Drop It

[Bill Nolan]

"Aaron Yeater" <AYEATER at ksgrsch.harvard.edu> writes:

> whoa.  that was a little harsh, maybe.

Harshness is necessary, if only as a corrective to jporter's attempts to 
beautify the attack on all those people.

To obscure so many people's loss and suffering behind a screen of pretty 
metaphor is a little harsh, too. To render pain as "information" is not 
just harsh, it's monstrous.

Oh, wait a minute, I'm overlooking something. The nervous impulses arriving 
at a child's brain when the skin has burned off her back ... why, those 
impulses are information! Cool! A-and that person whose shadow was burned 
into the steps of a bank ... that person was really just a vast amount of 
information, right?! Just like the old wino on the burning mattress in _The 
Crying of Lot 49_!

Whoa, indeed.

> i think that what leads us 
> (and i sympathize with jporter in the matter) to such a conclusion is 
> that the bomb was so instantaneous, so complete, such the power of a 
> deity or something else, something m-more...that from a certain 
> perspective it doesn't have a human reality of the sort you describe. 

Yes. But that "certain perspective" requires a critique.

> then you read John Hersey's "Hiroshima" piece and you understand of 
> course, it did.

Do you really need to read a book to understand that "human reality"?

> but i don't think that jporter was denying that, just pointing out 
> that the bomb is not as melodramatic as your post suggests--there is 
> irony there too.

Call my response melodramatic, if you insist. I call it humane, and though 
I admit its style might have been overheated, I stand by it.

> and if that's literary snobbery, well, paint me red and sell me a 
> baguette.

Want some butter with that?

--Bill
___________________________________________________________________________
Bill Nolan, Writer/Editor/Wiseguy            http://www.halcyon.com/bnolan/
Amid slender firs in the green and gray Northwest        bnolan at halcyon.com