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You don't sound harsh. You sound like any other punkass with a short patience. Take five seconds and look at anything else I've done. It's not like I'm coming

by unalone 17y ago

You don't sound harsh. You sound like any other punkass with a short patience. Take five seconds and look at anything else I've done. It's not like I'm coming out of nowhere and saying these things. I'm the Hacker News presence that writes essay responses to everything. It's not that I dislike people who small talk, it's that — honestly — when I talk these minute little essays shoot out. The people I hang out with tend to be people who talk about things comprehensively. It's not particularly deep. If anything, it's an inherently nerdy trait. But it's who I am. My love for Joyce is similarly something that I talk about a lot. He was the first major artist I fell in love with. Beckett was probably the second. Understand that I came across Joyce and Beckett before I developed a diverse taste in movies/music/art, and so they stick out in my mind in a way other things don't. But Joyce is utterly readable, if you know how to read him. I read Ulysses to thirteen-year-olds. They were stitching up. People that call Joyce unreadable are people who never learned to hear an author's voice in their head. Anybody with half an ear for tone can translate him into the hilarious Irish comic that he is. I mean, his hero masturbates and fantasizes about sex! It's a Seth Rogen comedy in the making. I thought that I clarified the whole "lonely existence" thing in my writing. In fact, I'm sure I did, because you're the first person to complain about that. The issue's not that I'm lonely, because I'm not lonely. The issue's that there's an inherent disconnect between the secular God I worship and the various things other people worship. My idea of a good time is different from a lot of other people's. I don't need to brag about the girls I date. The fact that I write about girls is because that happens to be a part of my life, as much as Joyce is. So I'm not allowed to write about smart people things or social people things? What am I allowed to write about? Lisp? I wrote what I did for other people, not for me. Last year I was in a shitty place; this year I'm in an awesome place and life is great. It's just that I happen to have an audience of hundreds of people, and I do my best to follow them when I have free time, and a good part of my audience is alienated/isolated/heartbroken/generally human, and I thought I had some ideas that might help them. I wrote that article, a lot of people loved it, and when it got posted to Hacker News it got a more fiercely emotional response than anything else I've posted here. I didn't post it, and I wasn't expecting HN of all places to react the way they did. It was not an article I wrote for Hacker News. But I'm glad that people found it and got some sort of strength out of it. If this sounds harsh, it's because you remind me of certain former professors of mine who were vain assholes and who killed my former ambition to become a teacher. Let's not mince words: I pity your students students if you're always such a nagging fucker.

randallsquared 17y ago
People that call Joyce unreadable are people who never learned to hear an author's voice in their head. I believe it's generally thought that people learn to read at first by sounding out the author's words in their head, and as they become more proficient at reading, learn not to do that.
- unalone 17y ago
  That's subvocalization. But you can read without subvocalizing and still figure out tone as you read. The problem I had reading Ulysses when I tried at fifteen was the opposite. I was so bent on reading Ulysses as Serious Great Literature that I couldn't read it as something amusing. So I got to the weirder parts of the book and concluded, as a lot of people unfortunately do, that it was pretentious crap. It's funny how pretentious masturbation sounds in a book when you don't let yourself think it's funny. There's another passage in particular that has the same effect on people. Leopold Bloom looks at the sky and calls it "the grey sunken cunt of the world". A lot of people jump on that passage and accuse Joyce of gratuitous swearing for shock value and assume he's being a bitter, wordy arse; once you convince yourself to read the passage as being thought by a cranky Irishman, it suddenly becomes hilarious.
  - araneae 17y ago
    So you're saying... The set of all people that think Joyce is pretentious is the same as the set of all people that can't imagine the author speak in an Irish accent. elaborated to emphasize absurdity
    - unalone 17y ago
      No. I'm saying there are two ways to call the sky a sunken grey cunt. The first is to strive earnestly to describe the sky in just the right way to define the sky. When you decide the proper thing to call the sky is a cunt, then you might be accused of a bit of pretension, and bad taste. The second way to call the sky a cunt is to be a grumpy Irishman in the morning who calls the sky a cunt whimsically, if annoyed. It's the difference between the clean-shaven trendy beret-wearing guy who pronounces "cunt" with much deliberation, and the long-nosed family man who says cunt like a curse. They're both saying the same words, but the one guy's being an ass, and the second guy is hilarious. I'm saying that the people that think Joyce is pretentious are the people who haven't figured out he's hilarious. You can do the same to any comedian, incidentally. Take George Carlin's rant on reducing the ten commandments to two, remove his inflection, focus on the words, and that could easily be some dick's attempting a hoity-toity statement about religion with no humor whatsoever. Steven Wright talking about the museum that has all the heads and arms from all the other statues can be less of a joke and more of a self-involved critique on the nature of art and decay. But it's not, because it's Steven Wright telling a joke, and in his case we know to laugh. I am saying that I find it irritating when people take rational statements and attempt to make them absurd.

by unalone 17y ago

randallsquared 17y ago

People that call Joyce unreadable are people who never learned to hear an author's voice in their head. I believe it's generally thought that people learn to read at first by sounding out the author's words in their head, and as they become more proficient at reading, learn not to do that.

unalone 17y ago
That's subvocalization. But you can read without subvocalizing and still figure out tone as you read. The problem I had reading Ulysses when I tried at fifteen was the opposite. I was so bent on reading Ulysses as Serious Great Literature that I couldn't read it as something amusing. So I got to the weirder parts of the book and concluded, as a lot of people unfortunately do, that it was pretentious crap. It's funny how pretentious masturbation sounds in a book when you don't let yourself think it's funny. There's another passage in particular that has the same effect on people. Leopold Bloom looks at the sky and calls it "the grey sunken cunt of the world". A lot of people jump on that passage and accuse Joyce of gratuitous swearing for shock value and assume he's being a bitter, wordy arse; once you convince yourself to read the passage as being thought by a cranky Irishman, it suddenly becomes hilarious.
- araneae 17y ago
  So you're saying... The set of all people that think Joyce is pretentious is the same as the set of all people that can't imagine the author speak in an Irish accent. elaborated to emphasize absurdity
  - unalone 17y ago
    No. I'm saying there are two ways to call the sky a sunken grey cunt. The first is to strive earnestly to describe the sky in just the right way to define the sky. When you decide the proper thing to call the sky is a cunt, then you might be accused of a bit of pretension, and bad taste. The second way to call the sky a cunt is to be a grumpy Irishman in the morning who calls the sky a cunt whimsically, if annoyed. It's the difference between the clean-shaven trendy beret-wearing guy who pronounces "cunt" with much deliberation, and the long-nosed family man who says cunt like a curse. They're both saying the same words, but the one guy's being an ass, and the second guy is hilarious. I'm saying that the people that think Joyce is pretentious are the people who haven't figured out he's hilarious. You can do the same to any comedian, incidentally. Take George Carlin's rant on reducing the ten commandments to two, remove his inflection, focus on the words, and that could easily be some dick's attempting a hoity-toity statement about religion with no humor whatsoever. Steven Wright talking about the museum that has all the heads and arms from all the other statues can be less of a joke and more of a self-involved critique on the nature of art and decay. But it's not, because it's Steven Wright telling a joke, and in his case we know to laugh. I am saying that I find it irritating when people take rational statements and attempt to make them absurd.