Experience Means Nothing
A defense of the Writer's art being Writing
Deep breaths. Frater Asemlen responds to
’s response to his original article.
Apologies for the long delay in reply, it was May of course. But I won’t bore the reader with Niceties, let’s begin immediately.
>I’d keep this as private correspondence, but since readers of the Unreal Press Substack have taken time to read and respond to Frater’s admittedly lackadaisical philosophy, I think it only makes sense that this “response” is public as well.
Don’t pretend to NOT be an attention-hound, you wouldn’t use the voice register and style nor talking to the crowd if the ideal was really making public a private communication. As to “lackadaisical philosophy” all that I said is consistent with my axioms, this is in contrast to your loose appeals to a variety of gentlemen which often don’t actually agree with you.
>Frater, your argument hinges on the idea that the key to being a successful writer is the study and imitation of past authors. In order to become better at evoking the emotions one desires in his writing,
No not at all, it’s clear by your choice of language “success” “evoking emotions” that you haven’t actually consciously dealt with what I’ve written, success to you is clearly tinged not with the implication of “formal success, a good writing “ but with wide spread acclaim, with sales, a silly ideal in the days of tiktok, YouTube, film and tv, but you know this which is why you don’t really have a dedication to writing and see play/screenwriting as the actual ideal, because the point is not the art of writing to you, it is success and to be a propagandist, but propagandist of what? A peddler of the common opium of modernism onwards, your uninteresting individual persona, a propagandist of auto fictions, transient political positions and paradoxical moral qualms.
When you bring up that the point is to evoke emotions, you betray these things, as we have spoken at length I will reiterate my opinion which we’ve already spoken of, that, there are a diversity of arts and ideals in art, and that, one of the lowest ugliest variants is the evocation of emotion through the faculties of sentiment and for the purpose of emotion itself, reducing the art of writing down to emotion removes both its lowest and highest parts, its simplistic pleasure in musicality, image, pretty conceit and intriguing time-passer are its low elements. When you say it’s about emotion you say the music is meaningless, you say the image if it is not for your emotion it is nothing, there can be no delight in brilliant conceit nor the simple passing of an hour, unless am i to believe you are on this constant roller coaster, crying, screaming, shitting, pissing, laughing and rolling around with each page you read? No, you sit there for the bulk of your writing experience in utter stillness and ataraxia, to paraphrase the words of MP shiel, in the moment of reading the multitude of pleasurable literature, you are struck-dumb stuck from the verbiage as a horse, mouth-chewing, glass-eyed mouth-fulled with herbage and laid there made a dullard.
Such a paradoxical condition is well known, that as the mind extends the mind also in effect is loose and dull to the sensations and emotions, thus the erudite like Thomas Aquinas being called “the Dumb Ox of Sicily” in reality neither internally nor externally are you stirred to emotions save the more complex or simplistic aesthetic sensibilities defineable as Rasas, these occurring in the suspended fluid of intellect whereby they are otherized and in the good pieces, not assumed to be subjectively shared but viewed as an object for some purpose or another, never for themselves. That is, the sad man or woman of the book is not to produce sadness in us, it is towards a greater aesthetic end, when not, it is trite, when not, it is the experience of reading a teenaged diary.
>I mean that, as a writer, it is your duty to observe reality around you and to transform this into an evocation of sensorial qualia, feeling, thought, or the myriad of states that the best writing is able to convey.
Your first and foremost job is not to be a journalist, your first and foremost duty is to “write well” that means the evocation of qualia may not even be the point, purely musicality, imagery, pretty conceit and many others have been the point of writing since the dawn of writing and have been popularly and widely consumed and accepted as acceptable ends, the “observation of reality” which you claim is the author’s own has never actually been the primary import, no one went to Homer for accuracy, they went to him because of stateliness, yes dramatic capacity, rhythm, memorability of lines and intriguing conceit, that, first and foremost he is an entertainment. If basis in reality were the ultimate goal, then we would not have the fantastical pastoralism of Theocritus, we would not have the chimeric monstrosities of men like Nonnus and Ovid, we would not have the highly formalized Callimachus and the Callimachianism so influential, we would not have the carnivalesque’s of Lucian true story or the golden ass, of the Elizabethan and restoration era what can be said save that they constructed a world apart from this one? Where is the world of Keats in Keats? Where is the world of Tennyson in Tennyson? Where in hudibras or gulliver’s travels is the observation of the common Lebenswelt?
It is said, “a rose by any other name” but I tell you the truth, this is a falsehood. The common object to the aesthetician is not the common object in his work, it is simply a bridge, it is simply a ladder to the higher mental implication and impression embedded in the bundle of nuances that is any particular word. The common rose is nothing but a bundle of petals and spike, the Rosicrucian rose holds the weight of the whole spirit of God, thus, the “Rose” is not simply a distillation of a rose, the “rose” is a door into the realm of “play” which Schiller describes, which is the place of the resting still-churning intellect in its many powers, that is, the rose is not the entrance to your experience of the rose, the rose is the entrance of any meaning and implication and zone you desire, which, chiefly, is marked not by its squeezing from the real world, but by its addition to the material world, that is, to remove ourselves from the refuse of substack tier literary critiques (of X is a Y and here’s why!) and instead taking ourselves to the high plateaus of Anandavardhana or Walter pater, the aesthetical is mind-born, being harmonious exotic modulations of the consciousness under various hallucinations which radically alter the relationship of the reader to his own perceptions in novel ways, you do not actually give them yourself, you simply give them a link to the field of impressions (which are simultaneously Supra-emotional and sub-emotional, being our conception of concepts themselves, and the highly subtle feelings underneath.) so then, the petty generation of emotion and the ideal of the journalist are really nothing more than pathos rhetoric, on account that the chief purpose of the aesthetical is to dwell in the aesthetical, which properly understood is really the world of intellect under a sort of interpenetrative self-oscillation, whereby each element the mind can partake and generate undergoes all permutations when interlaced with the others, such is the beauty and harmony and delight of the mind. an approximate idea to this is deleuze’s “virtual plane” when crossed with his conception of the baroque “fold” whereby he defines the baroque as the aesthetical becoming conscious of itself within the design, by this I mean to say, that any aesthetical work when delighted in, creates an inward folding of consciousness in the simultaneous act of being conscious of the aesthetical subject, being self conscious and being conscious of the self’s relative dissolution in the absorption of the aesthetical object, thus the aesthetical plane as a whole is the sum of the possible relations of knowledge (in the sense of datum of all sorts whether they be sensory or eidetic) intermingling in all varieties.
This is not simply delivering emotion nor reformulating the material into other material, it is an access point beyond the material.
> Taken to its logical conclusion what you’re arguing for is art as rote ingestion and reformulation which frankly I find unappealing.
Whether you find it distasteful or not is not a real problem to us when the topic is truth, what you’re really opposing and what you’re really avoiding in this is the question of, “what is intellect, what is reasoning” and the Andes to this is calculation and reformulation, you yourself cannot escape the language of reformulation, it’s why you say it’s about reformulating the elements of life, in reality the mind takes datum, immediately categorizes it and immediately by the process of storing and adding it to its stock-pile, re-invents its entire network of knowledge-points and conception by the introduction of the new point into the whole, thus the web of associations shifts with each individual new knowledge point, therefore, every singular object of perception is in the moment of apprehension reformulated, this is sensible both phenomenologically, and inarguable if we do consider the rote-nature of neurons and their production of one’s neuropsychological relation to knowledge and perception and intelligence. A fabulous study which demonstrates how truly calculative and reformulative according to mechanical stimuli and via mechanical transfers of data in the Brain is the Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga split-brain studies, wherein as a treatment to epilepsy they did split the right hemisphere from the left hemisphere in living patients and tested them, such as showing one eye an object and asking them to verbalize what it was, or asking them a written question visible to one eye to which, upon answering, they cannot explain why they answered. The brain truly is a system which calculates and re-formulates its data and if any of these processes are disrupted the consequences are empirically known. Your intelligence IS rote and your combination of elements is based on the rote ingestion and combination within the aforementioned virtual-plane.
>carpentry it’s true, but what you describe is more artist as plumber or artist as electrician
Spoken like one with no respect for the plumber nor the electrician’s art, these things take no less abstraction capacity than the carpenter and take no less formulation of parts, this is a demonstration of your appraisal being born of taste-sentiments not any will to truly interact with the nature of these.
> But do you really believe, for example, that the best pornographer can ever be one who has not experienced sex?
Absolutely I do, whether we speak of the “best” porn as the most appealing and grabbing, the sex and sexuality which hooks people the most has the least to do with reality, such is the case with the doujin writer who is himself often not having casual sex if any sex at all, and with the hentai and furry pornographer, all of which routinely are extracting far greater attention span from their groups of people, but even if we go to the pop pornographers selling their Mia khalifa’s and so forth, what is the biggest selling points according to the metrics given by Pornhub aggregating nations? Most often, it is impossible utterly unrealistic sex, thus the extreme popularly of incest and sister incest even among those without sisters, thus the global hold of hentai, thus the fantasy of the aforementioned khalifa as the taboo of the good Muslim girl, thus the world wide boom that is the soft-core e-girl, whose entire appeal is that she is a rarified experience unlike to the normal human girl but akin to the video-animated world, such is likewise the fixation had with tomboys and goths, an upper stylized ether further and further away from the mundane commonalities, but if we are to speak of REFINED pornologists, I reckon the finest of the bunch are the highly awarded and celebrated Pierre Louÿs, whose works as a straight men consist of forgeries of Ancient Greek lesbian erotic verse, a little lesbian school-girls erotic-social manual, “Trois Filles de leur mère “ which consists of a gentleman absolutely having his way with not only a mother, but her three daughters of variable age ranging from teenage to child in one long decadent miasma, likewise to this we have Apollinaire’s “eleven thousand cocks/eleven thousand virgins” who, following the lead of another leading man in the field, de-Sade, produces a phantasmagoria of depravity pushing it to an H.R. Giger-esque of complex-filth. What else holds the laurels of Porneia? Why, “the way of a man with a maid” being an extensive violent fantasy of impossible domination and mansions and powers, but what of the contemporary world? Why, agony in pink the power rangers fanfic clearly stands with its head held high, but is it as high as the vampire-based fanfic master of the universe which was later renamed 50 shades of grey? The point is evident, the best pornography is, empirically, impossible super-stimulus. Two links on the topic.
“You neglect that not every old man dies having lived with “life experience” and that seeking it out is as much a soldierly pursuit as is the study of the canon. It is a vocation. “
Bah this is just bias talking, everyone has life experience and everyone has difficulty, every life has extremes and every life does produce wisdoms, your preference for certain life-styles as “life experience “ generates is really just showing your hand, you don’t actually value the lived experience, you, like everyone, enjoys something exceptional and entertaining, what you call “life-experience” you really mean to say “writing interesting contents” and with that, do you really think any 80 year old who still has their mind cannot give you various interesting contents? No no, what we’re discussing is not style and not ability to write, what we’re discussing is whether you personally find what they write about interesting, the problem is of course, that no mundane life is as fascinating as the extent of fantasies and imagination, whether it be mundane fantasies like your Dostoevsky or Jane austen’s, or extreme fantasies such as your Lewis Carroll’s, or, even the bar-room story teller within his circle embellishing details to make the story finer, in all cases we prefer the play of the mind. Of course the “life-experience” of a soldier is more interesting, because the life-experience isn’t the point, a story about “a teenaged lesbian having relationship issues “ inherently is not gonna be as gripping upon first its first adumbration as hearing “a soldier from the trenches” is this because he’s lived more? No of course not, to live and not to live is a simplistic yes or no, now is the quality of one life better than another? Perhaps, but, do you really believe there are no soldier stories less entertaining to read than any relationship drama? As there are surely some petty relationship dramas of more interest than soldier stories, we must conclude that what makes one story better than another is how well it is written, following this logic line, can we say that every soldier story written by a soldier is always better than one written by a Gentleman who has not known war? No it’s impossible to say this, we may say one is more true or true to life, but we cannot say that the one is always inherently the better of the other, on account of this we must then admit, if the story contents do not make the story’s ultimate value, and the proximity to reality and lived experience do not better the soldier’s soldier story to the non soldier’s soldier’s story, then the answer of what makes the better story is apparent, that one is written better than the other. How did these certain superior non/soldier soldier stories get better than these “real” ones? They’re all published, they’re all grammatical, they’re all solid in the basics, so the question has to be answered by the simplest answer, that they were written better using the tools of writing, namely, narrative control, dramatic control, rhythm of dialogue and rhythm in general, composition of scene, imagery selected, and rhetorical modes and styles selected having been executed with efficacy.
Can you deny that you have ever preferred a work about a subject or field written born purely of one’s fantasy over one written purely in one’s real experience? How can you? Who’d lie to themselves like this?
> embarrassments of modern writers, who idolize information accumulation in the form of TvTropes.com and screenwriting guru principles. If one can accrue talent from the analysis of texts, then is there any reason for you to say that one cannot accrue talent from the study of actuality?
These sources offer nothing that is formally relevant in writing though, these principles are tailored to other mediums as a consumer at best, what great knowledge accumulation to the form of writing can you speak of together vs when I go back 200 years ago, where everyone knew how to actually produce rhythm (not in a vague sense, in the sense of actually producing a scansion in their prose, for which reason Cicero who was the handbook of good prose for the bulk of western history after his death gave various recommendations for various rhythms to end your sentence on) when was the last time these people cracked open Quintilian or Erasmus, which of these sites and gurus teaches even the basics of oratory such as “repetition produces impact and musicality “ ( http://philomel.com/musical_illusions/pages.php?i=1020 and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4310215/ ) which has been documented since Sumer? These groups do not actually tell you a lick about writing, they tell you about meta-fictional concepts. Thus why something like TV tropes will have examples from literature as a tiny category, next to anime, cartoons, comics, film, drawings! Music videos! Oral mythology! Etc. these things then are not of writing, but of the broader category of anthropology concerned with describing common narrative-character elements, it is precisely my argument that this accumulation doesn’t matter, because this is not the accumulation OF formal writing knowledge.
> But could he have ever come to Walden through reading alone? It’s an impossibility.
“Could specific person write this specific work if he was the precise specific person?” Down to the tiniest iota? Such is a ridiculous ask, but could he write a work of equivalent literary value on the same images, same or superior philosophy with equivalent or greater aesthetic pleasure, entertainment and so forth? Of course he could have. All records as far as normal documents show Shakespeare was a home-body, was his courtly and foreign excursions in his verse any less literary of value? What about the fantastical pantagruel of Rabelais? Was he a giant monster? Did he see mercury chop peoples heads off for throwing axes into the sea? Did Francesco Colonna see the hyper-pyramids he so extols? Is Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda less entertaining, just because Cervantes he was never an incestual prince? Because he was never a wild man on an island among barbarians willing to sacrifice a virgin? Or do you want to say those who extol Cervantes or lope de vega are wrong? Why? Because they entertain you less than the millions upon millions who have been most entertained? Then if it’s not entertainment, is it wisdom? Do you reckon Walden has more wisdom than the cultivated wisdom of any serious philosopher? Put in your hands a work of Longchenpa, of Plotinus, of iamblichus, or, I challenge you and do not just speak rhetorically, pick up and read the work of Secundus the Silent, whose inverse riddles will overwhelm you with an extreme of wisdom. If entertainment is not the ultimate ideal, and great pwisdom cannot be achieved to the height of these writer gentlemen, what exactly are you arguing this life-experience offers? The truth is this, the arts are vanities and whoever crafts the loveliest illusion of the vanities is the finest writer.
“Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. A myriad of excellent writers have taken this philosophy and, by deliberately affecting the course of their life into strange, unexplored or dangerous territories, produced exceptional fiction, like Thompson, Orwell, and Jack London.”
What is your litany against mine, having Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, having Dryden and Alexander pope, John ford and Samuel Johnson, Thomas Middleton and robert browning, Robert Burton and Roger bacon, Montague Summers and William Blake, mallarme, Verlaine, banville and Isidore ducasse, I’ll end the boring litany thus: for every one interesting or good author of any tradition or style you can cite, we can just as easily find 10 equal or better authors who were boring homebodies who did nothing but sit and read all day. And even that, coupled with the normal social expectations of the times! In my Bible the songs of asaph are next to the songs of king David, Solomon and Moses. If I ask the Greek pagans why was Virgil a prophet? Because of skill, why was Aesop so well? The blessing of the gods and nothing of his experience or power, likewise Pindar the finest of them by their own estimate? Blessed by the sting of a holy bee to speak with honeyed words his muscular lyrics.
>Textual study cannot teach you that which has not been written.
> divesting yourself, Frater, of the one thing which differentiates you, as far as your art is concerned, from an LLM chatbot. If you see the raising of an eyebrow this evening on your commute, you may write about it because it is real and you saw it. An LLM may only write about it as a document.”
I will demonstrate how a chat bot could approach your exact words and replicate them.
Prompt: machine, using the quote “divesting yourself, Frater, of the one thing which differentiates you, as far as your art is concerned, from an LLM chatbot. If you see the raising of an eyebrow this evening on your commute, you may write about it because it is real and you saw it. An LLM may only write about it as a document.” “ produce a sensory description of an event, use both the exact words and words inspired by the requested words quoted.
Output: I step onto the rattling train just as dusk drapes its lavender haze across the windows. The air tastes faintly of petrichor carried on a draft that stirs the collar of my coat. Beneath my fingers, the cold metal pole hums with the low-frequency thrum of electricity, a heartbeat pulsing through the carriage. Around me, murmured conversations fold into the warm hiss of brakes and the scuff of boots on linoleum.
And then—there it is—a single, imperceptible twitch: the raising of an eyebrow this evening on my commute. I see it in the reflection of my dirty window, a silent question etched above a pair of tired eyes. My pulse quickens; this quiet gesture, this small fissure in the monotony, becomes an ember of wonder. “If you see the raising of an eyebrow this evening on your commute, you may write about it because it is real and you saw it.” I say to myself. I lean forward, inhaling the faint scent of spilled espresso and musk, capturing every nuance. Her eyebrow arches the tired lashes, she is a living apostrophe in the gray narrative of routine.”
Why, quite opposed to my taste, but sensory? Yes, as or more sensory than your image-diversion? Why I do think so! Why do you mock “a document “ when, forgive my drop in register, EL EM AY OH, all writing is simply the construction of documents, the moment you write a TEXT it becomes a TEXT, if you oppose texts as textual documents, you shouldn’t be in the art concerned with MAKING TEXTS. To get to the heart of the problem, you are Like a man who looking at the body of the scientific disinclines and says “studying all of this and practicing in according with the tradition of the giants that we stand upon is incredibly less important than re-approaching the fundamentals” the scientist would not detach from his sure gigantic foundation, neither would the architect, yet you desire to reinvent the wheel by denying the material literature gives you. You yourself show your opinion of literature is that it is a profane valueless thing almost, if you really believed that life experience can be translated to literature and that this is the primary commodity to the great writing, does it not serve, that, by the study of such a work you would have gamed the system and have integrated the life experience at an accelerated rate without having to do so yourself? And having accrued such, could you not then refine it further despite never experiencing the things it speaks of? (As surely many people have done, like the d’avenant tempest which for most of history was considered superior to the Shakespeare original, the shadwell Timon, the Nahum Lear, etc. all examples of men taking material they have no lived experience relating to, and refining it by art to great esteem.) no instead you do not actually believe that the writing can transfer life experience so you do not count it.
>Twain. Daniel Defoe. Robert Louis Stevenson. These are all writers who made their bones writing about true experiences.”
Defoe has on record 198 proven pseudonyms according to commonly accepted literary history, all of which demonstrate intensely different styles and biography claims and on many differing topics all Of which have nothing to do with his life as a merchant or a spy, and if we are to speak of crusoe, what of “Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World” has to do with his real life?
What in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde can be attributed to his lived experience and not the swelling of interests of the times in still-popular figures like Eugene Aram the by-day goodly scholar poet, and by-night murderer? What can’t be attributed to the already substantial body of literature on him and similar gentlemen which Stevenson doubtlessly read?
As for Twain? The biggest part of him is not lived experience, the biggest part of him is not even literary quality, he is a creature of Witt, his stories are about demonstrating Witt, his pages Witt, is there 2 pages of Twain without a Witt display? Where? Thus the point of Twain is likewise dispelled because one can cultivate Witt without doing anything but sitting in a corner contemplating, one can cultivate it by studying, or one can simply be born with a lot of Witt.
>Perhaps the best argument against rote study and for life experience is – take a single look at the state of the self-publishing scene which you yourself occupy.”
Oh I’d love to! Because I see them as all examples of your same flaws!
>Lomez of Passage Press, Cairo Smith, Raw Egg Nationalist, even your very own Unreal Press “
What’s the commonality of these eh? Think it over real deeply, it’s that none of them enjoy reading for itself, the bulk of these gentlemen are fixated on literature as a status symbol, literature as a soapbox, a propaganda tool, a self extension or in cases of men like Cairo smith, (and possibly yourself) a cheap replacement to scratch their cosmopolitan itch to create indie films that nobody would want to watch either.
>Here are writers who have every opportunity like no generation before them and no contemporary besides to study and analyze and refine previous traditions into epochal masterpieces. What do we see instead?”
Oh but they do have many many contemporary models, you just didn’t name them. They are named film, for like yourself they idealize film over writing, they are named tv shows, anime, cartoon, even video games! These are the actual mental masters of the bulk of these men and are the bedrock of their style and ideas of aesthetic and methodology: the anonymous multitude of instagram psuedo confessional poets and slam poets also take a substantial share, of course when you imitate horrible slop that ISN’T EVEN designed for writing the result will just be sloppy writing.
>Cormac McCarthy knock-offs, post-apocalyptic movie pastiches, Cyberpunk-noir, and the old reliable True Detective Season 1 homage. This short list encapsulates about 70 to 85 percent of dissident right publishing. Surely someone would have emerged from this (notoriously chronically online) scene with a book that truly exemplifies the genius of the studied craftsman? “
Why would they when, as you say, their basis is a pop novelist who they Like for ideas of edgy ruggedness and film adaption, imitation of one movie genre, imitation of another genre predominantly through its film adaptations, and, what’s that, a tv series? But you don’t divide these from studying how to actually write because, just like them, you see writing as just an inferior screen-writing, you see the play and the film and tv show as the ideal and literature, really, something anyone can do if they’re classified by you as interesting, why have that interesting category? Because who is the most important and interesting person to the man impacted by in the modernist condition? Why, himself, so of course you want to consider personal valuation of an interesting life as the be-all end all!
“They proudly call themselves derivative, brush their hands, and go tend to their middle-class spouse or remote job. Maybe they’ll schedule a tweet before bed. That’s to say nothing of the fantasy genre as it exists both in samizdat and tradpub.”
Study trash and you produce trash, but I am not so hard on the fantasy genre as you, I don’t hate our mutual friend James Krake or the like, why, because I know the ideal you’re harping on about is the lie of the great-history-changing novel which is an a-historical conception. Edward Bulwer-Lytton had no interest but to entertain us with his skill, the same to Walter Scott, what these pulp fantasy slop publishers do is ultimately of a similar type. They simply are not interested in the form of writing as anything but utility just as you, but unlike you they do not see play or film the superior art, their ideal art is the world building in itself, the wiki-conception, the data point summary, this is what they have adapted from Tolkien and his sons directly, and they enjoy it. They deeply enjoy reading each other for its own sake. I oppose their style but I don’t oppose their work ethic nor their writers, they do not write for why I enjoy writing, but to say they fail at their aim, entertainment and artistry in world building, is simply sticking your nose in the air and ignoring the earnest work so many people are performing.
>And it is totally and absolutely derived from Tolkien and Tolkien derivatives in MMORPGS, games, comix, cartoons etc. There is no devotion to reality here There is no devotion to reality here. Frater, what would you say when faced with this glut? “
Simple, that these are going to typically be far more enjoyable than the generic literary autofiction piece born of self experience whether the writer is a self obsessed Congolese transsexual or a dasha-obsessed Celine wannabe murdoch-murdoch right wing pseudo incel. And also, again, lmao none of these have a lick to do with actually studying the forms of writing and learning how to write properly and building off of the actual giants.
>I’ve known you long enough to know how high your standards are, so no you wouldn't. You'd say it's shit. You might say, as per your philosophy, that the foil of the modern fantasy writer is that he has not studied his own genre extensively enough.”
He need not study his genre, he can study writing in general in any form, but sure, if he did actually study the likes of sterling or dunsany or smith he’d certainly be better.
> He might emulate their sentence structure, their forms, and ideas.
Halt, if he has already successfully emulated them, then that means he has produced material he reckons entertaining and pleasurable in forms he enjoys, he has achieved success ALREADY.
>He realizes that the deeper he goes into the past, into Dunsany, into the Decadent movement etc, the further he strays from what makes fantasy primally enticing, which is the civilizationally archetypal in fusion with the actuality of the reader's milieu. “
I am tired of saying lmao but I will again, no, the pleasure of fantasy is not the clash of mundane reality vs speculative realism, the pleasure of fantasy is imagination reformulating as many sensual elements according to the taste of the author as possible. There is nothing lost in your ability to imagine by studying dunsany nor how he writes just as nothing is lost if you study starbuck Mayo or Murray gilchrist or what have you, if I think of a gentleman like Keats he says no author of any value writes concerning his time period, and there are a legion of authors who say the true writer doesn’t write for his time period but for eternity, being always fresh, but focusing on just fantasy, do you really believe that reading more books you enjoy and studying them deeper would somehow isolate you from the ability to make fantasy? And make it enjoyable? How ?
> Our subject’s rubric has failed to make his writing any more enticing except as an academic curiosity”
Enticing to who? Is this still a popularity contest? If it’s a popularity contest, Ursula Guinn, Borges, Tolkien, Umberto Eco, Arturo Pérez-Reverte and many others show that erudition in the modern day does not harm readability nor potential range if that is your desire, but again why is this about popularity and wide sales if the ultimate question is aesthetic beauty? If you want the most eyes TikTok and YouTube are the answers, go, make some political video, go lift some weights and sell creatine, go take on an anime avatar and become the new gawr gura, these are all things that’ll give you 100 to 10000 times more popularity and influence than writing any literature will in terms of sheer readership and human-mind space you’ll take in this lifetime (assuming you won’t be lost in the sea of time in the future.)
>Writing informed wholly by your predecessors will inevitably be an unconvincing simulacrum, a fun house mirror. Recall the pornographer who's never had sex?”
The one we spoke of earlier who is genuinely the best pornographer, yes! I do! Your funhouse mirror perversion ideal has no weight, you use the word simulacrum while speaking of enticing crowds, do you not find it ironic! The entire point In baudrillard is that these simulacrum being generated off of bundled associations becoming signs signifying signs, by their invisibility to the real, by their all-present nature to the eidetic structures we hold, are impossibly MORE powerful than the real, can pack MORE DESIRE, because they can generate by fiat non existent desires (thus the endless horde of internet obsessives!) the simulacrum in itself is the star and ruler of the popular of the current “civilizational Milieu” therefore your complaint is actually ridiculous for your stated aim, can we verify this? Yes! Which books are read the most? The genre slop (whether Romance, fantasy, detective, light novel variants, etc) and the renown “classics” “best books” if you really wanted to maximize your enticement then, and your desire doesn’t boil down to wanting to be on opera’s best list for your biography about having smoked crack between bisexual affairs, then guess what! The highly simulacra based genre-slop is your best friend.
>What separates the artist from the carpenter is that the very best works of writing are often conceived spontaneously.”
Like who? It’s all completely well known that the Elizabethans and restoration era would take their time, group read, group rewrite and so forth, such is the common practice of the romantics, the Victorians, Georgians and basically anyone having produced good. In every moment we find extreme stylists and very fine works whose reputation is having taken a lifetime or endless pouring over every single hour, whether it’s Yeats and co admitting such is the case with modernism, Flaubert putting a lifetime into st Anthony or any other movement you can point to.
>states have given rise to passable derivatives. Did, for example, Helena Blavatsky, the progenitor of the Sword and Sorcery genre as we know it today2, arrive at the tenets of Theosophy through endless calculation, contemplation, and pastiche?
Did Blavatsky, the woman renown for creating the most derivative horrible broth of fourth hand occultism, get her model from beint horribly derivative? Endless calculation no, horribly derivative? Absolutely yes. I do not know why you bring up such an awful system with such obviously false roots (are you a theosophist to believe in this lodger which is not chronologically sensible?) but regardless, no, her model is just a hodge-podge born of not studying anything in depth. No Buddhist Tibetan or otherwise whose studied her works earnestly considers her of their rank, I can give you recommendations on Buddhist literature if you desire. Same to her horrible corruptions of hermeticism, alchemy, Kabbalah, etc, if you really desire it in private or public here I will give you reading lists.
>n any case, we see this “trickle-down” even in pop arenas. A food poisoning induced fever dream had by one James Cameron spawned not only the Terminator franchise but a slew of imitators, knock-offs, parodies, and, yes, refinements. When Bruce Joel Rubin began scribbling down the screenplay for Jacob’s Ladder in the middle of the night, it was prompted by a nightmare of “terrible despair”. That same brilliant picture would spawn the Silent Hill and Resident Evil games
All neither here nor there, Cameron didn’t invent the transformers, the films are loved for the mixture of their franchise with Michael bay’s vulgar auteur style, likewise Cameron’s work is nothing but technical displays, no one comes away from the avatar films with anything but praise for technology.
But regardless, terminator, what is this born of his lived experience? This is precisely the mind-born mind play with nothing to do with reality, his dream was of a phantasmal metal torso, should we consider all flights of fantasy, dream and reading of strange events to be lived-experience? If so, then your complaints against reading and calculation are again foolish, because these are AGAIN in that paradigm, just the maximally efficient way to accrue these life experiences in refined superior further distilled forms. Not a fan of jacob’s ladder I’m not a film guy, but of silent hill, I know enough of it to know it’s based on numerous writers and graphic artists, various streets in the game are even named after writers who influenced the games.
>I find it endlessly curious that you mention Edgar Allen Poe as being representative of genius only being arrived at by a “replication in finer and finer procession”.
Hey I wonder why I keep mentioning him?
Literally his own book on the topic.
>that the entirety of the Gothic vein, in which Poe wrote, as we know it can be traced to a nightmare suffered by Horace Walpope one night in 1764, which inspired the very first Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto.
Nah the aesthetic was already entirely existent prior, the reason walpope uses the term gothic, is because he was influenced by what? Sleeping in a gothic building and being influenced by the highly refined non-lived-experience born other art that is the gothic building, but you know, he’s neither the one to popularize the genre nor invent it, all of it exists already in Macbeth, in othello, in revenger’s tragedy, in paradise lost, in Spenser, in the graveyard poets, in the death-ode of John Hopkins, the number of poems and novels using all of the elements of gothic before the becoming of a simulacra is numerous (becoming a simulacra is what it is, the gothic genre as genre upon taking the label) you are just praising the creation of simulacra now.
>Plato argued: Ion’s talent as an interpreter cannot be an art, a definable body of knowledge or an ordered system of skills," but instead must come from the divine inspiration of the Muses. Poetry, he argued, is the art of divine madness
Don’t get ahead of yourself, this divine madness is not something owned or acquired by the poet even in the platonic material, your life experience yields nothing here, for which plato writes (after saying homer himself but imitates And makes nothing real or new, for remember, Plato was against the artists.)
The following quote is from the republic.
“Then, I said, we must put a question to Homer; not about medicine, or any of the arts to which his poems only incidentally refer: we are not going to ask him, or any other poet, whether he has cured patients like Asclepius, or left behind him a school of medicine such as the Asclepiads were, or whether he only talks about medicine and other arts at second- hand; but we have a right to know respecting military tactics, politics, education, which are the chiefest and noblest subjects of his poems, and we may fairly ask him about them. 'Friend Homer, then we say to him, 'if you are only in the second remove from truth in what you say of virtue, and not in the third-not an image maker or imitator-and if you are able to discern what pursuits make men better or worse in private or public life, tell us what State was ever better governed by your help? The good order of Lacedaemon is due to Lycurgus, and many other cities great and small have been similarly benefited by others; but who says that you have been a good legislator to them and have done them any good? Italy and Sicily boast of Charondas, and there is Solon who is renowned among us; but what city has anything to say about you?' Is there any city which he might name?
I think not, said Glaucon; not even the Homerids themselves pretend that he was a legislator.
Well, but is there any war on record which was carried on successfully by him, or aided by his counsels, when he was alive?
There is not.
Or is there any invention of his, applicable to the arts or to human life, such as Thales the Milesian or Anacharsis the Scythian, and other ingenious men have conceived, which is attributed to him?
There is absolutely nothing of the kind.
But, if Homer never did any public service, was he privately a guide or teacher of any? Had he in his lifetime friends who loved to associate with him, and who handed down to posterity an Homeric way of life, such as was established by Pythagoras who was so greatly beloved for his wisdom, and whose followers
are to this day quite celebrated for the order which was named after him?
Nothing of the kind is recorded of him. For surely, Socrates, Creophylus, the companion of Homer, that child of flesh, whose name always makes us laugh, might be more justly ridiculed for his stupidity, if, as is said, Homer was greatly neglected by him and others in his own day when he was alive?
Yes, I replied, that is the tradition. But can you imagine, Glaucon, that if Homer had really been able to educate and improve mankind-if he had possessed knowledge and not been a mere imitator-can you imagine, I say, that he would not have had many followers, and been honoured and loved by them? Protagoras of Abdera, and Prodicus of Ceos, and a host of others, have only to whisper to their contemporaries: You will never be able to manage either your own house or your own State until you appoint us to be your ministers of education'-and this ingenious device of theirs has such an effect in making men love them that their companions all but carry them about on their shoulders.
And is it conceivable that the contemporaries of Homer, or again of Hesiod, would have allowed either of them to go about as rhapsodists, if they had really been able to make mankind virtuous? Would they not have been as unwilling to part with them as with gold, and have compelled them to stay at home with them? Or, if the master would not stay, then the disciples would have followed him about everywhere, until they had got education enough?
Yes, Socrates, that, I think, is quite true.
Then must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning with Ho-mer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach? The poet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colours and figures.
Quite so.
In like manner the poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on the colours of the several arts, himself understanding their nature only enough to imitate them; and other people, who are as ignorant as he is, and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling, or of military tactics, or of anything else, in metre and harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well-such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by nature have. And I think that you must have observed again and again what a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.
Yes, he said.
They are like faces which were never really beautiful, but only blooming; and now the bloom of youth has passed away from them”
Plato continues at length explaining how all arts of all kinds are nothing but imitation even in their best, and how this is actually why the production of art is effectively evil.
In a word, this man is not your friend!
> What this illustrates is that poverty is valuable because it exposes one to situations which, to put it crudely, make for good stories, not because, as you suggest, it imparts some nebulous and implacable virtue on the writer which magically increases their writing ability.
No this is just some embarrassment over the collective belief, you do believe that the suffering imparts skill because you have already said you believe suffering for life-experiences generates them because you soldiered for them which automatically generates superior writing. Thus you do believe that simply living in poverty and suffering would increase your talent, since it is a question of life experience ultimately.
>the fact is that many otherwise financially well-off individuals deliberately left a comfortable life to live “Spartan-like” as Thoreau said. George Orwell, for example, was the son of an imperial agent in the Indian Civil Service and famously rejected a cushy job as an officer in order to “tramp”
So? A gentleman who writes well decided to tramp around and write a book, 1984 or Animal Farm gains what from this? Besides be honest, everyone likes him as an idea-man, do you even idolize his style? Would you enjoy the work less if another man read his book and re wrote it to be better without experiencing it?
>Henry Miller, too, left the “air-conditioned nightmare” for the bed-bug infested slums of Paris and the result was Tropic of Cancer, a great novel with a prose style that has no immediate predecessors.
Except Joyce, Rabelais, Thoreau, Celine, Dostoevsky, Whitman and Emerson all in calculation mixed in a broth, you mean?
> but as you yourself once said,
I will instead, consider your words here:
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Apologies for the few deformations in spelling and sentence structure, such abnormalities and degenerations are common when the ideal is truth, not aesthetical pleasure.