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Mercy--thank you, Mizter S. Isn't it nice, when people who disagree--even violently in some instances--can still be friends and love each other?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Quote:
Mercy--thank you, Mizter S. Isn't it nice, when people who disagree--even violently in some instances--can still be friends and love each other?
I would say vehemently, rather than violently. If you disagree on that, I'll have to kill you.
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veteran
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Mercy--thank you, Mizter S. Isn't it nice, when people who disagree--even violently in some instances--can still be friends and love each other?
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Maybeso Moderator, but still you are left with a small clan of disagreeable folks, violent in some instances, who are friends and love each other.
Christian Love, if you will remember, requires you to love those who you had rather hate.
I can, can you?
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enthusiast
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Hmm--let's say that I had tried to get you to embrace, oh, say Eminem, and you told me that you didn't care for him. But if I were passionate about him, I might tell you something like, "Trying to run down Eminem is so very silly. [...] At the risk of offending you, I have to say that you are only making yourself look stupid [...]" Now--if you agree that not liking or understanding Eminem doesn't make you an ignoramus, then I hope you can also see that someone who doesn't like or understand Joyce isn't necessarily stupid.
There is an important difference or oversight here between your analogy and what happened on the arruginated thread.
Did I claim that not liking or understanding Joyce makes you an ignoramus?
I did not.
However, to proclaim that trying to understand Joyce is a complete waste of time (as one poster asked facetiously, and another saw fit to reiterate: "And trying to make Joyce make sense serves us how, exactly?) is a horse of an entirely different colour.
To summarily foreclose the possibility that a book of the significance of Ulysses has anything to offer without, evidently, having read it, is the worst kind of ignorance. Now that truly is to content yourself "with a place in the lower intellectual orders."
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[..] and if that doesn't change, I think that once again you will not be welcome here.
What are you doing? You have no right to threaten me. Do not abuse your position as moderator. We have had a difference of opinion on a public domain message forum. I have not broken the law.
Surely you would not want to edit my voice from this forum simply because you disagree with me or dislike my tone? Particularly when I have explained this tone as jocose banter, apologised, and nevertheless had a certain cretinous yahoo tell me to "f**k off" without retaliating.
I may take a dim view of stupidity, but I would never deny someone the freedom to continue expressing it.
This brings me to my next point.
In the interests of your position as moderator, it is important that you hear candid feedback.
As you say, some of the posters here are intelligent. I enjoy their repartee; and their rich lexical palette. It is for this reason that I must tell you that to the cerebral hum of these posters' threads your saccharine bromides and mawkish sentiments are so like unto a meddlesome old aunt in a home-knit cardigan who would like AWADtalk to be a conduit for the bibble-babble of crossword biddies.
Personally, I find this smothering. Your flock will here no doubt here fly to your defence, but they know exactly what I am talking about.
And yet however much I would prefer the cold meshing gears of logical syntax, I have tried to accept your shortcomings. I only ask that you accept mine.
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(1) "It is certainly not my intention to make your lives miserable, and so, seeing as this thread has already reached the all-time low watermark of ad hominem digression from the discussion of words, I propose a game: Two more affirmative answers to the above question (by two more posters save yourself, whose vote has been counted) and Homo Loquens strikes out, thereupon to tie up his immigrants' handerchief bundle of Joycean abstrusiosities."
(+1) "Why not use the new, improved 'vote-a-lator' feature in this board to conduct an informal poll?"
(+1) "Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?"
(=) non sequitur.
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> a certain cretinous yahoo tell me to "f**k off" without retaliating.
What a perfect example of paralipsis! Well, actually I suggested that you fuck off – I never cower behind the pathetic cloak of bowdlerised orthography. But I count it a pleasure to be so labelled by you. Since I am patently not a cretin nor a yahoo (and could probably out-dance you on the head of almost any literary pin you chose to name) it confirms your own true colours. Every time I wade though one of your spiels I am reminded of that antanaclastic gem from Benjamin Franklin: “Your argument is sound... all sound.”
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enthusiast
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Quote:
What a perfect example of paralipsis! Well, actually I suggested that you fuck off – I never cower behind the pathetic cloak of bowdlerised orthography. But I count it a pleasure to be so labelled by you. Since I am patently not a cretin nor a yahoo (and could probably out-dance you on the head of almost any literary pin you chose to name) it confirms your own true colours. Every time I wade though one of your spiels I am reminded of that antanaclastic gem from Benjamin Franklin: “Your argument is sound... all sound.”
This has suddenly gotten very boring.
Goodbye thread.
Last edited by Homo Loquens; 12/05/05 11:29 AM.
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Your attack on Jackie is most uncalled for, HL. One of the duties of a moderator is precisely to warn a poster when he or she has overstepped the bounds, which you clearly have done, and ban them when they refuse to lay down the flamethrower. I expect to see a public apology to all members you have offended by your insults. I officially cast my vote with Consuelo. I believe Maverick's post should count as the first vote, so mine makes three. Will you now leave as soon as you post your apology? Why would anyone want to stay where they are not welcome?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?
HL/U:
First off, we are not your enemy. You have met the enemy and it is you, to paraphrase the immortal Pogo. You are the one who came in here and started attacking, once while Ulrich and now while wearing the Homo Loquenz sock. There is a term for this: trolling, and there are whole treatises on the subject. I think if you were to read a couple of them with open mind you'd recognize that you're the problem, not the solution.
I said this privately to a guy who wanted to turn AWADtalk into a Christian talk show:
Every board needs new blood to keep it healthy, functional and interesting. However, just like a human body, the new blood must be compatible with the old blood, otherwise there is a reaction which causes either the rejection of the new blood or the death of the organism.
No matter what you think, this board IS an organism. Many of us have been here over five years; some of us have moved on, all too frequently because of a reaction to an infusion of new blood that was incompatible with the organism. We hate it when that happens.
You've said that you didn't call anyone stupid, that you just said we look stupid. In my estimation that is just so much hairsplitting.
Here's what you said:
"Trying to run downt Joyce is so very silly. He is one of the most important writers of the modernist movement. Even the dictionary will tell you that. And unlike the hack blurb-authors of dust-jacket hyperbole, lexicographers don't throw superlatives at writers willy-nilly.
"At the risk of offending some of you, I have to say that you are only making yourselves look stupid."
First off, having a different opinion from yours does not make one silly. It means only that someone disagrees with you. I think Joyce is unreadable, verbose, incomprehensible, meandering, maudlin, overbearing, and oh did I mention unreadable. If, as you say, he is among the best of the modernist movement, that may go a long way towards explaining why I and a whole bunch of other people don't read the stuff. WE DO NOT LIKE IT! We have an opinion on it that is just as valid as yours, though in disagreement with it. I didn't say this makes you look stupid as you said of me.
When called upon it, you said that you didn't say I was stupid, you said I looked stupid. That's utter crap, and you know that as much as I know that. You sling pejoratives around, referring to Betsy as an idiot, and expect that you can fall back on the "I was only joking" excuse.
You cannot. We may forgive, but we will never forget that you attacked indiscriminately, safe in your little self-contrived world, pulling the strings of one puppet after another.
I will not vote on your staying or going because neither I nor any of the other people here are enfranchised; your asking for a vote does not empower anyone to do so; that decision lies solely in the hands of the Wordmaster, who runs a benevolent dictatorship. In the five-plus years this board has been in operation almost five thousand people have registered here yet only one person has been banned. For an unmoderated board I consider that an excellent track record since it shows that we are willing to tolerate a lot of stuff.
As I said in a previous post, get along or get along down the road to some other place; though it's obvious that you've been pooping in several other punchbowls and you probably will find your welcome there very short unless you change your attitude and lose the anger that poisons you from within.
TEd
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old hand
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> I think Joyce is unreadable, verbose, incomprehensible, meandering, maudlin, overbearing, and oh did I mention unreadable.
That doesn't sound like an opinion, but an outright rejection or brushoff, a dismissal. For so-called wordsmiths or language lovers to offer such statements up as sweeping reviews of the preeminent English-language author of the 20th century doesn't seem stupid, so much as utterly incongruous.
Finnegans Wake, readable or not, breaks all novel (pun intended) records with regard to vocab, orthograhpy and so on; and the collective understanding of said work might benefit greatly if some of the scholarly minds here applied themselves to a discussion of his works. If not it might just be fun;-)
This clearly seems unlikely considering the slating of Joyce along the lines of it simply being too 'wacky' or 'nonsensical'. So be it. But IMO, it does seem to indicate a certain unwillingness to engage in the messiness and yes, nonsense ... or 'non-sense' that is celebrated in anything deserving of the title 'literature' and indeed is self-evident to many in everyday life. This in turn seems to indicate that the aversion to Joyce may be symtomatic of an still stronger and more general unwillingness to accept the idea that (without going into too much detail) we tend to couch our ourselves in linguistic clothing to make us feel better about our lives, loves, losses, etc., leading in turn to disunion, misunderstandings and bad things:-) Perhaps Joyce was looking to provide a way out, a 'wake' for language, or an 'awake' language. But such discussion is apparently undesirable here; one might argue that 'haters' aim to bob on the cushy surface of the linguistic ocean and avoid wetting feet - oh well.
That said, I doubt anyone here has read the 'classic' Principia Mathematica, so mebbe(sic) that above is hot air. I just hope that when people say of Joyce that it is not written to be 'understandable' they mean that in a jovial, throw-away-comment way and don't disregard study of the works outright - that would be a shame. W. Faulkner said of Joyce he "had more talent than he could control", and that he was "electrocuted by the divine fire." That is a minimum one might expect from a good artist. And clearly Joyce certainly has the power to polarise <g> and reveal it in the world ... Finn's Wake is either The Holy Grail or the longest, best written book of utter nonsense ever written. Clearly divinity and stupidity are closer together than some might admit - it's a little like those knobs on you're oven .. at one point turning a little further brings you from full power to off. Conversely Joyce mysteriously went from (cliche for today) 'zero to hero' overnight, apparently without anyone's consent. If his books truely are almost utterly incomprehensible, then I would suggest that this is a true case of a (dangerous term alert) miracle or, if you will, magic in book form. This should give anyone pause for thought who would earnestly claim to 'hate' this author on a word site - 'dislike' fine, choose to avoid, fine, but 'hate', really? I'm not looking to engage in the ongoing argument on behaviour, but it seems HL does have a valid point in this regard and fault lies with both parties. Proportions another matter.
The Hagakure suggests that if one is in tune with their own way, then learning of the many ways of others will only strengthen one's own commitment to one's own way and one will not view the ways of others as challenges but confirmations. Let that be so for all here. Good tidings AWADers!
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