Show Library: Pseudointellectual Books That, in Fact, Suck

[challenger84]

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You're pretty much required to say Freud, Marx, and Hemingway suck these days, if you want to stay on people's good sides, because they're all doing it too. Stay posted for further alerts on people we're all supposed to be wiser than whom we may never even have read, much less understood in the slightest.

This is basically standard with college kids and people who never did more than cursory reading these days.

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...exactly. It's totally standard with your average freshman/sophomore in college who's taken just enough intro level psychology/sociology courses to pretend to know what they're talking about when they make overarching statements like "Everything Marx and Freud ever did has been discredited."

Ask anyone who has at least an undergraduate level education in psychology/sociology/economics/history what they think about that statement and you will get laughed at to your face.

[george w]

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William Carlos Williams did the same thing with poetry, his sentence breaks are basically just breaths

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so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Did the guy have a debilitating case of asthma or something?

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what is this about again?

[JaBlue]

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Did your class like it?

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they liked it, especially when I said "bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells" and stuff like "tintannibulation of the bells." Killer poem.

[NT!]

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NT,

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i am extremely hard pressed to give a flying [censored] about any of ezra pound's original poems. i really like some of his translations - although he took considerable liberties with the content.

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i don't think t.s. eliot wrote a single play worth two tenths of a rat turd even though his poems are pure genius.

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W/o Pound, Eliot would be nameless. Pound revised, rewrote and facelifted <u>The Waste Land</u>. Eliot's original and Pound's revised copy (the copy we buy and read at the bookstore) are so different that Eliot should have just put Pound's name on the cover.

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AND YOU KNOW THIS, MAAAN

Pound is maybe the most important editor of the 20th century. That doesn't stop his poems from being largely uninspired, esoteric nonsense.

I think TS Eliot is not only the best poet of the 20th century, but so clearly the best poet of the 20th century that it's silly to say otherwise. But his plays blow goats.

[bobman0330]

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Milton - I really want to like Milton, but it is not possible.

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[img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

[nath]

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NT,

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i am extremely hard pressed to give a flying [censored] about any of ezra pound's original poems. i really like some of his translations - although he took considerable liberties with the content.

[/ QUOTE ]

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i don't think t.s. eliot wrote a single play worth two tenths of a rat turd even though his poems are pure genius.

[/ QUOTE ]

W/o Pound, Eliot would be nameless. Pound revised, rewrote and facelifted <u>The Waste Land</u>. Eliot's original and Pound's revised copy (the copy we buy and read at the bookstore) are so different that Eliot should have just put Pound's name on the cover.

[/ QUOTE ]

AND YOU KNOW THIS, MAAAN

Pound is maybe the most important editor of the 20th century. That doesn't stop his poems from being largely uninspired, esoteric nonsense.

I think TS Eliot is not only the best poet of the 20th century, but so clearly the best poet of the 20th century that it's silly to say otherwise. But his plays blow goats.

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Can we all agree that "The Waste Land" [censored] rules, then?

[NT!]

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Any thoughts on Capital by Marx?
I haven't read it, but just about any person that is pretending to be intelligent has that one on the shelf.

I'm getting old enough to start pretending myself, but I'd like to know if it's a good read first. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

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Capital is one of those books that pseudo-intellectuals own and have read the introduction too. And actual intellectuals own and have slogged through, if it's relevant to their fields.

Since pseudo-intellectuals are so much more common, it makes sense that most people you encounter with this book on their shelves are douches.

[VanVeen]

anyone who proudly proclaims they've enjoyed or 'identified with the central thesis' of pretty much any book mentioned in this thread immediately qualifies as irredeemably stupid and hopelessly affected. fiction is a diversion: there is nothing to be learned politically, ethically, or otherwise. i've never met anyone i consider smart who didn't consider the preceding sentences trivially true and almost unworthy of articulation. note that i used the word proudly, please.

there are very few books that are 'pseudo-intellectual' on their own: it depends more on how idiots use the work to justify their own self-confidence and condescension. the works most often abused in this fashion are obv shakespeare's, pynchon's, freud's, marx's, and countless pop sci books from the last two decades.

[Fishmonger]

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anyone who proudly proclaims they've enjoyed or 'identified with the central thesis' of pretty much any book mentioned in this thread immediately qualifies as irredeemably stupid and hopelessly affected. fiction is a diversion: there is nothing to be learned politically, ethically, or otherwise. i've never met anyone i consider smart who didn't consider the preceding sentences trivially true and almost unworthy of articulation. note that i used the word proudly, please.

there are very few books that are 'pseudo-intellectual' on their own: it depends more on how idiots use the work to justify their own self-confidence and condescension. the works most often abused in this fashion are obv shakespeare's, pynchon's, freud's, marx's, and countless pop sci books from the last two decades.

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I might be misreading but are you saying that anyone who is proud to enjoy a work of fiction is stupid?

[diebitter]

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fiction is a diversion: there is nothing to be learned politically, ethically, or otherwise.

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You think a teenager can't learn something from reading Animal Farm? Or there's nothing to be learnt from 1984: or clockwork orange: or Macbeth: or Lord of the Flies?

wowowow.

Some people can read Crime and Punishment and think it was a good book, and others can read P.G.Wodehouse and unlock the meaning of life.