason.
mircea_popescu: by now the only places left outside are left outside because too dumb to qualify for anglotardation, such as argentina.
mircea_popescu: except if you go to i dunno, farm in normandy or w/e. certainly no paris in paris.