Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I wonder what it feels like to be an American.

I imagine it's actually closer to the feeling the Englishmen in Master and Commander have than the feeling us modern day Englishmen have.

Proud, intrepid, patriotic, not wanting to see a Minaret on Capitol Hill, not wanting that raggedy arse Xi Jingping be king, etc.

Although quickly now wilting irrevocably, becoming more and more post-Empire English. The good news is that the 2040s will be a vintage decade for irreverent American panel shows and 'AmPop' in the charts.
 

luka

Well-known member
One thing Gus has taught us is that American literature has become as twee and parochial as English literature, serving only as a marker of decline.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I was reading a Burgess review of Gibbon last night and Gibbon apparently elucidates a Vico-esque theory of history wherein an energetic barbarian culture violently (in every sense) forms a civilisation and then - having achieved luxury - becomes complacent and decays. Whatever doesn't advance retrogrades.

I wonder if you could apply that theory to musical genres? And if i could write a bestselling christmas stocking filler on that very subject?
 

luka

Well-known member
I remember going to see a Hollywood blockbuster with a Texan friend and suddenly realising that he is always the hero of every film, can cast himself into that role naturally. The whole machinery of the entertainment-propaganda-indoctrination industry centres around the white American male.
 

luka

Well-known member
This is my gibbon poem

scotch tape/semblance of seemliness/
temperance and toil. Grin at grindstone/
gone in God’s graft.
Fore and After/hollow laughter.
Shatter simpering silent night.

Read the runes/it’s Romefall/
Baleful barbarians/at the gate/
Feast/till flame throws its own/
Leering shadow/in the sanctum.

Diagnosis-
WATERY BLOOD
FLACCID DECADENCE
FOREIGN GODS.
Sacrifice the city to save it
The card/is the wheel of fortuna/
First you’re up/
Then you’re down.

II.
Hooting gibbons/shoo away the sun/
The discursive & interminable sentence/
Falls/with the finality of the gavel/
Fate sealed. No repeal/
Subsumed/in sooty/silent night.

III.
Savage luxury/beasts in the palace/
Hooves ringing on the marble/
Clatter of cloven hooves/
Burlesquing the circuit/of the dance.

Perfume of goat & swine/
Music of the pigsty &
The drinking hall/
Crescendo of artless violence.
Diagnosis
THE UNMEDIATED ACT
RENEWS
CIVILIZATION
GONE TO SEED.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
One thing Gus has taught us is that American literature has become as twee and parochial as English literature, serving only as a marker of decline.
Yeah, it's not an expression of confidence anymore, is it? (Basing this on having read about three Delillo books.)

It's all irony, footnotes, hedging, screaming.

There's a flowering that comes with decay - it happened to us with Modernism. But then you're just left with a shattered load of bric a brac (or nostalgic fluff.)
 

luka

Well-known member
One thing Gus has taught us is that American literature has become as twee and parochial as English literature, serving only as a marker of decline.

Dissensus
Body Awareness tracks a lesbian couple, Phyllis and Jannis, and their Aspie son Jared, during a "Body Awareness Week" at the Vermont liberal arts college where Phyllis works as a feminist psych professor. The Aliens is set in a coffeeshop backyard, stoners Jasper & KJ hanging out, befriending a shop employee, talking about music, about their dreams. John, a young couple visit a Gettysburg bed'n'breakfast for the weekend, end up awkwardly alone with the elderly woman who runs it.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Would you say americans seem more prone to relying on these codes? Certainly wouldn;t surprise me, but then again I have no frame of reference.

yes I think so, some of the ones i've met at parties i sensed there was a default ingratiating quality to how they acted that makes us danes uncomfortable
 

entertainment

Well-known member
isn't there a trend among american alt culture diagnosticians of comparing USA to the Roman Empire? dissecting the decadence, eschatologizing the great looming fall.
 

Leo

Well-known member
yes I think so, some of the ones i've met at parties i sensed there was a default ingratiating quality to how they acted that makes us danes uncomfortable

yeah, much more fun to be at a party where a roomful of brooding social malcontents stand around and stare at the floor.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's because they have no 'inner self' that demands fidelity, no souls. So everything becomes about surface manipulation and presentation.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
isn't there a trend among american alt culture diagnosticians of comparing USA to the Roman Empire? dissecting the decadence, eschatologizing the great looming fall.
Yeah - America as the Rome to Britain's Athens. Craner could probably point us to a good essay (perhaps he wrote) about the foolishness of the UK's post-war leaders who thought this and thoroughly endorsed it.

There's this, of course: https://www.theonion.com/report-china-to-overtake-u-s-as-worlds-biggest-asshol-1819571423
 
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