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Re: CHAT: JRRT

From:J Y S Czhang <czhang23@...>
Date:Sunday, March 7, 2004, 19:28
In a message dated 2004:03:07 04:21:38 AM, cowan@CCIL.ORG writes:

>And Rosta scripsit: > >> That excuses the incompleteness of the languages, especially the gross >> inadequacy of their documentation. > >We must also allow for T's personality: "great but dilatory and >unmethodical", as C.S. Lewis called him. He was, in addition, a niggler >of the kind that makes most of us ordinary perfectionists look like >nothing.
My personal pet theory (Down, boy! down...) is that Tolkien was afflicted by OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder [and/or OCLD - Obsessive ConLang Disorder]). And AFAIK he did not see himself as being just quite right (a viewpoint which was also "religious"), but thought others were somehow more so.
>David Peterson scripsit: > >> And I still dislike that a Shakespeare class is a requirement at, >> for example, UC Berkeley (and I'm sure the same is true of many other >> institutions), but that he's the only *writer* that's a requirement. > >I think that Sh's importance in such contexts is not so much a result of >his quality as of his influence on all post-Sh literature. No other works >in English save the King James Version are anywhere near as influential. >If philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, English literature is >a series of adaptations of Shakespeare.
I read somewhere that Shakespeare was his times Quintin Tarantino (sp?). Elsewhere someone else says that Shakespeare was his times Anthony Burgess... but I would add Groucho Marx, too. --- º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º º°`°º ø,¸~-> Hanuman "Mister Sinister" Zhang, Sloth-Style Gungfu Typist - "the sloth is a chinese poet upsidedown" --- Jack Kerouac {1922-69} <A HREF="http://www.boheme-magazine.net">=> boheme-magazine.net</A> "We don't read & write poetry because it's cute. We read & write poetry because we are members of the human race. & the human race is filled with passion. & medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits & necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for." - Robin Williams, _Dead Poet's Society_ "Chance is the inner rhythm of the world, & the soul of poetry." - Miguel de Unamuno "One thing foreigners, computers, & poets have in common is that they make unexpected linguistic associations." --- Jasia Reichardt "There is no reason for the poet to be limited to words, & in fact the poet is most poetic when inventing languages. Hence the concept of the poet as 'language designer'." --- O. B. Hardison, Jr. "La poésie date d' aujour d'hui." (Poetry dates from today) "La poésie est en jeu." (Poetry is in play) --- Blaise Cendrars --- *DiDJiBuNgA!!* Hang Binary,baby...--- Hanuman "Stitch" Zhang, ManglaLanger (mangle + manga + lang) <A HREF="http://www.boheme-magazine.net">=> boheme-magazine.net</A> Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode, orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap... ...languages are "naturally evolved wild systems... So language does not impose order on a chaotic universe, but reflects its own wildness back." - Gary Snyder "Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" - a chapter on pidgins & creoles, John McWhorter, _The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_ = ¡ gw'araa legooset caacaa ! ¡ reez'arvaa. saalvaa. reecue. scoopaa-goomee en reezijcloo ! = [Fight Linguistic Waste! Save, Salvage, Recover, Scavenge and Recycle!]

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Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>