The Just Stumbled Upon: The J. D. Salinger Mother-load

[Guest]

By the way, I would disagree with those who admire Shakespeare. Aside from the argument about whether William Shakespeare wrote all the plays and sonnets assigned to him, I think he's overrated. I've never laughed or even smirked at his "comedies". His "tragedies" don't make my tears well up, either. He is eminently quotable, however. A case of "Emperor's new clothes" - that's the view I take.

Thankfuckingchrist. Now I can dismiss you and stop working at being polite.

Perdita

p.s. "Comedy" for Shakespeare did not mean what it does today, i.e., per your note above. There is great (refined and coarse) humour in the histories and tragedies, and tragedy in the comedies and histories. Comedy does not mean funny, it's a classical form of drama.

 

[gauchecritic]

I haven't laughed at a thread this much in months.

Use of the word "cromulent" in a serious, logical, albeit subjective post is delicious. and it's listed at dictionary.com (80 hits on google)

Anything which embiggens my vocabulary I will gladly embrace.

Literature is that which the great unwashed accept as highbrow.

Snobbery is that by which we can be better than our fellow, voiced or not.

Gauche

 

[Guest]

I haven't laughed at a thread this much in months.

Aw, you big buggerlugs. I wish I had your sense of humour (well, on second thought...)

embiggened, Perdita

 

[Clare Quilty]

I am unable to comprehend why you should find the phrase "I take the view that" so unpalatable...

I don't. What I find unpalatable is a conclusion that states as fact, "this means that...,"which is based on a presupposition of unsupported personal opinion. Anything that begins with "I take the view" should be followed up with a conclusion to the effect of "this means that in my view."

Your linkage of literature to time, weight, etc is incorrect. Time can be measured. Weight can be measured. Relative time and/or weight can be ascertained. Provided the same scales are used by all parties (e.g. seconds, kilogrammes, etc) there can be no debate on such matters.

Here you show yourself, at least in matters of science, to be a blithering idiot. Time is not objective at all. Neither is the concept of weight. The measurement units do not matter in the least. Time passes more quickly for someone sitting in their easy chair than for someone on The Concord. For someone traveling at relativistic speeds the discrepancy in his or her subjective experience of the passage of time would be dramatic. Weight, not mass, is too subjective. I one kilogram rock weighs more in Holland than it does in Nepal. On the moon, the difference in weight would be approximately six fold. Again, you couch your conclusion in absolute terms, “there can be no debate….” I agree, there can be no debate that you are wrong.

Karl Popper focused on the application of hypothesis to scientific principles and ideas. Time and weight can be subject to a hypothesis that can be proved/disproved by replicable testing. Literature cannot. Therefore your analogy falls down.

See above.

Karl Popper, who I think was a bit of a nut, also said that it is impossible to verify a universal proposition by reference to experience, and by extension experiment. He also said that single counter-instance refutes a universal law (not that any of this has fuck all to do with art, but I’ll humor you) So, if you hold his theories as facts, and it seems that you do. His pronouncements effectively shoot down your own—I have listed two instances above where time and weight are subjective. Sir Karl required only one.

Iit seems to be that you then go on to make my point - that art and literature are subjective, and not the same as science.

Sir Karl had a problem with the demarcation of science from non-science. Either you are with him or you are not. Make up your mind. I have asserted from the beginning that which defines great art (from which for some reason you seem to distinguish great literature) is ethereal and beyond deconstruction and anything but superficial explanation. It is not, however, subjective in any practical sense. To reiterate what I actually said, high art like the law is what a society agrees that it is. Individual opinions are as various as the wind, but they cannot minify that which society, as a whole, exalts.

By the way, I would disagree with those who admire Shakespeare. Aside from the argument about whether William Shakespeare wrote all the plays and sonnets assigned to him, I think he's overrated. I've never laughed or even smirked at his "comedies". His "tragedies" don't make my tears well up, either. He is eminently quotable, however. A case of "Emperor's new clothes" - that's the view I take.

Why am I not shocked to learn that you have no appreciation for Shakespeare? That confirms everything that I think about you but will, in deference to civility, refrain from writing here. Even by a lowbrow estimation, the man was a Titan—“He doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus.” There are more movies (by the by, I watched Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood just last night), books, television shows and video games that are either version of, or based on, his work, than I care to attempt to list. Merely reading any number of passages from a dozen or more of Shakespeare’s plays is enough to bring tears to my eyes—not necessarily from the tragic circumstances therein, but from the sheer beauty and poetry of his words.

Now run along and read some insipid noir detective novel. At this point, you are merely making ridiculous pronouncements in an attempt to outrage. I’m unlikely to waste anymore time on you.

 

[bloodsimple]

Thank you, Perdita and Clare.

After much preamble, we have reached the crux of the matter. Someone has a different opinion to you, and you find it impossible to accept that this could have any validity. You've both failed to respond logically to any of my points, back to and including my request for an explanation of the appeal of Catcher in the Rye.

Clare, your "argument" about time and weight is bullshit. Time passes at exactly the same rate for everyone. Their perception of how quickly it passes will vary from circumstance to circumstance. That perception is subjective. You are unable to differentiate between perception and measurement.

I see that, as soon as I mention that I don't like Shakespeare, we are launched into a tirade of petty personal abuse and the most appalling, laughable snobbery. I've read plenty of Shakespeare, thanks, he's the pre-eminent writer of my country. I've also visited his house many times, so I'm perfectly aware of the historical context. He may have been a great writer of his time, and therefore a noteworthy chronicler of Elizabethan times, but that doesn't mean he's a great writer now, or necessarily relevant now. I know all the arguments about universal themes and ahead of his time, I just disagree with them. The fact that I think he's overrated is, once again, my subjective opinion. By holding a different subjective opinion, you merely confirm my hypothesis, not yours.

I see that on this issue, you prefer to sneer at people who disagree with you, rather than debate and accept that anyone else might have an interesting point to make. Good luck discussing politics, religion, world affairs or emotions with anyone who doesn't worship your every utterance.

I find your narrow-minded snobbery and self-satisfied, verbose pseudo-intellectualism pitiful and pointless. Perhaps you should run along, use twenty words where five will do in the vain belief that it makes you look clever, and leave the rest of us to choose what we like and what we don't, rather than fall in line with a lamentable orthodoxy of your choosing.

 

[Clare Quilty]

your "argument" about time and weight is bullshit. Time passes at exactly the same rate for everyone. Their perception of how quickly it passes will vary from circumstance to circumstance. That perception is subjective. You are unable to differentiate between perception and measurement.

Again, you are a full-on idiot. But, don't take my word for it. Ask a physicist. Atomic clocks don't know from perception ... LOL

 

[bloodsimple]

Congrats, Clare. A sentence without thirty redundant words. Take a bow.

Couldn't resist the petty personal abuse though, eh? That must be your superior mind at work, then. I'm in awe.

 

[Clare Quilty]

Congrats, Clare. A sentence without thirty redundant words. Take a bow.

Couldn't resist the petty personal abuse though, eh? That must be your superior mind at work, then. I'm in awe.

Either address the topic at hand or bugger off. You're beginning to bore me.

 

[Clare Quilty]

VI. Time Dilation

Time is not a physical constant. Motion and gravity effect time by dilating (slowing) it or by expanding its duration. In 1905 Albert Einstein described the effect of motion on time in his special theory of relativity. In 1916 he described the effect of gravity on time in his general theory of relativity.

Time dilation effects due to motion were experimentally observed in the early 1970s. Researchers placed atomic clocks on commercial airliners and observed the expected changes in time as measured by those clocks relative to similar clocks on the ground. In particular, when the planes traveled east, in the direction of Earth’s rotation, the clocks on the airliners were 59 nanoseconds (59 billionths of a second) slow relative to the atomic clocks on the ground. When the airplanes traveled west, the clocks were 273 nanoseconds fast. This discrepancy is caused by the rotation of Earth, which causes an additional time dilation. If the effect of Earth's rotation is removed, the time dilation produced by the motion of the airliners confirms Einstein's theory of how time changes with motion, as the dilation is in agreement with predictions made by the theory.

Time dilation effects due to gravity have been experimentally verified in many ways. For example, time on the Sun's surface runs about two parts in a million slower than on Earth because of the Sun's much higher gravity. In 1968 American physicist Irwin Shapiro confirmed this effect when he showed that radar signals (see Radar Astronomy) and their reflections from planets are delayed when the Sun is near the path of the signals.

http://encarta.msn.com/text_761561386__1/Time.html

 

[Clare Quilty]

Mass and Weight
Before we get into the subject of gravity and how it acts, it's important to understand the difference between weight and mass.

We often use the terms "mass" and "weight" interchangeably in our daily speech, but to an astronomer or a physicist they are completely different things. The mass of a body is a measure of how much matter it contains. An object with mass has a quality called inertia. If you shake an object like a stone in your hand, you would notice that it takes a push to get it moving, and another push to stop it again. If the stone is at rest, it wants to remain at rest. Once you've got it moving, it wants to stay moving. This quality or "sluggishness" of matter is its inertia. Mass is a measure of how much inertia an object displays.

Weight is an entirely different thing. Every object in the universe with mass attracts every other object with mass. The amount of attraction depends on the size of the masses and how far apart they are. For everyday-sized objects, this gravitational pull is vanishingly small, but the pull between a very large object, like the Earth, and another object, like you, can be easily measured. How? All you have to do is stand on a scale! Scales measure the force of attraction between you and the Earth. This force of attraction between you and the Earth (or any other planet) is called your weight.

If you are in a spaceship far between the stars and you put a scale underneath you, the scale would read zero. Your weight is zero. You are weightless. There is an anvil floating next to you. It's also weightless. Are you or the anvil mass-less? Absolutely not. If you grabbed the anvil and tried to shake it, you would have to push it to get it going and pull it to get it to stop. It still has inertia, and hence mass, yet it has no weight. See the difference?

http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/weight/

 

[ferociouskittycat]

It's rather sad to see yet another thread becoming a debate.

My original comment was relating to the 'please leave' or what ever it was comment.

Clare was obviously wanting to show his thread about said author. I originally walked away, finding no instant interest in the topic, but found the 'please leave' comment as uninviting for any others who may or may not know the said author, and wished to learn more.

Sorry Clare for turning your thread into a debate. Once again apologising after reading how heated it has become.

I merely wanted to point out that this forum attracts a LOT of readers/writers, also those who lurk.

Okay, I've apologised.

Carry on.

 

[Clare Quilty]

Sorry Clare for turning your thread into a debate. Once again apologising after reading how heated it has become.

There is no need for apologies. As I said earlier, I worded the initial post so as to invite debate, thereby keeping the thread afloat in a sea of crap and allowing interested parties to discover the link to Salinger's collected works.

http://terebess.hu/english/salinger.html

 

[bloodsimple]

Clare,

Thank you for the illuminating pieces on time, weight and mass. Very interesting. Much more so than your need to describe me as an "idiot" or telling me to bugger off.

The deviations from weight, mass and time being an absolute, that you so ably describe, occur in minute quantities and in a known, measurable way. Take time and the clocks on the aeroplanes. Precisely because time is objective, you had a measure against which to test the hypothesis. The hypothesis that time is relative is proven by the experiments, therefore the objective measure has to be altered to fit the evidence. In this case, by the calculation of the effects of motion, although for most purposes the difference is too small to be relevant to any particular task.

This does not mean it ceases to be objective, it means the parameters are altered in the light of new evidence. I presume that, following this experiment, it was then possible to calculate the expected effects of motion for any given circumstances. Until these new calculations can be disproven by experiment and evidence, they become the objective status of time.

The same is true of a simpler example - the boiling point of water. Water, as we know, boils at a different temperature in Nepal than the Netherlands. However, boiling point remains objective because

a) we can all agree on the parameters - what is water, what is a boiling point, what is the scale of measurement

b) in the light of empirical evidence, we can calculate the expected boiling point for any given altitude, and then replicate this result time after time.

Your pieces do not alter the central tenet of my argument, therefore. That which is measurable under standardised conditions, and where replicable evidence either proves or disproves whether the measurement is correct, is objective. That which relies on opinion, preferences or taste is subjective.

Thus, even if everyone in society believes something is great literature, does not make it so, nor does it make it objective. It makes it a mass of subjective judgements. Society is subject to the prevailing social mores, changes in taste, technology, religion etc, and so changes its' subjective view over time. DH Lawrence was once thought by society to write "obscene" works, but would probably not be considered by today's society to have done so.

This means that your (or my) opinion of what is great literature is subjective and cannot be proven, which I hold to be a basic condition of something being objective. As a result, I hold that being snobbish about literature is pointless, since it implies a superiority that cannot be backed up.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

There are people who are moved by Shakespeare’s poetry, and there are people who are moved by the stuff in greeting cards. Judging from the general quality of the poetry on Lit, the latter are in the majority. You can’t argue about the subjective experience of the poerty and say that one group is right and the other is wrong to feel the way they do, but you can argue about the music and mechanics of the poem, the depth of the sentiment, and what makes the thing beautiful and moving.

Literature is no more than what some very articulate and sensitive (and influential) people say it is, and their judgment has to be verified by other articulate and sensitive people. Fashions change, and Lord knows they’ve made mistakes in the past and we were served heaping portions of egregious crap in school under the name of “literature”. But I think most of us—or maybe just some of us—were able to reach into that crap and pull out something that we found stunningly beautiful.

For me at the time (freshman high school) it was “Beowulf”, which seemed to satisfy my adolescent blood-lust but in a language that thundered just like the language in the Old Testament, followed by MacBeth (for the same reason). I came into high school a serious Sci-Fi/Fantasy junky, yet even I knew that these pieces of Lit had an effect on me that went beyond what Sci-Fi and fantasy had ever made me feel. That was my first brush with what I’ve come to think of as “literature”. Like Lucifer Carroll said, it picked me up and shook me. I used to write lines from MacBeth on the cover of my notebook like they were magical incantations, and they were.

Catcher In The Rye was the first thing I remember reading in my own language—the language I spoke—that gave me that literature buzz, and that’s why it will always be kind of sacred to me. You never forget your first.

I still read stuff for entertainment. I read stuff that would make a high-schooler blush: Doc Savage mysteries, space-opera, Dan Tanner Hollywood Detective, but sometimes I need more than entertainment. I need that literature fix, and I have my sources.

I also read as a writer. I study the way that other writers do what they do. I’ve studied Salinger and I’ve studied King. King is possessed of a terrific imagination but his writing style is nothing special to me. Salinger doesn’t write that way. What he did was turn everyday life into art. In my own view, I think that’s the greater gift.

So I don’t know. Maybe you come away from King with insights and new understandings that change the way you feel about yourself and the world around you. He doesn’t do that for me though. He’s entertaining as hell, but I have no desire to go back and reread his stuff so I can re-experience some particular emotion I felt before from a gorgeously-worded passage. He doesn’t astonish me with insights like other authors do. He doesn’t put into words things I couldn’t say myself. He doesn’t give me new eyes with which to see the world, and he doesn’t make me think that my own life has meanings that I haven’t even realized. Literature does all those things, though, and that’s why I prefer it.

---dr.M.

 

[Guest]

I'm lazy today and really don't want to waste time with disagreements. So, I agree with everything Mab. and Quilty have said. - Perdita

O time, thou must untangle this, not I.
It is too hard a knot for me t'untie.

TN II,ii