jriggenbach

It was Michael who asserted that Obama should produce documentation because "credible people" were raising questions. I inquired as to whether Michael could name even one of these (I suspect mythological) "credible people." How precisely is raising such a question an "argument" at all? How is it an "argument from intimidation"? Don't you think it would help your campaign to improve everyone's argumentation if you understood how an argument is distinguished from any other set of propositions? How unspeakably asinine. JR

Name one "credible person" who has devoted as much as 30 seconds to thinking about this ridiculous non-issue. JR

I already named three, Phil. If you spent nearly as much time reading as you do fuming, you'd know that. But you aren't really interested in finding out what I have to say on this subject, are you? All you're interested in is "proving" me wrong and "proving" that your uninformed impressions, based on reading a few of Hemingway's better known novels, makes you some kind of expert on Hemingway and insures that you understand exactly how his fiction should be comprehended and evaluated. JR

Have you ever encountered anyone who argued that Hemingway's best work was in his novels? I've never encountered anyone who took that position. What I said is really a commonplace in the world of Hemingway criticism. There are passages here and there in the novels, though. Here's the opening paragraph of A Farewell to Arms: "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves." This is exquisite. I have never seen a passage that so perfectly encapsulates and merges what Hemingway learned from Twain and what he learned from Gertrude Stein. It is poetic to an extraordinary extent. Anyone sensitive to the music of prose will grasp this immediately. I know of nothing to rival it anywhere in Steinbeck, even in the more successful (perhaps because more economical) of his famous stories about the Great Depression in rural California, Of Mice and Men. Actually, the entire first chapter of A Farewell to Arms is worth quoting here (it's very brief): "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. "The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming. "Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side of their pack-saddles and gray motor trucks that carried men, and other trucks with loads covered with canvas that moved slower in the traffic. There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns covered with green branches and green leafy branches and vines laid over the tractors. To the north we could look across a valley and see a forest of chestnut trees and behind it another mountain on this side of the river. There was fighting for that mountain too, but it was not successful, and in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn. There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child. "There were small gray motor cars that passed going very fast; usually there was an officer on the seat with the driver and more officers in the back seat. They splashed more mud than the camions even and if one of the officers in the back was very small and sitting between two generals, he himself so small that you could not see his face but only the top of his cap and his narrow back, and if the car went especially fast it was probably the King. He lived in Udine and came out in this way nearly every day to see how things were going, and things went very badly. "At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army." As I have indicated elsewhere, Hemingway isn't able to sustain the purity of his rhetoric in this extraordinary passage for the entire length of the novel. In fact, arguably, he never reaches that peak again in the remaining pages of the novel. But the ending is almost equally memorable, and the novel conveys with considerable power the futility and tragic absurdity of World War I as it looked to a young volunteer in Northern Italy (the novel is autobiographical in this respect). Whatever one may think of the merits of this way of looking at World War I, it is of considerable historical interest, since it dominated public opinion in this country throughout the 1920s and 1930s, in no small part because of Hemingway's writings on the subject. But yes, it is a commonplace that Hemingway's best work is in his short stories. "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" is often cited, but I think this particular short story is overrated. I would nominate two of the Nick Adams stories - "Big Two-Hearted River" and "The Killers" - and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." It is necessary to be cautious in approaching these works, however. I have seen readers at every level of sophistication fail to grasp these stories properly because, in effect, they demanded things of them they were never designed to provide. In effect, these readers missed the points of the stories and faulted the stories for their own inadequacies as readers. JR

Not having expert knowledge of "movie-making . . . acting, and/or cinematography," I couldn't be sure what view would most likely be adopted toward any particular film by a person who did have such expert knowledge. When I find myself in such a position, I generally make no comment. I know that you prefer to blunder forward with great confidence in such circumstances and then angrily defend your supposed expert knowledge if it happens to be questioned by someone who knows more than you do about the subject at hand, but I don't favor that approach myself. Though I admit that the common human flaw of pride sometimes defeats me here as it does others, I prefer to try not to claim knowledge I don't actually have, not to atttempt to pass myself off as knowledgeable about subjects I have only passing familiarity with, and to confine my comments to subjects I actually know something about. JR

Early matinees are usually less well attended, the blue/gray hair types attend then, they're supposed to have better manners. And they do have better manners, but it only takes one loudmouth to ruin things. So you won't be going to see it at all? Yet, in a matinee attended by fewer than two dozen people, you had to pay to put up with the lump of talking excrement you described. No, though the recent expansion of venues did bring it to Houston and vicinity, after thinking about it, I decided I'll wait for its release on DVD or as a download. I'm betting that'll happen by Xmas. JR

This is why I don't go to theatres. JR

Excuse me, but I just rose out of my torpor to offer the following lazy one-liner: Ready? Now that Michael has shown himself to be such a thoughtful poster, I guess I'm going to have to insult and vilify him until he either leaves the list or stops posting. It's damned unpleasant work, let me tell you, but it seems to me somebody has got to do it. JR

Hemingway is overrated in some senses. At his best, he was a much finer writer than John Steinbeck ever was, but Hemingway wasn't always or even usually at his best - and he was never, except intermittently, at his best in his novels. He was never able to sustain what he was capable of at his best if he had to fill 200 pages or more. He doesn't even sustain it (though he comes much closer) through the 130-odd pages of The Old Man and the Sea. What you think of as Hemingway's influence on modern writers is really the influence of earlier writers, chiefly Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein, as refined through Hemingway, who basically learned everything he knew about writing from those two profound influences during the years of his youth. In part, also, what you're calling the influence of Hemingway on modern writers is really the influence of the plain style - what Gore Vidal used to call the "demotic" style - in 20th Century writing in our language on both sides of the Atlantic. Cyril Connolly goes into this in considerable detail in his Enemies of Promise (1938), contrasting the plain style with what he calls the "mandarin style" that began going out of fashion in the early years of the 20th Century. He offers a fascinating paragraph, which he has cobbled together from the works of half a dozen contemporary writers (including Hemingway and Orwell) to illustrate his contention that practitioners of the plain style end by making themselves stylistically indistinguishable from their fellow practitioners - something Hemingway At His Best never did. I should add, for the sake of clarifying my earlier point, that the most common reason people feel bored by something is their own failure to understand the point of that something. JR

I first read Nineteen Eighty-four in 8th grade, when I was, I guess, about 13 ( I believe I read The Fountainhead for the first time in that same semester). I've read both novels numerous times since then. Anthony Burgess is a great favorite of mine; I think he's one of the most accomplished prose writers (in our language) of the 20th Century. http://mises.org/daily/5089/Some-Further-Notes-on-Libertarian-Science-Fiction And, unbeknownst to most of the ignoramuses who comment on his work, Barry Lyndon is Stanley Kubrick's greatest film (and Kubrick was one of the top half dozen authentic geniuses among 20th Century film directors). JR

I wouldn't try to teach The Old Man and the Sea to 13-year-olds. It's not "age-appropriate," as they say. The main thing that needs teaching about the book centers around issues of literary style, and few people in that age range are even capable of understanding what is meant by "literary style," much less capable of taking an interest in it. I don't really think Hemingway is a good choice for that age group at all. It isn't just The Old Man and the Sea; it's his entire oeuvre. (Nor, of course, is the situation improved by giving the kids a teacher who has apparently missed the point of what Hemingway was doing, so that he finds Hemingway's work "boring" himself.) JR

Note the tacit assumption by Phil that JG is trying to change minds, that his goal in writing is to do so and that what we are looking at is thus an example of someone setting out to accomplish something and failing because of not doing what he did in the way Phil thinks it ought to be done. Note the absence of even the faintest glimmer of realization on Phil's part that perhaps JG was not trying to change anyone's mind, but was merely trying to express his opinion. Suppose, just for a moment, that this was JG's true goal. I'd say he accomplished what he set out to do. He expressed his opinion. As for Nathaniel Brnaden, I could not agree more. His involved essays simply cannot be summarized adequately in a single sentence. I am working on an exegetical text, tentatively entitled The Involved Essays of Nathaniel Brnaden: A Reader's Guide, which I believe will become a useful secondary source for those too busy studying Chinese culture to consult the original works. Helpfully, JR

Thank heavens no one here is disapproving or inclined to explain to everyone else exactly how and why they're doing whatever they're doing incorrectly and how it ought to be done a different way. That would be very off-putting. JR

I don't acknowledge your original point because I have nothing of any import to say about it. On the one hand, I think it is true that at least some of my comments on literary matters would be more persuasive to at least some readers (though, as I keep trying, apparently in vain, to remind you, I did not write them in the hope of persuading anyone of anything or in the expectation of doing so), if I took the time to flesh them out a bit by looking up some illustrative quotations. Generally, I haven't the time to do so. Would you prefer that I refrain, therefore, from making the comments at all? That can be arranged. On the other hand, I have another reason for not acknowledging your original point - namely, that it seems to me tiresome to concentrate virtually all one's energy, as you do, on telling people how everything they do, no matter what it is, could be infinitely improved if only it had been done Phil's way instead of their way. I tend to focus more on whether there's something in a post (whether it's the main point or a side issue) on which I think I could make an informed comment that might be of some use to someone. How I would have written the post, if I had written it, how I think it should have been done, etc., etc., etc., seems to me to be irrelevant. JR

Not who. What. Ignorance. Indifference to philosophical ideas about politics or anything else. JR

Just out of idle curiosity, would you consider E. L. Doctorow to be an "historical figure no one knows"? JR

Yeah, Steve, keep posting them as you find them. I don't mind reading through all the unrelated stuff that's now on the thread - some of it is even interesting - but I'm very strongly interested in the mission you had in mind when you established the thread. JR

An odd book for someone who claims to know something about American literature not to have heard of. I read it a long time ago, actually, but no, those passages wouldn't entice me to read it again. They seemed pretty much standard-issue Steinbeck to me - nothing I'd show to a friend in an effort to stimulate interest in the book. But you get no satisfaction out of identifying exactly which post you're responding to? Or from letting readers know where they can find the exact statement from which you extracted your snippet? JR

When I was in high school, a friend gave me Pynchon's V, which was then, I think, a fairly current book. I liked the way it started, but bogged down somewhere around the middle and never finished it. I still have a copy on my shelf and the notion that one day I'll try again. About ten years later, sometime in the early '70s, an editor at Reason magazine asked me to review a then-new paperback reprint of The Crying of Lot 49, which she felt had libertarian implications. I started it and liked it okay for a while, though less well than I'd liked V, but I bogged down again (despite the fact that, as ND says, it's very short). I never finished it. I never wrote the review. In 1974, Theodore Sturgeon told me I had to read Gravity's Rainbow. I started it and thought the opening couple of chapters were brilliant, but I bogged down in Chapter 3. About ten years later, I gave it another try. I bogged down in Chapter 3. Nonetheless, I put it back on the shelf, convinced that I would try again. It was obvious to me that Pynchon was an extremely talented writer. There were passages in all the books of his that I'd tried so far that were very impressive. As a storyteller, he hadn't impressed me much - I didn't really feel interested in the characters or what was happening to them; I just liked the writing. But there are a few novelists of that sort on my list of the very good, if not great, and definitely to be read: good or great writers with not much skill or talent at storytelling. So I put Gravity's Rainbow back on the shelf. Then Vineland came out. I bought it, I started it, I loved it. I loved it all the way through to the end. I liked everything about it. (I have since been told that Vineland is the Thomas Pynchon novel people who don't really like Thomas Pynchon tend to like.) When Mason & Dixon came out a few years later, I bought it, but have never cracked it. I never bought the short story collection, and since Mason & Dixon, since the turn of the new century, I haven't kept up at all. I still read the reviews, but I've acquired no more books. ND - is mine a hopeless case? JR

Oh, are we back to pretending that it makes some difference whether Republicans or Democrats win elections? I always hate it when that rotation pops up again. I'm in something like the position of Alice in her famous conversation with the Red Queen: "Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said 'one can't believe impossible things.' "'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'" JR

Who sits around reading old posts? (Yawn.) JR

Jeff, Relevancy implies a standard. If you ignore the standard I am using, it is irrelevant to you. But it is relevant according to the standard I am using. We have to be careful in these discussions to not fall into a bait-and-switch trap on standards. This is one of the favorite games of propagandists. (I'm not referring to you here.) btw - Did you like my reframe? It's a little exaggerated, but no more so than ignoring the social customs of the times. Michael Your reframe is too exaggerated for my taste - as Zinn's is for yours. JR

Jeff, I use a different epistemology. I try to look at what is before I look at what ought to be. In my simple uneducated understanding, I have come to the conclusion that I need to correctly identify what something is before I evaluate it and make my projections on what it ought to be. As to your neocon versus left insinuation, that's nowhere near the ball park in the way I view the world. You gotta take that game to some other field to play. I ain't playing by us versus them. Not when I don't fit either team. But I can say why. I don't mind truth coming from a leftist--or even from a Muslim. (I don't know if you have noticed that around here. ) I do mind when presentism is used as a form of propaganda to denigrate a larger target, especially the culture I live in. I don't like historical rewriting. And that is what I believe the narrative of presenting Columbus as a scumbag does. In essence, the message is, "You are nothing special. Your heroes sucked and your historians were propagandists. So change. Become a decent human being and become a communist (or whatever)." To condemn Columbus as a scumbag, I have to condemn the entire society he lived in that way. In fact, I would have to condemn almost the entire human history. (And don't you dare try to spin this as saying I don't think slavery is vile. I do.) So yes. I do object to that kind of presentism as propaganda. What do I do about it? I start by not taking it as a serious attempt at history. "Judge and preach, then try to identify" just doesn't meet my standards of cognition. I prefer "identify correctly, then judge." After that, I speak my mind. Just like anyone who thinks for himself. Here, let's do it this way. I don't mind calling Columbus a vile slave-trader in the following context: Among the worms and maggots that constitute all of humanity throughout all history up to now, Columbus, regarding slave-trade, was just one more vile person--no better and no worse than the human scum we all come from. Does that work for you? (Heh. Propaganda... where did thy sting go? ) Michael What Columbus did is not under dispute by anybody I know of. It's been "identified" long since. He bought and sold human beings, whom he also routinely brutalized. The fact that many other people of his time did the same (it was far from all Europeans, by the way) is irrelevant. It doesn't make what he did any different. Nor does it justify deciding that the modern way of looking at such things is in some fashion incorrect or inapplicable. As for denigrating your "heroes," why in Galt's name would anybody regard Christopher Columbus as a "hero"? JR

And one of these days, I'm sure you'll explain just why that makes any difference. Jeff, Correct identification of the facts. Nothing more. Do you object to trying to be correct? Michael It is correct identification of the facts to say that Columbus was a vile slave trader. The fact that the people around him didn't look at it that way is irrelevant. We're not writing the history of popular attitudes here - the history of how people looked at things in different periods; we're writing the history of one man's specific deeds and how they ought to be regarded (irrespective of how any particular individuals of any particular time or place did regard them). Do you object to keeping separate questions separate? Or do you prefer to ball them up together so you can use the resulting mess as an excuse to reject a perfectly defensible historical judgment? After all, we both know that the real problem with that judgment is that it was offered by a "leftist" and is therefore wrong by definition. JR

And one of these days, I'm sure you'll explain just why that makes any difference. JR