28/12/11
Oh Ellis, you poor man. You’re 70. Let it go. How sad that you spend late nights thinking of a new way to malign a playwright who has survived 40 years when you have barely made it in the alternative theatre. Yes, I loved King O’Malley but you did have a gifted co-writer. You have talents. Heaps. I used to read your Nation Review pieces and laugh out loud. I hear you are sought after as a speechwriter by every state politician who has ever lost an election. Why bother using your considerable wit on trying to destroy a playwright you once claimed as an admired friend? Ah, but you are an honest creature. You do admit you are envious. No, I didnt write a word of Nothing Personal. Yes, there was a mass of research into publishing companies. David acknowledged and thanked two major companies, Penguin and Random House, in the programme.
Why do I even bother to reply to you Bob? I never read blogs but Bruce Beresford alerted me, laughing in disbelief, to this one. And at the time he had just seen Nothing Personal and was genuinely positive about it. Check that out if you don’t believe me.
Enough, already. It’s Christmas. A dear friend up here on the Sunshine Coast has just lost his whole family -wife and three small daughters — in a tragic house fire and the whole community is in shock. There is more to life than creating vitriol. Sad man, let it go.
Kristin
Name:
Bob Ellis at least writes his “vitriol” under his own name,but what horrifies me is how people become almost revolting when doing all their writing under aliases…
On ABC Unleashed where the moderation is quite strict, bloggers appear to behave almost civilly…
When let loose on non-moderated blogs they become devils, losing all decorum and manners, swear words and ad hominems slung around like confetti…
You are doing all your writing here under an alias, Helvi.
Do you thereby “become a devil,losing all decorum and manners, swear words..” etc etc., of which you accuse all other bloggers? Or do you excise yourself from this?
How easy it would have been for you to insert the word “some”, which would have rendered your post inoffensive.
I am not given to swearing, altho I hear plenty of it from teens, where they are just words, and couldnt give a fig.
But, I do find passive aggression offensive, Helvi: and you do a lot of it.
FI Kendall,no,I’m writing under my own name,most people writing here know me from ABC Unleashed, they know my surname, where I live, where I have lived before, they know who my husband is…
FI Kendall. I just realised who you are.
It’s not a big call to know who I am when my name heads each post I make, Helvi.
If you are suggesting that my name is some sort of disguise, not only are you wrong, but you are making another passive-aggressive comment.
Simon is banned for life plus three hundred and twenty-eight years.
One more word against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our own invention, our most necessary self-expression and self-defense: any other kind of virtue is merely a danger. Whatever is not a condition of our life harms it: a virtue that is prompted solely by a feeling of respect for the concept of “virtue”, as Kant would have it, is harmful.
Nietzsche, The Antichrist
I particularly like this quote, R1 :
“Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious”
That sounds about right. But where Nietzsche and I part company is where he seems to assume that Christianity is an antidote against a primal form of nihilism : the despair of meaninglessness. Surely we don’t need it.
The meaning of life is something we all struggle with, in our diverse ways. Many answers are possible, but none seem wholly satisfactory.
What’s your take, R1?
He’s not nice about Christianity but nevertheless it does need to be replaced with something because of the function it performed. It was something, and without it, there was nothing. His theory was that the whirlpool effect created by a meaningfully deprived society is what creates the conditions for momentous individuals like Hitler and De Vere, so it’s possible that things have gotten off track on a civilisational level for quite a while now. Researching and tracing backwards is the way to attain mastery over a set of ideas, a way out of the “es muss sein”, or however you spell “it must be” in German. You don’t build, you break it down MC Hammer style.
Objectively speaking there is no real meaning in the universe but in the subjective sense, there’s more meaning than can ever be gotten around to. Cultures and value systems are relative in how effectively they can harness that meaning. A meaning that is real in as much as it corresponds with genuine instincts.
Hitler and De Vere? In the same sentence?
I think you have a world first there, Reader1 !
Tiny Dancer is now banned for life plus one hundred and sixty-four years.
Three hundred and twenty-eight years.