Re: Lighting Some Flames: Towards conlang artistry

On Wed, 13 Mar 2002, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> En réponse à Jesse Bangs <jaspax@...>:
>
> >
> > A couple of people gave some version of what Christophe said: "it's
> > art, in which case it's incomparable to anything else and depends
> > only on the eye (or ear, or whatever organ they use) of the beholder
> > and the intention of the author. There's no such thing as bad
> > art."  IMHO, this is plain hogwash, the purest example of the
> > postmodern fallacy.
>
> First thing: learn to be polite! And be happy that thousands of kilometers of
> cable are between us! If your idea is to insult people, you have no place here!
> And about it being postmodern fallacy, I shall warn you that I first read this
> opinion in Latin classes! If the Roman Republic was already postmodern, where
> are we now?
Well said, but can I add, as a sometimes reader of Foucault and an
occasional dabbler in Derrida that postmodernism is not a fallacy in any
sense of the word.

Perhaps, before one assays to present a school of criticism, one should do
some professional criticism of art.  I do literary criticism more or less
for a living (well, it's a condition of my teaching freshmen the use of
semicolons) and we do nothing like what Jesse suggests, nor have we since
around 1400.  Instead we interrogate a text for structure, meaning, and
connections to the outside world.

We certainly have no arbitrary standards of "good" and "bad" books.
Although we do make such judgements (the decision of what to read implies
some sort of value judgement) we make them on the basis of multiple
criteria.  I don't write on Ginsberg because I think he's the best poet of
the 20th C., or even ofthe Beat movement.  I write on Ginsberg because I
think there are many interesting things he does in his poetry that can
also be applied to other works by other authors, and I wish to elucidate
them.


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Prurio modo viri qui in arbore pilosa est.
                        ~~Elvis

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