Quote:
Originally Posted by peacegirl
You have no idea what his first discovery is even about. What are the three forms of first blow Chuck?
|
peacegirl, what is the Butt Stuff Injunction? Can you explain the Boohog Corollary?
Let's just take a shortcut here: Your father's discovered what authors have discovered since
Gilgamesh. The written word is a powerful tool to help us be.
Once you pare away the veneer of incoherent nonsense babble, the Authentic Text is, at its core, a catalogue of the insecurities of a lower-middle class to middle class mediocrity living in mid-century America. It recites his various anxieties (educational, financial, sexual, etc.) and imagines a new world - a Golden Age - in which each of them is resolved. Not by dint of personal improvement, but rather by the global embrace of a worldview that, by its nature, exalts the Author and normalizes those very things at the root of the anxiety. It is an expression of a fantasy world through which the Author is elevated in the esteem of others, not only for "wisdom" the pseudophilosophical ramblings that constitute a weak glue to bind this ball of anxieties together, but also by abolition of the very norms that he perceives to deprive him of the esteem that he deserves. In the Golden Age, the Author will be accorded the same respect for which he so clearly envies Will Durant, whose bizarrely outsized presence looms so consistently large. In the Golden Age, mismatched libido will simply cease to be a problem. In the Golden Age, no one will judge him for his lack of education - a sensitivity the peculiar acuteness of which is singularly clear. In the Golden Age, teenaged boys will not face that same (completely ordinary) awkward fumbling and stinging rejection. And so on and so on.
In brief, the Authentic Text imagines a Golden Age wherein the Author is perceived by others as he wishes to be perceived in the present. He is more than the pool pro, and is also praised as a thinker, relieved of financial pressures, and freely pursues the sexual life that his id persistently demands. He imagines the life in which he has achieved those goals that reality has frustrated.
This is perfectly healthy and normal. All socialized humans grapple with their own insecurities, each in his or her own way, and much very fine literature has resulted from precisely this. The Authentic Text was the Author's way of relieving these internal pressures with the tools at his disposal. Incidentally, that is why there are so
many books. He continued to write them because the underlying anxieties are perennial and evasive of resolution. (Indeed, some anxieties echo down the generations peacegirl, as from time to time you are yourself a pitiable devisee of certain of them.) Though it is wrapped in a thin veil of hackneyed chatter that is the Author's best effort to simulate academic writing - or at least Will Durant's writing - the Authentic Text is nothing more than the Author's mechanism for coping with the symptoms of existence.
Quote:
You are trying to make my compilation look phony, but it isn't. Adding a few sentences, or changing a word that does not alter the meaning of the concept, is trivial. It has no bearing on the validity of his discoveries. My alterations do not contaminate the true meaning of the book, unlike your ridiculous interpretation based on hot air. You are working overtime to hurt Lessans' 30 year work. But you won't be able to because truth always wins in the long run.
|
Well, not quite. I'm not working to hurt Lessans' work. Neither do I care how you mutilate it and carve it up to try to sell it, peacegirl. Your Corrupted Text is a way for you to mediate your relationship with your father. That is between you and your dad.
So the question remains, peacegirl: why would I go to the trouble of reading what Lessans actually wrote?