Let's call what you did here translating. That says that you trusted Gasset to land his fishily funny diagnoses. I fall down reading Gasset because he seems to have a country estate and to be choosing his characters for a performance there, caprice! Clearly it was a question of when in time his snapshots land. He was teaching his hard stoppages of history, that is clear, to: Spaniards have known since the longest time they are desertified and have not the resources to muscle their pictures into every livingroom. Gasset puts the problematic back in critique. I say you have found Nietzche's red and yellow treliss work at the cofvey shop? The anecdotal is verifiable by panicked enthusiasm. It has the deep meaning that you survive to tell about it. With Gasset as with us, after 2:30 pm all bets are off, the sport of New York latenights 1982 is on: and who wins, despite such low stakes-is enacted now in America. Porn. Let's all read Nicholson Baker's pornographic novels, it is natural to want to see what happens when female and male worlds collide.
Gassett had friends. As versus that lonely and smart German. Gassett has you. For others of us the way he sets up his punchlines makes us doubt we grasped his gist. Your teaching notes are e-ssential.
Max Weber accepted the disenchantment of the world. Seems a small price to pay for more people having their basic needs met. I'd put up Norman Borlaug as an example of beneficial science/disenchantment.
Absolutely! Norman Borlaug may well be the greatest person who ever lived - and is almost completely underacknowledged/underappreciated. I totally take your point about Ortega y Gasset being a sourpuss. I think the right moral position is somewhere in the vein of Borlaug - to say we have lots of people, and that makes the world sort of uncomfortable for everyone, but we have to take the sanctity of human life as our ethical base and then reconfigure society as-need-be around accommodating everyone. That's my position - and I'm pretty sure yours. Ortega y Gasset has a pretty scathing critique of that point of view and it's an interesting challenge for anyone who believes in liberal democracy to argue back against him.
Interesting. 92/3% of the masses think, like him, they should be on top. But he's right about the masses. Take writing. When I was a young man and aspired to be a writer, an author, the real deal, there were only 5,643 of them. Of those, 292 were the stallions of the big publishing stables. Mostly men, but a small percentage of women (Before you start passing out the torches and the ropes, I'm not saying that that was the way it should have been, only that that was the way it was.) The rest were 'mid-list' writers. In the aggregate they brought in half the profits, the Stallions (Mailer, Styron, et al) the other half. It was an imperfect formula, but it produced some great results. Oh, and it was not fair, of course. It was bases strictly on merit, with just some nepotism and cheating around the edges, or maybe more than just 'some.'
Anyway, Amazon changed all that with their Kindle. The Kindle made possible the ebook. I know a little about this because it brought my books back into circulation. Also, one of my books was a finalist at the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards. (Back then, my ebook was published as a PDF. The competition was funded by grants from Adobe and Microsoft, outfits like that.)
So, Amazon's Kindle was, in my opinion, a blessing and a curse, not for Amazon (It was all blessing for them), but for writers. You could finally get your work published without scraping and bowing and submitting before the powerful 'Houses.' Anybody could. And they did.
And now we have a two-tier system of publishing. The Publishing House model, and the peanut gallery of 'self-publishing.' By the way, in case anyone thinks I'm an elitist, I'm in the peanut gallery crowd now. And when I was 'House' published, I was a mid-list writer.
Getting back to the masses. Substack is/was like the great fishing hole you stumbled on. There were four people fishing there when it started. Having found it, you told others. And they told others. And now it seems like it's getting massive. I've noticed that when venues like this get massive, the hucksters and potato peeler salesmen and women do better than anyone else.
I know, I'm jealous. I can't sell. I can only produce. Back in the bad old days they, the 'Houses' had people who did the selling. Now, if you 'self-publish' you have to have that skill.
If Ortega was writing on here, he'd probably have to give away his missives, like I do.
He is right, though, about the growing masses, overpopulation, and the entitlement of the masses, their low contribution compared to what they get... But that's where we are.
The solution? Doesn't nature step in at some point to fix this? I think so. Nature (and that includes us) is self-regulating. Nature, some would argue, is God's creation. So God will have to act.
Okay... I has spoken. I'm gonna go and get a cuppa coffee and write something else.
Very interesting comment Paul! Thank you. Amazon Singles always seemed like a trap to me. Did anybody at all launch a career through Singles? You describe Substack really well. Yes, it does feel like this amazing fishing hole - and now that the secret is out it may well get overrun by the tourists. I think we're in an interesting moment where the market cap is about to flip. The traditional publishers just aren't even trying anymore - and are barely even pretending to try. What's interesting in literary/intellectual space HAS to come from this dynamic online scene, but whether it has real staying power very much remains to be seen.
Let's call what you did here translating. That says that you trusted Gasset to land his fishily funny diagnoses. I fall down reading Gasset because he seems to have a country estate and to be choosing his characters for a performance there, caprice! Clearly it was a question of when in time his snapshots land. He was teaching his hard stoppages of history, that is clear, to: Spaniards have known since the longest time they are desertified and have not the resources to muscle their pictures into every livingroom. Gasset puts the problematic back in critique. I say you have found Nietzche's red and yellow treliss work at the cofvey shop? The anecdotal is verifiable by panicked enthusiasm. It has the deep meaning that you survive to tell about it. With Gasset as with us, after 2:30 pm all bets are off, the sport of New York latenights 1982 is on: and who wins, despite such low stakes-is enacted now in America. Porn. Let's all read Nicholson Baker's pornographic novels, it is natural to want to see what happens when female and male worlds collide.
I should have know you had already read Ortega y Gasset! How would you compare him to Nietzsche?
Gassett had friends. As versus that lonely and smart German. Gassett has you. For others of us the way he sets up his punchlines makes us doubt we grasped his gist. Your teaching notes are e-ssential.
That 2:30 pm is funny. That is Spain. 2:30 am with us.
Max Weber accepted the disenchantment of the world. Seems a small price to pay for more people having their basic needs met. I'd put up Norman Borlaug as an example of beneficial science/disenchantment.
Absolutely! Norman Borlaug may well be the greatest person who ever lived - and is almost completely underacknowledged/underappreciated. I totally take your point about Ortega y Gasset being a sourpuss. I think the right moral position is somewhere in the vein of Borlaug - to say we have lots of people, and that makes the world sort of uncomfortable for everyone, but we have to take the sanctity of human life as our ethical base and then reconfigure society as-need-be around accommodating everyone. That's my position - and I'm pretty sure yours. Ortega y Gasset has a pretty scathing critique of that point of view and it's an interesting challenge for anyone who believes in liberal democracy to argue back against him.
Interesting. 92/3% of the masses think, like him, they should be on top. But he's right about the masses. Take writing. When I was a young man and aspired to be a writer, an author, the real deal, there were only 5,643 of them. Of those, 292 were the stallions of the big publishing stables. Mostly men, but a small percentage of women (Before you start passing out the torches and the ropes, I'm not saying that that was the way it should have been, only that that was the way it was.) The rest were 'mid-list' writers. In the aggregate they brought in half the profits, the Stallions (Mailer, Styron, et al) the other half. It was an imperfect formula, but it produced some great results. Oh, and it was not fair, of course. It was bases strictly on merit, with just some nepotism and cheating around the edges, or maybe more than just 'some.'
Anyway, Amazon changed all that with their Kindle. The Kindle made possible the ebook. I know a little about this because it brought my books back into circulation. Also, one of my books was a finalist at the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards. (Back then, my ebook was published as a PDF. The competition was funded by grants from Adobe and Microsoft, outfits like that.)
So, Amazon's Kindle was, in my opinion, a blessing and a curse, not for Amazon (It was all blessing for them), but for writers. You could finally get your work published without scraping and bowing and submitting before the powerful 'Houses.' Anybody could. And they did.
And now we have a two-tier system of publishing. The Publishing House model, and the peanut gallery of 'self-publishing.' By the way, in case anyone thinks I'm an elitist, I'm in the peanut gallery crowd now. And when I was 'House' published, I was a mid-list writer.
Getting back to the masses. Substack is/was like the great fishing hole you stumbled on. There were four people fishing there when it started. Having found it, you told others. And they told others. And now it seems like it's getting massive. I've noticed that when venues like this get massive, the hucksters and potato peeler salesmen and women do better than anyone else.
I know, I'm jealous. I can't sell. I can only produce. Back in the bad old days they, the 'Houses' had people who did the selling. Now, if you 'self-publish' you have to have that skill.
If Ortega was writing on here, he'd probably have to give away his missives, like I do.
He is right, though, about the growing masses, overpopulation, and the entitlement of the masses, their low contribution compared to what they get... But that's where we are.
The solution? Doesn't nature step in at some point to fix this? I think so. Nature (and that includes us) is self-regulating. Nature, some would argue, is God's creation. So God will have to act.
Okay... I has spoken. I'm gonna go and get a cuppa coffee and write something else.
Thanks for this post. It's most interesting.
Very interesting comment Paul! Thank you. Amazon Singles always seemed like a trap to me. Did anybody at all launch a career through Singles? You describe Substack really well. Yes, it does feel like this amazing fishing hole - and now that the secret is out it may well get overrun by the tourists. I think we're in an interesting moment where the market cap is about to flip. The traditional publishers just aren't even trying anymore - and are barely even pretending to try. What's interesting in literary/intellectual space HAS to come from this dynamic online scene, but whether it has real staying power very much remains to be seen.
These 3 references provide an interesting perspective on the inevitable failure of mass politics.
http://beezone.com/current/stresschemistry.html
http://beezone.com/current/frustrationuniverdisease.html
http://fearnomore.vision/human/what-man-represents
Very cool! Thank you!