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

[Bled Welder]

I hate to break this to you, but the gods gave us booze.


On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 7:35 AM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>wrote:

> "Whiskey don't make liars, it just makes fools
> So I didn't mean to say it, but I meant what I said" --James McMurtry
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 7:19 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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