I'm empathetic to this acceptance of truth's many unresolved possibilities, and the stance of an author who leaves her conclusions provisional in a public, didactic, critical work. But, Tim, I think you're missing a couple of things in favoring this 'intuition'---that the monstrous creative "writer is never introspective, is never doubtful about his own tolerance and openness, is never struggling with feelings, is never of two or three minds, and never ever takes an interest in positions that do name some work of culture—or some producer of culture—monstrous, anathema, beyond the pale." -1 Call it merit or luck or accident or "The Lottery in Babylon," but some people [NotWE but 'like me'] often?/always find? we're put on the spot to express aloud those things we think and fee---but with self-control/ audience-awareness of what's economical and timely. Possibly, that person knows she only has time and space to 'satisfice' by expressing *one* opinion. She hasn't the authority to consider "negative capability" or second-guessing about nuanced things that concern her. She has just an instant's opportunity to sound-out WH Auden's "voice." -2 I find [and people like me find] that Stephen Frye 'seems' like an intolerably smug, self-involved late-Enlightenment personification of highly 'civilized' Latitudinarian humanism. His willingness, seemingly always, to acknowledge the multivocal, dialogical potentials unrecognized in those self-proclaimed experts' embarrassingly explicit restrictive, monological arguments that prove their reductive authority is a dramatic proof of his sense of transcendent, inarguable rational and aesthetic discernment---of his acknowledged privilege as one of 'nature's aristocrats' who doesn't have to account for himself. Is it that Stephen Frye *doesn't* acknowledge views that are beyond-the-pale, or could it be that he is too careful of his public propriety to risk reputation by being drawn into controversy? Take the example of another of 'nature's aristocrats', who's always willing to acknowledge---and support without reservation---any alternate, contingent claim that might be a fruitful avenue for self-aggrandizement---the pathologically toxic narcissist and liar, our former president. Sometimes easy willingness to admit the contingency of human judgments isn't an allowance of how arrogant and flimsy our certainty is in a mysterious world but a demonstration of the iron fist of a 'master's social control: ‘You are a slow learner, Winston.’ -‘How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’ -‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’
There is a kind of economy of attention? I understand that. (Though this is an underappreciated aspect of many-to-many communication; it defies the economy of attention that a book or even something like The New Yorker demands. That gets people worried who believe, I think maybe without evidence, that we were all once deep readers of singular texts.) But it does mean, yes, you can't just dither, or say everything. One of my failings in this space, in fact, is that I sometimes write lists or compendiums intended to exhaust the space of possible expression, as a substitute for saying one thing well. But I think her book has a tremendous economy of attention, actually--I wouldn't want to give the impression that it just goes on and on, quite the opposite. But it does not truncate what it has to say by being efficient and making a singular demanding point.
So excited to read this one! Hadn't heard of it until now. Yes I've gotten so tired of reactionary centrists telling me to appreciate complexity and nuance. It's silly. It reminds me of the Bush years when my liberal friends would say "God I wish instead of watching Fox News, those right-wingers would learn to appreciate news that is fair and balanced." And I'd say, "Is that a joke" And they'd say, "No, what're you talking about, Fox news is so slanted and awful." And I'd say, "Because the tag-line of Fox News is literally 'Fair and Balanced'"
Nobody is anti-complexity in the abstract, or anti-fair and balanced news in the abstract. But what complexity am I supposed to be appreciating? What nuance am I supposed to be missing? Reducing all these conflicts to abstraction is so foolish. Not everyone's anti-Semitism was the same! Charles Dickens's anti-semitism was different from Edith Wharton's, and hers was different from Wagner's. That's the complexity people need to appreciate. The complexity shouldn't just boil down to, "We should overlook anti-semitism."
Yeah, exactly. She's really good on that point--and the issue for her in any event is not "in what way shall we feel superior and enlightened about the past" but instead "why do we feel the need to self-compliment so much about our Present enlightenment"?
I just read it, and I very much appreciate the way she values people's actual emotional reactions over theories about how they ought to react.
On the other hand, speaking of emotional reactions, I became less and less comfortable long about the middle of the book. I was wondering if she had a stance of "I can't write as well as Hemmingway, but at least I can be a monster, too".
And then I find out she'd been an alcoholic.... were there actual ways she'd mistreated her children?
That conclusion.... if love is the answer, where might it lead?
I'm waiting on a copy of "Can This Romance by Saved?" by Jean Kerr-- it was a sarcastic take on _Lolita_ that I didn't really understand when I was a kid. Has anyone else read it?
I think you get some foreshadowed warning that addiction is going to be an issue at some point via the number of "I thought about that as I drank my bourbon" passages. Addiction seems to me to be a pretty necessary issue to raise at some point--another one that she doesn't really get at is mental illness, which is actually pretty aligned with some of our modern readings of monstrosity (e.g., that there are monsters who just can't help it; or that monstrosity requires a more or less liberal understanding of agency, e.g., that Dr. Frankenstein is the monster, not what he creates.
I'd previously read her _Poser: My Life in 23 Yoga Poses_, which is about learning to let herself want things without always making justifications. I recommend it.
I appreciate her analysis of the way people use "we". I've been seeing it as people presuming knowledge of many people they don't know, she says it can be a way of avoiding saying "I". I think we're both right.
I remembered a humorous piece about Lolita by Jean Kerr-- "Can This Romance Be Saved?" (1960) in _The Snake Has All the Lines_. It's very funny, and also a glimpse of a world where things weren't taken as seriously.
It's also a parody of the Lady's Home Journal "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" and stupid Freudianism. Humbert Humbert is a blow-hard, trapped in his jail cell as he is in his own parentheses.
Lolita sees him as a pain in the ass rather than as a horror-- he takes the large dresser drawers and monopolizes the Sunday comics.
I don't know that you or anyone needs to read it, but it's another example of the public reception of Lolita.
I'm empathetic to this acceptance of truth's many unresolved possibilities, and the stance of an author who leaves her conclusions provisional in a public, didactic, critical work. But, Tim, I think you're missing a couple of things in favoring this 'intuition'---that the monstrous creative "writer is never introspective, is never doubtful about his own tolerance and openness, is never struggling with feelings, is never of two or three minds, and never ever takes an interest in positions that do name some work of culture—or some producer of culture—monstrous, anathema, beyond the pale." -1 Call it merit or luck or accident or "The Lottery in Babylon," but some people [NotWE but 'like me'] often?/always find? we're put on the spot to express aloud those things we think and fee---but with self-control/ audience-awareness of what's economical and timely. Possibly, that person knows she only has time and space to 'satisfice' by expressing *one* opinion. She hasn't the authority to consider "negative capability" or second-guessing about nuanced things that concern her. She has just an instant's opportunity to sound-out WH Auden's "voice." -2 I find [and people like me find] that Stephen Frye 'seems' like an intolerably smug, self-involved late-Enlightenment personification of highly 'civilized' Latitudinarian humanism. His willingness, seemingly always, to acknowledge the multivocal, dialogical potentials unrecognized in those self-proclaimed experts' embarrassingly explicit restrictive, monological arguments that prove their reductive authority is a dramatic proof of his sense of transcendent, inarguable rational and aesthetic discernment---of his acknowledged privilege as one of 'nature's aristocrats' who doesn't have to account for himself. Is it that Stephen Frye *doesn't* acknowledge views that are beyond-the-pale, or could it be that he is too careful of his public propriety to risk reputation by being drawn into controversy? Take the example of another of 'nature's aristocrats', who's always willing to acknowledge---and support without reservation---any alternate, contingent claim that might be a fruitful avenue for self-aggrandizement---the pathologically toxic narcissist and liar, our former president. Sometimes easy willingness to admit the contingency of human judgments isn't an allowance of how arrogant and flimsy our certainty is in a mysterious world but a demonstration of the iron fist of a 'master's social control: ‘You are a slow learner, Winston.’ -‘How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’ -‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’
There is a kind of economy of attention? I understand that. (Though this is an underappreciated aspect of many-to-many communication; it defies the economy of attention that a book or even something like The New Yorker demands. That gets people worried who believe, I think maybe without evidence, that we were all once deep readers of singular texts.) But it does mean, yes, you can't just dither, or say everything. One of my failings in this space, in fact, is that I sometimes write lists or compendiums intended to exhaust the space of possible expression, as a substitute for saying one thing well. But I think her book has a tremendous economy of attention, actually--I wouldn't want to give the impression that it just goes on and on, quite the opposite. But it does not truncate what it has to say by being efficient and making a singular demanding point.
So excited to read this one! Hadn't heard of it until now. Yes I've gotten so tired of reactionary centrists telling me to appreciate complexity and nuance. It's silly. It reminds me of the Bush years when my liberal friends would say "God I wish instead of watching Fox News, those right-wingers would learn to appreciate news that is fair and balanced." And I'd say, "Is that a joke" And they'd say, "No, what're you talking about, Fox news is so slanted and awful." And I'd say, "Because the tag-line of Fox News is literally 'Fair and Balanced'"
Nobody is anti-complexity in the abstract, or anti-fair and balanced news in the abstract. But what complexity am I supposed to be appreciating? What nuance am I supposed to be missing? Reducing all these conflicts to abstraction is so foolish. Not everyone's anti-Semitism was the same! Charles Dickens's anti-semitism was different from Edith Wharton's, and hers was different from Wagner's. That's the complexity people need to appreciate. The complexity shouldn't just boil down to, "We should overlook anti-semitism."
Yeah, exactly. She's really good on that point--and the issue for her in any event is not "in what way shall we feel superior and enlightened about the past" but instead "why do we feel the need to self-compliment so much about our Present enlightenment"?
I just read it, and I very much appreciate the way she values people's actual emotional reactions over theories about how they ought to react.
On the other hand, speaking of emotional reactions, I became less and less comfortable long about the middle of the book. I was wondering if she had a stance of "I can't write as well as Hemmingway, but at least I can be a monster, too".
And then I find out she'd been an alcoholic.... were there actual ways she'd mistreated her children?
That conclusion.... if love is the answer, where might it lead?
I'm waiting on a copy of "Can This Romance by Saved?" by Jean Kerr-- it was a sarcastic take on _Lolita_ that I didn't really understand when I was a kid. Has anyone else read it?
I think you get some foreshadowed warning that addiction is going to be an issue at some point via the number of "I thought about that as I drank my bourbon" passages. Addiction seems to me to be a pretty necessary issue to raise at some point--another one that she doesn't really get at is mental illness, which is actually pretty aligned with some of our modern readings of monstrosity (e.g., that there are monsters who just can't help it; or that monstrosity requires a more or less liberal understanding of agency, e.g., that Dr. Frankenstein is the monster, not what he creates.
Thanks. The bourbon slipped past me.
I'd previously read her _Poser: My Life in 23 Yoga Poses_, which is about learning to let herself want things without always making justifications. I recommend it.
I appreciate her analysis of the way people use "we". I've been seeing it as people presuming knowledge of many people they don't know, she says it can be a way of avoiding saying "I". I think we're both right.
I remembered a humorous piece about Lolita by Jean Kerr-- "Can This Romance Be Saved?" (1960) in _The Snake Has All the Lines_. It's very funny, and also a glimpse of a world where things weren't taken as seriously.
It's also a parody of the Lady's Home Journal "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" and stupid Freudianism. Humbert Humbert is a blow-hard, trapped in his jail cell as he is in his own parentheses.
Lolita sees him as a pain in the ass rather than as a horror-- he takes the large dresser drawers and monopolizes the Sunday comics.
I don't know that you or anyone needs to read it, but it's another example of the public reception of Lolita.
Thanks, Tim. I will take a look.