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)
22 November 06 - 17:03LADIES (part 1)
LADIES (written 1990)
The pain started in his elbow, since the bones thereabouts felt no longer suited. He wondered whether it would fade as quickly as it welled up, since bodies were strange creatures — no accounting for some of their idle tricks and idiosyncracies.
The young man believed most pain was in the mind, in any event. Not that he would go as far as Faith Healing, of course.
He could not recall knocking the elbow. So, the pain must have been home-grown. Luckily, he was in his bedroom, thus enabling him to strip off and have a butchers at the offending area. There was a small red mark, like raw meat, between the ligaments, too neat to be a random abrasion, forming, as the mark did, an almost perfect Isosceles triangle. ...
(more)
22 November 06 - 16:55LADIES (part 2)
Later, there was a half-hearted attempt by an angel to contact George Slight, an attempt that failed abysmally, to such an extent that George ended up himself trying to to re-establish contact with the alien intelligence (if not an intelligent alien) — only to discover he was on a crossed-line with a lady he once knew as Agnes Tidy.
Agnes shut the hardback, having riffled through its pages in search of its ending, picked out the tin can from the flip-top and listened. She being religious thought George was one of God's messenger-angels. She was not sufficiently religious to have full faith in the existence of God Himself, so an agent, as she assumed Geore to be, was, presumably, more believeable than the principal.
"Wishful thinking if you think a message from me is a message from God," George said. ...
(more)
