Word: thinking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...annotators try, their exegeses are usually self-congratulation for the act of explanation. The result has been a sanctimonious exhumation which consists of a disfiguring serious of antinomies, most commonly Mahler as neurasthenic Demon and Poet. But more violent misconceptions are the persistent currency of Mahler criticism, Many people think of him as a charnel-house, a confusion of specters and fantasies, an artificer of self-pitying jeremiads, or as a fraudulent amateur celebrating merely the craft of symphonic composition. Others consider him, like all other "late-romantic" (i.e., decadent) composer, as imperishable for is aspirations but cruelly betrayed...
...human spirit and the inextinguishable beauty of nature. Mahler felt everything and felt in with an intensity forever incomprehensible to people like ourselves who stalk through a stupefyingly drab and insensate life. He wrote, after conducting the Scherzo of his Fifth Symphony, a wonderful movement which always makes me think of Falstaff, waldhorn in hand, dancing and rioting, stealing Apollo blind...
...right, of course, about the third alternative, and a very sensible one it is--working out some system of fooling the grader; although I think I should prefer the word "impressing." We admit to being impressionable, but not hypercredulous simps. His first two tactics for system-beating, his Vague Generalities and Artful Equivocations, seem to presume the latter, and are only going to convince CRIMSON-reading graders (and there a few and we tell our friends) that the time has come to tighten the screws just a bit more...
...Think, Mr. Carswell (wherever you are) think, all of you: imagine the situation of your grader. (Unless, of double differential-CH3 C6 H2 (NO2) set. These people are mere cogs, automata; they simply feel to make sure you've punched the right holes. As they cannot thinks, they cannot be impressed; the are clods. The only way to beat their system is to cheat). In the humanities and social sciences, it is well to remember, there is a man (occasionally a woman), a humane type filling out your picture postcards. What does he want to read? How, in a word...
...third suggestion, the Over powering Assumption, I think is the best: but not for the reason he suggests--that the assumption is so cosmic that it may sometimes be accepted. It is rarely "accepted": we aren't here to accept or reject; we're here to be amused. The more dazzling, personal unorthodox, paradoxic your assumptions (paradoxes are not equivocations) the more interesting an essay to likely to be. (If you have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course--and we like to be called "assistants," not "graders"--you may be able to ferret...