Category: Literary Matters
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The Harsh Style
I just now came across an excellent post by D. G. Myers in defense of the harsh style. Excerpts: . . . the harsh style is first cousin to the plain style. They share a genetic predisposition, inherited from their ancestors the anti-Ciceronians and anti-Petrarchans, for clarity and exact statement (which are, of course, the same…
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Pseudo-Latin French Bullshit: The Cartesian Castle
In Misattributed to Socrates, I announced my opposition to "misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression." But I left one out: the willful fabrication of 'quotations.' And yesterday I warned myself and others against pseudo-Latin. Today I received from Claude Boisson an example of…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs From a Passage in Thomas McGuane
Here is a passage from Thomas McGuane, Nothing but Blue Skies, Houghton-Mifflin, 1992, pp. 201-202, to which I have added hyperlinks. He [Frank Copenhaver] turned on the radio and listened to an old song called "Big John": everybody falls down a mine shaft; nobody can get them out because of something too big to pry;…
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Bogus Camus Quotation
One finds the following on several of those wretched unsourced quotation sites: "I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't, and die to find out there is." ~Albert Camus Having read and taught Camus, the above…
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On Diachronic or ‘Emersonian’ Consistency
Yesterday I said I was opposed to ". . . misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression." An example of the last-mentioned follows. Here is a famous passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance" rarely quoted in full: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of…
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Misattributed to Socrates
I am a foe of misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression. Have I ever done any of these things? Probably. 'Suffering' as I do from cacoethes scribendi, it is a good bet that I have committed one or more of the above. But…
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Joyce Johnson on Kerouac
Here. Amazingly, yet another Keroauc biography has been published, this time by Johnson. Just what neither the world nor I need. But being a 'completist' I'll probably acquire this one too. Related post: Joyce Johnson Remembers Kerouac
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Roger Scruton on the Art of the Aphorism
Speaking Neatly. Excerpt: FALSE APHORISMS are not as rare as one might think. More significant than Wilde's, on account of its influence, is Marx's dismissal of religion as "the opium of the people." For this implies that religion is adopted purely for its ability to soothe the wounds of society, and that there is some…
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An Aphorism of Mine Translated into Slovak
Dear Mr. Vallicella, My name is Cyril Šebo, I am an English teacher in Slovakia and also a blogger on our national Slovak blogspot http://cyrilsebo.blog.sme.sk/clanok.asp?cl=309289 Today is The International Day of Translators and in my blog I dared to use one of your thougts from your blog, to show how difficult it can get to…
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Lanzetta Responds re: Kerouac
This is Danny Lanzetta. I saw your blog posting in response to my piece in the Huffington Post last week, "In Defense of Jack Kerouac…" Thanks for reading. In your reaction, you wrote of my link to that famous OTR passage: "Lanzetta seems to be suggesting that this is a particularly bad specimen of …
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Some Aphorisms of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
I have discovered the aphorisms of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec via a reference in a book by Josef Pieper. Here are a few that impressed me from More Unkempt Thoughts (Curtis Publishing, 1968, tr. Jacek Galazka), the only book of Lec's I could easily lay hands on. No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. (9)…
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To Doctor Empiric
When men a dangerous disease did 'scape Of old they gave a cock to AesculapeLet me give two, that doubly am got free From my disease's danger, and from thee. Ben Jonson (1753?-1637) from Epigrams and Epitaphs (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 27. At the very end of the Phaedo, having drunk the hemlock, Socrates is…
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Literarily Pleasing, but Incoherent
I found the folllowing quotation here: But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. — Umberto Eco The world is a play of phenomena, an enigmatic play of…
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Some Recent Writing on Kerouac
October is Kerouac month hereabouts and she is still a good six weeks off. But Danny Lanzetta's In Defense of Kerouac and Other Flawed Literature should be noted before it scrolls into cyber-oblivion. Excerpt: Kerouac's work is undoubtedly sophomoric at times. He is hopelessly naïve about people, which sometimes leads to this and other times…
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Victor Davis Hanson on Gore Vidal
Here. Excerpt: For all his claims of erudition, Vidal suffered the wages of the public autodidact. I noticed he quoted Latin ad nauseam — and nearly always with his nouns and adjectives not just in the wrong cases (especially the confusion of the accusative and ablative in preposition phrases), but predictably in the fashion of…