Shockley
Maester
Indeed, Steerpike, it's Finnegans Wake.
It's meant, of course, to be read out loud.
It's meant, of course, to be read out loud.
It's meant, of course, to be read out loud.
"The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living."
Indeed. Joyce was blind by that time, so he had Samuel Beckett (the Samuel Beckett, even) sit down and write what he said - since Joyce couldn't read what Beckett wrote, he couldn't correct spellings or individual words so it's best understood out loud.
Edit: We know, for instance, that Joyce preferred the spelling 'kwork' to 'quark' but didn't bother correcting Beckett.
I'm not sure how this can be considered purple prose. The living lament the dead. Lament means to deeply mourn. Some examples would be crying or wailing. So the crying and wailing of the living serves as songs of the dead. A lengthy way of saying the living who lament with cries and wails are creating a requiem for the dead.
I think I'm on board with Steerpike here. This attack on descriptive narratives reminds me of the bully complex I recall through my youth. If you don't understand something, or if you are envious of something, you attack it. Don't attack art, understand it.
There was a time when writing was entirely considered an art form. Remember the phrase "paint the scene with words?" That is exactly what I think these examples do. Do you have to think about the phrase a bit? Why not?
I liken this to the expanding selection of garbage rap. It's all entertainment and requires very little, if any, thought to consume it. Then there are those artists that are wordsmiths. They make you think about the lyrics. They require you to become an active party in the sharing of ideas. I'll never buy the piles of garbage rap (and other music) but I can't wait to buy the artists.
Indeed. Joyce was blind by that time, so he had Samuel Beckett (the Samuel Beckett, even) sit down and write what he said - since Joyce couldn't read what Beckett wrote, he couldn't correct spellings or individual words so it's best understood out loud.
Edit: We know, for instance, that Joyce preferred the spelling 'kwork' to 'quark' but didn't bother correcting Beckett.
I think I'm on board with Steerpike here. This attack on descriptive narratives reminds me of the bully complex I recall through my youth. If you don't understand something, or if you are envious of something, you attack it. Don't attack art, understand it.
There was a time when writing was entirely considered an art form. Remember the phrase "paint the scene with words?" That is exactly what I think these examples do. Do you have to think about the phrase a bit? Why not?
Thank you, Shockley. I didn't know any of this. I don't know much about Joyce's life, I just know some of his works. As I said, I thought Dubliners was very good, and Ulysses was intellectually interesting. Maybe I'll give Finnegan's Wake another look and try this approach, just to see how it sounds to me.
Dubliners is wonderful. If you like that, you might want to grab A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It's about halfway between Dubliners and Ulysses stylistically.
Pourquoi? The argument against circular logic involves circular logic - 'circular logic is bad because circular logic is bad because circular logis is bad because circular logic' and so on and so forth.
No, circular logic is bad because it requires the premise to be the answer in order for the answer to be the one you want. It fails to logically lead from premise to argument to conclusion, because assumptions are made about the conclusion in order to conceive the premise.
Yes, precisely. Which is, of course, what we mean when we say the sentence is meaningless. It fails to give any information. "The songs of the dead are lamentations of the living" delivers no more meaning than the similarly tautological sentence "The red couch was a reddish color."
Mindfire, while I don't really like the lines, I think you're over reacting. The bird-across-moon imagery is just fine when he's looking at some movement inside a dragon egg, and the gray-eyed destiny line - while pretentious - just means that the events which just happened are going to start a war.
"The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living."
What if I wrote it this way?
The weeping of their widows was the only song the Red Fire Soldiers had left sing.
Okay, it's still a little much, unless they were connected to music somehow, but the words do have meaning.
What I mean to say is, it's more that the prose is more ambitious than the author's skill levels to execute, rather than that they have no meaning.
But there are more than enough people on the web who harp on Paolini. Just so long as we can keep the conversation in some ways useful.
The weeping of their widows was the only song the Red Fire Soldiers had left to sing.
Yes, precisely. Which is, of course, what we mean when we say the sentence is meaningless. It fails to give any information. "The songs of the dead are lamentations of the living" delivers no more meaning than the similarly tautological sentence "The red couch was a reddish color."
The sentence, as nearly everyone on 'my' side of this argument has indicated, has more meaning than that - at least to us.
The important thing for everyone to remember here is that just because you yourself can not comprehend a meaning to something does not mean that there is no meaning - it just means that you yourself can not find it. We're weak mentally, on some level, and all in different ways; this is a difference we should expect.