The Feminization of American Culture: Ann Douglas: 9780374525583: Amazon.com: Books

[Ian Livingston]

But wait, does alcohol make us more anything, or does it just make anything
we are seem somehow bigger and more important?

On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 7:34 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Lionel Trilling famously believed that those, all?,  writers were only the
> geniuses we know when they were writing non-drunk........but someone else
> once said many writers feel so deep a---and feeling contains pain ( as well
> as joy) but maybe more pain in understanding our dark sides....
>
> And, perhaps we have all known drunks who tap their anger and get quite
> verbal when drinking.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Sep 29, 2012, at 10:19 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > On 9/29/2012 7:41 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
> >>> The big three of the 30s and 40s, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner
> were
> >>> all heavy alcohol users.  Was this mainly to fight inner demons, or
> was it
> >>> integral to their creative powers?  Their writing was so different.
> What
> >>> were the common elements? Where was the "family resemblance"?
> >>> (Wittgenstein)
> >> Looking back, from Wittgenstein, we might say that the idea, a family
> >> resemblance, is one that, if only when we look back, peep in the
> >> public record, open the old photo albums, watch those old home movies,
> >>  generates memories and defeated desires, so Nihilism...
> >>
> >> and, like the phrase about family resemblance, American Nihilism,
> >> while not fathered by Nietzsche, looks a lot like the mustached
> >> European madman.
> >>
> >> We might also photoshop into the portrait, Mr Eliot, who is, after
> >> all, as much a part of this American generation of nihilists as the
> >> others, though he does find a dead tradition to bury his individual
> >> talents in.
> >>
> >> And there are lotz of others, though not as famous as these members of
> >> the family.
> >>
> >> But what kind of nihilism? There are so many in American fiction.
> >>
> >> And, we might say that  Pynchon, with his early works, V., and Lot49,
> >> is much in the family; no conclusion or final illumination, no Joycean
> >> epiphany. The heart is darkness, the bomb is pushed from its precipice
> >> by the boys, the island burns, the beasty is in us and we are
> >> metaphysically and aesthetically lost; sometimes in the pun house,
> >> sometimes in the labyrinth, sometimes in the mundane stranger's
> >> murdering meaninglessness under the indifferent sun , sometimes in the
> >> grip of Them.
> >>
> >> Does Booze make this nihilism more intense, release the aesthetic from
> >> the metaphysical sickness unto death? Camus talked of suicide and
> >> rolling a stone; perhaps this is what the booze soaked nihilism
> >> afforded?
> >
> > I kind of think it might.  For example Proust and Joyce weren't big
> drinkers, and both  In Search of Lost Time and Ulysses ended quite
> affirmatively.
> >
> > I wonder if Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights) and Samuel Richardson
> (Clarissa) might not have taken a drop or two to get them into a darker
> view of things.  They were quite the exceptions to their respective eras.
> >
> > On a personal note I've observed that watching the  PBS nightly news in
> a semi alcoholic haze makes the very serious discussions  appear slightly
>  absurd.
> >
> > P
> >
> >
> >>
> >
>



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds
the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in
reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness
groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest
urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
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