Annie Anthrax wrote on Nov 19^th, 2011 at 9:35pm:

He was. And as for his taste in music, he would have been entirely in agreement with Soren. He had little time for the music of his generation.

He wrote listening to Mozart, Bach, Beethoven - all the masters... although he was pissed as a fart.


the soldier, his wife and the bum


I was a bum in San Francisco but once managed
to go to a symphony concert along with the well-dressed people
and the music was good but something about the
audience was not
and something about the orchestra
and the conductor was
not,
although the building was fine and the
acoustics perfect
I preferred to listen to the music alone
on my radio
and afterwards I did go back to my room and I
turned on the radio but
then there was a pounding on the wall:
“SHUT THAT GOD-DAMNED THING OFF!”

there was a soldier in the next room
living with his wife
and he would soon be going over there to protect
me from Hitler so
I snapped the radio off and then heard his
wife say, “you shouldn’t have done that.”
and the soldier said, “bugger THAT GUY!”
which I thought was a very nice thing for him
to tell his wife to do.
of course,
she never did.

anyhow, I never went to another live concert
and that night I listened to the radio very
quietly, my ear pressed to the
speaker.

war has its price and peace never lasts and
millions of young men everywhere would die
and as I listened to classical music I heard them making love, desperately and
mournfully, through Shostakovich, Brahms,
Mozart, through crescendo and climax,
and through the shared
wall of our darkness.

Helian, do you think that Bukowski on the same level as Dante?

Help me, Helian. Have I been corrupted by Scruton?

Annie Anthrax wrote on Nov 19^th, 2011 at 10:43pm:


If you think Dante is on some higher echelon than Bukowski then what IS the point of posting snippets of Bukowski? Is art to be arranged in military formation, some for privates and some for generals? I think not.

Are we to grade Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Roy and Marquez ? By what criteria, who wrote the most words. who invented the most, who used most words of three syllables and longer?

OVER MY DEAD BODY !  

NorthOfNorth wrote on Nov 19^th, 2011 at 11:07pm:


Okay but no writer ever wrote sublimely throughout. Will we judge by the most sublime snippet? And won't we always undervalue the artist of our own time? While we dissect the dissections of dissections of Shakespeare reading ever more into every phrase. I bet Shakespeare had a healthy ego, but would be amazed ar the importance the present places on him and the subtlety of his nuanced meanings.

Grey wrote on Nov 19^th, 2011 at 11:15pm:

Yeah, all that... I was being facetious, but...

How do you measure the "quality of artistic sublimity" 

Annie Anthrax wrote on Nov 19^th, 2011 at 11:16pm:

And, I'd bet, he's saying something to you in his own unique way, that doesn't require you to stop and think... "art".... Because, if you did, would it be the same?

Having read Robert Pirsig's books when I was young and then reading, through the years, of his lifelong struggle with his defining of 'quality' (his 'Metaphysics of Quality'), has made me wary of quantifying art.