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

[Paul Mackin]

On 9/29/2012 10:47 AM, Bled Welder wrote:
> I hate to break this to you, but the gods gave us booze.

Creator and Destroyer.

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