MDDM: melancholy, Mason, Lolita

[cathy ramirez]

--- Doug Millison <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> Yes, you've managed to make connections that
> illuminate rather than fog, unlike Mr T and now
> "cathyramirez69". Thanks, Dave.  
> 
> What strikes me as I've been reading Burton off and
> on
> these past many months is the way his subject always
> manages to ooze out of his grasp, amoeba-like, the
> more he tries to hem it in with citations and
> authorities -- he just can't seem to get to the end
> of
> it -- like trying to love the People in GR, or watch
> the map grow to match the territory in M&D -- or
> like
> that story I heard from an old guy, used to go
> downtown and watch the bottles thread through the
> capper at the brewery, no way to keep up -- so he
> makes the most of digression, tangents, the
> accretion
> of detail and repetition.  

What a bunch of crap. 
Why don't we talkn about the book. You have it and I
have it. Howboutit? 



> 
> Burton offers another take on the great shift in
> sensibility that M&D explores:
> 
> 
> "The impetus toward a scientific prose derived
> ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the towering
> intellect of the century, who charted a
> philosophical
> system well in advance of his generation and beyond
> his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of
> Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum (1620) Bacon
> visualized a great synthesis of knowledge,
> rationally
> and comprehensively ordered so that each discipline
> might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
> The
> two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight
> that there could be progress in learning, that the
> limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be
> pushed
> forward, and his inductive method, by which
> scientific
> principles were to be established by
> experimentation,
> beginning at particulars and working toward
> generalities, instead of working backward from
> preconceived systems. Bacon democratized knowledge
> at
> a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and
> lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and
> ethics
> and into the domain of mechanically operating second
> causes (though he held that the perfection of the
> machine itself testified to God's glory). The
> implications for prose are contained in his
> statement
> in the Advancement that the preoccupation with words
> instead of matter was the first “distemper” of
> learning; his own prose, however, was far from
> plain.
> The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is
> underpinned by a tactful but firmly persuasive
> rhetoric; and the famous Essayes (1597; enlarged
> 1612,
> 1625) are shifting and elusive, teasing the reader
> toward unresolved contradictions and
> half-apprehended
> complications. 
> 
> "The Essayes are masterworks in the new Stuart genre
> of the prose of leisure, the reflectively aphoristic
> prose piece in imitation of the Essais of Montaigne.
> Lesser collections were published by Sir William
> Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben
> Jonson (his posthumous Timber; or, Discoveries). A
> related genre was the “character,” a brief, witty
> description of a social or moral type, imitated from
> Theophrastus, and practiced first by Joseph Hall (
> Characters of Vertues and Vices, 1608) and later by
> Sir Thomas Overbury, John Webster, and Thomas
> Dekker.
> The best characters are John Earle's
> (Micro-cosmographie, 1628). Character-writing led
> naturally into the writing of biography; the chief
> practitioners of this genre were Thomas Fuller, who
> included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642;
> includes The Profane State), and Izaak Walton, the
> biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard
> Hooker. Walton's hagiographies are entertaining, but
> he manipulated the facts shamelessly; his
> biographies
> seem lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville's
> tragical and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir
> Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major
> historical work of the period was Sir Walter
> Raleigh's
> unfinished History of the World (1614), with its
> rolling periods and sombre skepticism, written from
> the Tower during his disgrace. Raleigh's
> providential
> framework would recommend his History to Cromwell
> and
> Milton; King James found it “too saucy in censuring
> princes.” Bacon's History of the Raigne of King
> Henry
> the Seventh (1622) belongs to a more secular,
> Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for
> its
> lessons in pragmatism.
> 
> 
> Prose styles 
> 
> The essayists and character writers initiated a
> reaction against the orotund flow of serious
> Elizabethan prose that has been variously described
> as
> metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or Senecan, but these
> terms are used vaguely to denote both the
> cultivation
> of a clipped, aphoristic prose style, curt to the
> point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness,
> asymmetry, and open-endedness. The age's
> professional
> stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of
> Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne the clipped style
> is
> used to crumble the preacher's exegesis into tiny,
> hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated
> restlessness. An extreme example of the loose style
> is
> Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a
> massive encyclopaedia of learning, pseudoscience,
> and
> anecdote strung around an investigation into human
> psychopathology. Burton's compendiousness, his
> fascination with excess, necessitated a style that
> was
> infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas
> Urquhart, whose translation of Gargantua and
> Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even Rabelais. In the
> Religio Medici (1635), The Garden of Cyrus, and
> Hydriotaphia, Urne-buriall, or A discourse of the
> Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk (1658) of
> Sir Thomas Browne the loose style serves a mind
> delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation,
> content with uncertainty because of its intuitive
> faith in ultimate assurance. Browne's majestic prose
> invests his confession of his belief and his
> antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an
> almost
> Byzantine richness and melancholy. 
> 
> These were all learned styles, Latinate and
> sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of
> the
> first corantos, or courants (news books), generated
> by
> interest in the Thirty Years' War, heralded the
> great
> 17th-century shift from an elite to a mass
> readership,
> a change effected by the explosion of popular
> journalism that accompanied the political confusion
> of
> the 1640s. The search for new kinds of political
> order
> and authority generated an answering chaos of
> styles,
> as voices were heard that had hitherto been denied
> access to print. The radical ideas of educated
> political theorists like Thomas Hobbes and the
> republican James Harrington were advanced within the
> traditional decencies of polite (if ruthless)
> debate,
> but they spoke in competition with vulgar writers
> who
> deliberately breached the literary canons of good
> taste—Levellers, such as John Lilburne and Richard
> Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner;
> Diggers, like Gerrard Winstanley with his call for a
> general Law of Freedom (1652); and Ranters, whose
> language and syntax were as disruptive as the
> libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples
> were Milton's tracts against the bishops (1641–42),
> which revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous
> abuse and withering sarcasm. Milton's later
> pamphlets,
> on divorce, education, and free speech
> (Areopagitica,
> 1644) and in defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of
> Kings and Magistrates, 1649), adopt a loosely
> Ciceronian sonorousness, but their language is plain
> and always intensely imaginative and absorbing.
> To cite this page:
> "English literature" Encyclopædia Britannica
> <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=108552>
> [Accessed October 2, 2002]. 

Heavy. but nothing you can say a word about. 

Look in the archives for all the names dropped here. 

Look up Bacon and langiage for starters. 

What a jack you are, Doug. A jack ass, 

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