Forum / The Style Of The Times

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    Chris Okum
    Dec 09, 01:38am

    From page 340 of Clive James' Cultural Amnesia: "In his elegant, learned and finally disgraceful NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE, published 1948, T.S. Eliot simply declined to admit that the Holocaust might be a pertinent topic in a discussion of what had happened to Europe. Closer to the scene but equally untouched, Eliot's admirer and colleague Ernst Robert Curtius achieved a similar feat of inattention. If pressed on the point, both savants would have blamed the new technological order: the style of the times. But there was no such thing as the style of the times, except in the sense that they themselves personified: a style of not concerning themselves with the catastrophic results of a political emphasis they had been given ample opportunity to recognize as the first and most deadly enemy of the humanist culture they claimed to represent.

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    Mathew Paust
    Dec 09, 05:28pm

    The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
    Which an age of prudence can never retract

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    David Ackley
    Dec 09, 09:44pm

    It may be more pernicious than mere "inattention," on Eliot's part. The Anti-Semitic lines in "Gerontion," and "Burbank," are well-known, and not worth quoting here. However, they were written in the era when Anti-Semiticism was beginning to undergo its metamorphisis from prejudice to something like the official doctrine of the Nazi Party. Blame for the holocaust can't obviously be assigned to Eliot or others like the more blatant Ezra Pound but they were a significant part of the pre-war intellectual Zeitgeist that gave Anti-Semitism undeserved credibility and, indirectly, carelessly-- prepared the way for "The Final Solution." One can understand why the post-war Eliot would distance himself from it as much as possible by his self-serving "inattention."

  • Samuel Derrick Rosen
    Dec 10, 08:39am

    Eliot was a great poet, overrated and underrated.

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    David Ackley
    Dec 11, 01:57am

    At issue is not Eliot's "greatness" as a poet, which is nearly indisputable, but whether, his poems are diminished by gratuitous anti-semitism. It was Eliot's decision to smuggle this crap into his poems, as if his reputation and his technique would somehow camouflage or excuse it. It's finally repulsive and taints him irredemably in my view, whatever the particular assessment one has of the quality of the poetry.

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    Chris Okum
    Dec 11, 03:56am

    I feel the same way about Heidegger, David. Although I don't hardly understand him, his chumminess with the Nazis makes me not want to even try.

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    Smiley McGrouchpants, Jr-Esq-III
    Dec 15, 12:48am

    Knut Hamsun's reputation, similarly, seems to confound me — or should I say elude me? I first heard of him through Miranda July (Richard Linklater, similarly, has expressed interest in trying to make a movie of his novel "Hunger") and, for somebody who won the Nobel for literature and then was unapologetically (unambivalently?) pro-Nazi — albeit, in a country not on the European continent, where such "distance" mentally might be sustainable — I haven't (in an albeit-cursory search) come across anybody who grappled with this. Did he have a clue to begin with, and then lose it completely, like a downward slide on a kids' playground? Something 'bout the strength and reach of the sine curve of one person's growth & development might seem to make this possible — "conceivable" and "describable" if not "understandable," in the empathetic sense.

    I've come to figure out — took me long enough — that "atrocity" is what is sounds like: minds gone into the red, psychosis (on the part of the perpetrators) and shock (on the part of the victims) so overwhelming it can't be used for experience. Whatever people might make of a battlefield, you *can't* use an atrocity for growth; it blots out memory, it defies the minds scope to grasp it and remain stable.

    Wim Wenders' most recentl film, "Salt of the Earth," about that photographer guy, who witness the Rwanda atrocities and had to scamper off, afterwards, just to collect himself (they show some of his images in the film; refugees in a world gone mad, like "In the Zone" part of Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow") is a helpful example of how to come to grips with this sort of thing: it's literally beyond a person, which is part of the how-and-why it happens and *can* happen, and why we're only able to get a tentative grip on it (I think), by now, in the early 21st Century.

    J.G. Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition" and Charles Stross's "The Atrocity Archives" are doubtless works of art that help Humanity in this regard — but hey, me too, I feel vaguely guilty I haven't gotten 'round to 'em yet, the pile just keeps growing the more you find out about, doesn't it?

    Goddamn books. Goodamn films. Goddamn people. Too little time ...

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    Chris Okum
    Dec 15, 01:43am

    The Atrocity Exhibition is a wonderful book.

    And I can't think of a worse director for Hamsun's Hunger than Richard Linklater. I find his movies unbearably frothy.

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    Mathew Paust
    Dec 15, 05:00pm

    I just want something that will make me laugh--not grimly or smartly or madly -- just going-to-hell-in-a bucketly. That's all. (I guess that is madly, but it's denial madly.) I'm sick of atrocities and trying to understand them or the people whose appetites or egos are so fucking out of control they commit them. Sick to fucking death of the shit, you know? If the Maos and Hitlers and Pots and Stalins and Nixons and Uns and Trumps are destined to rule us rabble then it's our fucking fault, isn't it? For being rabble? Would it do any good to bootstrap up to some kind of specialness, some elitehood? Get out of rabblehood? Ya think? Nah. I don't. Specialnesses and elites get fed to the Soylent Green machines just like everyone else.

    Read David Martin's "Spiders." He's nailed it. Us. He's nailed us. The rest is self-delusion. We can mope about it, growl or whine or screech or write "truth" about it if we think it will help us feel better. Me, I just want to laugh my ass off before they lock me up. And if I can get a shot in at the bastards while they're exercising their prerogatives, I just might take it, laughingly. I dread only going grim. http://fictionaut.com/stories/david-martin/spiders

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    Smiley McGrouchpants, Jr-Esq-III
    Mar 18, 08:51am

    Okum: Try "A Scanner Darkly." Sad to say, it's eluded Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and Verhoeven, et al., in a way that's not their fault: Philip K. Dick's characters are, of course, literally and figuratively "behind in their rent" (dumped, paying alimony, in trouble at their jobs, trying to smack the Kenmore VidPhone so it'll work and not talk back to them, etc.) but it's kinda hard to imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger's got sad-sack "problems," or what-have-you, with all the spinner cars and other visions caught by these fine directors notwithstanding . . . Linklater really *got* it; the characters seem to have their inner, personal turmoil overlapping with the tumult in the outside world, and it's right there up on the screen, as a causal driver. Well worth checking out. ALSO: The DVD has a terrif. interview with P.K. Dick, talking about his problems with the FBI, the state of the world, and various other symptoms of Nixon America/70s life.

    "Seven years in the future ... "

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    John Riley
    Mar 18, 12:36pm

    This is an example of an intellectual being convinced the theme of an era overrides in importance the the events of an era. It's a classic fallacy of the thinking class.

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