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Allright now Hydra, don't you go being cruel to a heart thats true.
Like you and aortomus and belligerentyouth, I decry the swapping of Beethoven for...uh... Elvis Presley.

Anyway, the subject of this thread has been resolved quite nicely, namely, "desublimation" or the "democratization of the higher arts" both define the process of cultural dumbing that we observe in the world today.

I just thought that you might like to discuss the reason why.

Last edited by themilum; 08/17/06 07:38 PM.
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Listen my dear Awad friends to the words of the newly dead R.A.Lafferty.
See...it writhes, it writhes, the coming of the Milum.

"How is a person or a world unmade or unformed? First, by being deformed. And following the deforming is the collapsing. The tenuous balance is broken. Insanity is induced easily under the name of the higher sanity. Then the little candle that is in each head is blown out on the pretext that the great cosmic light can better be seen without it."

[The process is not some great uprising of evil, easy to see, to rally against: it is insidious, it creeps, it overtakes the unwary]

"The persons and the worlds were never highly stable. A cross-member is removed here on the pretext of added freedom. Foundation blocks are taken away on the pretext of change. Supporting studs are pulled down on the pretext of new experience. And none of the entities had ever been supported more strongly than was necessary. What happens then? A man collapses, a town, a city, a nation, a world. And it is hardly noticed."

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Quote:

Allright now Hydra, don't you go being cruel to a heart thats true.




I was thinking of myself at 19. Now I'm 27 and know better.

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I was thinking of myself at 19. Now I'm 27 and know better.




I know what you mean, Hydra, when I was 19 I thought a lot about myself too. Just think, when you are 54 you will have read twice as many books, seen twice as much life, and will have had twice as much time to consider life's meanings. Wow! You will be real smart then and I will be 89.

Good Luck.

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Good Luck.




Thanks for the encouragement themilum. If I entertain any hope of becoming smart by the time I'm 54 I'm gonna need all the luck I can get!

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I would call it trivialisation - and as the Feuerbach quote shows, it has been going on for some time. Fortunately, fresh fuel is added continuously . "The Genes" are a likely candidate.

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Good one, Wiesber, as a verb or as a noun or as a example of its own meaning.

But don't blame the genes. Genes function best when adaptation is required, like during glacial times.
Good genes are not much needed in a Garden of Eden.

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This discussion reminds me of one of my favorite speeches from Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia":

"We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles wil turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveaal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?"

(notice in this metaphor that the future is behind, as was discussed on another thread at this site)

Aren't hiphop sampling techniques similar to what 13th-14th century composers were doing when they blended chant fragments and popular songs into polytextual motets? Then there's the cantus firmus mass--how many Renaissance composers embedded "L'homme armé" into their Mass Ordinary movements? How much Motown is embedded in CCM?

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But don't blame the genes - I don't! I think the concept of genes is a very powerful one. But what I meant (thus the quotation marks..) was, that this term is undergoing trivialisation, and is losing its poignancy thereby. It is being reduced to a label attached to one warring faction by their opponents.

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But don't blame the genes - I don't! I think the concept of genes is a very powerful one. But what I meant (thus the quotation marks..) was, that this term is undergoing trivialisation, and is losing its poignancy thereby. It is being reduced to a label attached to one warring faction by their opponents.



Again well said, wiseber. Yet, I am beginning to question your good judgement, because so far, I have agreed with everything you've said.

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