@darthbarracuda There's no simple answer to the questionin the OP. Feminism today is hyper-splintered and you're never going to satisfy everyone. But it mostly boils down to 'don't essentialize women'

I believe that you believe that I'm doing nothing but rehearsing ingratiating rhetoric. You might believe that it's become so engrained, for me, that I've tricked myself into believing the stuff.(FWIW, I don't believe that women are better than men. I think there's a lot of awful men and a lot of awful women. I certainly don't consider myself 'good,' though I want to be, nor am I blind to the obvious flaws of the women I enjoy spending time with. Anyone you get to know well has endearing traits as well as character flaws.)

If you wanna play the game of finding the hidden motives underlying what's being said, that's fine, we can do that. But I think you're savvy enough to understand how easy it would be to furnish an equally simple explanation for the anger you've shown here.
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I also cited 'getting groceries' which is perhaps even more stupid. I intentionally included both trivial and non-trivial things in that list, because the point was to contrast the incredibly narrow idea of women only thinking men are good for dying or being in prison with the infinite variety of other things actual women think men are good for.

I've known very few women who don't value men for anything beyond their muscles (whether used to raise houses or raze enemy cities) so it's difficult for me to understand where you're coming from.

Is it really so self-evident to you that all women hate all men, that you think, by asking someone if women act like they value men, you've backed them into an inescapable corner?

Do women act like they value men?

All the time.

looks like the leaves have it, you guys

whether they value them as any of these other things is questionable

I guess strictly speaking that's true. As men, I guess we can never know for sure. Similarly, as a white person, I can never know whether any black people value anything at all. As a gentile, idk about the jews. Sure they say they value x, & they act like they do, but who knows what their true motivation is??

Sex;Getting Groceries;Talking with;Songwriting;Vacationing with;Raising children;Playing Sports;Banking;Grabbing drinks with;Cooking;Camping with;Filmmaking;Sleeping next to;Writing;Emotional Support; Joking with;

idk, a lot of things. Obviously not all women think all men are good for all these things, in the same way not all women think all men are only good for being dead and being in jail.

There's a whole big blooming bundle of things. It's clearly not the case that all women want all men dead or in prison. Are you trolling?

Well, the claim that all women want all men dead or in prison is a bit histrionic (I'm still not sure if you're serious) so, to suggest the absurdity of the claim, I pointed out just one other thing women want of men, and even made it one that doesn't require women respecting them in any way- a spoonful of misandry to help the medicine go down.

So 'all women want all men dead or in prison' actually means women, in general, labor to maintain a institutional status quo which kills and imprisons men?

For the sake of argument, I'll assume there's some truth to what you're saying. Is the 'kingdom of ends' of this institutional drive the death or imprisonment of all men? That doesn't make any sense to me at all. But I can't come up with any other charitable interpretation of your statement that the only thing all women want of all men is for them to be dead or in prison. (My grandmother, for instance, pays a man to mow her lawn. So I think your assertion needs some revision. Women want all men to either be dead, in prison, or available for lawn mowing.)

yeah, I was just having a laugh. TGW's last post seemed pretty ridiculous to me, though maybe he was joking too.

No, the will's grades clash with each other through their individuals in time.

So the will is never at variance with itself, it's only the manifestations of the will that are at variance with one another? Is that right?

I've noticed the same thing about those saps who actually believe that there exists a single woman who doesn't want all men dead or in prison - they're always stuttering. So strange.

This physically hurts... — TGW

The love-making in Nantucket thing kills me. & this sentence in particular:

"He extended his legs and began to take his shoes off, edging the heel with the back of the other shoe"

I think 'slope' is definitely more beautiful phonetically -- one syllable, a long vowel, no flaps or schwas.

I think they're both nice, in their own ways. I'd say 'Slope' is more deep-yielding.

(P.S. Even having not read O'Connor, I know enough about literary criticism to know that comparisons to her tend to be lazy throwaways,usually meaning nothing more than: 'this writer writes morbidly about fate and human motivation.' I don't think that's what MOS meant, but take a drink every time a reviewer in a major literary organ mentions O'Connor. It hardly means anything anymore.)

That's the spirit!

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I've never read O'Connor, not a single story. I've been meaning to get around to it for the past decade or so, but, for whatever reason, never quite manage to. The sample you've provided does flow very nicely.

I can't say too much about how Means typically operates - All I've read is the opening story in Assorted Fire Events and a memoir/essay in Harper's about his father. I actually really liked the essay, which is what led me to check out his short stories.

But, based on the one story:

Beginnings, Middles & Ends - There's a kind of willful fucking with the very idea of such things. The protagonist, throughout, tries to understand why he's come out to the railroad, but he never really comes to anything. Maybe it's his wife's death. Maybe it's this problem at work. The story beings in media res and intentionally frustrates any attempt, on the readers' part, to retroactively establish any beginning. There's a false ending, before the final ending, and either ending can be read as the true one. I get the sense that Means is trying to express something like: To be alive is to be in the middle, having lost the plot. And I get the sense that he's suspicious of tight endings for similar reasons (too tidy, too much false closure) That's fine, I'm ok with that, but that only works if the middle's exceptionally pretty or if you care about the characters. So:

Characters worth Caring About: I don't know. I didn't much care about the protagonist. Maybe its just because, as a poor twenty-something, I find it hard to sympathize with a middle-aged man for whom Brahms evokes love-making in Nantucket. But I don't think it's just that. I've sympathized with plenty of rich characters in literature. The protagonist in this story just doesn't seem to be in any way unique or real. A lot of his inner monologue reads like a parody of dialogue in a Rohmer film. The poor thugs who beat him up aren't any more interesting. Means goes on about their growing up in a trailer park, with their impoverished dads putting out cigarettes on their arms. It just reads like a sheltered dude trying to look into the impoverished heart of darkness and feels false.

Dialogue - Can't speak to this. There's essentially no dialogue in the story.

Endurance in Memory Well, I'll give this to him. Something sticks. There's a violence and pain he's trying to convey, but doesn't quite seem to be able to - yet glimpses of that pain emerge every now and then.

There is entirely too much traffic in altered parts of speech; "vise" is not a verb. Is there something wrong with "pressed", "squeezed", "caught", "trapped", "locked" or whatever it was that was happening between his knees?

Yes, he alters and word-drops a lot. And, again, I'm fine with that if, as Moliere says, it's done to good effect. I get the sense that a lot of this altering and word-dropping is merely a way for him to signal literariness. Like, 'declivity' is a very pretty word, imo, but nothing's done with its prettiness. It's just dropped their awkwardly, for no reason I can decipher. Why not just say 'slope'? (Though, I suppose 'declivity' has a kind of geological vibe to it. That would tie it in to the shale and limestone deposits. It suggests, perhaps, an impersonal landscape. Cormac McCarthy uses this kind of trick a lot, but it seems to work better when he does it. Not sure why. I'd have to think about it.)

FWIW here's what happens next: dude takes off his shoes ("He extended his legs and began to take his shoes off, edging the heel with the back of the other shoe") steps on a broken bottle ("as jagged as the French Alps, the round base of the bottle forming a perfect support for the protrusion, the only piece of glass for yards, seated neatly against the rail plate") thinks about his dead wife ("her car simmering steam and smoke upside down in the Saw Mill River Parkway, twisted wreckage betrayed by the battered guardrail) and then gets beat up by a bunch of poor people while he imagines the performance of Brahm's Symphony no. 3 he could be at ("the third movement of which he was particular fond, Poco Allegretto, so rounded and soft at the beginning it would, if he had gone, remind him of the shoulders of his wife, of a moment twenty years ago making love in a small room on Nantucket")

By itself I would say that the style is fine. But, admittedly, I also do not mind labored and awkward prose put to good effect — Moliere

That's my feeling too, more or less. One of my favorites, Laszlo Krazsnahorkai, routinely writes sentences which stretch over ten pages.

It's the effect that I feel is lacking in this case. I'm actually partial to his style, or at least the idea of a style that he's going for (I've read my fair share of literary fiction and I think I've got a good sense of which writers Means is fond of.) What's evocative in this opening, in my opinion, is the idea of a railroad bed, blasted out of shale and limestone, which is near a city, though hidden from it. And salty air. You have these evocative elements, on the one hand, and an elegant rhythm, on the other, but they don't quite work together.

I'm fresh off a Conrad kick, so maybe I'm setting the bar too high, but with Conrad the imagery unfolds along with the sentence, so the imagination is carried - and shaped by - the elegant syntax. Here, with Means, everything feels strained, like his well-curated selection of evocative elements is being painstakingly organized in order to service the rhythm. @Mayor of Simpleton already pointed out some faulty points. There's nothing wrong with ambiguity, used well, but there are a lot of moments here when the uncertainty over which element is being described feels less intentional than clumsy.

Another thing @jamalrob First the sea 'opens up' into the harbor. This seems strange to me. How does the vastness of the sea 'open up' into a smaller, more enclosed space? It's counterintuitive, but could work, for all that, if he were to continue tracing the motion of the sea's opening. But that's exactly what he doesn't do! Instead, the sea is urged, into a 'deep yielding' estuary, up a river. This is a faintly sexualized narrowing. Your point about his face being vised between his knees - that's the problem in a nutshell. Everything feels like an elegant evocation of elegance and evocation. It only works if you don't try to imagine what's being described.

No, it's not. But any given sample of text prefaced by the question "Is this good writing?" is doomed to unfriendly and close analysis, which isn't the way we read fiction — BitterCrank

That's a fair point, but I've been feeling unfriendly and analytical lately, and Means seems as good a person as any to take it out on.

What I fear is that Will is being used as a magical device that wipes away the problem.

Truth be told, everytime Schopenhauer starts talking about the indivisible unity of the will, outside the principium individuationis, I get the sense he's not really sure himself what he's talking about. It's basically a somber and confused oscillation between negative theology and ontotheology. The diversity of the world, its conditioned multiplicity, must, its felt, rest on some unified unconditioned (Why? this is the ontotheological impulse accepted unquestioningly). But how's the unity of something inherently eristic supposed to work? What does that even mean? Well...(& then we get the negative theology)

I think people do a switcharoo and try to explain the causes of consciousness as some sort of hitherto unexplored origin and then because it is some genus of causes which is not what we originally thought, they want to then go an extra step and say the actual consciousness is therefore an illusion. — S1

Yeah, I tried to read Dennett's Consciousness Explained (recon to know the enemy better, I guess) but, even though I expected to disagree, I was legitimately disappointed by how shallow the argumentation was. It's exactly as you say - he just attacked the 'cartesian theater', again and again, as if the only two positions were eliminative materialism and Homunculism.

Maybe the book gets better, but I gave up after a couple hundred pages.

So much selves, so little consciousness. This is getting a bit off topic perhaps, but I would say that most of the time I am performing, conforming to an image that I hold onto and from that nothing new can come. But to be 'authentic' (is that the right word?) is not to make that division for a moment but to respond from the whole of what one is, and in doing so one learns - recognises -something of the truth of what one is. Unfortunately, what tends to happen is that the same process of thought immediately makes a new image of this, and one starts performing it.

My experience is very similar. To my therapist, I've likened that moment, where an image is immediately made of authentic expression, to those scenes in horror movies where the protagonist finally escapes the lair of their captor, runs out into the street, flags down a car --only to realize their captor is the one driving it. (Probably a bit melodramatic, but it sometimes feels that disheartening.) (& the turn of the screw here is when I first came up with this metaphor, it was spontaneous, to the point where I teared up a bit. Now its something I've rolled out a couple times in various places as yet another set piece)

I wonder to what extent this is universal though? You certainly see this kind of thing discussed a lot in philosophy, but perhaps that's because the type of people drawn to philosophy are the same type of people who struggle with 'authenticity'? (You have to be at least a little of a narcissist to think you can uncover profound truths through the exercise of your reason.)

And I guess you could say, even in those 'authentic' moments, one is performing. The difference, maybe, is that its a performance you truly believe in, deep down, all the way down to those primitive emotional currents we can never really leave behind. I've always liked the phrase 'Transcendence is absorption.'

ok. My point is only that book II presents itself as the true account of the will's adventure and it does so in terms of a striving that grows in complexity as it clashes with itself. It doubles down on progression. It seems like an exceptionally bad metaphor for something that has nothing to do with change, progression or time.

Then Book II is essentially one long nonsensical metaphor.

I wasn't suggesting the 'Platonic Ideas' change.
What I'm saying is that book II presents a narrative about a pre-representative will striving, expressing itself, in ever new and more complicated ways. It explicitly discusses this as a progression.

Yes, as he is obliged to do when taking an objective perspective[...]Yet from a transcendental perspective, the knowledge of this whole history of objects depends upon a knowing subject, without which, nothing can be said to exist.

The account Schopenhauer gives, of the will objectifying in different grades, is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a mere 'empirical' account, describing the change of matter in space. He explicitly presents it, in BOOK II, as a narrative about the will itself, striving in this way, then that, battling itself in ever more complicated ways.

Oops, phrased that poorly. Not a difference between objectifications and affirmations. A difference between this or that objectification. Between this or that affirmation.

Again, the thing is Schop explicitly discusses the will affirming itself in different ways before the debut of representation-forming animals.

If the will affirms itself in different ways, then there is change. And somehow, for Schop, there's change before time. Which doesn't make any sense at all (though you can paper it over with vague generalities about the will and atemporality which ignore the problem altogether)

If there is a difference between objectifications or affirmations, then there is change (note that this doesn't require the introduction of change into the realm of platonic ideas, if you're concerned about that)

Is there a difference between one objectification and another?

I'm not trying to be rude, I just have no idea what you're trying to say.

Does the will take on different forms?
Does taking on different forms imply change?

It seems tautologous to me that something that objectifies itself in various ways is something that takes on different forms, so, regarding my 'query,' I still feel like we're back in the same spot.

What are you trying to say?

ok, objectify works for me too

Does the will manifest itself in different ways? (This is almost rhetorical. I know you've read WWR)

Does the will take on different forms?
Does taking on different forms imply change?

should have said 'one' not 'you', sry, wasnt trying to ascribe to you any claims

Is, has, idk - It's strange to me that the essence thing made perfect sense to you in one context, but not in another.

Anyway, feel like we're still back at the same spot. The will changes, evolves, takes on all sorts of forms, before organisms capable of representation come on the scene. And that doesn't make much sense, if there can be no time without representation. Yet that's precisely what Schop suggests.

There's a good chance, he'll have a good run of it, and enjoy the remainder of his days etc.
— csalisbury

This would be unwarranted.

Fair. So maybe you think there's very little chance he or she will experience anything but an abundance of sorrow. Still, no advice one way or the other. Huh.

Being convinced that life is neither worth continuing nor worth ending, you will notice, practically results in continuing to live.

Sure, and if you've continued to live, no one has any reason to listen to any claims you might make that life's not worth continuing to live, because they're gibberish.

It would be the same were I dead and deciding the merits of continuing to be dead or becoming alive. If I am convinced of neither, then I will by default continue being dead, or "deading" to coin a word.

This analogy's fun but its 100% meaningless.

Ok. What did you mean when you said I'd answered my own query? I'm lost. What was my answer?