The Deconstruction Continues, pt. 4a
Austin Loomis
[Sorry to break it back up, Serdar, but I just have trouble getting my
inspiration together for posts that big. I'd also like to take this
opportunity to mention that any time Elliot cares to debate us, he's
more than welcome to join the discussion.]
In article <341c8a89...@nntp.netcruiser>, sye...@ix.netcom.com
(Serdar Yegulalp) wrote:
>alo...@whale.st.usm.edu (Austin George Loomis) wrote:
>
>>Some of this reply will be me giving more support to Serdar's points;
>>some of it will be me nitpicking on his linguistic flubs (like the man
>>himself says, "*Damn* those Words that Mean Things!"). Hopefully, as
>>little of it as I can manage will be just me mindlessly me-too-ing.
>
>To be honest, I'm glad you picked out the spots where I was typing in
anger
>and got the second cousin to the word and not the word itself. Unlike the
>Giver of Spam, I can take a well-intentioned criticism or correction.
>
Good to go. (And again, I'm going to mercilessly trim everything you
said to which I could think of no better response than "Me too!" No
matter how much a given slam makes me go "BOO-yeah!")
[...]
>>Simon Lacerous, one of the voices Frederick C.
>>Crews used to write the parody of critical styles known as _The Pooh
>>Perplex_.
>
>Is this in print? Now you've got me eager to track it down.
>
Sure is. NAL/Dutton, 1965. ISBN 052547160X. It's got representatives
of every critical school that had a major following in American academe
at the time -- Marxist (Martin Tempralis' "A Bourgeois Writer's Proleta-
rian Fables"), Freudian (Karl Anschauung's "A.A. Milne's Pit-Jar-Honey-
Bathtub-Balloon-Tail Complex," translated by B.B. Braille), Christian
(Cyrus J.L. Culpepper's "_O Felix Culpa!_: the sacramental meaning of
_Winnie-the-Pooh_"), anti-matriarchal (Myron Masterson's "Poisoned Para-
dise: the underside of _Pooh_"), and a couple that I suspect of being
aimed at specific professors Crews had known -- Murphy Sweat's breezy
and name-dropping "_Winnie_ and the Cultural Stream" and P.R. Honeycomb's
"The Theory and Practice of Bardic Verse: notations on the hums of Pooh"
(less to do with Pooh than with Wallace Stevens, who was [we are told]
Honeycomb's special obsession because one of them discovered the other).
However, except for the book's merciless shredding of the various
critical vocabularia it imitates, there's no deconstructionism, or at
least nothing I recognized as such -- hell (tm), there's not even any
feminism. If you feel you can afford to do so, I'd suggest getting two
copies and sending one to the Spam-Meister, just for jolly. Since we
know he doesn't *read* the newsgroup, even when he's replying to it,
he won't realize it's a parody until he reads the jacket flap (at the
earliest).
[...]
>>Oh, you've got more points than Elliot -- remember, he's only got one
>>genuine point, and you can't usually see it because he's wearing a hat
>>in most of his pictures.
>
>[Sorry, I mistook it for a wife. <G>]
>
Oog. I walked into that one, didn't I?
>>>(Reminds me of the "I am Zoltar, Emperor of the Moon!" thread in
alt.angst.)
>>>
>>Is that a current thread, or a past one?
>
>Archived in alt.angst's www.angst.org archive... courtesy of the
caustically
>bitter henry ennui, who has since gone on to slay the hydra of
Scientology.
>
I went and looked that up. "I am ZOLTOR, EMPEROR of the MOON! Just
wait until my MOONBEASTS get here!" Sounds about like Elli, aye, except
of course that henri was (I think just kidding. I didn't find the Co$
stuff, except for a post *labelled* as about the Co$ but not really about
it AFAI could tell. I also found a post from henri about Elliot's hero
Kurdt, and about how we all thought he was just kidding when he said
"I hate myself and I want to die" until the day he granted his own wish,
but maybe we shouldn't give Elliot ideas...
[...]
>>Um, point of literary order here -- Claudius was Hamlet's *stepfather,*
>>not his father-in-law. Unless you're referring to Polonius, in which
>>case it *still* wasn't technically true because he was never actually
>>married to Ophelia.
>> Apart from that, of course, you nailed him beautifully.
>
>Argh. I stuck my foot in my mouth AGAIN. (I hate that -- here I am trying
to
>skewer the guy by quoting his source material back at him, and I botch
it.
>Keep on correcting me.)
>
Not a problem. 8-)
>>>>The advent of the new school
>>>>year each September accents the passage of time,
>>
>>...with just a *hint* of lemon.
>
>[sound of milk splashing keyboard as it comes out my nose]
>
<bows> Thank you, I'll be here all week, try our salad bar.
>>Yeah. Like, how come he never took Pat Farley up on his suggestion that
>>if he wants to reach the Common Working Man, he should try selling his
>>sonnets in a blue-collar bar? That'd be something to see. ("A working-
>>class hero is something to be..." -- some dead liberal rockstar)
>
>I'm constantly annoyed at his undeserved elitism... "Deserved" elitism,
by
>the way, would mean that he's found a way to separate himself from the
>masses through some genuine intellectual effort.
Which, since this is Elliot we're talking about, will happen shortly
before the Omicron Epsilon Time Intersection, if it happen at all, but
hey! it could.
>>>>[...]Herman Melville, who
>>>>never went to college, and yet has provided so many with
dissertations,
>>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>>>thesises, enlightenment, inspiration, and significance,
>>>
>>>A fact that should have stopped you cold like someone dropping a
thousand
>>>pounds of whale-dreck on your head,
>>
>>How so?
>
>It just makes me that much more certain that Elliot is merely confused
about
>so many of these issues -- that he's never thought them out that
thoroughly.
Because he thinks about like he reads -- and, as you've pointed out time
and again, he reads "like JFK survives assassination attempts," to swipe
a cruel yet apt metaphor from Grant Morrison.
>Melville didn't go to college -- does that mean there's room in his
insular
>cosmogony for the self-taught, for intellectuals who didn't have the
>"advantage" of higher learning? Or are all those people just one with the
>herd? He never seems to draw these distinctions more sharply.
Yeah, well, we all know how well the Jelly Blobber deals with anything
*sharp* or *pointed.*
>I don't think
>it's possible for someone to really be a part of this world without some
>level of education -- literacy and logic being the two biggies; the world
>will eat you whole unless you have some tools to separate fact from
fancy,
>rumor, gossip and slogan --
It certainly seems to have devoured Elliot.
>but at the same time, I'm not going to assert
>that you're an asshole if you don't have a diploma.
>
Or that you're an asshole if you *do* have one.
"A Ph.D. often serves as a license to make one's ignorance one's
arrogance." -- Elliot, "Pearls of Wisdom"
"When people with doctoral degrees try to tell me I might be
capable of somehow being *wrong,* I don't take them any more seriously
than I take anyone else who makes that insinuation." -- my translation
of the above pearl
>Just a thought.
>
Yeah, but a thought of a depth I have yet to hear from Elliot, and that
makes all the difference.
>>>The last time you had a thought, it was
>>>the show-stopper, "What if words means things?" which apparently
started
>>>this whole idiot crusade.
>>>
>>Nah -- all it started was "Poetry for Physicists," or "Why Sir Stephen
>>Hawking believes in the Bible God and is therefore a Conservative Intel-
>>lectual."
>
>And I'm at odds as to whether that thought died of loneliness, or shame.
>
Considering the uses it was put to, I'd guess it was shame.
>No, I think I have it nailed: he's all for intellectualism, so long as it
>toes his party line. Intellectualism that challenges any of his
orthodoxies
>of faith or politics are instantly showered with insults and discarded as
>useless.
>
Something like that, yeah. *sigh* If it's trying to tell him something
he doesn't already know, or even trying to tell him there *is* something
for him to learn, he tunes it out with terrifying completeness. (Maybe
what he needs is the Ludovico treatment.)
>>>>We are not content to merely document decline, nor
>>>>are we here to preach platitudes that we ourselves do not aspire to.
>>>
>>>Could have fooled me.
>>>
>>And me. If Elliot can present one post in which he's done anything
*but*
>>piss-and-moan about how Western Civ is going to hell(tm) in a handbag
>>and/or gritch at others for supposedly using the ad-homs and empty whi-
>>ning which palpably constitute roughly 103% of Grungeservative debating
>>style, I will eat my own stewed and fried asshole off a plate and post
>>JPEGs to alt.binaries.tasteless.
>
>Don't make me hold you to that one.
I could try to fudge and say I'd meant a post prior to the date/time
of the one in which I made that offer, but the present perfect tense
is ambiguous enough to let me be called on it in the (unlikely) event.
>If Elliot has a lightning-strike of
>*paravritti* in his lifetime and does an intellectual volte that leaves
us
>all gasping, we'd...
>
>What the hell am I saying?! This is ELLIOT we're dealing with here!
>
I've remarked on the implications of that myself.
"HISTORY: Papa Hegel he say the only thing we learn from history
is that we learn nothing from history. Hegel must have been taking the
long view. I know people who can't even learn from what happened to
them this morning." -- Chad C. Mulligan, _The Hipcrime Vocab_ (quoted
by John Brunner in _Stand on Zanzibar_)
Oh, and BTW, I recognize "paravritti" as a Sanskrit word, but
I don't think I know what it means. "para" is "beyond" (as in gate,
gate, paragate, parasamgate...), I know that, but "vritti" is a new one
on me.
>>>Isn't it wonderful how completely he discounts the possibility that
Marx
>>>would have *anything* to say?
>>>
>>For that matter, isn't it wonderful how he assumes Jefferson believed
>>in the same God Elliot does? [...]
>>[...]This philosophy, Deism, with its basis in "liberty and
>>property," was the *real* ideology behind the American Revolution, not
>>Elliot's silly fantasies about a Christian nation.
>
>Thank you for bringing this one up. I always love it when some do-goody
>gogglebox brings up the religious inclinations of our founding leaders
(who
>were also possibly hemp-smokers -- you know how details like that make
the
>ConservaSheep squirm) -- in utter ignorance of the recorded details.
>
Terry Coppage has a quote, somewhere on RL-LNW, in which Abraham Lincoln
speaks of relaxing on his front porch in the evenings with a pipe of
hemp and a harmonica. I think every Republican who clamors for harsher
enaction of what Robert Anton Wilson calls the War on Some Drugs should
be sent a copy of that quote.
And before you jump to conclusions, Elliot: I myself use no drug
stronger than chocolate, but if other people want to use them, as long
as they aren't hurting anyone else, it's no skin off my anatomy. The
War on Some Drugs is a Big-Government project, the kind of thing most
conservatives deplore when it's, say, the War on Guns. (Come to think
of it, many conservatives, Bill Buckley and P.J. among them, aren't all
that thrilled with the WoSD either.)
And, on the subject of god(s), Pat used to have a page on his
website (maybe he still does, but if so, I can't find it) where he listed
all the gods he's followed in his lifetime, from the Spaceman God of
his Florida childhood to the Saint of Sales, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs hisownbad-
self, to his supermodel Gaia-figure the Great Curvaceous Intelligence.
It opened with a quote from (IIRC) James Madison (or maybe Long Tom,
I forget) along the lines of:
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to preventing
those acts which are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for
my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks
my pocket nor breaks my leg."
Chew on that, Elliot. Maybe it'll cause a moment in which you
follow the advice Serdar once gave you (after you'd just been ranting
about Rush as a genius poet) to "[s]top chewing on your lower intestine."
>Or when idiots use Mark Twain's essay about the Jews as antisemitic
>propaganda.
>
I want to note how close it comes to being just that, how all it takes
is a slight twist of Twain's words, but I'm afraid if I do that, I'll
be viewed as *supporting* that sort of thing.
Deniers and other anti-Semites say the Joos must be destroyed
because they're "inferior." Twain's essay says the *real* reason Gen-
tiles fear the Jews is because Jews are *better* than Gentiles at every-
thing they try.
>Or when someone like Elliot takes words out of a fictional character's
mouth
>and uses them as an assertion that the author who created that character
>also supported those opinions, without any other substantiation.
>
And then uses that assertion to justify his next assertion, that those
words represent the Absolute Truth, or to back up some other claim he
wants to make (like when he used that quote from the whaling book, about
God as "the center and circumference of all democracy," to support his
contention that "to deny God is to deny freedom," a view which Ayn Rand
would have said was exactly self-contradictory).
>>That reminds me -- I keep meaning to check on DejaNews and see if he's
>>ever posted to sci.physics, since he claims to be a physics major. Does
>>anyone know if he has?
>
>I've checked his other posts, and they're mostly related to things like
how
>to write perl scripts.
I went Deja-ing and saw one of those "help me" posts, but I'm not really
enough of an expert on perl to know how simple the answer was.
>All political, scientific, or other real-worldly
>debate is confined to his read-only Roger broadsides.
>
The Jolly Roger: Just Visiting This Planet since 1995.
[continued in part 2]