[ExI] Fan of Sci-Fi? Psychologists Have You in Their Sights

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 6:32 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> James Joyce's novels are literary jokes.  English teachers keep teaching courses
> on them and looking for some meaning amid the simple or complex plots and
> characters.

Have you read them? _Ulysses_ starts off with mocking a religious
rite. I think most people reading it get that. _Portrait of an Artist
as a Young Man_ also has its share of jokes. There's a lot of dark
humor in Joyce, especially in _Dubliners_ (not a novel, but a
collection of short stories), I believe most readers and critics of
him are well aware of.

Ditto for Beckett. His plays and novels are full of jokes, though
usually sardonic ones. As in:

'But is it true love, in the rectum? That’s what bothers me sometimes.'

'You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.'

> They will never find any (that they don't create).    If Joyce is anywhere he is
> laughing his ass off, thumbing his nose at people who think they know what
> he is up to.  He was up to fooling them and he succeeded.
>
> Ditto premodern, modern, post-modern (who can keep up?) poetry - so obscure
> that no one can find any meaning or sense in it.  Ergo, it must be really important
> and profound.

Please don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel about all this?:)

Tell me that these two modern poems are 'so obscure that no one can
find any meaning or sense in' them:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57158/ballad-of-orange-and-grape

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47687/next-day

As someone who personally knows a few poets, I don't think they're
kidding around.

And one thing about poets and writers generally is that quite of few
end up teaching or doing criticism (usually because writing poems and
stories doesn't pay well, so you teach or critique what you know
best), so there's no clear divide between being a creator of work and
an interpreter of it.

To be sure, I have read enough obscure poetry -- stuff that's really
hard to get or even seems to not want to be understand. Or maybe it
has a very personal meaning -- like writing it code. In those cases, I
do wonder why it got published at all. Any literary journal or
magazine is bound to have some of this. But this stuff almost certain
won't stand the test of time. I mean it's almost certain to not be
read fifty years from now. (In the same way, most poetry (and art in
general) of the past has been forgotten and moulders in libraries,
though online it's bound to last though go mostly unaccessed.)

> Classical music kept up too.  I won't name names out of a fear of skewering your
> favorites, but the more abstract and random they could make it, they did.  And
> acted like snobs when we didn't like or said we didn't understand it.  Again,
> laughing behind their scores

I don't mind you 'skewing' my 'favorites.' So do tell. :) I'll even
make it easier on you. In terms of modern 'classical' composers, my
favorites are Shostakovich, Arvo Pärt, and Henryk Górecki. (I don't
like everything they've done, but I like a good number of each of
their works. Shostakovich is my favorite modern composer so far.) I
don't believe any of them acted like snobs or 'laugh[ed] behind their
scores,' but then I don't know all their biographical details.

> Truly accurate last words that should have been said by all of the above:
> "I did it.  I got away with it!  I am famous and they don't know why!"
>
> So if you think you understand any of the above, the joke's on you.

One can understand exactly what you said above and simply disagree
with it. That's my take. This isn't to say you're completely wrong
about every last modern or postmodern or contemporary artist. Sure,
there are tricksters -- like, I believe, Duchamp and Andy Warhol.

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://author.to/DanUst