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Originally Posted by 2wins
first, do not pretend to tell me what i mean. you may well possess a great deal of rote knowledge and you might even have a bit of that old high brow palate, but your intelligence is centered in your ego and your arrogance knows no bounds.

Mirror, mirror on the wall.... wink

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numan Offline OP
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'

Neither man nor woman can be worth anything until they have discovered
that they are fools. This is the first step toward becoming either estimable
or agreeable; and until it is taken there is no hope.

--- Lord Melbourne

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Anyone who breaks into "nanny nanny boo boo" gets a time out.

Julia, the Ranter


Julia
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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
(Philip K.Dick)

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Originally Posted by EmmaG
I will also add, in the painting category, N.C. Wyeth. Pure American.

EmmaG
Andrew Wyeth was not bad, either. ThumbsUp
[Linked Image from tfaoi.com]
Yours,
Issodhos

Last edited by SkyHawk; 08/23/09 12:34 PM. Reason: image resizing

"When all has been said that can be said, and all has been done that can be done, there will be poetry";-) -- Issodhos
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Originally Posted by numan
My innocent remarks about H.P. Lovecraft piqued the interest of a number of Ranters, so I thought I would start a thread to go more deeply into the matter....
I missed you remarks about Lovecraft, but are you familiar with the works of another American writer very strongly influenced by him - Robert E. Howard?

Originally Posted by numan
I have often wondered why the USA has produced almost nothing but second- and third-raters in the arts --- particularly in literature.
Is it necessarily a reasonable comparison to make between the artistic accomplishments of a culture that is barely four centuries old and its European parentage that has 2.5 millennia of development? Or to the East Asian cultures that you so obviously admire and their four millennia of artistic treasure?


Life should be led like a cavalry charge - Theodore Roosevelt
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numan Offline OP
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Originally Posted by Ron G.
Is it necessarily a reasonable comparison to make between the artistic accomplishments of a culture that is barely four centuries old and its European parentage that has 2.5 millennia of development? Or to the East Asian cultures that you so obviously admire and their four millennia of artistic treasure?

The point you make is worthy of consideration, but it merely shrinks the arena of comparisons to a span of four centuries. During that four centuries, Europe has vastly outshone America in art and letters.

Moreover, America has not sprung from the forehead of Zeus; in the main, it is a side-branch of European culture. That makes the degeneration into barbarism of its culture all the more appalling,

Last edited by numan; 08/23/09 03:39 PM.
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numan Offline OP
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'

The essential failure of America is that it has no High Culture.

Let me emphasize that I am not referring to the culture of a snobbish clique. I allude to what I mentioned in a previous posting here. The goal of High Culture is the elevation of the spirit; it is centered around the pursuit of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. It drives consciousness into realms which could never have been conceived without the transcendent fire of artistic creation.

To paraphrase Aristotle:

True Art is the energy of the soul at its highest peak, as it pursues the goal of existence.

It is a measure of the utter degradation of American consciousness that these statements sound ridiculous or incomprehensible to most Americans.

American life is dominated by pop culture and mass entertainment. Profit is its driving force, not the expansion of consciousness. Its "art" is ephemeral, shallow, the "suppliance of a moment" --- which is inevitable, since most Americans no longer have the ability to concentrate their minds for any length of time.

It is this almost total lack of a High Culture, and the triumph of garbage in the marketplace, that renders plausible the false view that art is a matter of taste, rather than the traditional view that there is an inner core to art which is real and unchanging.

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Numan -

I have, I am sorry to say, serious questions about your taste.

Over time you have suggested that Americans have no real culture, that our population is ignorant, uneducated, and devoid of curiosity. You feel that our government is deeply disordered, corrupt, self-serving, and fatally flawed.

Given that most of the members of this board are Americans, your views and your values must make spending time at RR a bit like a visit with the tattooed denizens of a trailer park.

You are, of course, welcome here; you always have been. But there must be boards like this where the membership is primarily Canadian, European, anything but American; I find myself shaking my head that you continue to spend your time with us.

I can only assume that other sites have not been as welcoming - or perhaps you prefer feeling like the fast fish in a slow pond.

Still, I feel it wise to remind you that there are many boards in the webisphere where you could express your opinion without running the risk of insulting the other posters, where your erudition could be appreciated by members who were raised and educated to value it properly, and where those members can engage with you on a more equitable level.

Until you find a board like that you will, of course, continue to be welcome here.

Julia
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Thank you, Julia. You say things so nicely.


"I believe very deeply that compassion is the route not only for the evolution of the full human being, but for the very survival of the human race." —The Dalai Lama
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