Hamlet's Mother, Jonah, The Diary of Anne Frank, Sand County Almanac, All Quiet on the Western Front

[Bled Welder]

If you take, the inside curcuffrance, of the Great pyramid, and you
subtract it from the outer decimelicatattyyingthing, that number ,is the ,
speed of light.

Does any idiot here know about the Comma of Pythagoras?



On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 6:48 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I too have considered Steiner's ideas and other similar lines of reason.
>  It clearly discredits the idea that artistic cultivation alone is of use
> in resisting the evils of scapegoating and aggression etc.   Perhaps the
> only good thing to come out of WW2 is the opportunity to try to understand
> what shaped those Germans Italians etc. who actively resisted Fascism along
> with those who behaved altruistically toward the victims and also those
> everywhere who  foresaw  and warned against its essential nature. And if
> there has been any progress toward humane values in any society we have to
> ask what was the role of language in that transition.  What had to be
> changed and what was the role of the arts in doing that?
>
> The heart of what I am trying to say in the course of this exchange is
> that if we fail to see our own culture's moral failures and misdeeds  and
>  if we fail to  confront and correct what is most directly our
> responsibility , then any moral claims we make are self flattering
> nonsense, because that is the only place that it really matters in a
> practical sense.
>
>  The blunt truth gets very ugly here. I t is not just Germans who murdered
> millions using a combination of lies, racism, ignorance and greed. Gooks,
> ragheads haji's, redskin heathens, commies, greasers jungle bunnies,
> niggers, papists, micks, chinks, uncivilized..... we all know the language
> that  goes with our own aggressions as we all know the extent of those
> aggressions.  What we fail to confront is the connection between Vietnam or
> Iraq and the self flattering story we tell about WW2 and American
> militarism since that time.
>
> Does not a single Pynchon reader think this was a central part of the
> intended effect of Gravity's Rainbow?
>
>
>
> On Jan 20, 2013, at 3:04 PM, Markekohut wrote:
>
> >
> >>> On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 12:03 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> wrote:
> >>>> Can literature or art in general promote empathy, wisdom, change, or
> is that just a nice dream we like to entertain ourselves with for a while?
> >>>> Generally people don't want to commit to answer this kind of
> question, reluctant to choose between the appearance of cynicism and the
> appearance of naivete' .
> >>>>
> >>>> College age, searching for all the answers, I read Steiner 's
> Language & Silence. It had lotsa
> > Intellectual press. Good Catholic-raised Puritan, I had ASSUMED getting
> ' the best that has been thought and said" made one a better person, a
> noble thing. Steiner wrote about those--many Germans in his examples, who
> read the best books and listened to the best music, cultured
> > enough to be "saints", so too speak, who still could .....be evil.
> >
> > I have spent too much mental time hoping Steiner was somehow
> wrong---maybe they didn't really
> > READ, Feel, the meaning of the words, the music, but how to tell?
> >
> > And one learns writers can be almost-inhuman too---how can that be?
> (Some writers, of course)
> >
> > and lately, them there psychologists are showing how, in the young,
> stories and the characters in them do seem to develop something like
> identificatory empathy.
> >
> > But I still know nothing.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >>
>
>
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