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writer Jack London published a firsthand account of life in the slums of east London, The People of the Abyss,
Jack London wrote his book in 1903 in London,
Lol
One cannot travesty the word by calling such dens and lairs “homes.”
Travesty as a verb, wild
As they grow older they become steeped and stupefied in beer. When they have nothing else to do, they ruminate as a cow ruminates. They are to be met with everywhere, standing on curbs and corners, and staring into vacancy. Watch one of them. He will stand there, motionless, for hours, and when you go away you will leave him still staring into vacancy.
Kinda true
On the contrary, the very mother and father, even in the presence of the children, talk about his teacher and school in terms which are not fit to be repeated, and are more inclined to curse the latter to their face than to take their little offspring across their knees and teach them some sense.
Whoops there’s an xkcd about this
Ian Kershaw suggests there might be a touch of autobiography here,
Which is weird because the whole thing isn’t autobiographical?
This is a treacherous statement, typical not only of Hitler but of the times. By saying it is not the fault of the individual that he or she has become brutalized, but of the system within which the individual exists, one thereby expresses a humanistic attitude by which it is emphasized that it is the conditions under which the people live that are unfit and wretched, rather than people themselves. However, one consequence of this is that the individual is thereby seen to be a manifestation of class, and if class is the important category here, then the life of the individual diminishes in
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That’s a good point but the weirdest possible conclusion to draw from it. Don’t legitimize his brutalism
Jack London’s urban exploration of 1903 construed man as a cow,
Ok jack
for blood is the same for all of us, the same blood in the rich as in the poor, in
He said this before. Which is also surprising that he’s not more repetitive over this whole thing
Hitler never formulated any ideological manifesto apart from what may be gleaned from the various reasonings, assertions, and analyses that go to make up Mein Kampf, and which in actual fact cannot be extracted from it without turning them into something else,
OKAYYYYYY
it can barely muster a quorum,
This may not be untrue, but knowing that he earned money carrying luggage at the railway station and shoveling snow, a young man who in his adult life so far has set his sights exclusively on becoming an artist, but has failed and withdrawn from all human company, tormented and grossly humiliated, a loser in the eyes of all others, the comparison with the pioneers in America, who worked the soil and made fields and built houses, seems eccentric to say the least. But this is what Mein Kampf is like: Hitler construes his poverty in words that fall sorely short of its actual consequences, yet
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It’s not really clear why he’s harping on the theme of poverty so much. Usually you bring up destitute upbringing of an artist or whatever to show their struggle and how, despite hunger and living conditions, they persevered and made their art. I can’t think of another biographical spin you might give by emphasizing his poverty other than to try and justify something about him. Something about his anger was righteous? This paragraph falls short of calling him a liar, which bothers me. Karl just showed the the actual all reality was different than the anger presented in MK, and it was an opportunity to show how manic and delusional H was. Instead , his point his how H can spin reality into something “immensely powerful “. Why.?..
His mode of survival too is highly reminiscent of Hamsun’s hero;
See don’t fucking identify him with a hero!,!,!!
What separates Hamsun’s young alter ego in Hunger from Hitler is that Hamsun would later write the book he imagined he would and break through as a writer, whereas in Hitler’s case nothing happens. Why
Lol
This was an idea born of the understanding that the one should manage the culture of the many, and this by its idealization, by evoking the sense of there being something the many could reach out and long for, by distilling the insights of the many into one: such is our life in this world. This is the mandate of Goethe and Wagner. What happened in art at the end of the nineteenth century was that this figure, the artist genius, altered character. The one no longer represented the all, but went against them. An example is Munch. He went beyond the social world – not positively, but negatively.
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Since he wrote the book about Munch I wonder if Goethe and Wagner are forthcoming
On the contrary, his aesthetic was identical with that of bourgeois culture, sharing with it the imperative that art should be splendid, beautiful, ideal. The foremost shaper of such a conception of art, to many still so obvious as to resemble a law, was perhaps G. E. Lessing, who put the idea into words in his Laocoon, originally published in 1766, in which he writes of the difference between ugliness and beauty in art. The ugly form “wounds our sight, offends our sense of order and harmony, and excites aversion without regard to the actual existence of the object in which we perceive
Not to be confused with Doris Lessing.
Also, interesting , I wonder if Eco has anything to say about this because he has a book on ugliness
To Lessing’s mind, ugliness in art was a threat also to order and harmony in society as a whole, and he wished to forbid representation of ugliness altogether in favor exclusively of art that presented beauty.
Yikes
“The object of art … is pleasure,
Wrong
With the advent of realism in the middle of the nineteenth century, which represented ugliness as well as beauty, the hideous as well as the sublime, Lessing’s view of art fell into decline,
Haha yeah dumb
What Hitler lacked as a painter and Hamsun gained for himself as a writer was intimacy with the form of his art. Hitler’s weakness as a painter was that he found no way of expressing his own inner being, or else lacked the will to address it, and perhaps this was the reason he gave up and settled for painting as a simple means of making ends meet.
Do I express my own inner being? What is that?
Hitler was not the only person in the Habsburg Empire with an authoritarian father and a loving mother, with siblings who perished and dreams of becoming a metropolitan artist. No, the age was full of them.
The
What is this break that happens right here?
authority. It is not surprising that Kafka held Kubin in high esteem and was influenced by his work; the dreamlike otherworldliness
Franz makes his entrance
Kafka read both Kubin and Hamsun, who met each other in Munich in the company of Hamsun’s publisher Langen,
The heart is not modern either. It is neither reasonable nor unreasonable, neither rational nor irrational. The heart beats, and then it does not. That’s it.
I’m waiting for the dramatic loop back to the very first line about hearts
might choose to die for it. But what could be more hallowed than the life of the individual? The life of the all, or one’s own all, one might surmise, this being the legitimization of the majority of wars. Nonetheless, it is an abstraction, and must surely mean nothing in the instant of rising to one’s feet to charge forward into a hail of bullets.
Ok. So is his whole thing railing against H’s eradication of the =I= or the individual? So he wrote this whole thing to show how significant one life is? No way
Anyone who has seen footage of the rallies of Hitler’s Germany knows what feelings they evoke, the sheer might of the uniformed, I-less community, the strength of the collective, and oh, how one might long to be a part of such a we.
This seems simple
Who would not wish to be a part of something greater than the self? Who would not wish to feel their life to be meaningful? Who would not wish to have something to die for?
So... nazi apologist? Or justifying his books?
Yet in my mind, as I sit here in the spring, in a room in Glemmingebro outside Ystad, the sun pouring onto the greening landscape I have blotted from view by means of a travel rug so as to concentrate on my work, though not without
The first mention in the last 200 pages of the present time
my mother is in the garden weeding the flower beds, Linda at the shop buying
The mom!!!!!
But the sun beats down, the grass grows, the heart pounds in its darkness. * * * “But the sun beats down, the grass grows, the heart pounds in its darkness.” Why did I write those words? Such language is hollow.
Unusual fourth walling
Everything that language brought with it we have since discarded.
Does poetry have a lifespan?
Oh, I can hardly bear to speak of it, the difference between the stirring emotions that run through me when a Norwegian skier wins the world championship, and those that run through a person kneeling before the holy itself, whose soul is elevated by that experience. Oh, for crying out loud, what do I even know of the divine? What gives me the right to even use the term?
Hwoa
I see a cruise ship thick with people gliding past, high above the rooftops of an ancient, sinking city, and a shiver goes down my spine. So what? Is that all?
This is a little juvenile. I hope it doesn’t boil down into “teen searches for stars”
Everything in Ulysses is moreover always something else, not because the world is relative, but because the language through which we see it is. The transcendency of Ulysses lies in the language, it opens up a chasm in the now, which is thereby no longer epiphanic – neither isolated, whole, nor particular – and if Joyce’s portrayal of the world is true in its relativity and in its massive intertextuality, it is then cerebral and at root scholarly in its determination toward systematics and cohesion, hurtling away from physical reality and the realistic novel, much as the medieval Church
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Hermann Broch, for instance, in his Death of Virgil, one of the most hardcore modernist novels of the nineteenth century, whose opening, in which the dying Virgil is lying in a boat on its way into a Roman harbor, contains one of the finest sentences of prose written in Europe during the last two hundred years: Steel-blue and light,
thriftless extravagance,
Back at the house, Linda took a picture of her with the fish in her hands. For once I felt like a real dad.
I miss this. From book 2
Everything he saw would soon be gone to him, and would never come back.
A beautiful phrase for death
all the time I sang out loud, drunk on the sun and death. What else could I do? I was so happy.
Lol but also, how people ask questions when they’re happy
The street had opened like a flower, now it closed again. Apart from the bike, which was still lying there on the road, everything was exactly as before.
Nice expression describing a sudden bike accident
when it descends from heaven to earth in all its chthonic longing, its lust for mull and humus,
What are these words
Aha, so he moved the hat?
Hahaha
Was the painter a homosexual, and in what ways does this show in what he chose to paint?
This distinction between we and they is consistently of the greatest significance
ok so its all the pronoun combinations in literature
The gripping fear of sameness encroaching upon the unique is the same fear of the inhuman encroaching upon the human, of nonlife encroaching upon life.
His sensitivity, which is so great and which compels him to sever himself from other people completely, either by withdrawing, avoiding the gaze of others, keeping to himself, or by talking incessantly to keep everyone at arm’s length, this sensitivity, so unmanageable in the face of an individual you, now comes into its own, perhaps for the first time in his life, for while he is so aware of that you as to shut it out entirely, with near-autistic compulsion, his awareness of the we is quite as intense, and to this we, which is unthreatening, he is able to open himself.
Hitler rejects the singular you, and stands outside the we, and yet he longs for it, and it is this longing his audiences sense when he speaks, the longing for the we being the very foundation of the human, swelling in times of crisis, swelling in chaos, as it did in the Germany of the 1920s, and in Hitler it burns fiercely indeed.
Hanfstaengl obliged with some Bach, to which Hitler sat nodding his head with vague interest. But when Hanfstaengl moved on to the prelude of Wagner’s Meistersinger, Hitler switched on immediately:
Less than a year later Hitler had started to lose interest in her, and when she discovered he had stayed the night in his Munich apartment without getting in touch she tried to hang herself with a clothesline,
