Thank you for being you — ArguingWAristotleTiff

It seems I can't help it, no matter how hard I try. :wink:

Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

------------

It shows how undeveloped my appreciation of poetry is that the poem I've chosen is one that I posted about back on the old forum. It's still the only one I know well.

As I said back then, I find it frustrating that the internet is full of allegorical interpretations of this poem, the hawk representing the Nazis or violent destructive humanity, for example. But it's not an allegory. I find myself wondering if the people who interpet it that way have ever seen a hawk before. Probably what's happening is that with the wider exposure to literary and film and art criticism that's been enabled by the internet, bad interpretations abound, with some folks apparently thinking that a non-allegorical interpretation of any work of art is simple-minded.

But it's the other way around. Hughes is describing what he appears to be describing, and that's hard. It's about a hawk, and as he said himself later, about nature in general.

I'm pretty much with Tolkien, although I'm not sure about "in all its manifestations":

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author. — Tolkien

But there's a deep difficulty about the poem, the thing that makes it interesting. The poem doesn't take the form of the poet's observations. It's the hawk talking, with some level of human-style self-awareness. To show the purity of an animal in contrast to the artifice of human lives (at least as the hawk sees it), but using a human point of view, is quite something. It's anthropomorphism but doesn't feel like it.

One thing about it I don't understand. Maybe poetry heads here can help. I think I get the full stops, but some of the other punctuation seems arbitrary to me. But it must be very deliberate.

:cool:

When Hebrew is written among speakers, they don't use the vowels because it's not necessary to be understood. For example, here is a Hebrew version of a newspaper and it does not contain any of those vowel marks: https://www.haaretz.co.il/ — Hanover

This is the main thing I wasn't sure of, to what extent the vowel marks are used today. I'd guess it's similar with Arabic.

But TheMadFool seems to be looking for something more mysterious.

@thewonder: I think Wheatley meant for this thread to be for informative links, videos etc. You're making it your own twitter feed, and later you edit most of the comments to remove what you wrote, leaving lots of empty posts that I have to delete. I just deleted more than 45. Please stop posting this way in this thread (in fact, it's not appropriate anywhere).

I know it's the Lounge, but there are limits even here.

BTW there are other ways of indicating vowel sounds in writing, without using separate letters. I think modern Hebrew does this, though I'm not sure.

There are always battles to be fought, and sometimes we fight for ideas.

You weirdly rejected Tim's answer so I won't attempt one myself. In any case, it's an empirical question for historical linguistics and I'm not sure where the question is coming from.

my question is about books/documents (written word) — TheMadFool

But vowels and consonants are by definition speech sounds, and written letters represent them. If there's no need to represent speech, neither consonants nor vowels are required in the alphabet or whatever.

It also depends on what you are trying to do with your philosophy. Messiness can get in the way of clear communication, which is bad. But some ideas are crude and need time to develop, I guess you can call developing your ideas as a "messy process". — Wheatley

Yes.

Some of the clear, well-argued posts here can seem too self-satisfied, as if they're done thinking and now it's just a matter of convincing people. No doubt we all do that. A minority of members, who are less prideful or more willing to take risks, take a messier approach. They change their mind mid-discussion and fire out half-formed ideas. That can be good, but not always.

I'm probably in the first camp. To me, messy often means wishy-washy. Maybe it's a matter of taste.

When I read some of the things on this forum, I'm like "yuck too clean, too thoughtless". I guess that's just me. — Wheatley

I know what you mean, but I think it's unavoidable in philosophy. The ideas are what's important, not the style, although that in itself is probably debated within philosophy.

Maybe you're describing something that's more often used in creative writing. Can you write philosophy in the style of Ulysses?

Did you go "yuck" when you read this?

"Dense" by Univers Zero. The whole thing is great, but there's a section from 3:46 that culminates in an oboe (or cor anglais) solo that's particularly beautiful.

Absolutely not. Just bothered by things. — thewonder

Fair enough. May your botheration dwindle.

That'll have to do. I'm going to leave. — thewonder

You keep on promising, but never deliver :wink:

Are you drunk?

There are whole guidebooks for GR — Manuel

I looked at one today, but I approach literature as I do film, knowing as little about it beforehand as possible and certainly avoiding plot spoilers, which this guidebook apparently has.

This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow. — Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

This is always quoted, but the thing is: the whole book is like that.

I've been trying to get up the nerve to read "Gormenghast." — T Clark

Titus Groan is ponderous, if you can imagine that as a positive, but Gormenghast I found somewhat lighter and more comedic, in a Dickensian kind of way.

Really odd, but wonderful. — T Clark

:up: :100: :cool:

Thank you for sharing your experience. I appreciate it.

There was a time when I went for big difficult books in the way that young men do: to prove to myself and to others that I was a serious intellectual.

These days, it's more like curiosity and exploration. These books stand in the cultural landscape like mountains to be climbed.

The endnotes thing puts me off, I have to say. Friends of mine have raved about Infinite Jest, but I feel more drawn to Gravity's Rainbow. I can handle books I can't understand so long as it seems like the writer knows what he's writing about, and if it looks like it could be interesting. That's when I know I have to go and do some research of my own.

I first read Moorcock back in the late '70s – The Eternal Champion-Silver Warriors duology and Elric stories mostly, later Behold the Man, von Bek stories and "sampled" quite a few other of his novels. I really fell for Moorcock's pulpish weird fantasy (i.e. sword & sorcery), especially Elric and the Multiverse back in the day (which, along with Conan stories and Lord of the Rings-The Silmarillion, lead me to running & designing tabletop roleplaying games through the mid-80s). Foundational stuff for me. — 180 Proof

:cool:

I was into the Corum and Von Bek stories back in the day. Later on Colonel Pyat.

Ursula LeGuin — 180 Proof

:up: :up: :up:

I've never ventured past Titus Groan, so maybe I'll give Peake's trilogy another chance. — 180 Proof

I definitely recommend the second one, Gormenghast, but the third is non-essential and really not of a piece with the first two. But it's fascinatingly odd.

What do you think of Moorcock's Gloriana with its deliberately Gormenghast-like 'mood'? — 180 Proof

I abandoned it when I tried reading it in my adolescence but I'd be interested to try again. But although Moorcock loved Peake, I don't think he's the same kind of writer at all, so I don't know how he'd succeed with that kind of thing. I could be wrong about that, because there's a lot of Moorcock I haven't read (I've probably only read his Eternal Champion/Multiverse stories, and less than half of those). What did you think of it?

Btw, reading Gene Wolfe rewards patience. — 180 Proof

Glad to get some support for my suspicion that he's not just crap after all!

EDIT: btw, I saw Dune in a beautiful "premium" cinema with big chairs and tables and all that, and only four other people there. It was a very good experience, but I'll say no more.

I also like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and 1Q84 — javi2541997

[SPOILERS]

I just read 1Q84 and after the first book of the three, which was compelling and fascinating, it seemed to just fall flat, dominated by (a) mundane activities--which can be described interestingly in fiction but not here--and (b) the dull, bloodless thoughts of the main characters, especially Tengo. I can happily live with a main/point-of-view character who is evil or contradictory (or breast-fixated), but not with a boring one. He's the most boring fictional main character I can remember. In the third book, no sooner does the increasingly likeable and interesting Ushikawa begin to liven things up than he gets caught by Fuka-Eri's gaze and becomes as boring as the others, just before getting killed off.

It was my first Murukami and I've seen people say it shouldn't be the first one you read. And it has indeed put me off reading more.

Currently reading and reading soon:

• The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake. I've read it every ten years or so since I was a teenager and it seems to get better each time.
• Dancers at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock, another re-read.
• Dune by Frank Herbert. Abandoned it after a few pages a few times for whatever reason, but I've just seen the movie and fancy reading it now.
• The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. I read this supposed classic (UKLG called Wolfe "our Melville" because of it) a long time ago and took its uneven narrative and confusing world-building to be clumsy incompetent writing, but I'm going to give it another go.
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Now that I'm the same age as the character, it's time for a re-read.
• Black Spartacus by Sudhir Hazareesingh. So far the only book on Toussaint Louverture I've read is the brilliant classic The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James.
• The Volga: A History by Janet Hartley. I've just been on a cruise down the Volga, all the way to the Caspian, and I always for some reason do my research after I get back from my travels.

I also want to try those big difficult American classics, Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow. Until now, just as the thought of being stuck in an upper class manners-infested house for a whole book has put me off Jane Austen, so getting bogged down in anything to do with tennis has put me off Infinite Jest. Maybe it's because I myself was a promising tennis athlete for a short time in my adolescence, before throwing it all away.

Jesus said it best: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

@Waarzin was one of Prishon's many reincarnations, by the way.

Note that @Hanover did send him a message to ask him to change his ways, but the response was a bad one.

Something philosophical for the first time in ages:

Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

Welcome to TPF, Hel :smile:

:roll:

My advice is to find better sources of information and advice than this forum.

Dave Stewart the producer is the Dave Stewart formerly of the Eurythmics, I think, but this is the keyboardist.

The synth solo in that Hatfield track rips btw — Noble Dust

Yep! Probably Dave Stewart, not to be confused with Dave Stewart.

That Motohiko Hamase is rather nice.

@hope was banned for low quality.

Listening to music when I should be applying myself entirely to work seems appropriate for a Friday. A selection from today's list, ranging from new or newish stuff to old favourites, in reverse order of release date...

I banned @Trey for low quality. His admiration of Hitler probably didn't help.

I hope the forum adds the posts download feature soon. — TheMadFool

It probably won't happen.

Each page of comments in your profile shows 40 comments. Any programmer should find it easy to write a script to go through the pages and scrape the comments and put them in a text file:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/profile/comments/126/themadfool/
https://thephilosophyforum.com/profile/comments/126/themadfool/40
https://thephilosophyforum.com/profile/comments/126/themadfool/80

And so on.

We must make a distinction between how language is (ordinary language) and how language should be (ideal language). — TheMadFool

To put differently what has already been said by others: the part of Wittgenstein's philosophy that you're looking at is built on a rejection of the search for an ideal language, so what you're doing is arguing against his whole approach. In principle that's fine, of course, but it's good to be clear about it.

By the way, the idea of a "misuse" in his later work is to show, not that people need to work on improving language--which it seems to me is your own takeaway--but that philosophers have to pay attention to how language actually works.

How do we download our posts? I'd like to download my posts. Thanks — TheMadFool

With this software it can't be done. Yet another reason we should move to something better. It's possible that PlushForums will send me the posts of a single member if I ask them nicely.

I tried this:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/profile/comments/126/themadfool/all

But it just shows the first page of posts.

Good times

@Noble Dust

It turns out there's a handy playlist on Spotify called "Georgian restaurant playlist". I guess it's mostly pop music but because it's a different kind of pop that sounds like it's closely tied to traditional music, it's not boring. And you get a flavour of the their famous vocal polyphony.




I'm going to see them play live on Friday. :party: