30 June 09 - 09:41Intentional Fallacy
I had another on-line discussion about the Intentional Fallacy yesterday. I have a book called 'The Verbal Icon' by WK Wimsatt that I first owned in the late sixties, a book sitting, as it happened, on my bookshelf in immediate proximity to 'From Blue to Black', a novel by Joel Lane - which was coincidentally appropriate as the discussion in question was with Joel himself!
I was pleased to find this quote in the Wimsatt book to help demonstrate the point I was trying to make:
"In his essay on 'Hamlet and His problems' TS Eliot finds Hamlet's state of emotion unsatisfactory because it lacks an 'objective correlative', a 'chain of events' which are the 'formula of that particular emotion'. The emotion is 'in excess of the facts as they appear'. It is 'inexpressible'. ... (more)
16 March 09 - 12:44Holding
My Readings aloud: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/df_lewis_reading_aloud.htm
My reviews: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/recent_reviews_of_books_by_dfl.htm
Cone Zero: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/cone_zero_under_way.htm
05 November 08 - 13:22The Lady Opposite
THE LADY OPPOSITE by DF Lewis
Dear lady opposite, you may live in the large house across the road, but I seem to know you better than if you lived over here with me. On the other hand, it is strange how little I do know. There is of course the timing of your curtain drawing, the people who visit, the various delivery men, your doctor, tbe rare trips you make (both on your own and arm in arm with lady friends) and, of course, the smoke curling from your chimney, at times, grey, thin and uninteresting, but at others tantalisingly black and so very thick with the fuel on which you must feed it. Only yesterday, you had a visitor whom I was extremely shocked to see was a man. Your normal callers are of course people of the female persuasion, most with wide-brimmed hats and walking tall on fashionable heels. But this visitor was a sooty-faced man and, what was more, your curtains were closed before it was ... (more)
05 November 08 - 13:19The Clinging of the Cold
THE CLINGING OF THE COLD
Donna wanted to be the first woman werewolf. You see, most of her friends dressed like vampires, with more eye-shadow than any their actual bodies cast when the sun was low in the sky. They wore loads of jingle-jangling bangles, too, but they did draw short of hanging fangs because that would have indeed been a tinsy wincey bit childish - or 'sad', as the fashionable word for unfashionable was among nineteen year old girls then.
Thus, you must understand, Donna wanted to go a stage further than her Gothic pals: break new ground, if not graveyard ground, and be a glorious wolf howling to the same moon as hounds bayed at. Donna's own glossy pelt of fur would then no doubt suit her taste for luxurious clothes without transgressing her almost religious regard for Animal Rights. ... (more)
05 November 08 - 13:13The Last Mover
THE LAST MOVER
The boy was no angel.
He had not knotted his tie properly—because, of course, this crumpled foot-length of cloth with horizontal stripes was the last thing on his mind. It joined many other last-things on the boy's mind, namely: the dirt-scuffed knees—the "designer" rips in the elbows of the school jacket, a jacket which, although it had obviously seen better days and a body more fitting for its size, his mother made him wear because "it cost a tidy few bob and you can't go throwing things away with use still in them, can you?"—the short grey trousers that the school authorities said must be worn just to the middle of the knees, which trousers were newish, since the previous pair had been irreparably soiled one awful awful day of tummy upset towards the end of the endless summer holidays—the socks circumcised down to the ankles and wrinkled uncomfortably under ... (more)
