Tolkien, New Sincerity and My Little Pony ramblings

Jade

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Yeah I guess I'm gonna vent out a little. I've been listening to the audio book of Tolkien and the Great War and it's striking how the man managed to write such beautiful poetry in the middle of a certified Hell on Earth. I got the same impression when I read the Penguin book of First World War poetry (TM). Here is an excerpt from a poem Tolkien wrote while in the war.

O fading town upon a little hill, Old memory is waning in thine ancient gates,

Thy robe gone gray, thine old heart almost still; The castle only, frowning, ever waits

And ponders how among the towering elms

The Gliding Water leaves these inland realms And slips between long meadows to the western sea –

Still bearing downward over murmurous falls One year and then another to the sea;

And slowly thither have a many gone Since first the fairies built Kortirion.


How can you write such kino bro. Of course the poem is sad and melancholic, but it's deeply beautiful and innocent in an ineffable sort of way. I think you can clearly tell this was written from a man of another age, an age long and distant that it feels impossible to journey into. And perhaps this is my greatest frustration and aching sadness right now. Here we have men who were experiencing more horrors than we'll probably even experience in our lifetime and yet they managed to write such beautiful and hopeful prose stuff. You can call this sort of faith a cope, but really can you say that about someone that experienced the Somme? Nevermind that, John Garth makes a great defense of Tolkien's imagination:


But this was not the escapist urge it appears at first glance. The West of Tolkien's imagination was the heartland of a revolution of sorts: a cultural and spiritual revolution. (...) There he had written that it was from Kôr, west over the ocean, that 'the fairies came to teach men song and holiness'.

And

The overriding metaphor of the seasons also provides a note of consolation, suggesting not only loss and death but also renewal and rebirth. To similar effect, the fairies of faded Kortirion sing a 'wistful song of things that were, and could be yet'. Thus it is not sadness that finally prevails in 'Kortirion' but an acceptance of approaching contentment.

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Of course not every modernist who experience WW1 came out with a curious whitepill. WW1 also produced the Hollow Men, and as far as I'm aware most modernist I've read feel 'black-pilled'. Though the fact still remains that this was the generation that produced the Inklings, that sprouted Christian Humanism. Now compare that to us zoomers, and zoomer writers especially. I can't imagine any of us producing anything as beautiful or with the vision of someone like Tolkien. As for me, I just feel like everything I write is hideous, not hideous in the proud 'omg I'm such a bad writer you guys', but rather in the sense that I feel like I can only write about vulgarity and disgusting and debauched stuff. There's a sense that if you want to be taken seriously, you have to write trashy, ironic, posmo, degen, unhinged, hentai stuff. When I write I sometimes feel disgusted at myself, I often find myself surprised by the things I write down in the moment like, Shit this really is inside of me huh. For example curse words. I don't use cursewords because I wanna write like a Big Boy or whatever, I just do it cause it's literally how my inner monologue works, I curse all the time, and how can you even hope to come back from that and towards a more beautified view of things? I say shit more than I say thank you, probably. You end up feeling cursed.

And you end up feeling especially like a pussy. Like fucking hell if men who went through literal war can write about the Higher Things why can't we if we haven't suffered for shit. Most of us anyways. Maybe that's why? Because we haven't suffered? But I don't think that's right either, in a way I feel like we zoomers suffer from a meaningless that previous generations could only fear and philosophize about, but we're the ones actually experiencing it. Though this view risks being perhaps too flattering and too meta-narrative focused for zoomers, it really feels like we've got a special kind of suffering that renders most of us incapable of producing beauty. And we're still a bunch of brats really, according to Jean Twenge, most of us don't know how to drive or have ever had a job. Reading about Tolkien and his Oxford buddies, a good amount of them died in the war btw, and they died very young, like at ages 20-22, then you realize how lowly you truly are. Men who died at age 21 (I'm 23) and already did more than you can probably ever hope to accomplish in your lifetime.

As for me, though I suspect this is a common sentiment, I suspect this is why some of us are so into My Little Pony. The early seasons managed to touch a sense of childhood, innocence, wonder, and moral imagination that feels lost in our modern world, it's a sort of refugee from modernity or postmodernity or metamodernity or whatever you wanna call it. Speaking of meta-modernity, in his memeable TV essay, DFW wrote the following copypasta:

The next real literary "rebels" in this country might wel emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gal actual y to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that'l be the point. Maybe that's why they'l be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists wil ing to risk the yawn, the rol ed eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "Oh how banal." To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of wil ingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today's most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line's end's end. I guess that means we al get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.

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my little pony school GIF



The highlighted parts, that's all stuff Tolkien has been accused of. And I have to wonder, for all this talk about how to overcome le postmodernism, maybe the answer has always been in the literary sense of christian humanists like Tolkien. And Tolkien is a very serious author, the J.R.R Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical assessment, is 800 pages long, the Blackwell companion to J.R.R Tolkien is 600 pages. That's a lot of scholarship. And it's not like Tolkien hid in his own wine cellar ignoring the philosophy of his day either. Tolkien scholars like Theresa Freda and Bradley Birzer have pointed out that The Lord of the Rings was very much an indirect response against modernism and modernist literature. And of course modernism sprouted postmodernism.

I don't feel confident in calling Tolkien proto new sincerity, that might be anachronistic, but the vision that Tolkien give us seems like a better antidote for postmodernity and etc than new sincerity with its My Little Pony, Star Wars prequels, Wes Anderson, and K-On. New Sincerity arguably gave us the Alt Right and the wokies too. That's what I think at least, but the problem still persists, how can such a nihilistic generation engage with the moral vision of someone like Tolkien? Perhaps this is the ultimate blackpill, how can we enter Faeri when it's way easier to enter hentai? My christian itching says that God works the greatest through the lowly. But who knows, my more cool zoomer self is yelling Coooope!

pink glitter GIF
I feel like I should give an actual response to your OP since my spiel was kind of its own thing, lol

The Great War had a huge impact on Tolkien's life, yeah. So many parts about LOTR have their roots in his experiences during the Great War. Your comment about how you feel you can only write 'disgusting' stuff and how hideous nihilism feels is displayed in LOTR through the orcs. The Orcs in LOTR are the result of ruthless exploitation and torture. Orcish youth are exposed to disgusting, disturbing environments and countless horrors from the moment they're born, and the instant they've outlived their usefulness they're thrown away like trash. It's what soldiers like Tolkien went through during the Great War, where generals would just throw endless waves of soldiers at the opposing side and call it strategy, while they watched safely from their luxury homes and meeting-halls. The Orcs are simply the result of that mentality taken to its logical extreme. Orcs aren't cruel because they want to be cruel, they're cruel because its all they've ever known.

You also mention Tolkien as being a "man from another age", which I think is very significant, because Tolkien absolutely was a man from another age in spirit, but even that spirit pined for ages long before him. Magic slowly fading from the world, and nihilism creeping in faster and faster, is a persistent theme in Tolkien's works. When the One Ring is destroyed, it also results in the destruction of the Three Rings held by the elves. Some of the few remaining Elvish kingdoms in Middle-Earth, like Rivendell and Lothlorien, are abandoned soon after this as their inhabitants flee to Valinor, because they can't continue to live the way they have been now that the protection the Three alotted them is gone. The Ents also seem to be on the verge of extinction for similar reasons - Men mutiliply while the elves decrease, and woodlands and wildernesses that once covered the entire continent are chopped down and destroyed by Men (and Orcs) in order to build farms and cities.

Tolkien mentions the countryside in England as being "rapidly destroyed" before he was 10, and how much that affected him. In fact, villains like Saruman are heavily associated with heavy industry, as he destroys the woodland around Isengard in order to exploit them for food and fuel to feed and equip his Uruk-Hai. Even in their names this is reflected - "Isengard" means "iron enclosure" in Old English, and "Saruman" is a portmanteau that could mean "armored man", "mechanical man", or even "robot".

It's wonderful to see these more subtle themes appreciated, because I think a lot of Tolkien scholars don't pick up on them very well, let alone the average person who only knows it from the movies, and I've seen some pretty brain-dead takes even by people who have know the series back to front.
 
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please pray for the idiot, please tell me who DFW is so I can take a look.

Google is awful now and all I see is this airport BS

Edit: aw shit it's that dude who wrote Infinite Jest, can we really compare that book with Tolkien at all? not shitting on Infinite Jest but holy fuck they are totally different and written for different reasons
 
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please pray for the idiot, please tell me who DFW is so I can take a look.

Google is awful now and all I see is this airport BS
David Foster Wallace. is a famous writer known for writing what's often considered the last great American novel, Infinite Jest, an encyclopedic piece that deconstructs postmodernism and consumption. The dude kickstarted (accidentally imo) a literary movement called New Sincerity. This movement, at least for internet relevancy, is often associated with Moe anime, Star Wars Prequels, and My Little Pony. The concepts for New Sincerity come from the last pages of his essay, E Pluribus Unum, and the movement generated about New Sincerity is often proposed as an artistic alternative against postmodernism.
 
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>Be Feanor, prince of the Noldor
>Most beautiful and charismatic elven-king to ever live
>Live in a hallowed paradise called Valinor at the edge of the world with your kin
>Morgoth, ultimate enemy of your gods, is released from prison after 3000 years
>Claims to be repentant, but immediately starts stirring up trouble among your clan and subtly manipulating them
>See no problem with this and ignore this disaster waiting to happen in favor of showing off the light-gems (silmarils) your father Finwe made
>Be surprised when Morgoth kills your father and steals said light-gems, fleeing to his fortress across the ocean in Middle-Earth
>Get so pissed off that you and your seven sons swear a collective oath to wage eternal war against anyone who possesses the silmarils, except yourselves, and make the oath binding with magic and invocation of the gods
>Take your entire clan and start making preparations to head to Middle-Earth
>Suddenly realize that you have no actual way of crossing the ocean to get to Middle-Earth
>Beg another Elvish clan called the Teleri to borrow their entire fleet for transport across the ocean
>Get so pissed off when they refuse that you and your clan end up slaughtering them all and stealing the boats, resulting in your clan's permanent exile from paradise.
>Your clan is so incredibly shit at sailing that half the boats are wrecked on the voyage before even making it to the open ocean
>Now there aren't enough boats or supplies to make the journey
>Decide that it would be a good idea to betray your brother and permanently sunder your clan by taking the families most loyal to you, stealing the ships again, and abandoning the families most loyal to your brother, leaving them to trudge over a glacial hellscape called the Helcaraxe to reach Middle-Earth
>By some miracle manage to sail to Middle-Earth without further incident
>Morgoth notices your arrival and sends a host of orcs and balrogs after you
>Actually manage to fight them off and force them to retreat into the mountains, but get so arrogant over this victory that you decide it would be a good idea to chase after the fleeing host into unknown terrain despite not having set up camp or surveyed the land or done anything yet
>A balrog gets the better of you in the mountains and you die like a little bitch
>Your half of the clan throws a pity party over this for the next 500 years
>Be Fingolfin, brother of Feanor
>Your half of the clan finally makes it over the Helcaraxe, greatly diminished and starving
>Want to get revenge on Feanor and his half of the clan and decide it would be a good idea to start a civil war inside of the already existing war against a literal god
>Only just barely talked out of it by the quick thinking of your nephew Fingon, who manages to convince Maedhros, your competition to the title of High King, to step down, leaving you with de facto rulership over all of the Noldor
>Set up various kingdoms all over the north of Middle-Earth, pissing off the elvish clans already living there who had never been to Valinor and who were already pissed at them after hearing about what they did to the Teleri, who they were distantly related to.
>Fight a stalemate against Morgoth for the next 450 years and make zero progress
>Then one day some random dwarves show up on your doorstep with a crazy story
>The local elvish tribes actually managed to get one of the Silmarils
>WTF, how?
>Apparently, a human fell in love with an elvish princess and, as a joke, her father (Elu Thingol) told him that he could marry her if he brought him one of the Silmarils.
>The absolute madman actually does it
>This guy, with only the help of his lover and a talking dog, literally did all by themselves in the span of a few years what the entire Noldor clan combined failed to do over the course of CENTURIES of constant warfare and scheming
>Thingol hired the dwarves to make him a necklace for it so he could show it off, but supposedly he tried to stiff them
>The dwarves tried to kill him, but failed, and so they fled north
>Send spies to confirm this info
>It's actually fucking true
>Shit
>You are now oath-bound to sack the place and kill everyone there
>March on i, kill Thingol, and burn his entire woodland kingdom to the ground
>STILL FUCKING FAIL TO GET THE SILMARIL
>Beren manages to hide it on the secret river-isle of Tol Galen where you will never ever find it
>Fuck
>Very soon after this Morgoth gets the better of your kin at the Dagor Bragollach, and your own personal fiefdom is under siege
>Decide it would be a good idea to challenge him to single combat, despite the fact that he is a god, and you aren't, because you have about a gazillion hours of playtime in Dark Souls and Elden Ring
(I'm not shitting you, this is actually how the fight goes, Fingolfin just dodge rolls everywhere while Morgoth swings his giant mace again and again)
>Finally you start to tire and realize that maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all
>Morgoth kills you by stepping on your neck George Floyd style
>But hey, at least you managed to stab him in the heel before you went
>Your entire clan throws another pity party over your death
>Pity parties aren't enough to stop Morgoth though
>Be Fingon, successor to Fingolfin
>Fuck up big time at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears
>A Balrog kills all your guards and splits your head with an axe
>Morgoth burns the entire north of Middle-Earth to the ground with his dragons and all of your lands are destroyed
>The remnants of your clan crawl back to Valinor like the bitches they are and beg for help from the same people they slaughtered and betrayed over a bunch of sailboats
>They hate you so much it takes the interference of your gods for the Valinorian elves to agree to help you
>They send a huge army against Morgoth and the resulting war is so huge the entire north of Middle-Earth is destroyed and sinks beneath the waves
>But they win, Morgoth is imprisoned forever, hooray!
>Except wait a minute
>Remember how you swore to declare eternal war against anyone who held the silmarils that wasn't a descendant of Finwe?
>Well guess what, now the elves who you betrayed, and yet helped you anyway, have the silmarils
>Decide you have no choice but to steal the stones back from them and the gods
>Royally fuck it up because the stones recognize you as "evil" and start burning your flesh whenever you touch them
>Commit mass suicide because of how much it hurts, and two of the stones are lost to the bottom of the sea and the depths of the earth
>The remainder of your clan stays in Middle-Earth while the rest return to Valinor due to sheer embarrassment and because in spite of everything they've grown to like Middle-Earth
>Your descendants are the population of Rivendell


And that is the tale of the Silmaril Shuffle.

This was all the doing of one (1) elvish clan, and not even the most powerful of them. Don't even get me started on the forging of the rings and the relations with Numenor.

(2/3)
this is a great tl;dr. I read the Silmarillion but would be hard pressed to do this. thank you.

aside: it's incredibly funny for the tale of the Silmarils, which if I remember correctly takes the top tier of Rivendell tale tellers three days to recite in Sindarin, can also be written in greentext form
 
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David Foster Wallace. is a famous writer known for writing what's often considered the last great American novel, Infinite Jest, an encyclopedic piece that deconstructs postmodernism and consumption. The dude kickstarted (accidentally imo) a literary movement called New Sincerity. This movement, at least for internet relevancy, is often associated with Moe anime, Star Wars Prequels, and My Little Pony. The concepts for New Sincerity come from the last pages of his essay, E Pluribus Unum, and the movement generated about New Sincerity is often proposed as an artistic alternative against postmodernism.
alright I'll read that essay, think I found a copy here if anyone else wants to read

 
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@Remember_Summer_Days , I'm nearly done with the article, and I can't help but remember what my philosophy prof said about postmodernism: "You either have to play the same game or ignore it completely." His decision was to ignore it completely and it suited him. Anyhow. Just a comment before I finish this article. Thanks for the recommend, I'm enjoying it.
 
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And we're still a bunch of brats really, according to Jean Twenge, most of us don't know how to drive or have ever had a job. Reading about Tolkien and his Oxford buddies, a good amount of them died in the war btw, and they died very young, like at ages 20-22, then you realize how lowly you truly are. Men who died at age 21 (I'm 23) and already did more than you can probably ever hope to accomplish in your lifetime.
First of all, what has Jean Twenge done for you that you should take her opinions seriously? Have her studies been independently replicated? Or is she just some pop psychologist who provides fresh meat for the media? She's a cisgender woman who has never had to raise sons, and you're going to let her tell you how to be a man? She has no idea what it's like to even try to be a man. You shouldn't even let other men tell you how to be a man, either. Your masculinity is your property to do with as you please.

Stop worrying about being somebody else's idea of a "good man". You've got enough on your plate just being your own man. Likewise, what's the point of comparing yourself to men who lived and died a century ago? Most of those poor bastards who died in the trenches in the First World War were conscripts. They were draftees. They were slaves. It's always a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight, and the poor men doing the fighting are often shamed into volunteering by the women in their lives. If you don't believe me, then you haven't heard of the white feather girls.

Furthermore, even if you haven't gone through combat, do you really think you've had it easy? I thought school was a meat grinder when I was doing time; it only got worse for people your age. The stakes have only gotten higher; there's more risk and not nearly as much upside, not when there are people with doctorates tending bar because teaching pays fuck-all and techies getting ghosted by dozens or hundreds of shops before finally getting past the phone screen. What you don't seem to realize is that you're the veteran of a thousand psychic wars already. How many economic crises have you lived through? Aren't you living under the threat of environmental collapse and the renewed threat of nuclear holocaust? You aren't living in peacetime. You're living in a carefully maintained ceasefire that could easily end tomorrow.

Incidentally: I'm almost 45; depending on who you ask I'm either a very old millennial or one of the lastborn of Generation X; being a low-key Billy Idol fan I prefer the latter label. I didn't learn to drive until I was 28. I didn't need to until then, but once the need arose I sucked it up, learned how, and got my license. It's not that hard; if you've seen how often drivers go full retard as soon as there's a little precipitation on the pavement you'll understand that the DMVs in the US will pretty much issue a license to just about anybody.
 
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Right, so this post will be off the cuff, but here are my thoughts.

Intellectual speech generally speaking, does not exist; however, what it portrays or begins to approach through mastery of the intellectual craft is reality, in itself. Trees are real, the forests and glens and dales and mines and dwarrowdelves and dens and little men who live beneath the earth who cannot be seen by those who do not look are all quite real. At least, to those who live in the worlds where they have not been destroyed and buried by the tyranny of intellect and scientific opinion, these things are real and quite findable, and are preserved throughout history by a recognition that these are, indeed, miraculous in their structure as well as the mere fact of their rare appearance to oneself.

I think I'll probably repeat myself.

Speech, as it is progressively mastered by an individual, approaches the description of reality. Generally speaking, intellectual work or even fiction cannot transmit the necessary spark of truth. What I mean is, for example, if you have ever tried to tell a story about your own experience, or something else that happened to you that deeply affected you, it is basically impossible except in very rare circumstances for another person to be affected in the same way. Generally speaking, they will have some general reaction like "Oh, how happy for you" or "Oh, how sad for you", but the tale you tell is not woven in such a fashion as to bring tears to their eyes. It does not penetrate the heart.

What the fuck am I talking about? I really don't know. But probably I mean in part that it is incredibly important to consume fiction of substance, rather than the dross of Being, in order to be a decent fiction-person.

Anyhow, the facticity of dwarves and other elder spirits of the earth has nothing to do whatever with whether we believe in them or not; however it has certain ecological consequences, wrong belief is it's own poison much like a preponderance of intellectualism. (1) IN THE SAME FASHION, postmodern art critique entering the entire discussion of Art in a society is like a bad smell, here and then fastidiously blown away by the natural processes of the earth. What remains is that there are certain cores of truth inimitable expressed by arts like Infinite Jest, that I agree with another poster in this thread, that the movement toward subjectivity has uniquely brought to the aesthetic palette of writers in this era.

However, that subjectivity has become extremely emphasized in current trends in poetry, generating the "therapy poetry" which is common now. These are among the most awful things I have ever read. I feel extremely vicious about subjectivity in poetry, but that's off topic.

DID YOU KNOW I LEARNED THE WORD INIMITABLE FROM DAFFY DUCK???? This sentence I entirely mean to indicate that even in the silliest of medium, there are often things which persist and have value.

I've tired myself out, thank you for the thread. Rereading this, it's very schizo and hard to read probably, so I am sorry for not being more clear. BUT THIS IS THE FUN PART FOR ME


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXPC2HXjrYU


(1) This is not to say that over intellectualizing is the only poison, over-embodying reality is a type of poisonous ignorance also. The great human beings we revere and look forward for are often balanced in their approach, as I believe Tolkien was (warrior as well as poet, boy as well as man.) I often think of Tolkien as a boy exploring the mystic lattices of vast and old forests in his youth, and then chasing the death of others in these natural places when he grew older, setting out the groundwork for his own unique literary necessities and dare I say eccentricities. @Jade Also interesting is the total savant, but that is another conversation.
 
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I've tired myself out, thank you for the thread. Rereading this, it's very schizo and hard to read probably, so I am sorry for not being more clear. BUT THIS IS THE FUN PART FOR ME

(1) This is not to say that over intellectualizing is the only poison, over-embodying reality is a type of poisonous ignorance also. The great human beings we revere and look forward for are often balanced in their approach, as I believe Tolkien was (warrior as well as poet, boy as well as man.) I often think of Tolkien as a boy exploring the mystic lattices of vast and old forests in his youth, and then chasing the death of others in these natural places when he grew older, setting out the groundwork for his own unique literary necessities and dare I say eccentricities. @Jade Also interesting is the total savant, but that is another conversation.
I don't mean to sound rude but I'm having a lot of trouble understanding your post. What do you mean by "total savant"?
 
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@Remember_Summer_Days , in response to your original post, I would actually assert that many times beauty does come as a result of strife. Tolkien was a real one, at least as far as we can tell.

momma always told me "it hurts to be beautiful" and that often means to me that difficult effort and striving many times do lead to their intended (good) result. Tolkien seems like he might agree with that.

Its interesting that the whitepill dude (Tolkien) gets remembered so well and other writers do not.

I notice that while my heart stylistically clashes with Infinite Jest, I can basically understand and commune with Wallace's story though a tennis player that can't communicate with anyone (the part of Infinite Jest that's autobiographical)
 
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Its interesting that the whitepill dude (Tolkien) gets remembered so well and other writers do not.
There's a market for the sort of comforting fantasy fiction that Michael Moorcock derided as "Epic Pooh", but I have no idea why Moorcock regards J. K. Rowling as "redoubtable".
 

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I don't mean to sound rude but I'm having a lot of trouble understanding your post. What do you mean by "total savant"?
not at all, my shit is wack.

My note is off topic I bet, but I'm referring to guys like Tolkien or Bukowski. They are great writers in their own fashion, are far different, but both have practical experiences deeply crucial to their works.

"Total savant" might be a writer or artist who is a genius without practical experience, who is extremely advanced in their craft but not grounded. Immanuel Kant is probably a good example.

I meant to direct your attention toward the preceding sentence anyhow, since I think it was echoing some of your earlier posts. Sorry for the confusion thank you for asking to clarify
 
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"Total savant" might be a writer or artist who is a genius without practical experience, who is extremely advanced in their craft but not grounded. Immanuel Kant is probably a good example.
I read Kant in high school and I can't think of a better description of his works than that
 
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"Total savant" might be a writer or artist who is a genius without practical experience, who is extremely advanced in their craft but not grounded. Immanuel Kant is probably a good example.
Nietzche be like
 
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There's a market for the sort of comforting fantasy fiction that Michael Moorcock derided as "Epic Pooh", but I have no idea why Moorcock regards J. K. Rowling as "redoubtable".
have ye opined yet on Shadow of the Torturer?

good article, I totally forgot about Susan Cooper
 
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have ye opined yet on Shadow of the Torturer?

good article, I totally forgot about Susan Cooper
It's been a while since I've read Shadow of the Torturer, and since I haven't yet finished The Citadel of the Autarch I don't feel qualified to have an opinion on Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.

I will say that C. J. Cherryh's Morgaine saga blew my mind when my first girlfriend gave me her copy. It's pure science fiction, but reads as fantasy because the narrator Vanye has no idea WTF is going on and is so ignorant and superstitious that he sees Morgaine's tech as qhalur witchcraft. Then again, she's an atomic blonde out-of-context problem with a nasty reputation.
 

Jade

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Nietzche be like
Neitzche's inexperience is most noticeable in the sections of his books talking about female psychology. It's shockingly bad, literally incel-wiki tier. "Good and evil are relative to the observer" was an extremely provocative and revolutionary insight for his day, even though it's rather common now - It dumbfounds me how he could have such depth to some of his arguments and then start speaking absolute nonsense only a few paragraphs later. Freud did this too with his idiocy on how fetishes are based on repressed male trauma from looking up their mother's skirts as infants, in the same essay as his revolutionary theories on the id, ich, and uber-ich
 
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starbreaker

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Neitzche's inexperience is most noticeable in the sections of his books talking about female psychology. It's shockingly bad, literally incel-wiki tier. "Good and evil are relative to the observer" was an extremely provocative and revolutionary insight for his day, even though it's rather common now - It dumbfounds me how he could have such depth to some of his arguments and then start speaking absolute nonsense only a few paragraphs later. Freud did this too with his idiocy on how fetishes are based on repressed male trauma from looking up their mother's skirts as infants, in the same essay as his revolutionary theories on the id, ich, and uber-ich
There's some really wild shit in Beyond Good and Evil, particularly the little aphorisms. One of my favorites is "You go to women? Do not forget the whip!" Taken literally it's arrant misogyny, but then again if I had Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche for a sister I might have more issues with misogyny than I already do, too.
 

remember_summer_days

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Good and evil are relative to the observer"
Was this even his argument though? Wasnt it more like, Good and Evil are concepts the spiritually weak create to disefranchise the strong, those who have will to power? Looking at you Christcucks.

Regardless, I think he saw strenght manisfested in will to power as an objective good, though his ideas later lead to postmodern attempts to make morality relative, I dont think this was Nietzche's project. At least not if we interpret will to power as an objective good.
Freud did this too with his idiocy on how fetishes are based on repressed male trauma from looking up their mother's skirts as infants, in the same essay as his revolutionary theories on the id, ich, and uber-ich
I feel like a lot of these late 19th and early 20th century thinkers built the foundations for real scientific disciplines, but they themselves were full of nonsense. My contempt for Freud is immense lmao. I cant stand how he's still taught seriously in the humanities when his theories have no scientific evidence and are outright pseudoscience. And awfully nihilistic at that.
 
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starbreaker

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I cant stand how he's still taught seriously in the humanities when his theories have no scientific evidence and are outright pseudoscience. And awfully nihilistic at that.
Don't we need to understand Freud to understand Edward Bernays?