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Monday, April 25, 2005
Reputation Economy Again
Does your literary weblog lack readers? Are your best posts alms for oblivion? Well, then, that is what the comment box is for. To make yourself known. Go ahead. Announce your existence. Tell us of your blog, or your best post.
Speaking of the blogroll, I just remembered to add: God of the Machine. He used to do more of the cultural blogging. Even Yvor Winters blogging. Now I gather he's starting a cult and mathematics is involved. I really couldn't say. Also, you should visit the nice behold the considerable, eccentric intelligence of John Emerson at Idiocentrism. Also, here's something odd Halfway Down the Danube. (For those who care to step in the same river twice, part II. I do want to encourage holbonicism. Does 'hooked on holbonics' have a ring to it?)
Tonight we broaden our invitational canvas to include those who mix philosophy and art - well or badly, but above all: boldly. Is this you? I take as my inspirational text, as I often do, Nietzsche's essay, "Schopenhauer as Educator". In §7 he declares: "It can be assumed that if nature were human it would never cease to be annoyed at itself and its ineptitude. Nature propels the philosopher into mankind like an arrow; it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere. But countless times it misses and is depressed at the fact." Why o why are not children raised up on such sentiments? (The childish mazes on fastfood placemats, for example, with which the young idle away the time it takes their nuggets to fry: why not 'help nature propel the philosopher into mankind?' Instead of these silly 'help the little bird get back to the nest' themes.)
Thankfully the blind watchmaker has hit on blogging and now has an inexhaustible quiver from which he is firing in all directions. So we're safe. Or so it would seem, but for a sad fact noted in Amareep's Samuel Johnson post. The reader - he is enough to drive any author mad; idle, amusement-addicted thing is he. Art as well as philosophy suffers. Nietzsche:
The artist and the philosopher are evidence against the purposiveness of nature as regards the means it employs, though they are also first-rate evidence as to the wisdom of its purpose. They strike home at only a few, while they ought to strike home at everybody - and even these few are not struck with the force with which philosopher and author launch their shot. It is sad to have to arrive at an assessment of art as cause so different from our assessment of art as effect! The artist creates his work according to the will of nature for the good of other men: that is indisputable; nonetheless he knows that none of these other men will ever love and understand his work as he loves and understands it. Thus this greater degree of love and understanding is, given the ineptitude of nature, required for the production of a smaller degree; the greater and nobler is employed as a means of producing the lesser and ignoble. Nature is a bad economist: its expenditure is much larger than the income it procures; all its wealth notwithstanding, it is bound sooner or later to ruin itself. It would have ordered its affairs more rationally if its house-rule were: small expenses and hundredfold profit; if, for example, there were only a few artists, and these of weaker powers, but on the other hand numerous recipients of art of a stronger and more mighty species than the species of the artist; so that the effect of the work of art in relation to its cause would be a hundredfold magnification.
Do you think Nietzsche's advice to nature is sound? (Should publishers start giving handsome advances to the best readers, to assure good work is properly appreciated?)
Comments
I began a weblog to record what I read this year, and what my feelings about those books have been. That’s right, feelings, thought that includes satisfaction as much as some thought about the quality offered.
Turns out I have become reader enough to dislike books for a reason, because I can see what they lack.
Should publishers start giving handsome advances to the best readers, to assure good work is properly appreciated?
The problem with this is that the best readers can put a book in context, which isn’t necessarily flattering for the book reviewed.
There’s a lot of crap for sale.
There are, for instance, a lot of books written for academical interpretation only.
Here is a blog on aesthetics.
Nice? That hurts.
You’re right, John. That was faint praise. You are a considerable, eccentric intelligence and I shall update the post to reflect this fact.
No offense. It’s just that I try to be evil and no one takes me seriously.
Oh, none taken. I can tell you aren’t evil and I didn’t take you seriously.
John:
Not only are you “nice,” you are also “interesting.” Is that better?
I insist on being called evil.
speaking of art and philosophy, what’s the deal, Holbo? You bid adieu to all your other blog-like endeavors, or at least promise such, and yet, here, here, such paltry posts. Where are the 15 page sentences of yesteryear? the weddings of the Hulk and kierkegaard? the endless analyses of literary hokum? More is desired.
Have I lost my edge, grackel? Have I gotten too mellow? (Do I know you?) Oh, I’ll post some more theory-bashing sooner or later.
Thanks for the links, John. Come for the oddity, stay for the Balkans! The threads get more holbonic each day.