Lillie Fortenbaugh

[bronzeage]

No more than I have in Charles Manson.

The human mind is capable of inventing any number of alternate realities.

The alternative reality where I exceed Bach and Mozart is your invention, but if Mozart's car stalls and will not start, I could probably repair it.

As a skill, it's not quite as impressive as composing music, but it has its value in the moment. It's a menial trade and certainly not the sort of thing that makes one famous.

 

[butters]

did i make you want to punch me yet, Byron?
the world's full of viewpoints, and no-one's so scary as the one who KNOWS he's right.



well i have to go now, so bye people.

 

[Byron In Exile]

I couldn't agree more, but when you talk about Mencken, you might as well be talking about Nietzsche or Noam Chomsky. It's a guaranteed pissing contest. Forgive me for saying well-clear, but I'm greatly enjoying your posts with his writing.

Thanks, man. Really.

You mention Chomsky... one of the most brilliant minds of our age.

I have his "The Sound Pattern of English," written with Morris Halle, and I can understand some of the later chapters, but his notation right at the start I just can't make natural.

His "World Orders: Old and New" is good, even though it's from 1994.

 

[Byron In Exile]

The way I see it, is that if M had written that as a piece of characterisation, then it would have been a fine piece of writing. It was clean, concise, and led most of us to feel some dislike for the character's own nature. Job done. It is unfortunate, then, that he was speaking of himself. Of course, there's another possibility: he was perfectly aware that his words would see exposure and wanted to be disliked. Looking at things from all angles. Perhaps he disliked himself.

it happens

He was quite popular at the time.

 

[Byron In Exile]

The alternative reality where I exceed Bach and Mozart is your invention, but if Mozart's car stalls and will not start, I could probably repair it.

As a skill, it's not quite as impressive as composing music, but it has its value in the moment. It's a menial trade and certainly not the sort of thing that makes one famous.

But you're at least their equals, right?

 

[Byron In Exile]

did i make you want to punch me yet, Byron?

Lol... yes, I'm full of rage because you said... what was it you said, again?

the world's full of viewpoints, and no-one's so scary as the one who KNOWS he's right.

When he actually is right, it's not so scary.

That's when it gets kinda fun...

well i have to go now, so bye people.

Bye! Come back soon!

 

[bronzeage]

But you're at least their equals, right?

Not as composers or musicians. Would it matter if I were? Would that give my opinion of them more validity?

I think I could beat Bach at pool, not so sure about Mozart.

 

[Hapless_Mouse]

who's HL Mencken?

Whenever I am tempted to write something of a philosophical nature and begin casting about for quotes and such to adorn my rhetoric I am reminded that, whatever it is I am about to say, H.L. Mencken has already said it, and much better than I could.

If you want an introduction that you will find congenial, get yourself a copy of his In Defense of Women. He endevoured to look at life with an honest eye, and often succeeded.

 

[Byron In Exile]

Not as composers or musicians. Would it matter if I were? Would that give my opinion of them more validity?

I think I could beat Bach at pool, not so sure about Mozart.

You'll be as famous, then?

For your pool skills?

Or does the fact that you breathe trump all the accomplishments of people who no longer do?

 

[HungryJoe]

Thanks, man. Really.

You mention Chomsky... one of the most brilliant minds of our age.

I have his "The Sound Pattern of English," written with Morris Halle, and I can understand some of the later chapters, but his notation right at the start I just can't make natural.

His "World Orders: Old and New" is good, even though it's from 1994.

Yes, Chomsky's mind is otherworldly, but amongst people who actually know who he is, you tend to get the wide-open, opinionated extremes that you do with Mencken.

Unlike poor Nietzsche, Chomsky is blessed with a certain general anonymity.

 

[Hapless_Mouse]

Whenever I am tempted to write something of a philosophical nature and begin casting about for quotes and such to adorn my rhetoric I am reminded that, whatever it is I am about to say, H.L. Mencken has already said it, and much better than I could.

If you want an introduction that you will find congenial, get yourself a copy of his In Defense of Women. He endevoured to look at life with an honest eye, and often succeeded.

There are copies on Bookfinder as low as $4.00 including US shipping.

http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?a...title=In+Defense+of+Women&lang=en&st=xl&ac=qr

 

[bronzeage]

You'll be as famous, then?

For your pool skills?

Or does the fact that you breathe trump all the accomplishments of people who no longer do?

Do they give awards for beating famous composers at pool or repairing their cars?

The fact that I breathe does mean I have more potential than those who no longer do. Is there another advantage to it?

Is it necessary to exceed the value of the people one judges, in order that the opinion have merit?

Is there some value to posthumous fame other than people will declare their genius after they are gone?

Does my declaration that Mencken was a cranky old man lessen his stature in your eyes? If not, why is this worth the effort?

 

[Byron In Exile]

Do they give awards for beating famous composers at pool or repairing their cars?

The fact that I breathe does mean I have more potential than those who no longer do. Is there another advantage to it?

Is it necessary to exceed the value of the people one judges, in order that the opinion have merit?

Is there some value to posthumous fame other than people will declare their genius after they are gone?

Does my declaration that Mencken was a cranky old man lessen his stature in your eyes? If not, why is this worth the effort?

It doesn't lessen his stature in my eyes, it lessens your stature in my eyes.

I hope it was worth the effort.

 

[Byron In Exile]

Yes, Chomsky's mind is otherworldly, but amongst people who actually know who he is, you tend to get the wide-open, opinionated extremes that you do with Mencken.

Brilliance is bound to stir up the hornets.

Unlike poor Nietzsche, Chomsky is blessed with a certain general anonymity.

Not to the far-right, unfortunately, to whom he's become a sort of anti-Christ.

But what he says isn't so very far from what they espouse... they just refuse to read any of it.

 

[HungryJoe]

Not to the far-right, unfortunately, to whom he's become a sort of anti-Christ.

And, ironically, I think that Nieztsche would have been completely alright with that.

 

[bronzeage]

It doesn't lessen his stature in my eyes, it lessens your stature in my eyes.

I hope it was worth the effort.

It was no bother on my part.

How could you possibly have room for an opinion of me, considering your opinion of yourself?

 

[Byron In Exile]

It was no bother on my part.

How could you possibly have room for an opinion of me, considering your opinion of yourself?

I managed to squeeze you in.

 

[Hapless_Mouse]

On Suicide

H.L. Mencken

From The Human Mind, Prejudices: Sixth Series, 1927
First printed in The Baltimore Evening Sun, Aug. 9, 1926


The suicide rate, so I am told by an intelligent mortician, is going up. It is good news to his profession, which has been badly used of late by the progress of medical science, and scarcely less so by the rise of cut-throat, go-getting competition within its own ranks. It is also good news to those romantic optimists who like to believe that the human race is capable of rational acts. What could be more logical than suicide? What could be more preposterous than keeping alive? Yet nearly all of us cling to life with desperate devotion, even when the length of it remaining is palpably slight, and filled with agony. Half the time of all medical men is wasted keeping life in human wrecks who have no more intelligible reason for hanging on than a cow has for giving milk.

In part, no doubt, this absurd frenzy has its springs in the human imagination, or, as it is more poetically called, the human reason. Man, having acquired the high faculty of visualizing death, visualizes it as something painful and dreadful. It is, of course, seldom anything of the sort. The proceedings anterior to it are sometimes (though surely not always) painful, but death itself appears to be devoid of sensation, either psychic or physical. The candidate, facing it at last, simply loses his faculties. It is no more to him than it is to a coccus. The dreadful, like the painful, is not in it. It is far more likely to show elements of the grotesque. I speak here, of course, of natural death. Suicide is plainly more unpleasant, if only because there is some uncertainty about it. The candidate hesitates to shoot himself because he fears, with some show of reason, that he may fail to kill himself, and only hurt himself. Moreover, this shooting, along with most of the other more common aids to an artificial exitus, involves a kind of affront to his dignity: it is apt to make a mess. But that objection, it seems to me, is one that is bound to disappear with the progress of science. Safe, sure, easy and sanitary methods of departing this life will be invented. Some, in truth, are already known, and perhaps the fact explains the increase in suicides, so satisfactory to my mortician friend.

I pass over the theological objections to self-destruction as too sophistical to be worth a serious answer. From the earliest days Christianity has depicted life on this earth as so sad and vain that its value is indistinguishable from that of a damn. Then why cling to it? Simply because its vanity and unpleasantness are parts of the will of a Creator whose love for His creatures takes the form of torturing them. If they revolt in this world they will be tortured a million times worse in the next. I present the argument as a typical specimen of theological reasoning, and proceed to more engaging themes. Specifically, to my original thesis: that it is difficult, if not impossible, to discover any evidential or logical reason, not instantly observed to be full of fallacy, for keeping alive. The universal wisdom of the world long ago concluded that life is mainly a curse. Turn to the proverbial philosophy of any race, and you will find it full of a sense of the futility of the mundane struggle. Anticipation is better than realization. Disappointment is the lot of man. We are born in pain and die in sorrow. The lucky man died a' Wednesday. He giveth His beloved sleep. I could run the list to pages. If you disdain folk-wisdom, secular or sacred, then turn to the works of William Shakespeare. They drip with such pessimism from end to end. If there is any general idea in them, it is the idea that human existence is a painful futility. Out, out, brief candle!

Yet we cling to it in a muddled physiological sort of way — or, perhaps more accurately, in a pathological way — and even try to fill it with gaudy hocus-pocus. All men who, in any true sense, are sentient strive mightily for distinction and power, i.e., for the respect and envy of their fellowmen, i.e., for the ill-natured admiration of an endless series of miserable and ridiculous bags of rapidly disintegrating amino acids. Why? If I knew, I'd certainly not be writing books in this infernal American climate; I'd be sitting in state in a hall of crystal and gold, and people would be paying $10 a head to gape at me through peep-holes. But though the central mystery remains, it is possible, perhaps, to investigate the superficial symptoms to some profit. I offer myself as a laboratory animal. Why have I worked so hard for years and years, deperately striving to accomplish something that remains impenetrable to me to this day? Is it because I desire money? Bosh! I can't recall ever desiring it for an instant: I have always found it easy to get all I wanted. Is it, then, notoriety that I am after? Again the answer must be no. The attention of strangers is unpleasant to me, and I avoid it as much as possible. Then is it a yearning to Do Good that moves me? Bosh and blah! If I am convinced of anything, it is that Doing Good is in bad taste.

Once I ventured the guess that men worked in response to a vague inner urge for self-expression. But that was probably a shaky theory, for some men who work the hardest have nothing to express. A hypothesis with rather more plausibility in it now suggests itself. It is that men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of contemplating life — that their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from reality. Both work and play, ordinarily, are illusions. Neither serves any solid and permanent purpose. But life, stripped of such illusions, instantly becomes unbearable. Man cannot sit still, contemplating his destiny in this world, without going frantic. So he invents ways to take his mind off the horror. He works. He plays. He accumulates the preposterous nothing called property. He strives for the coy eye-wink called fame. He founds a family, and spreads his curse over others. All the while the thing that moves him is simply the yearning to lose himself, to forget himself, to escape the tragi-comedy that is himself. Life, fundamentally, is not worth living. So he confects artificialities to make it so. So he erects a gaudy structure to conceal the fact that it is not so.

Perhaps my talk of agonies and tragi-comedies may be a bit misleading. The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense. What is ahead for the race? Even theologians can see nothing but a gray emptiness, with a burst of irrational fireworks at the end. But there is such a thing as human progress. True. It is the progress that a felon makes from the watch-house to the jail, and from the jail to the death-house. Every generation faces the same intolerable boredom.

I speak as one who has had what must be regarded, speaking statistically, as a happy life. I work a great deal, but working is more agreeable to me than anything else I can imagine. I am conscious of no vast, overwhelming and unattainable desires. I want nothing that I can't get. But it remains my conclusion, at the gate of senility, that the whole thing is a grandiose futility, and not even amusing. The end is always a vanity, and usually a sordid one, without any noble touch of the pathetic. The means remain. In them lies the secret of what is called contentment, i.e., the capacity to postpone suicide for at least another day. They are themselves without meaning, but at all events they offer a way of escape from the paralyzing reality. The central aim of life is to simulate extinction. We have been yelling up the wrong rain-spout.

On reading any philosophical treatise, one is impelled to notice this or that point about which one could quibble. This or that point that needs a further explication. But the above is pure perfection. Pretty much all human striving is an attempt to ignore or deny the truth of the human condition.

 

[bronzeage]

I managed to squeeze you in.

You are tighter than I thought you would be.

 

[HungryJoe]

You are tighter than I thought you would be.

Time to take it to Sexual Role Playing, I think.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

In her earlier years Lillie banged the piano every evening

Classic erotica, this.

Lol...

One whose name will be remembered long after you die.

Not unlike Michael Jackson's name.

 

[Byron In Exile]

Not unlike Michael Jackson's name.

And Hitler's.

 

[where]

Time to take it to Sexual Role Playing, I think.

Oh I don't know. I'm rather enjoying the homoerotic sword play between the two here...

 

[bronzeage]

Oh I don't know. I'm rather enjoying the homoerotic sword play between the two here...

Homo, maybe, but not particularly erotic until right at the end.

 

[butters]

goodness, you guys still at this here? *grins*


neither of you seem to be making much headway - like a tug-of-war with no rope

but it's still a spectator sport