rap wrote-
Such ideas are in the realm of magic and phantasmogoria. We know the trick and there is little of interest. If we pretend we don't know the trick there is no verisimiltude. No Courts of Love for example. Eleanor of Aquitaine and the regulations governing chivalrous conduct in the presence of refined ladies. Camelot being a sort of pun.
Quote:It's too bad that you thinks that way of Twain
I must beg your indulgence for that rap.
It is caused by an admixture of prejudices I hold to.
Where I morphed from a moustache was, and still is, seen as the epitome of vanity. The thought of standing before a mirror with a razor in hand sculpting such a monstrosity that Twain sported on his upper lip can only be justified if commissioned by a lady and from what little I know there are few signs of that in his writings.
Mr Bronte buried a wife and all his children and the supicion is current in certain circles that in view of the unnaturalness of such a proceeding he must have drawn the life force out of them to sustain his own. Twain, I gather, managed something similar.
His bankruptcy is another negativity but that is a minor matter when set beside his aw-shucks down-home, folksy, cloying sentimentalities which are of the most obvious and naive simplicities and only tolerable to simple minds.
And he was pronouncedly preachy. He has advice for every occasion except, of course, those involving friendly female company in secluded apartments at the mention of which he probably, like Hippolyte in Madame Bovary, "grinned sheepishly".
Years earlier Kant had written of art as disinterested, ( "Stand back, and view my sorrows as a painter might"), and as creating a "second nature" through human agency. A neat definition of ID and an explanation of why ID cannot be taught in any way formally.
Why AIDs-ers persist in talking about the teaching of ID baffles me. When one teaches a child how to get on one doesn't talk about getting on. It would sound selfish. Manners and etiquette indoctrination never mention the objective of the exercise. I can only surmise that AIDs-ers persist in the illusion in order to obey the laws of conservation of energy and prevent the straw getting on fire.
Gautier, later, followed up by declaring art useless, amoral and unnatural and thus being outside of the Darwinian canon. Flaubert's ambition was to write a novel about nothing so as to allow the appreciation of literary felicity to stand alone. Art for art's sake.
And here is Twain--being useful, moral to the point of bigotry and as natural as a skunk on a snuffling hunt.
It is the old argument of the aesthetic against the ethical. All AIDs-ers are ethical and philistine and think the world around them degenerate. The aesthete views it as the best age of all because it contains all the previous historical possibilities plus those of its own time and thus would prefer to have not been born just yet.
"You can do anything but lay off of my blue suede shoes" is aesthetic. Oscar Wilde had a similar thing about his blue china.
Americans, like the Romans, are a practical race of men. They had to be. They act and leave the dreaming to the nambie-pambies. And science is nothing if not dreaming. Stephen Hawking can only dream.
So you are to be congratulated rap on your preference as it shows that you have been correctly indoctrinated as Sinclair Lewis explained. In this respect your choice of avvie suggests a certain fraying at the edges.
The aesthete has one large advantage though over the man of ethics. He can easily poke fun at himself whereas an ethics man can never do that because to do so undermines his ethics and reduces his confidence in his moral strictures.
An sound aesthete, for example, would take advantage of the evacuation of Congress to admire the fixtures and fittings in the absence of distractions. "There are plenty more where I come from", he might say to the ushers who are eager to exercise their incipient and largely frustrated control freakery. He might even have a sit in the Speaker's Chair or examine the graffiti on the intern's toilet's doors.
Whether to return Jim to his owner is probably the result of a computation of the personal risks being run by doing so. I think Mr Bush would allow Jim to go north. Possibly even Mr Cheyney.
I think you will find rap that rivers have an important influence in a number of cultures. It is not only in North America. It would be interesting though if you explained the nature of the influence of your rivers specifically.
BTW rap-- the eclipse trick was employed in King Solomon's Mines.
Has any AIDs-er read The Song of Solomon? Nancy Mitford set off reading it out at a wedding, for the lesson, but a couple of bishops removed her from the lecturn. Wilde did something similar with the same result. But not bishops. Is it that book which bothers them so much?
If Twain had a sense of humour I'll eat Sitting Bull's ceremonial hat.