Spent some time in the spare bedroom in bed with J with both windows open with the wind and rain. We both had a book and snuggled close to stay warm. My latest song wafting in from the other room. All very nice. J is always so warm while I'm usually quite cold. I was trying to read Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Beautiful book but I was quickly falling asleep... Trying to stay awake as I've got to switch back to night shift after 5 days off.. Ate a bunch of chocolate but still fell asleep very early and am here up by 5AM next day... So now the possiblity (again and again and again) of having a 27 hour day. At least (as it happens over and over) not bothering as much to stress about it. This time will go out for breaky and then take sleeping pills.... Which I bet probably aren't so good for me. But what else to do?

Well anyway, this was supposed to be a happy post. Have been running at least 3 days a week. A max of 4, work stops me from any more than that. And have been sleeping very well. Managing to sleep deeply for 6 hours instead of waking up after 3. That is The Reason for the running. Knees and hip joints holding up very well thanks to set of lunges and toe raises after each run. Side effect has been that I'm running much faster. Running with 5 pound weights also.

Anyway, so nice to fall asleep while reading with J. With hohner 26 melodica glitchy reggae coming from other room and the rain and wind and three kitties. And Proust.

Also read Hobb's new Dragon book. Read the entire 400+ page book yesterday. It's both really enjoyable and incredibly absurd on some level. Kept on imagining a friend as being the main character. A lady described as having red hair and freckles and being very scholarly...

And a vikingish Weis and Hickam fantasy that was slapped together pretty badly.
And Black Hole by Charles Burns which was extremely depressing. I suppose the disfigurements were symbolic... It maybe is a good representation of high school...
And The Genius in All of Us, which is I guess what I've mostly thought... That it's a matter of wanting it and then practicing hard enough and smart enough. And that virtually anyone can achieve virtually anything. But, the thing is, the wanting it part in the first place is no simple matter... Nor practicing smart enough...

Trying to find a cello teacher somewhere in the area. The one's listed online have moved/disappeared. Cello is so expensive. Online the talk is you must spend at least 2000 dollars or otherwise not even waste your time. Also must get a teacher they say... I've never bothered with teachers. Past music teachers only seemed to be trying to make me hate music and were quickly discarded. Might end up just buying an electric cello... But for now still looking for a teacher and hoping to rent a 2000 dollar cello...

Two books, one I had previously forgotten to mention:
Andre Agassi's autobiography. This is well written in the sense that he manages to make himself come out looking as if he's being honest, while at the same time he comes out looking really good and making others look not so good. And that's pretty much the idea of any autobiography it seems. Or blog, etc. One can't just say it straightforward (I'm wonderful, everyone else sucks!) but that does seem to be the goal. So we come to the conclusion (seemingly on our own) that Brooke Shields is materialistic, selfish, shallow. That Agassi's dad, to whom Andre owes all his success in life, is basically a lunatic. And that despite making a few mistakes, Andre is just this wonderful person who exists to make the lives the others better.

Humorous to hear him try to explain the 'Image is Everything!' quote he's so famous for. Still, other than being almost as vacant ultimately as Brooke and everyone else in his book, he comes across as relatively harmless...

Dragons of the Dwarven Depths by Weis and Hickman: guilty decadent book. All long stories are decadent in the first place. This is 'escapist fiction'. Understand though it's not so much that it's dwarves and dragons and elves that makes it escapist. What really makes it a nice place to escape to is how 2D everyone is. How simple to understand the people are. How relatively straightforward everything is. Good people, bad people. Stark charater flaws. Things are exaggerated and thus so much clearer... With a plot that's badly glued together.

Sturm is honor. Pefect morals. Tanis is the smart guy. Raistlin is a basically a good guy but he's kind of an ass. Clearly a bit morally challenged. Tas is a total airhead. Flint is the stereotypical grumpy dwarf. Caramon is 2D stupid and exists to be taken advantage of by Raistlin. Etc. Each character is clearly not a real person. Just shards of real people. And so they merely survive as 2D evil bears down on them. Is this not really what life is? Or is it maybe exactly what life really isn't? Could it be that this type of thinking is so appealing to people that makes real life such crap? That in real life it's not the existence of evil that's the problem, it's the constant mistaken perception of it. It's that people are constantly seeing it all around them where there's actually none.

Occasionally I think I should set my sights low, hold my nose and try to write such a thing. Was really thinking that the past day or two as some disgusting back stabbing at work has really stressed me out and thus, this is a nice escape. But then later, when I'm less stressed out I'll change my mind. The constant changing of my mind and only having a few moods that desire to write, stops me from writing. Clearly I don't have the continous steady desire in me. And once I've stopped for a while, I don't start again because the stopping part has deeply engraved Failure upon whatever it was I was doing. And so a feeling of certain failure stops me from ever starting up a given project again.

Also the mood for the given story is just gone by the time I feel like coming back to writing again.

My moods change thus I can't stick with any story long enough to get anywhere with it. Is it a flaw in me or the lack of a necessary flaw in me?

A woman at work was going around saying I had a crush on her. I did not. I definitely don't want her to think that. I also don't want that kind of rumor going around, seeing as I'm married, etc. So I've since been erring on the side of being unfriendly, making sure to not smile at her, etc.

And so now she's smearing my work performance. Lying about varioius things. Seeing as I work with 50 some people, you'd think the fact that only one person is smearing me would mean management would be able to figure out the person is full of shit? But no, my management is incredibly stupid. So now what? Get down in the mud and smear back? Just shut up, continue to do more than my part, kiss ass, and say nothing while this person ruins my reputation?

Considering how middle management is, the thing to do is leave somehow. But I have to have worked for a year as a nurse here to be able to transfer. And I have to pay back my college money if I just leave the hospital before then. So I have to stay right here for at least 4 more months. Should I fight back in the meantime? Or will that just make things worse? Maybe it's really just management stirring up the trouble in the first place?

So then from the tick tock back on over to the chop chop for a bit, a while, a life, whatever.

It makes one want to wander around underground with an axe killing goblins.

Two books:

How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (And Why You Should Care) by Ross Duffin.
Duffin mostly advocates bringing the thirds a little less out of tune, as they are so far out of tune in 12TET. That would mean something like quarter comma meantone. He does say the best tuning depends on the song.

Actually this article here compares Duffin and Isacoff's books and I mainly agree with it.
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2007/01/the_tuning_tide_turns.html

Evening in the Palace of Reason by James R. Gaines.
Sort of biography of JS Bach and Frederick the Great. Bach kept making tons of music because of his faith in god. He actually wasn't all that popular at the time. The galant style was more popular, which seems to mean lighthearted, fluffy, etc. Bach was darker, and more profound. And his counterpoint, lots of stuff happening at the same time, instead of a single melody line. People supposedly found that too serious. So the author says. Bach was just about forgotten until long after his death. Some of his greatest works were barely played even once until decades and even up to a century later.

It is hard to imagine putting the effort into writing all that music, knowing it might only get played a single time. Or that you'll send the sheet music to Frederick The Great (some of your best work ever) who's just going to throw it aside and never listen to it even once. It would seem to take something like faith in a god, and a belief that your music was written for the glory of god, to bother continuing to compose so much. To work so hard at it. If not that exactly, something else about as mystical.

And that's it then. I've told a number of people to either communicate by using the phone or just go away, basically. I may not have come across as very nice but I cannot think of any way to sound nice about it. If there was anything else to do to manage to sound nice that I could have thought of (along with being world record good even as it's killing me) I would have done it.

So the phone: I don't think that's asking so much really. Really it's not asking hardly anything at all. And so then, these people I communicated online to for years without ever actually speaking to, how many do you think simply picked up the phone and chose to be a real actual human being?

Try zero. And ask yourself, what kind of person will spend endless hours communicating online with someone that they won't even once speak to on the phone for even a few minutes?

People with issues clearly. And although it appears to be disgusting indifference. Although it appears to be postindustrial living, (so easily dropping people). And it appears to show a complete lack of empathy. And it appears to be dishonest (communicating online with someone you don't actually think enough of to actually speak to). I try, to somehow just leave it at fear. Fear which has overwhelmed people. And of course being a weak, fearfilled person means you cannot show compassion for others. Such people can only be indifferent, or worse.

And it's no good feeling frustration that just about everyone is so well assimilated (thanks to their fear.) To not be assimilated is generally to be dead. Literally. It's no good being frustrated with those who aren't dead. So all these people are owned by Fear. The personal muppets of Fear.

And finally I've never used this blog with much concern for how I appeared. It should have always been a given that this gives a warped picture of me. And it's always been a given that anyone who knows me through this, is probably going to run in the other direction in fear. Occasionally I've allowed a tiny bit of hope that a person or two maybe was intelligent enough to manage better. But with one exception, all have failed. And that's OK.

The only people who know me through this blog, did so exactly because they expressed great unhappiness and it's a matter of my ethical laws (the same ones which would have meant immediately picking up the phone to speak to someone I had communicated online with for years) that I respond to people in distress. I saw them in distress and had no choice in the matter.

Perhaps though, when the need to follow my ethics, exactly when it does not appear at all to coincide with my own self interest. Perhaps I need to think harder at such times, instead of usually being kind of fatalistic. I'm fatalistic exactly because I know I'm almost certainly going to pay one way or another for my kindness. But perhaps at the same time whatever altruistic act I then perform isn't thought out well enough...

...mmm no, not really. Being openminded, I persecute myself. Always looking for flaws. But here, at least, there isn't one. It's more just that there's nothing to be done. I do the right thing, knowing it will do no good and will only hurt me, but there really isn't anything else that can be done. Over and over, it's hopeless. You reach out to people and they respond, "Don't pity me!" Or with suspicion. Or anyway, basically you're not allowed to actually do anything helpful for them anyway as to actually do anything would go against social norms. (I'm married!) Nuclear families. Post-industrial living. Fear of any action that even looks vaguely gay. Simply just fear really. Fear that both stops people from giving compassion and ever receiving any compassion. Fear that keeps people isolated. And makes it all basically hopeless. And thus the only solutions are completely personal solutions. Learning to not mind the established order.

-

Books I've read lately:
The Tyranny of Email: Nothing actually stupendous in it. Just mirrors actually what I've been thinking increasingly for the last decade. Been thinking it but trying so hard to be understanding to all these people who will only communicate online because they're so overwhelmed by fear... Decided I'm just encouraging something harmful, for everyone involved, finally, as a result of reading this. So, life changing book.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas: Excellent writing. Excellent insights on slavery that reach far beyond actual slavery in my opinion. Best book I've ever read on this issue. I'm wondering if instead of my crude attempts at depicting a Dante type hell, I should be going more in this direction here...

Temperament by Stuart Isacoff: Smirky 12TET polemic. Still useful. In trying to decide whether or not one should use TET (not just 12, by TET in general). I had decided that one might as well just use TET. That art is ultimately about symbols. To complain about TET is like complaining about seeing a zipper of a Dr. Who monters. As long as the symbolization is made it really doesn't matter... And then I finally slept well after a long bout with insomnia. And suddenly music just sounded so much better. And I listened to my pythagorean song and the tuning gave it so much more... So I still don't really know. It does seem that laziness played a huge role in eventually just deciding on TET. And that with today's technology, any thinking composer would be questioning it and experimenting with other tunings.

Heaven and Earth by Robert Johnson: (Haven't finished this one and not sure I will.)Jung disciple. At first I liked it but the language is getting so vague. I agree some mysticism is necessary but this guy just personally got extremely lucky. And then after the fact attributes all that luck to some divine power. That is incredibly annoying to me. (People don't normally literally find a suitcase full of money sitting in their hotel room given as charity by a crook so that they're able to continue their studies at the newly opened Jungian institute.) It's always incredibly annoying to hear the few lucky people giving what amounts to motivational speeches. They like to pretend something other than luck had anything to do with it. Johnson thought he was just following his 'thin threads'. And apparently if we all did the same we'd all be so happy. Bullshit. You got lucky. Extremely lucky. If 'following your thin threads' had led you to being stuck working at mickie D's I bet you wouldn't be going on about following your thin threads. And the majority of people who act like you did, (commune new age, wandering to a foreign land without a penny, etc) it doesn't work out so well for at all. Ultimately you're combining some wise insights about modern society with stuff that sounds like someone stuck a blender in your ear.

But, I understand, for a thinking man, finding a way to keep some mysticism is difficult to do... To believe that 'religion/spirituality,etc' is within our dreams, is for example one road forward, I suppose... But Johnson really it seems is so much strengthening his mysticism just through the incredible luck he's personally had. And that is nauseating BS.

"According to a survey in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we misunderstand the tone of emails 50% of the time--and for good reason: there is no face on the other end to stop us in midsentence, to indicate that what we are in the process of saying is rude, not comprehended, or cruel.... Psychologists call it disinhibition, and its pervasive effect--as can be witnessed every day in nasty comments appended to newspaper articles online, in the aggrieved tone and intent of some blog postings, in email inboxes scorched by flame wars--has turned many parts of the internet into a nasty place."

"According to Marco Iacoboni, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCLA, this has bolstered the notion that "our mental processes are shaped by our bodies and by the types of perceptual and motor experiences that are the product of our movement through and interaction with the surrounding world." Consider then, the ramifications of an era of communication in which we are disembodied as never before...."

"A 2006 Cisco research paper concluded that failing to respond to a (email) sender can lead to a swift breakdown in trust. Lose an email forever, and you are sitting on an unexploded land mine."

"Email is addictive, it has been shown, in the same way that slot machines are addictive. You press the send/receive button just as a gambler pulls down a slot machine lever, because you know that you will receive a reward some of the time."

"Thirty years ago, in The Society of the Spectacle, the French philosopher Guy Debord predicted we would be spending more time apart. 'The reigning economic system is founded on isolation,' he wrote. 'At the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system, as it strives to reinforce the isolation of "lonely crowd.'" To this list of machines we can now also add the internet and email.

Ironically, tools meant to connect us are enabling us to spend even more time apart."

" By depriving ourselves of facial expressions and the tangible frisson of physical contact, we are facing a terrible loss of meaning in individual life. The difference between a smiley face and an actual smile is too large to calculate. Nothing-especially-'lol'-can quite convey the sound of a friend's laughter."

The Tyranny of Email-John Freeman

--



Better sounding 19tet than I did with my awful 'Homegrown Piano.' Maybe I'll have to purchase something from h pi. Not a lot else out there really...

Of tet versus just intonation, for 12 tone each key will have different sound in just intonation, not just if it's major or minor. Except for a few trifles each key is exactly the same in 12tet. That's a positive for 12JI.
Then there's this fellow:
http://music.case.edu/duffin/Norton/Letter.html
Unfortunately the damm song files aren't working. I guess I could figure it out on my own further...

But I must say for very large scales there is something nice about a relatively even step up. In Partch's pure tone 43 I don't like the jumps.

Another issue 43 notes means only two octaves for an 88 key keyboard. Needs to be a bit less. I think 31 will still be too much. May have to stay at 19. But will experiment further up into the 20's. Or should I be limited by the keyboard I happen to own anyway? I hate to be a dabbler (into too many things) but I see myself trying to build a microtonal instrument eventually.

But for now I want a conventional virtual orchestra, yet microtonal. Something that can just be played on a keyboard.

It sort of matters to put down this half thought out stuff. Otherwise I forget. I forget whole projects not to mention possible directions. Granted this is somewhat ignorant musing.

-

Read Perfume by Suskind. Good but will leave no trace at all on me.

The Handmaid's Tale by Atwood. Excellent. Like 1984 but darker. I guess a little too dark. 1984 has the hope of a love affair smacked in the middle. Handmaid just has a small one near the end. But it brings up the question again of how women are treated especially in the ME. Though many of the women claim they want to be treated that way and will scream religious intolerance if anyone says there's something wrong with the inequality there, still it ought to ultimately be handled like slavery was. It should not be tolerated. No matter the panglossianism.

Kushiel's Dart, the first 100 pages were pure fluff and I gave it up.

These three mentioned by Robin Hobb, possibly to just hopefully get me to go away for a while. In response to the concept of 'preachy' books. She ignored my mentioning 1984, CS Lewis and Ayn Rand and instead responded with these three. As books that bothered her. Awfully fluffy reply it was. But then it's an awful medium to interact by so who cares? How she can stand being so open and out there and yet exposed to endless anonymous hidden people is completely beyond me.

I recall Chomsky promptly used to answer emails. What did I feel when finding this out? Sad that he wasn't sufficiently famous. That his email address was right on the internet and he could so quickly respond to people. And then I felt him to be such an angel. The guy must get incredible hate mail. And yet there he sits dutifully opening up new anonymous email messages. What an incredible saint.

In other news Lamarckian evolution might be right after all.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1951968,00.html

..so what all books did I buy yesterday? Two Trilogies by Robin Hobb plus two more additional books by her. Then one by Guy Gavriel Kay (The Last Light of the Sun). I had read and liked Tigana and this one is somewhat historically accurate with regards Nordic/Viking history. Then something by George R.R. Martin. I had liked A Crown of Swords I think it was called. Then Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, but that was really for my wife. But I'll probably read it...

..then today I bought three books by Jung and The Mind of the South by W.J. Cash.

Currently was already reading... six books. Deustch, Duncan, Sutherland, Laing, Foucault, and Wolfe. Liking best Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland. Exactly the sort of thing that interests me most of all. And the most comprehensive I've ever come across. Will write extensively about his book later. And will definitely buy other books by him.

Robin Hobb: The Assasin's Apprentice, pg 426.
Suddenly I felt such energy in me I managed to get out of bed.

The book as a whole has many important concepts about human behavior but I was too busy enjoying the escape and falling for all the tricks to bother taking much note. This is the rare book that if it were me I could see bothering to write it.

The only question that troubles me is I think I already read it just a few years ago but can't quite remember for sure. Definitely read Liveship Traders but not sure about this one. Liveship Traders though was a relatively unique idea combined with lots of emotional anguish. The idea of a ship being alive with the lady at the front being able to talk and all seems goofy and perhaps childish but it really worked.

All of her books really do go heavy on the villains doing awful things to good people. In this one the main character almost commits suicide from the despair he feels. Yet, somehow, there is something happy to the point of highly dishonest about it all.... Thus a good escape. And the worlds she creates are pretty real. Not the realist. But quite real enough while somehow managing to have a positive feeling despite heroes having such awful things done to them that they are such a nice escape.

-

Forgetting is definitely an essential thing to be able to continue tolerating life. Or at least life as it's commonly lived, amongst a bunch of other people who are doing such a good job of forgetting.

In the case of completely forgetting that I've read 400 page books it is a bit distressing. But maybe I got to enjoy it twice then.

More about pretentiousness

http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2009/06/ethics-and-enthusiasm.html

“Motherfuckers” equals “bastards” equals “arseholes” equals “ponces” equals “pretentious”.

I can smell that word in the air from a mile off. Pretentious. It’s probably my least favourite word in the whole discourse of critique. In a review that aspires to be no more than a compatibility assessment for populists it basically translates to “smarty-pants”, stands as a marker of a philistine grudge against the audacity of ambition. “You think yer so big with all yer dictionary learning and la-de-da long sentences!” In a review that aspires to greater things it basically translates to “you’re trying to look clever, but failing”, and stands as a marker of that which it accuses. Which is to say, the moment you project that spectre of hollow intent onto a writer, on the basis of your inability to glean meaning despite a work’s blatant complexity, (the charge of pretentiousness implying a sense of show-offery,) the moment you assume that this is an absence in the text rather than inability to perceive what’s there on your part, you are claiming an intellectual eminence that unpacks to empty flummery. You can try to excuse it as shorthand for various types of tangible problem — mannered prose or gauche symbolism, for example — but with this lazy stopgap term you are not really addressing the flaws you perceive in the text, but rather mumbling and waving at the signpost of a word which can be applied to a text only in an act of transference, which conventionally signifies a projected flaw in the writer. You are still painting a fantasy into the negative space of your reading rather than delineating the positive space of the features that mark it out. The fact that you didn’t mean to just makes you look even more of a simpleton. Sorry.

Again: Have you ever used the word “pretentious” in a review? Come on, hands in the air. You know you have. Thing is, we all use it informally, as lazy shorthand, as presumptive dismissal, in one sense or other. I’m sure I’ve used it in talking about other writers’ works and probably will again out of laziness and ill-considered frustration, though given the veiled quality of the insult I’d rather be plain-spoken and just say, “poncy”, “arsey” or “wanky” if ultimately I’m playing j’accuse. It’s probably the veiled quality to the insult that irks the most when it’s levelled at you, the sense that personal slight is being passed off as criticism of the text, that the person using it may themselves be blind to their own presumption, so cocksure of their own nous that it simply never occurs to them they may just have missed the fucking point completely. And so they wave a hand in the air and say “pretentious”, a hand with a gun in it. Pretentious. Poncy. Arsey. Wanky.

There's plenty of that sort of projection in reviews. Sometimes it's meant as hyperbole. Sometimes it's a figurative turn-of-phrase. But as much as writers have to learn not to take it personally, sometimes there is a blatant personal insult, an impugning of motives. Any reviewer who crafts a fanciful narratives characterising the writer as some sort of hack or charlatan is waving that gun in the air...

I really try to hold back on the criticism of thinking something pretentious. Some stuff really is though. Some nonfiction at least really is dishonest. Some is really only pretending to be objective and just hiding it's actual biases behind a pseudo intellectual facade. A couple of examples: Thomas Sowell's Vision of the Anointed, which is just rightwing propaganda, funded by a rightwing thinktank, Sowell gets paid to push rightwing arguments. If he quit doing so he'd no longer be getting a paycheck. Vision of the Anointed is a dishonest book which contains a lot of statistics trying to support rightwing arguments against government intervention, etc. It's an insulting book in that these lies are so slapped together he must have had a very low opinion of his intended audience. The appeal of the book is that he sounds intelligent while making arguments that are roughly the equivalent of Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Hannity. Rightwingers mention this book in trying to claim that the right is just as smart as the left. What's strange is that one big argument of the book is that the left is a bunch of arrogant elitists hence the title. You'd think he might then adopt a folksy tone..? No, instead he tries to show how he's just as smart. It ends up seeming so damm pretentious because despite the language adopted, the ideas are just so pitiful. Anyone with a political clue can see right through it.

Another example of obviously pretentious that comes to mind would be "H. G. Wells at the End of His Tether" by I don't know who, he doesn't deserve to have his name remembered. Buying this book was a mistake. Of course it's good to read points of view that differ from my own. But I think I've pretty much heard all the rightwing arguments. They're on TV 24/7 (unlike the left which is censored). This is a book (not even a biography really) that pretty much consists of a sentence about the far left utopianist views of H. G. Wells followed by a paragraph consisting of the conservative personal opinion of the author. And the conservative arguments are just the tired old crap you hear on FOX news.

I mistakenly bought the book because the title really suggested to me a person sympathetic and empathetic to Wells. The last book Wells wrote was called, "Mind at the End of its Tether," which was a very sad unhappy thing Wells wrote. It did occur to me such a title (H.G. Wells at the End..) might instead be someone poking fun at Wells but, that would be so vile, so mean spirited in view of the final Wells book, I thought surely no rightwinger would go that far.

I was wrong about that. The title and the book amount to pissing on Wells' grave. It is one of the most vile and mean spirited books I've ever read. I would suspect the author had some secret jealousy of Wells, like Wells stole his lover or something except they never even met. And the author tries to hide what looks a lot like just hatred by adopting a psuedointellectual tone. Clearly psuedo as the author isn't intelligent enough to even understand a lot of Wells' ideas or his state of mind. He gives ridiculous summaries of Wells' books. The very book the title of his "biography" is based on he only gives a couple of sentences about at the end which amount to, "it's incomprehensible and stupid."

It's pretentious because the stilted language adopted isn't remotely necessary for the crude ideas it contains. It's just a cover to try to appear scholarly and objective when actually he just hates leftism. But a pitiful attempt at that. It's so bad it doesn't deserve me or anyone bothering to write about it.

But I was just curious, does anything ever deserve the criticism of being pretentious? Yes, some things definitely do.

But probably the majority of times that I'm starting to think: "Pretentious!" Maybe not.

"The problem with you smart people is... you think you're so smart."

I hate that people get attacked simply for being intelligent and I hate to think that I also probably do that to some others. Probably I do though. The question is where is the line? Where is someone being pretentious and where is it just my own damm problem that I'm too stupid to follow them?

If it's fiction, people can write however the hell they want. One can write "beautifully" and if that means that they're hard to comprehend, oh well. I, for example, couldn't comprehend a lot of Joyce's Ulyesses(sp) (although I was trying to read a good bit of it at an awful Jimmy Buffett concert) but I never for a moment thought it pretentious.

But for nonfiction I think the question is, "Are the ideas really so complex that such use of language, etc is necessary?"

People all the time try to make themselves/their ideas seem more important/get taken more seriously by really trying to sound smart.

...a problem with the above is the divide I've made between fiction and nonfiction. From pulpish escapist fantasy fiction to nonfiction there is varying degrees of relevance to real life. All of it can be (is to some extent) getting at The Truth. And Truth does matter. More Truth equals less suffering and thus worrying more about sounding smart then making your ideas easy to understand equals causing additional suffering and is thus ultimately an immoral thing.

I was essentially saying above though that in fiction a person is free to not give a damm and just enjoy what amounts to pure escapism, where sounding "beautiful" can be the primary goal and if no one really understands a point, whoopee.

Why would this be OK? Because there maybe just isn't any meaningful Truth/understanding contained within it that's really going to lead to reduced suffering in the world. Perhaps all it's got going for it is a very short term escapism which in large part relies on "beautiful" writing. But such is either rare or practically doesn't exist at all.

If it's worth anything at all there should be some useful truth within it. And a person may feel that the unique Truth in their writing is contained in part within the unusual use of language they're using (which others may just find hard to understand and totally miss the intent of.)

OK I really don't know about the fiction/nonfiction divide with regards to being pretentious. I suppose I'm wrong and there isn't really any meaningful divide but I just can't happen to think of any examples of pretentious fiction at the moment*. In theory fiction could be just as pretentious. The thing is that instead in fiction it's usually just that the ideas are so paltry it just doesn't even matter. As opposed to worrying about being pretentious it's just boring. For it to reach pretentious it would first have to manage preachy (IOW actually have some ideas that aren't so universal thus they can be noticed as actual ideas (thus preachy), which one can then either successfully or unsuccessfully communicate thanks to the usage of pretentious or unpretentious language).


*Has any rightwinger ever thought Golding's Lord of the Flies was pretentious or preachy?

Colin Wilson's The Outsider

I still haven't actually finished this one. I really haven't had time to do much reading for many months. I fear I'm going to forget what I've thought of this one before I make it to the end.

I think it boils down to being intelligent makes you nihilistic. To a large extent I think Wilson is vague and oversimplifies. When he tries to then divide things up into three types of outsiders (mental, emotional and physical) he's just going way too simplistic. I can't help but remember that he was only 24 when he wrote this book... But I like the ambition of it. And it goes on about a lot of writers. It's interesting.

I've got plenty of nihilism in me and as such it's a good book to me. It's existentialist, like Camus. Why bother doing anything? An important question to me. Ultimately he's just showing how many great writers were nihilistic. But he's maybe really oversimplifying... but then the attempt to understand means trying to simplify, so I just don't know. It is though a rich book.

Curtis White's The Spirit of Civil Disobediance

This was a bit ranty and some ranting that has already been done over and over. But he did point out that atheism's "reason" is ultimately based just on an assertion no different than NT christianity. His critique of Office Space combined with some discussion n the Dysamoria blog made me ponder if humor maybe unfortunately takes all the air out of "revolutionary" talk while at the same time making it possible to stand watching/reading highly negative critiques of society. In other words being able to laugh at how effed up this world is makes us too complacent to bother changing it at the same time that being able to laugh is the only way most people will bother giving attention to anything being critical in the first place.

Change my life? He did interview Kunstler who wrote The Geography of Nowhere which I'm now reading. That is causing me to seriously reconsider my criteria for buying a house.

Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent

Capitivating? Well, not really. Not a single character is such that you are able to care what happens to them.

Mere survival? Of course everything is eventually mere survival. Somehow the question seems to not make sense with regards to this novel. And that is good.

If it had been me, could I ever have bothered writing this? I don't know. And that's just gushing praise coming from me.

Plot, characters or setting? Characters. And a damm good job of that.

Will I remember this book at all? I seem to think about the secret agent here and there as I ponder whether a very few bizarre people in real life perhaps are secret agents. Why is this guy a secret agent anyway? For being such a good job of characters it's really not clear at all. But then people in real life, ultimately have such unexamined motivations quite often. Where if they ever bothered to look at themselves they might just disintegrate and blow away into nothingness.

Then there is the ending. The typical inability to comprehend one another. It could stick with me.

Lots of points for being an incredibly negative story. Conrad's most negative I've heard. He actually apologized for it being so damm negative.

But it would be nice if some of these characters were such that people referred to them with regards to the real world. They aren't quite such that that can really happen. Some things are touched upon too subtly. Other things aren't quite talked about really. Perhaps they would get in the way of primarily telling a story.

I guess it has that worry of being preachy. So instead to an extent that which could be of long term use just slips by unnoticed.

William Golding's The Inheritors

Capitivating? No. You pretty much know they're all going to die. Sooner or later.

Mere survival? Yes.

If it had been me, could I ever have bothered writing this? No.

Plot, characters or setting? Mostly setting. 99.9% of this book seems to just be supplying detail about the uninteresting wilderness and I guess somewhat about the characters which... the insights about his imaginary neanderthals aren't really that interesting. A ton of writing about uninteresting stuff to just make it all feel as if it were real. So that we manage to care a bit as the neanderthals are killed.

Will I remember this book at all? Am I changed at all by it? I probably read it ten years ago and just don't remember having done so.

Still I like Golding for being such a negative guy. I guess.