Waiting for Godot
— Marcus de Brun

Waiting for Godot? — Bitter Crank

Waiting for Godot??

I think I just didn't understand what you were saying. Sorry. — frank

You’re good. I responded a bit aggressively. I agree with your overall point that a compassionate approach is better than a vilifying one. I disagree that the the two hatreds are on the same level. I do think that the ability to paint someone as ‘racist’ is sometimes wielded cynically by people playing power games. But I think that needs to be disentangled from the larger dynamic. The office example was meant to highlight how it’s not a symmetrical vilification.

There’s a difference between defending a tradition and defending a tradition from people who you identify as inherently bad. Anyway, I have a link to an article you might like that I’ll send you when I’m free. (& it’s not an article that condescendingly ‘educates’ you on why you’re wrong. I sincerely think you’d like it)

My point in the OP is that malignant intolerance is a result of a misunderstanding. A side ramble was about this:

X-race fails to see the humanity of Y-race.
Y, with a psyche full of angst from having to deal with X, begins to fail to see the humanity of X

Y has fallen into the same misunderstanding as X. I would not suggest that anyone should be intolerant of Y because of that. That intolerance formed naturally. No regress. I'm not trying to congratulate myself here. There just isn't a regress. — frank

Why isn't there a regress for you though? What's arresting the regress?

Another way to ask this same question. You describe two groups mutually not-recognizing each other. Which group are you in? And to whom is your op addressed?

thanks, but you’re still calling it a strawman —- and adding “peace” while maintaining strawmanhood, is a bit ( is very much) like a passive aggressive smiley. I want to know where I’m misrepresenting you, and what you actually meant.

I’m sincerely willing to engage with you on this topic. I think we’re closer than you think here. But I have no patience for passive “just saying” games. Which is absolutely what you’re doing.

Assert yourself. Say what you mean.

Intolerance works as a survival tactic on the cultural level, not so much among individuals. It's the way it works out in the individual psyche that sucks: as a lightning rod for whatever frustrations happen to be floating in the mists. — frank

My gut-take is that they work (or don't work) on both levels, for the same reasons. What's the difference you see?

My point was that you're missing something if you think a person has to be evil in order to be racist

Sure, but your post was couched in qualification, and illuminating detail. I responded to the whole of it.

If all you wanted to ask was 'are racist people necessarily evil?' then that's all you would've asked. You're trying to anticipate gut-responses, and frame things a certain way. Rightly so. My post was responding at that level, the one your post was on. I was responding to the way you were framing things. If you don't want people to respond to the framing, don't frame.

Your strawman is pretty interesting, though. — frank

There's another way of doing this: 'You seem to think I'm saying this. What I'm really saying is this. This is the difference between the two." Then I have some place to work from, to respond. "your strawman is pretty interesting' isn't doing any of that work. It's just trying to elicit venom. If you'll meet me, I'll meet you.

I think you’d fare better with an argument along these lines: people need stability. They need something they rely on. When stuff changes, and leaves them impotent, they resort to scapegoating.

However, stuff is always changing, forever, world without end. You hear a lot about traditions, awesome ones, that have been lost. People cite Dante a lot for this, which is insane. He was excommunicated and thoroughly lost. That’s what the damn book’s about. What about Ulysses? What did Michelangelo think of the pope?

The great works and traditions built on them begin in disruption.

So empathy and support for the dislocated, of course, but also an awareness of how contingent tradition is.

You can play this game all day though. What about people who are intolerant of intolerant people? Ugly, and so -

But wait: what about people who are intolerant of people who are intolerant of intolerant people? Isn’t this ugly too and —-

the quasi-phil argument falls flat as it collapses back into infinity.

Analogy: there’s a dude at work who follows you around, fucks with you, gets everyone at work in on it, makes your life a living hell. You talk to HR “yes but we don’t want to demonize him, he has a family, aren’t you kind of doing what you’re accusing him of doing? He’s a person too! Monstrous behavior but if you knew him well, you’d understand where he’s coming from.”

I feel like maybe there’s a kernel of something in your post, but I don’t think your argument works.

“fridge light of philosophy” was great. Gonna respond when I get a moment

Tldr: to paraphrase a close friend “he’s identified the problem and knows that things have to change, but all he does is talk about it. He tells me how unbearable things are for him, and talks about what he needs to do next. But it’s been like that for years. I listened for a long time, but now, I just can’t do it anymore. I’ve been supportive for a long time, but I have to get on with my own shit.”

I think that works perfectly as a description of left preoccupation with the a venir. (Cf zizek’s signs of the future). It’s not wrong, but it’s a check we keep being told we need to wait to cash. Eventually you suspect this particular kind of check has wait-to-cash baked into it. Like those joke signs that say “free beer tomorrow.”

Yes. I mean I haven't mentioned him at all here but yes, 'how to step beyond Derrida' is massively written across all of this. Because yeah, it's actually a question that really messes me up, like, how do you move beyond the formalist promise of the à venir, of the 'mere' always-already opening to the future? (especially because I think it's entirely correct?). And I'm finding in this language of 'choice' precisely that way to think beyond Derrida's 'undecidables', those moments that both belong and do not belong to a system (like Godel statements...); But I'm also trying to think that move beyond in a very specific way, a way that isn't just a fall-back into a Russellian 'theory of types' where you simply avoid self-reference (even as you self-refer to do it), but in a way that affirms the productivity or the generativity of paradox, where this moment of two co-existing incommensurables force a leap of creativity to diffuse the tension. — StreetlightX

I guess my thought is that this is the limit of formal analysis (tho maybe laruelle... but I don’t know him except for some postcard synopses.) Or the limit of a universal formal analysis. I think you could bring the analysis to bear on actual moments (which tbf you are doing with the math stuff, tho—-) but in a way that the actual moments aren’t examples furnished in support of the model, but such that the model is more like a base camp, set up in order to better sketch a single moment in its haecceity (for lack of a better word.)

I think (and maybe this is laruellian?) that there’s no formalist (and philosophy is alway formal) way past the a venir. Once you’re there, then you just have to enter into it, which, to me, means bringing philosophy into uneasy commerce with something else. You mentioned ecology and so forth, but I have the queasy sense that any philosophical analysis of this sort is going to funnel into the insatiable maw of whatever it is that apo’s peddling. There’s still an anti-TOE TOE lurking, as apo likes to point out. But I don’t think this is just a rhetorical gotcha. It’s a real danger. I think apo’s wrong that there’s only two choices (Kierkegaard and Hegel) but I think he is pointing out something.

I really like the image, in Dante, of Virgil not being able to pass into purgatory. Not that reason is hell (tho maybe reason left to its own telos is?) but the idea that Dante has absorbed what he needed. He doesn’t leave it behind, but he steps over a boundary that reason alone would leave him approaching, retreating in endless oscillation. So like: an image of philosophy as a “class” in a rpg. Or a character in a poem or story: say one samurai of the seven. Training and mastery is important, to stand on your own with your own unique skill set but then: Something that is used ina broader conversation, but in a way that refuses to reintegrate the entirety of the conversation into itself. The best part of these kinds of conversations is that a meeting of philosophy and something other than it creates its own thing, the same way two people talking (as equals) are in a novel space which is irreducible to either of the two.

I feel like samz[]dat is an example of this. Nick Land is too, but an example of when it goes wrong. Proust, imo, is an example of when it goes very right. Of course the state of the art then was Bergson, so things have changed, but the process of going to the limits of the art, then setting it up to talk with other currents. Sloterdijk in my opinion is the best thing on the market right now. He’s not perfect and has his flaws, but If I had to cite someone I think is doing it right, it’s him. Spheres is the best work of ‘philosophy’ in the past fifty years. His training is Heideggerean, (tho he has facility with Derrida, Deleuze, Brandom etc) but he writes with his whole being and you get something legitimately new ( not merely novel)

Or like series in deleuze where a bunch of disparate ideas resonate, not because they’re all thought under the same magisterial umbrella, but because, taken together, they birth something new.

Big D decisions are aligned with stuff already mattering a lot or stuff coming to matter a lot. First's a perturbation in stance on stuff in general; like a personality or value system, it's an island of sense demarcating what's nonsense. So it looks intrinsic, and is intrinsic to a frame for most intents and purposes. The first one is also usually accompanied by some combination of volition, permission and dedication; I choose to quit smoking as a frame (big D) every time I refuse a fag (little d). Another way of putting it is it's the conditions that naturally accompany the frame. Big D decisions in the context of little e events.

I like this, if I follow you (& I'm not 100% sure I do.) I especially appreciate the example, because I've been trying to quit smoking for a while now. This gives me some solid ground to work from.

[was gonna dig into your post by way of my own attempt to quit smoking] but actually now that I've read through that posts a few times

Clarifying question first:

the usual way people occupy frames constrains variation in their own frame changes by a delimitation of how the other frames are embedded perspectivally into each other. Most don't matter, some matter a lot, sometimes we're surprised by something that didn't matter becoming something (or already was something) that matters a lot. — fdrake

I was puzzling over the first sentence for a while. Just clicked now though, as of writing the last sentence. Is "frame changes" "frame-changes"?

If so, is the gist of the first sentence something like: each of the frames a person occupies tends to somehow refer to - or take into account - the other frames they occupy? So even a frame you're not currently 'in' is, in some way, supported by the one you are in?

I have in mind the image of a group of good friends. The experience ( frame) of hanging out will be different depending on which particular set of friends are present. But no matter what particular set, and no matter how much the experiences of the different sets vary - they still all kind of refer to each other, to the group of friends (frames) itself. You might experience radically different things and think about things in different ways hanging out with a certain person, or group of people, from within that group. But there's always (provided everyone's on good terms) a kind of unspoken awareness of how this experience can connect back to other experiences with the larger group, or different subsets from within that group. (though of course there's griping and shitting-on too.) This is why, when friends hang out, there's some fun in swapping stories about different escapades, which involve different groupings of friends.

So you have a quasi-encompassing frame knit from smaller frames (though that phrasing is off too.) I think you're saying something similar about a single personality, and the variations that personality goes through?


Does that make any sense? The friend thing was really really abstract, I could probably flesh it out with illustrations

On second thought, quite related. One quote to signal he’s not talking Kuhn in the way Kuhn’s often talked

One of the weirder results of Kuhn’s philosophy was an emphasis scientific relativism. A whole generation of philosophers brandished his book as a way to point out a certain groundlessness to the sciences, mistaking “paradigm” for something totally arbitrary, mistakenly demanding a kind of truth that comes from a different language. At the extremes, this tends to mean a total rejection of scientific fact as being “merely contextual fact.” Which is, you know, true, but equally true of everything else. This is particularly jarring because Kuhn provides something that should give you the opposite conclusion. — samzdat

@StreetlightX@schopenhauer1

Somewhat related Samzdat on Kuhn

I think you're just... wrong about this. I mean, yeah, the question of values is something so far underdeveloped in this thread, but the emphasis on pragmatism is conceptually inseparable from acknowledgement of the role that values must play. I mean, I think (maybe??) you're getting the wrong idea from the vocabulary of 'choice' which yeah, rings with all kind of 'voluntarist' associations. But analysing it this way - and it's pretty formalist, I admit - doesn't (yet) say anything about the conditions under which such 'choices' must be made. And nothing I've said precludes the idea that "choices/decisions involve the whole heft of your spiritual being" - which I think is entirely right!

At this point I don't even know if we agree or disagree with things. You're being much too meta for me, I can't keep up, well done, you're winning the prize?

Yeah, I'll own up to being a little too oblique. I’m pretty sure we’re in agreement on the object level, I.e I get that “choice” as you’re using it means something like (very simplified): the existing field of concepts + what (new thing)you’re trying to do with them determine new conceptual moves. This as opposed to progressively capturing broader swathes of some pre-existent truth. And you can’t just make up whatever rules, because you’re always already operating from within a dense conceptual web. And then there’s the T S Eliot-esque thing about how new choices retroactively reconfigure the pre-existing field. (The sense is always open)

The meta thing is more a kind of frustration about how this kind of analysis has itself become a kind of dogma (in certain quarters.) Dogma’s probably too strong. It’s become the central focus. It’s a step past Derrida (as stereotyped) because it’s concerned with creative construction, rather than deconstructive handwringing in the face of the void left by metaphysics. But, there’s no way around this, once it becomes a scholarly debate around an invariant process by which interventions in conceptual space are made, than this begins to calcify into its own kind of sub species aeternitatis. You don’t have some global theological container, but you do have a invariantly structured engine (with a leap, or a shove, at its heart). I think this is as theological as anything else. It’s tribute paid in ornate paeans to the generative moment. So pagan, rather than Christian, but theological nonetheless.

I’m not slamming the analysis at all, only it seems like analysis you’ve already done. It seems like a retracing. That’s what I was hinting at with the hamlet thing.

But I'm guessing from the hand-waiving that we've reached our usual limit to the extent you care to peruse these kinds of arguments and so further exposition would perhaps be pointless. — Pseudonym

On hand-waiving:

If someone said that he doubted the existence of his hands, kept looking at them from all sides, tried to make sure it wasn't 'all done by mirrors', etc., we should not be sure whether we ought to call this doubting.

Eh. Looks like frames all the way down to me. Wouldn't be so many philosophies of the event otherwise.

I think that's what I mean though. Philosophies of the event (as a sociological phenomenon) correspond exactly to the inability to unironically and sincerely hold some kind of value (related to action, not thought) that can be actually acted upon to produce an 'event'. (For example: Mao as Badiou's truth-event, but Badiou wasn't an actor in the cultural revolution. You could, cheekily, call this a kind of 'orientalism' and I think you'd be right.)

don't think you can escape the regress that's ultimately truncated through what you do; that's what it means to make your mark.

I agree!

yeahh. but I feel like there's some supplementary aspect missing.

To take a graphic example: Bimbofication, a fetish subculture involving plastic surgery and intentional self-dumbing down in order to meet a 'bimbo' ideal. It's totally a line of flight. Accept this self-modification and that self-modification and then go wild. Only it really hurts people, and also *marks* people in a way that make its difficult for them to then get out of it, and still be taken seriously as a person. (nb I'm not talking about whatever tattoos or piercings. I'm talking about body-modifications done specifically for this subculture)

So then I want to say: No, not *that* kind of line of flight. But, yes, picking a frame that fosters a (somehow spiritually or intellectually nourishing) line of flight.

But then that already is outside of frames and into *values*, which I think is what's missing here.

The major point being: I think choices/decisions involve the whole heft of your spiritual being. I don't think lines of flight always do. They can funnel you into addiction, or some kind of subculture crutch. But I think the missing element here is 'values' which is what the 'truth of problems' hints at.

Well, that is what made Trump so popular. People on both sides talk about him all the time, way too often.

That's what I mean tho

I agree though. 'Not knowing what you want to do' is just common usage. What I mean is: not committing to doing. A problem of life through and through, yeah, yes. The broken hammer is the broken ability to do, that was my point.

OP: Philosophy, like math, subsists on choices (decisions.)

It follows: The philosophy of choices is itself an example of the thing the philosophy of choices describes.

The concepts we employ are a function of what we aim to capture with them; to employ one concept rather than another is to bring out one aspect of the world rather than another. Moreover, the deployment of our concepts is not governed by truth, but by their range of illumination — street

What is being illuminated here? To take a well-worn example: We understand & thematize the hammer only when it breaks. The implicit becomes explicit when we can no longer unthinkingly rely upon it, and so have to explain it. What's broken? What old implicit is being forced into explication?

For B&C, the important point is that the choices made, although forced by the math itself, are nonetheless grounded in what we aim to do with the math, considerations which are not dictated by the math itself ('extra-mathematical') — sx

The motivating problem, for the philosophy of choices, is the problem that we don't know what we want to do. We can't choose, we can't decide. So the moment of choice becomes the object. We show that we, non-choosers, know about choosing better than any of the people who ever chose.

@Srap Tasmaner is right to focus on the threat of relativism. The focus on frames, versus what is framed, threatens to fling us into anything-goes. How do we choose the frame?

The solution offered, the quasi-badiouan one that truth still exists, but in the problem itself - that isn't really an answer. Or another way to say it: as it answer it's function is this:

will respond tomorrow — street

This sums it up perfectly. The philosophy of choice is a hamlet philosophy. (Deleuze knew this.) It wants to do the famous monologue without avenging the crime that elicited the monologue. And it's done it for so long, now, that it doesn't even know what the crime is. "The truth is in the problem" is an IOU full stop.

I guess it's finally time for me to reveal who I truly am *takes off mask* I'm Friedrich Engels/Meghan Markle (value pak). And I would have gotten away with it if you weren't for you meddling

As my Dad always said whenever I criticized an ad- "well, we're talking about it, aren't we?"

Who cares if people like the royal wedding? Liking the royal wedding could be bourgeois escapism, but not-liking the royal wedding is also bourgeois escapism. Calling the royal wedding bourgeois escapism is bourgeois escapism.

[edit] realized sherlock beat me to the punch

There's a number of times that the babysitter is either looking at a penis or imagining that she has a penis. It's never flattering -- the penis is small and rubbery and she imagines how funny it must feel to have it come out of the hole in male underwear. In some sense, to my mind, it almost seems like a desire to escape being the object of desire. Because the men are never mistreated in the story. And it points out how funny that a little rubbery bit flopping between the legs ready to piss over everything (as evinced with the Jimmy) makes such a huge difference.

ha, yeah! I'd passed over those passages without really registering them, but you're right - penis envy with the twist that the phallus is kind of a stupid thing (tho not-having one has severe ramifications.) ( I have a memory of being very young and looking at my penis and being like 'this is so weird.') I would kill to have a similar story written by a woman.

The tv aspect is huge too, and I'm having trouble pinning down its significance. I thought it was interesting that the one time desire and television neatly converged in a single scene was when the kids were wrestling with the babysitter. Scenes from the western echo a lot of other scenes, but they usually do so at a distance - like you have a western scene, and in another paragraph, some time later, you see it repeated. But there's that one paragraph where the western and the wrestling all kind of converge into one thing.

This wonderful story brings out another aspect of sense: the fact that it is intimately related with types or kinds. The priest was no doubt expecting a different kind of answer from Sutton, who changed the sense of the question by changing the expected category of answers

I've been a little whatever recently on some posts, but I think a muted version of that approach is appropriate here, given the subject matter.

Imagine you're out to dinner with a group of friends. You start explaining this post ^ (for comedy's sake, let's even say in the same words) and they all (of course) grow restless.

I know that you know well as I this isn't appropriate out-with-friends talk, so you wouldn't. But that does raise a question. Why here (or elsewhere) but not that table. Why is it appropriate to shut this down with a joke in person, but not here (or elsewhere.)

What is the sense, such that the sense is valued here (or elsewhere) but not there?

My sense is that sense, here (or elsewhere) is strict, and doesn't care for the outlaw reversals (tho it reveres them as examples) while out there, anything goes.

Who is the priest?

If the son thought about class much, he would realize his status is uncomfortably ambiguous: maybe he has an education (which is a leg up in class) but he doesn't have the connections or the ambition to go with it. — BC

Why does the son have such poor prospects? — BC

My reading of the story, much in line with Πετροκπτσυφας's, I think, is that he is as sheltered by his mother's fantasies as she is. He hasn't thought about class much, because he's focused all his emotional energy on his mother's worldview. And like he's drawn to the old mansion, right? His mind keeps straying back there. He kind of wants it. He lives in squalor, like her. Like her, he is drawn to the old mansion.

He's not going to be have the shelter of a fantasy world, and he won't have many means to make life better, either. — BC

Exactly. He has a little of a fantasy in the mansion, which is her fantasy too. But he can't accept it. So there's nowhere left, but... he can at least have the shelter of attacking another's shelter. And so that's what he does. He's kinda like a hermit crab that hates his shell. "I'd drop the shell, if only it wasn't [x].' It's 100% a defense. So he has a kind of emotional stroke as soon as his mother has a real one. They both live in the same shell, though they have different attitudes toward it. But either way, once the shell's gone: pure trauma.

Her world was fairly small, I think. She had lupus (from which she died) and stuck pretty close to home. She was a Catholic southerner, something of an outsider. Most of her characters have glaring faults, whether it's spiritual faults, false pride, predation on the simpleminded, or what have you. — BC

This is going to sound petty, but you're leaving one thing out, and petty as it is, I think it's relevant. O' Connor was unattractive. She wasn't a good-looking person. Her stories, what I've read, have the mean streak of someone very smart who won't ever be part of the sex-game, at least in the soft romanc-y way, and so can look at it coldly from the outside, and then look at everything coldly from the outside. This usually comes with a kind of sadism, and she does seem sadistic.

To go back to the civil rights thing. My gut feeling (based on very little, this story and some bio details) is she was a little bit indifferent to all of it. Not because she was racist, but because she saw all people as equally awful. If this story has a stance on the civil rights movement, it seems to me to be something like this: basically a externalization of a collective psycho-drama where both sides rely on the other. The protestors need the old guard, and the old guard needs the protestors. At the center of it all is a kind of black hole which leaves no room for goodness.

In short: it seems cynical about civil rights, unapologetically. But also fatalistic - like, this is gonna happen and it’s gonna fuck everyone up, and who knows what the moral is, or if there's one.

But, all that's based on a limited sampling.

But O'Connor also understood Grace. — BC

I've been very taken by the idea of Grace the past year, and also really liked this story, as troubling as I found it. I'm really curious about her take on grace (especially because I think you can only get grace if you can get its absence, and she definitely does.) Where does she get into the nice stuff?

Here’s a thing: does this story correspond to a particular stance on 60s civil rights?

Also interesting that of the four stories recently talked about here, two (the other is the Oates) involve domineering mothers and a “be careful what you wish for” tragedy

but that’s what makes it funny (in a pitch black way.)

The greatest irony of course was that: "He could not push her to the extent of making her have a stroke". Funny!

Missed that, so good.

This quote: "I think he likes me,” Julian's mother said, and smiled at the woman. It was the smile she used when she was being particularly gracious to an inferior", and the fact that the author does not say anything to counter the son's accusations, who saw the gesture as objectionable, make me doubt that she wasn't conscious.

I think I understand what Baden's saying. I think it might harmonize with what you're saying, if I understand what you're saying too.

So, my dad was raised in an ultra-WASPy family, disdain for blue-collar people through and through. His approach to blue collar folks is much more complicated than Julian's Mother (he's Julian as much as he is his mother, even married a blue collar person), but he still immediately adopts this kind of friendly but condescending tone whenever he talks to someone he (reflexively) considers to be of a lower class. But I'm pretty convinced now that he doesn't even realizing he's doing it. Clearly the tone is a manifestation of a deep-seated mix of ideas and feelings, but I don't think he consciously experiences it that way. The vibe I usually get is that he thinks he's just being friendly. Like, in some ways he knows what he's doing, but to him he still thinks he's just being straightforwardly magnanimous.

That's fair. Thank you for setting me up for that rant tho. I do want to read Something Happened. My ex-roomate had a copy and I flipped through it a few times and it looked good. I'm just skeptical of the tradition.

So the question I have is whether we can ever get through to the "truth" of another person, or ourselves. Because however we actually overtly act, there is then whatever is the antithesis of that by default. The issue is then whether that should be read as the hidden authentic desire - something we've repressed from sight because it is the bad "us" - or merely just another way we could have acted and didn't ... because we are essentially all right as a person ... as a habit of our social conditioning.

I haven't read Something Happened. I did reach Catch-22, a long time ago (13 years?). Catch-22, if I recall, does the Mark Twain thing of 'common sense in a world that sorely needs it.' If that holds true, it's ok, but...


at 16 it read like: no-bullshit hero follows the truth. Now, I'm a little skeptical of the pose. Twain was a misanthrope, like Vonnegut - the whole 'aw shucks, what a world, some people think theres a MAN in the SKY even though we're APES on a ASTEROID & pretend that STONES & METALS mean anything, but I'm just a MAN with a BEARD, SMOKING on my PORCH and I'm hear to tell you that..." - bullshit, but gets you in the literature books. Iconoclastic like America which is iconoclastic and also aristocracy is just people being like.... Thoreau is paradigmatic here: Cool thoughts about Ants, very cosmic, 'quiet desperation,' still have my mother do laundry on the weekends. The whole genre is bullshit. So those guys, got their number, but Helller?

I guess I don't know. My gut feeling he's part of this tradition. And my gut feeling is this aw shucks simple guy stuff links nicely up to irl doesnt know how the fuck to be with a real person. (because when a real person does real people things (APES on a ROCK) the husband guy can shrug to the camera that isn't there and go 'women (people), am I right?'

I was talking to someone younger (18ish) who read it, Catch-22 and he said [summarized] 'love that book, made me realize there's no point in risking anything for anyone but yourself, they're all just trying to sell you on something.' & ya maybe but ------

I 100% don't think we can get to the truth of another person (or ourself) but I'm open to the idea that we can get to the truth of a person insofar as they're part of some shared thing, which we are also a part of.

Sort of like umm - you got the mask, which is necessary, but you share a thing of knowing each other's masks, and their limits. Which is still not their truth (which is foreclosed to everyone, them too, except in moments.)

Is it possible to be authentic when being aware of how we think or feel must carry with it the sharp sense of the "other" which by implication or suggestion is getting suppressed by us?

'sharp sense' - I'm not sure. I think you can fall in love with someone, without ever really 'seeing' them, and go with that for a long time and neither of you will know who the other is and then after a while its too important, the relationship, to compromise, so you end up...

But I don't know what's essential or not here. I don't think the sharp sense of the other qua Other is essential, but maybe I'm romanticizing? In jungian terms I'd say I know couples who know each others shadows, the sharp sense isn't so sharp, and that seems closer, But yeah I don't -

yeah, but Schop was a misogynist of the 'don't know em, so i know i dont need to know em' stripe. And on top of that: schop wasn't a bad looking guy, right. He could have - but...something got in the way. so: Cause and symptom, chicken and egg - who knows? Either way, I can't take him seriously on romance, good as he is on some stuff. Very very very smart, not bad aesthetically, but stunted emotionally. Was he doted on by a nice mom, had a mean or absent dad? I don't know, but that's my guess.

But romance isn't just [boredomcureX]. Certain cases are escapes from boredom, yes, no question. But romance isn't like drink or metal gear solid (my two boredom escapes.) Sometimes, it just really is romance and gosh it's nice. Romance doesn't last forever of course, so that 'gosh it's nice' has to evolve. but, still - that 'gosh it's nice' isn't reducible to [treat x ] staving off boredom. It's something very ..... Well, I mean, you have some soft and sweet childhood memories, I'm sure, otherwise you wouldn't be a pessimist. It's like those memories, only in addition to the sweet sadness, its hot too.

@TimeLine How would you feel about this story if the genders were reversed?

Like:

Robert was a confident college-anchored guy, hot, working a part-time job somewhere, bored, flirting with customers to keep him busy. Girl comes up to the counter, a little overweight, but seems cool, and he jokes a bit. She leaves, nothing happens. But then a bit later she comes back, 'give me your number concession-stand guy!'.

They go on a date, (she shows up in some kind of clothing he can tell she's maybe a bit poorer than him, a stain on her jeans too. Clear she isn't a student, clear she's maybe a little desperate). The date is uncomfortable , she seems anxious, making probing jokes about class stuff to see how he responds. He feels uncomfortable, but occasionally he feels some kind of connection, drinks a bit to try to quiet his misgivings - then suggests they go back, to her place. During the drive, he worries, occasionally. She seems cool, had funny texts, but what if she's some kind of Fatal Attraction type? Is she gonna get obsessed? What if it doesn't work? Will she show up at his work? Holy shit, he doesn't know anything about her...

They sleep together. (He fantasizes about how she's a bit dumpy and is bowled over by a young well-muscled guy fucking her, how she can't think about anything else except how much she loves his body. Hot young college stud fucks....[etc]) After, she puts on some music, something hip she'd think he'd like, and he's like *rolls eyes* ("for some reason she played the smiths") ok I gotta gtfo. She says wait, why? He says 'they'll wonder where I am at the dorms.'

Drives back. Feels Guilty. She keeps texting him [smiley face with hearts for eyes etc.] He's like 'what the fuck, I don't want to deal with this. I feel guilty.. but. I got nothing to say" Finally his roomate texts back 'he's not interested, ok." She, hurt, texts back something reasonable.

One painful lonely night she goes to a bar he might be at - maybe she'll see him, maybe there was something there. She gets a few drinks and ends up slumped by herself (maybe about to call Uber).

Then!

he shows up with some friends. They sit at a booth on the opposite side. She can see them all talking and looking over. Maybe at one point he points, and they all laugh. Eventually they get up, laughing, all hammily 'concealing' him from her view and leave.

She texts him....


miss you
[etc]
(and finally)
do you do this with all the girls?
Why did you laugh when I asked whether you'd ever brought a girl over to your place?
What did I do wrong?
do you just fuck anyone?
Do you care at all, or do you just fuck anyone?
huh?
fuckboy
piece of shit


Is she a sociopath? Or is there some important difference between this ^ and the original story?

The short story as Rorschach Test

I was gonna object, but then remembered I also wrote a paper in college about how Joyce's The Dead was about female butter fantasies, butter coded as 'snow'.

Nah, I think that's a good way of looking at this story. Coover provides a lot of 'ins' perspective-wise

I tend to prefer stories that clearly reflect the author's understanding of the world

I think this counts though! I guess I tend to prefer stories that reflect an understanding as confused as mine (Nabokov, for instance, is consistently and elegantly all over the place). I think Coover is communicating an understanding, but he's doing it circuitously, obliquely. What that means about Coover, I'm not sure. (My guess is he is a pervert, and writing smart stories about perversion gives a kind of cover, even though he means it.) But I think it does clearly reflect his understanding. It isn't a clear understanding, but the story clearly reflects that inclarity (as well as an attempt to organize the confused elements to try to make it all fit....I think that's the significance of the Valery quote ---I think it's a fool's quest, myself, but I think I get where he's coming from.)

Yeah, maybe there's something to be said for a story that is potent enough to elicit strong reactions and debate as an end-in-itself.....But...still...I want to say he has a particular view he's trying to get across

I've only read Creation, I'll admit. I'll give Julian a look.

He was a very clever, perceptive man who wrote very well, and did his research (at least for his historical fiction) but could be fiercely malicious in argument and criticism. That evokes a certain admiration in a lawyer (this one, at least). In fact, judging from his writings he knew lawyers quite well. — Cic

I'm no lawyer but I admire that stuff too. I objected (overruled! I object nonetheless!) to sneaking in one of his bon mots, context-free, as a pat dismissal. Savage Joyce Carol all day, I'd say, but savage her yourself! Imagine you were having a scotch in a lawyer-frequented bar, between [whatever lawyers do], regaling your fellow laywers with tales of how Heidegger pooped on the original copy of Sound of Music to Wagner, and Joyce Carol walks up, and says [joyce-talk] and then you say...

OR, alternatively, reread the story Baden posted like this: The girl, connie, represents the german people, and the bad guy, arnold friend, represents Heidegger - now you got something.

@Moliiere whats your take?

Lynch comparison is spot on. I can totally see this as a twin peaks episode (I mean in a lot of ways Laura is the babysitter if she were an actual self-aware person) Don't have much more to say, but I think that's the right track.

I finished it. Really liked it. Still thinking it over. I think it's probably significant that the final section takes the wife's viewpoint. Not only that, but it takes the viewpoint of the wife's deepest fears (I don't think the final section is meant to be 'what really happened.') I thought ending it on this note was a brilliant stroke. Suddenly all the masturbatory fantasies are rewritten as Dolly's fears (even if there's a lot of truth to those fears.) Everything she could have feared happened, and so what's left? She doesn't know - she just wants to watch the late night movie

(fwiw my copy - used bookstore - has all sorts of sober, analytic notes (feminine handwriting) in the margins, but under the final paragraph it just says 'What the hell?!')

@Bitter Crank I don't think the butter/girdle thing was Benny HIll travesty, tho there's a taste of that - I think its something more like uncomfortably childish need for touch and texture, mediated by her own anxieties and the general vibe of the party she's at (packs of humiliating drunk golf-boys....basically frat boys) Like: Based on how shitty these dudes are, and how uncomfortable she feels, what's a fantasy that could get her out of the bathroom, touch-and-texture-focused, and into the party? She's too old for [something more obscene] so this is something else. (Think about the butter in relation to the bath and the wrestling) Humiliating, yes, but she lives in humiliation (self and male-driven) and sexual fantasies always have to work through that kind of stuff. This is the maso-submissive correlate to the sado-dominate butter scene in Last Tango.

I didn't like the pinball thing. I thought it was too obvious, and heavy-handed. It might work a little better if you recontextualize it as Dolly's fantasy about Jack & Mark's fantasy. (in the lynchian reading, this would be Bobby and his friend from twin peaks)

So I'm 100% sure I'm severely over-simplifying, but just as conversation-fodder this is my initial reading: The Babysitter is told from Dolly's perspective - a feminine fear-fantasy about masculine fantasies about the object of desire. (I think its appropriate to talk about this in terms of standard gender roles given the setting of the story. I'm not trying to say anything essentializing about male v female roles)

(Alt reading would put the focus on the wrestling to the cowboy movie instead....but, yeah, there's a lot going on here, just throwing a few thoughts out)