The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #142512 Message #3288595
Posted By: MGM·Lion
11-Jan-12 - 06:58 AM
Thread Name: 'Purist - a pejorative?
Subject: RE: 'Purist - a pejorative?
In courtesy, as challenged by Sean & others [leveller, raymond, NigelSpleen], let me try to specify my objections to the generality of Suibhne's posts.
There is a satire by Donne which has the lines
On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so.
I am always reminded of this by one of S's posts. They all consist, it seems to me, of a repeated point [to which I will come in a moment], surrounded by a forest of verbiage through which one must struggle to reach the inner meaning. Some writers can get away with this sort of style. As, among other hats I have worn throughout my long life and career, a professionl literary (or, if you prefer, book) critic, I have to say that Sean does not appear to me to be one of them. I find it hard to extract any nugget of meaning from his interminable and repetitious lucubrations and animadversions.
But, insofar as I can extrapolate a meaning, it really does seem to me to be, over & over again {how many times have we read posts of his almost identical to those above - 100? 1000? - anyone care to count?} a variation of that bloody old horse of Satchmo's, or Broonszy's, or whoever they are attributing it to this week. "A dreary axiom," as Bert Lloyd so aptly summarised it. If there is more to what he is saying than that, could he, or someone, please point it out to me? I have made this request multiply, but received nought in return but more of the same; and now an accusation of indulging in nothing but tiresome petty put-downs ~ in terms by which he at least demonstrates that, when stung to it, he can at least express himself quite pithily and comprhensibly without all the verbiage and hoo-ha. Result! {Mebbe!}
I indulged in hyperbole of course, raymond & others, in saying that nobody agreed with a word of it. Even I think he can be quite sound on the baleful influence of MOR. But, in general, I stand by what I have said here and elsewhere on the topic of Suibhne's posts.
Has he [in simple & comprehensible terms, please], or anyone else, anything to rejoin? To end as I began with an Eng Lit quote: in the words of a sonnet of Keats ~~
My ear is open like a greedy shark
To catch the tunings of a voice divine.
~Michael