On the Wordsworth poem, with the revelation that the man on his way to bid farewell to his dying son, poem produces a very stunning 'turning'. Instead of seeing a man who, seemingly by self-mastery, has dulled the life which nature has given him, we see instead that he has become unnatural because of the workings of nature itself—for what is more natural than to lose a fight with the sea? What is more natural than to come to grips with the death of a loved one? This isn't at all what you'd expect from a poet who is held out as extolling nature in a simple, primitive way! I think your discussion here is simply brilliant.
One Coronet interrogating the village clerk, you say we might find the mawkishness of the clerk's response funny, but I think there is something almost musical in the language used in response? "...[Y]ou may try in vain to seize the butterfly’s wing; the dust that colours it will be all you can hold in your fingers. Romanticism is the weeping star; it is the sighing wind, the chilly night, the bird in its flight, and the sweet-scented flower; it is the refreshing stream, the greatest ecstasy, that well by the palm-trees…"
Thank you for this Sam. On Cotonet - I think Musset put genuine romantic language into the mouth of the Clerk, and that this was part of the satire (the high romantic rhetoric undercut by the silliness of the clerk himself) as well as a sort of self-flagellation.
> Determined to ‘sift the question to its bottom’ they spent a decade cataloguing the different uses of ‘romantic’ in books and local gossip, but could find no way to combine them into a simple and stable definition. After much frustration and with a hint of incipient madness, Cotonet presents their final verdict: romanticism is a style of writing that uses ‘many adjectives’, and nothing more.
An absolute failure of the enlightenment to engage with culture lol
There's certainly something incomplete... I wonder if there was a degree of rebellion and eccentricity that died with the coinage of the word (I suspect this is the fate of anything that thinks itself a "movement"), worsened now that the thing is returning as a sanctioned, earnest yearning to return. Ouroborosesque. That said, I have no doubt romantics exist, characterised by various mental disorders and a knack for repeated reentry to the saddle. It's a childlike quest for things that stir, and it's both enviable and pitiable, and who's to say they're wrong? Sometimes, usually when drowsy, I believe in Xanadu out there somewhere, a little like a child believes at Christmas.
Nicely done, Nik. It might be relevant that some of my interlocutors, anthropologists of modernity, have stopped using the word "culture" -- or only as shorthand -- because it introduced more problems than it solved. And by the same token, refusing to define precisely can lead to further thought, better conversation, deeper understanding. There's a lot of this in Quixote's Dinner Party.
first one needs to revive "movements" per se, which have not existed since the artists as heroic marketeer has taken over the, ahem, market. Movements and manifestos were useful when there were court artists, or guilds of court artists called the academy, to move some publicity against as a middle-class arose with more republican tastes.
once "movements" are revived, then one can revive romanticisms' movements, or any other sort, #goodluck
> As for the ‘function’ of romanticism as a verbal symbol, it may be like a residual in mathematics, an index of what escapes our categories and theories, the things we have not and may never explain, the weeping star.
I appreciate the last part because they're not romantics except in a derivative sense, but metamodernists. I think they are even trying for manifestos, but manifestos are very modernist. I don't mean to negate the efforts of anything, but they're not doing anything that makes sense. Romanticism has been corporatized and watered-down and the effort to recapture Romanticism is honestly a huge work in itself.
On that note, Romanticism definitely has to be the subjugation of the other into the I in the context of nature and natural man being good. That provides the antagonism and content of the romantic revolutions, the, now-called, pseudoscience like terrain theory, romantic nationalism, the hippies etc. They're definitely working off of neonostalgia rather than romantic irony. I believe satire, as you showed, is more enlightenment (the idea of taking something to its logical conclusion). It’s more annoying than anything.
Wldn't be me, imitating maybe one of Ashberry's longer and more sensible kitchen sinks the Girls on the Runbook. I simply donot have the run and rise of my days to prepare the ground for Idk c stock taking and so donot believe in acting valuable. Belief and reliefs taking on the same game rules. Sometime Traylen's poems are the best, lately that has been because of using Ashbery's grammarbook. I guess the writing is so good on Romanticon,. Unless begins to remind me of a lyrical guitar strummer saying Anything atoll, maybe P's Little Island Rueful, but I donot need to know. We are not after everything done with Arthur R, men and women in effect living like he proposed right after hitting the city, "let's live apart" separate but equall polity you can sort of see.
Always happy to see these clowns beclowned, and the puncturing of Pistelli's aura here. My god, Nick Land, the inspiring spirit for Curtis Yarvin, being taken seriously as a cultural/literary thinker. How sick the Internet makes us, how right-wing, how sinister.
Nick Land wasn’t the “inspiring spirit for Curtis Yarvin.” Curtis Yarvin’s influences for UR were Mises, Hoppe, Bertrand de Jouvenel, James Burnham, the rationalist community, and Thomas Carlyle, among others. Yarvin didn’t even know Land existed until quite recently. Furthermore, Land’s 90’s writings, which are referenced in Nik’s piece alongside Toni Morrison’s book, weren’t regarded in the 90’s as “right-wing,” instead, as recently noted by Geoff Shullenberger in his recent article on Land, as - at least in part - leftist radical feminist theory (Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest, and Cyberpositive, e.g.), comparable to work by Donna Haraway, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Sadie Plant. The right-wing shift happened two decades later.
The criticism of romanticism, an essentially emotional mode, of consisting only of descriptive words is like the dissection of a rabbit to determine what it is and finding inside only squishyness.
This is great, Nik!
On the Wordsworth poem, with the revelation that the man on his way to bid farewell to his dying son, poem produces a very stunning 'turning'. Instead of seeing a man who, seemingly by self-mastery, has dulled the life which nature has given him, we see instead that he has become unnatural because of the workings of nature itself—for what is more natural than to lose a fight with the sea? What is more natural than to come to grips with the death of a loved one? This isn't at all what you'd expect from a poet who is held out as extolling nature in a simple, primitive way! I think your discussion here is simply brilliant.
One Coronet interrogating the village clerk, you say we might find the mawkishness of the clerk's response funny, but I think there is something almost musical in the language used in response? "...[Y]ou may try in vain to seize the butterfly’s wing; the dust that colours it will be all you can hold in your fingers. Romanticism is the weeping star; it is the sighing wind, the chilly night, the bird in its flight, and the sweet-scented flower; it is the refreshing stream, the greatest ecstasy, that well by the palm-trees…"
Thank you for this Sam. On Cotonet - I think Musset put genuine romantic language into the mouth of the Clerk, and that this was part of the satire (the high romantic rhetoric undercut by the silliness of the clerk himself) as well as a sort of self-flagellation.
> Determined to ‘sift the question to its bottom’ they spent a decade cataloguing the different uses of ‘romantic’ in books and local gossip, but could find no way to combine them into a simple and stable definition. After much frustration and with a hint of incipient madness, Cotonet presents their final verdict: romanticism is a style of writing that uses ‘many adjectives’, and nothing more.
An absolute failure of the enlightenment to engage with culture lol
There's certainly something incomplete... I wonder if there was a degree of rebellion and eccentricity that died with the coinage of the word (I suspect this is the fate of anything that thinks itself a "movement"), worsened now that the thing is returning as a sanctioned, earnest yearning to return. Ouroborosesque. That said, I have no doubt romantics exist, characterised by various mental disorders and a knack for repeated reentry to the saddle. It's a childlike quest for things that stir, and it's both enviable and pitiable, and who's to say they're wrong? Sometimes, usually when drowsy, I believe in Xanadu out there somewhere, a little like a child believes at Christmas.
Nicely done, Nik. It might be relevant that some of my interlocutors, anthropologists of modernity, have stopped using the word "culture" -- or only as shorthand -- because it introduced more problems than it solved. And by the same token, refusing to define precisely can lead to further thought, better conversation, deeper understanding. There's a lot of this in Quixote's Dinner Party.
first one needs to revive "movements" per se, which have not existed since the artists as heroic marketeer has taken over the, ahem, market. Movements and manifestos were useful when there were court artists, or guilds of court artists called the academy, to move some publicity against as a middle-class arose with more republican tastes.
once "movements" are revived, then one can revive romanticisms' movements, or any other sort, #goodluck
> As for the ‘function’ of romanticism as a verbal symbol, it may be like a residual in mathematics, an index of what escapes our categories and theories, the things we have not and may never explain, the weeping star.
I appreciate the last part because they're not romantics except in a derivative sense, but metamodernists. I think they are even trying for manifestos, but manifestos are very modernist. I don't mean to negate the efforts of anything, but they're not doing anything that makes sense. Romanticism has been corporatized and watered-down and the effort to recapture Romanticism is honestly a huge work in itself.
On that note, Romanticism definitely has to be the subjugation of the other into the I in the context of nature and natural man being good. That provides the antagonism and content of the romantic revolutions, the, now-called, pseudoscience like terrain theory, romantic nationalism, the hippies etc. They're definitely working off of neonostalgia rather than romantic irony. I believe satire, as you showed, is more enlightenment (the idea of taking something to its logical conclusion). It’s more annoying than anything.
Wldn't be me, imitating maybe one of Ashberry's longer and more sensible kitchen sinks the Girls on the Runbook. I simply donot have the run and rise of my days to prepare the ground for Idk c stock taking and so donot believe in acting valuable. Belief and reliefs taking on the same game rules. Sometime Traylen's poems are the best, lately that has been because of using Ashbery's grammarbook. I guess the writing is so good on Romanticon,. Unless begins to remind me of a lyrical guitar strummer saying Anything atoll, maybe P's Little Island Rueful, but I donot need to know. We are not after everything done with Arthur R, men and women in effect living like he proposed right after hitting the city, "let's live apart" separate but equall polity you can sort of see.
Wonderful. Where is the Whitehead line from?
Always happy to see these clowns beclowned, and the puncturing of Pistelli's aura here. My god, Nick Land, the inspiring spirit for Curtis Yarvin, being taken seriously as a cultural/literary thinker. How sick the Internet makes us, how right-wing, how sinister.
Nick Land wasn’t the “inspiring spirit for Curtis Yarvin.” Curtis Yarvin’s influences for UR were Mises, Hoppe, Bertrand de Jouvenel, James Burnham, the rationalist community, and Thomas Carlyle, among others. Yarvin didn’t even know Land existed until quite recently. Furthermore, Land’s 90’s writings, which are referenced in Nik’s piece alongside Toni Morrison’s book, weren’t regarded in the 90’s as “right-wing,” instead, as recently noted by Geoff Shullenberger in his recent article on Land, as - at least in part - leftist radical feminist theory (Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest, and Cyberpositive, e.g.), comparable to work by Donna Haraway, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Sadie Plant. The right-wing shift happened two decades later.
The criticism of romanticism, an essentially emotional mode, of consisting only of descriptive words is like the dissection of a rabbit to determine what it is and finding inside only squishyness.