mistersloane
heavy heavy monster sound
But he would have
Jack Law's Lord of the Rings Thread.
- Thread starter luka
- Start date
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Suddenly a wild mistersloane appears! Alright you old bugger, what's up?
william_kent
ON THE 09A
from the paper that can not be named, a story about a seriously misguided legal claim
I thought I'd better check out the pitch perfect prose before it gets completely pulped - seems like the Tolkien estate is robbing the world of great literature...
I tried to get chatGPT to extract the text from the image above but the prose was too complex for it
I thought I'd better check out the pitch perfect prose before it gets completely pulped - seems like the Tolkien estate is robbing the world of great literature...
I tried to get chatGPT to extract the text from the image above but the prose was too complex for it
william_kent
ON THE 09A
and the now the world will miss out on "HORCS"
william_kent
ON THE 09A
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Regrettably, one must assume so.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
versh
Well-known member
Because he's unaffected by the ring and can be all aloof about it.
droid
Well-known member
"As Taylor makes clear, the shift from a porous to a buffered self involves a complex series of exchanges. But to put that shift in simple terms, a person accepts a buffered condition as a means of being protected from the demonic or otherwise ominous forces that in pre-modern times generated a quavering network of terrors. To be a pre-modern person, in Taylor’s account, is to be constantly in danger of being invaded or overcome by demons or fairies or nameless terrors of the dark — of being possessed and transformed, or spirited away and never returned to home and family. Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) specifies many of these dangers, along with the whole panoply of prayers, rites, amulets, potions, chants, spells, and the like, by which a person might seek protection from the otherwise irresistible. It is easy, then, to imagine why a person — or a whole culture — might, if it could, exchange this model of a self with highly permeable boundaries for one in which the self feels better protected, defended — impermeable, or nearly so.
The problem with this apparently straightforward transaction is that the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The “showings” manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only. But the achievement of a safely buffered personhood — closed off from both the divine and the demonic — is soon enough accompanied by a deeply felt change in the very cosmos. As C. S. Lewis notes in The Discarded Image (1964), the medieval person who found himself “looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music” gives way to the modern person who perceives only emptiness and silence. Safety is purchased at the high price of isolation, as we see as early as Pascal, who famously wrote of the night sky, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”).
In these circumstances, one might expect people to ask whether so difficult and costly an exchange is in fact necessary. Might it not be possible to experience the benefits, while avoiding the costs, of both the porous and the buffered self? I want to argue here that it is precisely this desire that accounts for the rise to cultural prominence, in late modernity, of the artistic genre of fantasy. Fantasy — in books, films, television shows, and indeed in all imaginable media — is an instrument by which the late modern self strives to avail itself of the unpredictable excitements of the porous self while retaining its protective buffers. Fantasy, in most of its recent forms, may best be understood as a technologically enabled, and therefore safe, simulacrum of the pre-modern porous self."
www.thenewatlantis.com
The problem with this apparently straightforward transaction is that the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The “showings” manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only. But the achievement of a safely buffered personhood — closed off from both the divine and the demonic — is soon enough accompanied by a deeply felt change in the very cosmos. As C. S. Lewis notes in The Discarded Image (1964), the medieval person who found himself “looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music” gives way to the modern person who perceives only emptiness and silence. Safety is purchased at the high price of isolation, as we see as early as Pascal, who famously wrote of the night sky, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”).
In these circumstances, one might expect people to ask whether so difficult and costly an exchange is in fact necessary. Might it not be possible to experience the benefits, while avoiding the costs, of both the porous and the buffered self? I want to argue here that it is precisely this desire that accounts for the rise to cultural prominence, in late modernity, of the artistic genre of fantasy. Fantasy — in books, films, television shows, and indeed in all imaginable media — is an instrument by which the late modern self strives to avail itself of the unpredictable excitements of the porous self while retaining its protective buffers. Fantasy, in most of its recent forms, may best be understood as a technologically enabled, and therefore safe, simulacrum of the pre-modern porous self."
Fantasy and the Buffered Self — The New Atlantis
Alan Jacobs on how the genre offers re-enchantment without risk
www.thenewatlantis.com
droid
Well-known member
Context:
sibilantfricative.blogspot.com
Thoughts on Grimdark
I’ve been trying to wrestle some minimal cogency into an account of Joe Abercrombie’s writing, but am finding it tricky. I know Joe: he’s a ...
sibilantfricative.blogspot.com
sus
Moderator
Keith Thomas is a genius. Man and the Natural World is brilliant"As Taylor makes clear, the shift from a porous to a buffered self involves a complex series of exchanges. But to put that shift in simple terms, a person accepts a buffered condition as a means of being protected from the demonic or otherwise ominous forces that in pre-modern times generated a quavering network of terrors. To be a pre-modern person, in Taylor’s account, is to be constantly in danger of being invaded or overcome by demons or fairies or nameless terrors of the dark — of being possessed and transformed, or spirited away and never returned to home and family. Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) specifies many of these dangers, along with the whole panoply of prayers, rites, amulets, potions, chants, spells, and the like, by which a person might seek protection from the otherwise irresistible. It is easy, then, to imagine why a person — or a whole culture — might, if it could, exchange this model of a self with highly permeable boundaries for one in which the self feels better protected, defended — impermeable, or nearly so.
The problem with this apparently straightforward transaction is that the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The “showings” manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only. But the achievement of a safely buffered personhood — closed off from both the divine and the demonic — is soon enough accompanied by a deeply felt change in the very cosmos. As C. S. Lewis notes in The Discarded Image (1964), the medieval person who found himself “looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music” gives way to the modern person who perceives only emptiness and silence. Safety is purchased at the high price of isolation, as we see as early as Pascal, who famously wrote of the night sky, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”).
In these circumstances, one might expect people to ask whether so difficult and costly an exchange is in fact necessary. Might it not be possible to experience the benefits, while avoiding the costs, of both the porous and the buffered self? I want to argue here that it is precisely this desire that accounts for the rise to cultural prominence, in late modernity, of the artistic genre of fantasy. Fantasy — in books, films, television shows, and indeed in all imaginable media — is an instrument by which the late modern self strives to avail itself of the unpredictable excitements of the porous self while retaining its protective buffers. Fantasy, in most of its recent forms, may best be understood as a technologically enabled, and therefore safe, simulacrum of the pre-modern porous self."
Fantasy and the Buffered Self — The New Atlantis
Alan Jacobs on how the genre offers re-enchantment without risk
sus
Moderator
I was thinking about this tonight, reading about ergot and St. Anthony's fire and then watching Phantom Thread. Part of the pre-modern permeable self is that you can start hallucinating from syphilis or babbling glossolalia and you don't know why. And maybe also the witch who cursed you also put yellow-gilled mushrooms in your stew. Or your brain literally gets hijacked by parasites or prions or a tumor and you start acting in bizarre ways. I believe it was Winston Churchill's father who famously contracted syphilis when his boarding school classmates peer-pressured him to lose his virginity to a prostitute. And at seventy he was raving mad, devouring the roast duck entire while a horrified dinner party of nobles looked on. And the only interpretive framework you have for this is divine or magical or whatever. You are possessed, which isn't so crazy because you are in fact literally possessed by agencies different than your own, that want different things and treat your body like a meat puppet. And as medicine and health and science advance you rationalize these explanations yes but you also make the body literally less porous, tools and machines bolster your immune system and rationalize your consciousness, which is all sync'd up to the scholastic industrial consciousness complex transmitted by education and monoculture. And so we start poisoning ourselves with acid instead of ergot to make ourselves porous again, to reenter the mystical.
versh
Well-known member
I've never taken them myself, but aren't anti-depressants supposed to operate similarly? A leveler smoothing out the peaks and troughs. Baudrillard's invoking of the "schizo" unable to "produce the limits of his own being" comes to mind too, and Deleuze questioning whether man is simply a territory, a set of boundaries.
