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[AdamSmith]

The physicist you mentioned, together with his fellow initiates, whose writings are indeed as opaque to me as any of the scribblings of the linguistic scholars (at least those of the type you so ably defend), have a demonstrated power to produce mighty, nay awesome, works.

The powers of your MLA specialists, on the other hand, seems largely or even entirely constricted to magicing tens of millions of dollars from the coffers of English departments into their own pockets.

Yet they did not listen or incline their ears, but stiffened their necks in order not to listen or take correction. Jeremiah 17:23

Your rhetoric is delightful. Your logic, however, boils down to:

If it is not one of those disciplines possessing the practical power to annihilate or cure me, then my difficulties of comprehension demonstrate nothing about me, and everything about the discipline's failing.

You can say any discipline outside the hard sciences ought still to be comprehensible to the genial bumbling amateur in the best 19th-century English mold. But that train left the station long ago, and way beyond the literature departments.

[MsGuy]

You can say any discipline outside the hard sciences ought still to be comprehensible to the genial bumbling amateur in the best 19th-century English mold. But that train left the station long ago, and way beyond the literature departments.

In the summer after my 3rd grade, one of my uncles forgot & left a college geology text while on a visit to my house. I read it and found it fascinating. It answered all kinds of questions I had never even thought to ask. Reread that book several times just for the shear enjoyment of it but, even the first time I didn't have any difficulty understanding it.

Except for the two chapters dealing with synclines and anticlines.

Now I recall figuring out soon enough what synclines and anticlines were but the explanation offered for how the underlying up and down movements of the rock that generated them (specifically why they might be generated several times in the same place) made no sense to me. My initial assumption was that I had run into some difficult stuff that was hard for a little kid to get a grip on. I must have reread those two chapters a dozen times over the next two years and still it made no sense.

I think the last time I reread it I was in the 6th grade when I decided that the explanation on offer violated basic laws of physics, at least as I understood them.

4 or 5 years later, I read some articles on plate tectonics ( a new theory at the time) and realized that that theory contained a simple and comprehensive explanation for the underlying mechanics of recurrent synclines. When I went back to the college text it was immediately apparent that the author had not a clue of how to explain recurrent synclines but sure as hell wasn't gonna admit his bafflement. Sure enough he had cobbled together a lot of convoluted sentences to disguise the fact that the only explanation he could come up with did indeed violate the laws of physics (much to the frustration of little kids like me, the asshole).

I'm pretty sure you see where I'm going with this, so I'll just cut to the chase.

It's been my experience that when I really want to I can puzzle my way through damn near any natural language text (math is alien to me and makes my brain hurt). It's further been my experience that when I have real, persistent difficulty with a text, it's because the author is using jargon and convoluted sentences to disguise his own sloppy thinking, logic chopping &/or lack of understanding of the material.

I'm sure you've had similar experiences.

Now if you tell me all that MLA crap is different, then I just have to take your word for it because I have never before or since run across texts that made such a good job of concealing careful reasoning and precise logical thinking under mountainous heaps of shit. I simply find their papers completely unreadable.

It's possible, I concede, that the stars of your profession may actually have something to say but I hope you in turn will concede that the product of the average practitioner is simply worthless trash masquerading as pretentious garbage ('garbage' being pronounced with a phony French accent).

And I further hope you will at least consider the possibility the your "stars" are no more than those who have proven best at conning large salaries out of academic institutions.

[AdamSmith]

You see where I'm going with this?

[MsGuy]

I will take that to mean the hopes I expressed for you were in vain.

[AdamSmith]

It's possible, I concede, that the stars of your profession may actually have something to say but I hope you in turn will concede that the product of the average practitioner is simply worthless trash masquerading as pretentious garbage ('garbage' being pronounced with a phony French accent).

And I further hope you will at least consider the possibility the your "stars" are no more than those who have proven best at conning large salaries out of academic institutions.

Editing your response after I've already replied, eh? Making me look even more unreasonable than I already am.

To be honest: your first paragraph above is true in spades.

The second is also very often true.

What really happens in lit crit and linguistic studies, as it must elsewhere, is that every now and then someone struggles out a genuinely new idea. (It will usually be clothed in ragged hard-to-penetrate language, thus hard to discern at first just how much there is to it; but then physicists say that's usually true of their new ideas likewise, a by-product of thinking out something new. Perfectly formed breakthroughs beautiful at first glance, like those of Einstein or Dirac, are much the exception, not the rule.)

But after that, of course, every idea-bereft grad student and second-assistant-adjunct professor groping toward tenure-track gloms on to the originator's ideas, aping and morphing and elaborating them to less and less purpose, if any.

So to that very large extent, I agree with you.

P.S. Harold Bloom once said, "The idea of those MLA conventions with 25,000 critics in attendance is beyond hilarious. I doubt there have ever been five critics alive at any one time."

[lookin]

Well, what put me off this guy from the outset was the second sentence of the two I quoted: De Man poses the question whether such self-generating systems of figuration can account fully for the intricacies of meaning and of signification they produce.

I mean is there any possible way that question he poses could have any answer but 'no'? Call me an amiable bumbling amateur but I just can't see how he could reasonably stand in front of the class and say, "Yes, such self-generating systems of figuration can account fully for the intricacies of meaning and of signification they produce! Without question or exception, and let me tell you why."

I guess it's always possible he's using compressed specialist language to say the thing concisely and being as honest and forthright as humanly possible to say exactly where he stands but, after reading a bit more on de Man da man, I'm gonna need some convincing that he's not just showboating.

[AdamSmith]

Ah, Menand. Not quite as severe a case as the critic whom Gore Vidal always called "the Hotel Hilton Kramer" but not that far off either.

Cliff's Notes back story: Menand is big on the Pragmatists, as featured in his really excellent book The Metaphysical Club. Anybody with that bent will have scant use for de Man and others of remotely similar ilk.

de Man's influence has waxed and waned, to be sure. The little (!) Nazi bits that turned up after his death doing nothing to help. But I think Menand and some others don't really do his ideas justice.

Disclosure -- in the classroom I found his ideas really useful to pass through and try to understand, as one more out of many viewpoints that were helpful in learning how to read and to think about reading, writing and lit'rature.

P.S. The Geoffrey Hartman referenced in Menand's article is, I think, much the bigger intellectual fraud. He wrote one fairly original book on Wordsworth, then as far as I can tell has spent the rest of his career filching ideas from a profound but not universally known critic named Ernst Curtius. I've never seen that written about or heard it spoken of, but then Hartman is much better loved by colleagues and students on a personal level than was de Man. Nor has he yet kicked the bucket. So no hatchet jobs, at least yet.

[lookin]

Believe me, it's not with any sense of pride that I beg folks to dumb it down so I can play along. And, as you say, there are doors which shall ever remain closed to the likes of yours truly.

But then along comes a guy like your pal, Richard Feynman, who thinks it's up to him to make his thoughts available even to college freshmen and I start going all hopeful again.

Speaking of hopeful, please don't stop dangling the hard stuff just because some of us find it difficult to swallow. In the end, that is what brings us all here.

[Suckrates]

Speaking of hopeful, please don't stop dangling the hard stuff just because some of us find it difficult to swallow. In the end, that is what brings us all here.

Speaking for myself, hard to swallow is an understatement. And that coming from a person that can deep=throat a 12x8 dick with nary a flinch. But Adams stuff, I not only GAG, but often regurgitate, and thats only after I've spent a hot minute trying to figure out what the fuck he was saying. So lookin, I always appreciate that you try to spread "frosting" on every stale biscuit here, but Adams stuff being the reason we all show up crosses the Line....

I show up to find a good feud, learn what all you guys are throwing your money away on, and throw shade at Daddy ! Oh yeah, and to bask in the lushness of Axioms accolades ........

Thank you all for Having me !

[lookin]

Fasten your seat belt Suckrates because, in my opinion, you and AdamSmith are more alike than you are different.

You both post what you like with the hope that others will enjoy it. You rarely kvetch about what others post, and you never begrudge us hijackers our bits of fun. Those are rare qualities in a poster, and we're blessed to have the both of you.

Since it's now AdamSmith's turn in the key light, I'll add the opinions that he's unfailingly cheerful; supportive of nearly all other posters; and as regular as any of the chappies in his signature thread.

If he occasionally posts something that's a bit specialized somewhat arcane as opaque as a lead-dipped onyx, where's the harm in that? If he's not around to explain it, one can often make do with other available, albeit lesser, resources.

If we didn't have AdamSmith posting his stuff here at BoyToy, OZ would have to invent him.

[Suckrates]

More "frosting" lookin.....What it actually boils down to is that Adam smith "is Full of SHIT", and Piss, and a bagful of Farts...Everything else he posts is just a smokescreen, and I doubt even HE knows what he is actually talking about ! I think its the Chardonay, or the Hennessey, or just maybe its a big ole "doobie" ?????

Grandma is nothing like Adam.... I have style, I have grace, and always have a smile when I put someone in their place....

Yes, i do post what I like, but do take into consideration, especially on THIS site, since its soooooo fucking specific, what the viewers want to see.... If you go "over there" and look at my gallery posts, you will NEVER see a twink from me on those pages.... In fact, as for myself, twinks were NEVER in my repertoire of choice before BOYTOY, and I discovered those fresh "chickens" have HUGE gobblers...... So now, if it stretches my mouth, I dont give a flying fuck how many rings there are around his cock... (that's an age reference)

Saying that me and Mr Smith are alike is....

[MsGuy]

Grandma is nothing like Adam.... I have style, I have grace, and always have a smile when I put someone in their place....

Be that as it may, Sucky, and I would be the first to agree you have a certain style about you, but some would say (if they weren't terrified of incurring your wrath) that those smiles can, on occasion, curdle one's blood and freeze one's soul.

But why quibble.

[AdamSmith]

I agree with everybody about all this.

[Suckrates]

Be that as it may, Sucky, and I would be the first to agree you have a certain style about you, but some would say (if they weren't terrified of incurring your wrath) that those smiles can, on occasion, curdle one's blood and freeze one's soul.

But why quibble.

thank you for your kind assessment Missy.....

[Suckrates]

I agree with everybody about all this.

I agree with everybody about all this.

Introducing MISS SWITZERLAND......

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

Bump. 

[msclelovr]

Is AdamSmith Suckrates's alter ego?

[AdamSmith]

19 minutes ago, msclelovr said:

Is AdamSmith Suckrates's alter ego?

Compare & contrast...

Suckrates invests countless hours in finding and posting for us his magnificent porn collages. AdamSmith occasionally manages to post a link to a decent tumblr he comes across.

Suckrates loves sucking big cocks. AdamSmith loves getting fucked by twinks.

Etc.

I am flattered though.