Tevildo however, himself a great and skilled liar, was so deeply versed in the lies and subtleties of all the beasts and creatures that he seldom knew whether to believe what was said to him or not, and was wont to disbelieve all things save those he wished to believe true, and so was he often deceived by the more honest.
— J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘The Tale of Tinuviel’ (c. 1917)
J. R. R. T. on liars
24 February 2010 by Leave a Comment
Internet sociology
13 February 2010 by Leave a Comment
I have done a meticulous and exhaustive study, and found that 94.6% of flamewars in message boards and blog comments begin something like this:
Poster #1: X.
Poster #2: What do you mean, Q?
#1: I didn’t say Q, I said X.
#2: There you go again with Q.
#1: No, I’m telling you I said X.
#2: Q? Q?!! How DARE you say Q, you (expletives deleted)!
Poster #3: Calm down, buddy, he’s only saying K.
#2: That’s what I said . . . he’s saying Q . . . and don’t tell me to calm down!
. . . . . . .
Poster #1138: Oh, for Pete’s sake.
Dr. Johnson on intellectual vanity
2 February 2010 by Leave a Comment
Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow that will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
—Samuel Johnson
Meritocracy: a fable
4 January 2010 by Leave a Comment
The Lion having been shot by a passing hunter, the other beasts held a council to decide which of them should succeed him as King. All were agreed that the new king should be the one best fitted to rule, as excelling in the highest and most noble qualities of a ruler. But there was a trifle of difficulty in agreeing which quality best befitted a monarch.
English as she is spoke
4 January 2010 by Leave a Comment
Academic, n. One who, lacking the gift of natural stupidity, has attained stupidity by degrees.
‘Advice to a Young Actor’, by Mark Twain
4 January 2010 by Leave a Comment
YOUNG ACTOR. — This gentleman writes as follows: “I am desperate. Will you tell me how I can possibly please the newspaper critics? I have labored conscientiously to achieve this, ever since I made my début upon the stage, and I have never yet entirely succeeded in a single instance. [Read more…]
‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences’, by Mark Twain
4 January 2010 by 1 Comment
Originally published in the North American Review, July, 1895.
“The Pathfinder” and “The Deerslayer” stand at the head of Cooper’s novels as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished whole. The defects in both of these tales are comparatively slight. They were pure works of art. —Professor Lounsbury
The five tales reveal an extraordinary fullness of invention. . . . One of the very greatest characters in fiction, Natty Bumppo. . . The craft of the woodsman, the tricks of the trapper, all the delicate art of the forest were familiar to Cooper from his youth up. —Professor Matthews
Cooper is the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction in America. —Wilkie Collins
It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature at Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper.
Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in “Deerslayer,” and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.
There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In “Deerslayer,” Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require: [Read more…]
David F. Maas on silence
5 November 2009 by Leave a Comment
Occasionally, silence is not golden but just plain yellow.
—David F. Maas
Miles W. Mathis on the arithmetic of art
4 November 2009 by 1 Comment
This is the age of appeasement, of subordination. The artist is no longer the font; he is the shallow pool. Not the oracle, but the sump. The collection point of a thousand polluted expectations. The political tool of the untalented. The residue of education. The handmaiden of the self-appointed in social criticism.
For the critics have dished it out over the last hundred years, vilifying all, dismissing everyone and everything that could not be “pinned and wriggling on the wall.”
And the artist was silent.
Under the Usurper’s rule, modern art has become like Lewis Carroll’s four branches of arithmetic: “ambition, distraction, uglification and derision.”
And the artist was silent.
. . . . . . . . . .
Oh Fathers and Teachers, I claim that analysis is not art. Philosophy is not art. Politics is not art. Destruction is not art. Framing is not art. Finding is not art. Thinking is not art. Randomness is not art. Pathology is not art. Everything that a fool does easily is not art.
Fathers and Teachers, I claim that art is rare. Art requires talent. Art requires isolation. Art requires depth. Art requires subtlety. Art requires mystery. Art requires emotion. Art requires inspiration. The artist tells you what he must do, not what you must do.
Fathers and Teachers, I maintain that all art stands upon two legs: craftsmanship and character. Technique is not art. Emotion is not art. Together they may be art. Or not.
G. K. C.: ‘On Mr. Thomas Gray’ (excerpt)
23 October 2009 by Leave a Comment
Collected in All I Survey (1933).
A newspaper appeared with the news, which it seemed to regard as exciting and even alarming news, that Gray did not write the ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ in the churchyard of Stoke Poges, but in some other country churchyard of the same sort in the same country. What effect the news will have on the particular type of American tourist who has chipped pieces off trees and tombstones, when he finds that the chips come from the wrong trees, or the wrong tombstones, I do not feel impelled to inquire. Nor, indeed, do I know whether the new theory is proved or not. Nor do I care whether the new theory is proved or not. What is most certainly proved, if it needed any proving, is the complete lack of imagination, in many journalists and archæologists, about how any poet writes any poem. [Read more…]
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