Don wrote:
This is an excerpt from a talk given by Dr E Michael Jones at a high-
school commencement ceremony in June, 1995. It pertains to Mary
Shelley's motivation to write _Frankenstein_.
... By separating procreation from love, by accomplishing
procreation in the laboratory and not where God intended it,
which is to say in marriage, Frankenstein created a monster,
whose major work was death and horror. Which leads us to
answer our question about why a young lady connected with
the cream of English society at the time, people of
undeniable talent and seemingly unlimited promise, would
write a horror story as the best evocation of their lives
together. It is because sex disconnected from the moral
order leads to horror. This is not a new story, although it
seems to be a story that each generation has to learn in its
own way. Euripedes said something similiar in the Bacchae
thousands of years ago. As soon as the Asiatic god Dionysos
became an object of worship in any State, someone is going
to die. Sex disconnected from the moral order leads to death.
As soon as the women leave their looms and go off to dance
naked on the mountain side, horror is soon to follow. The
mother of young Pentheus, the king of Thebes, listened to
the music of undoubtedly thinking that she was engaging in
some form of liberation. When the intoxication finally wore
off, she found herself sitting with her son's head in her
lap, and in answer to her father's question about what she
saw, replied, "I see horror; I see suffering; I see grief."
...
... If you carelessly bring life into the world without
regard to the moral law (which is another definition of
sexual liberation) you invariably create monsters which
will return and destroy not only you, but your friends
and family, indeed, your entire culture as well.
Mary Shelley felt this particulary acutely at the time.
She was an 18-year-old girl, pregnant by a man who was
at the time married to someone else, reading the Marquis
de Sade's vision of the future. A vision which had already
led to the horrors of the French Revolution. In gazing at
Mary Shelley felt this particulary acutely at the time.
She was an 18-year-old girl, pregnant by a man who was
at the time married to someone else, reading the Marquis
de Sade's vision of the future. A vision which had already
led to the horrors of the French Revolution. In gazing at
the pornographic illustrations in Justine, she was smart
enough to understand what role 18-year-old girls were
going to play in the brave new world by revolutionaries
like her father and soon to be husband. "Woman," said the
divine Marquis in Justine, is a machine for voluptuousness."
Sexual license is in its way ultimately just a way of
treating people like machines, and as Mary must have
understood by reading Justine, the fate of female machines
was not a happy one. The trajectory of his novels is the
trajectory of pornography itself. When sex is separated
from the moral order, someone ends up getting tortured
and killed.
Frankenstein is a protest against the vision of the
world proposed by the Enlightenment, whose vision was
proposed in explicit terms by the Marquis de Sade. It
keeps getting retold because we still live in that world.
The protest is still necessary because the Enlightenment
is still with us in the form of in-vitro fertilization,
and test tube babies, and an $8 billion a year pornography
industry. In his latest encyclical the pope denominates
this world of the Enlightenment, the "culture of death."
<https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/frankenstein-10806>
<snippo>
All I remember of /Frankenstein/ -the-book was how hard it was to get through. And so a pain to read.
The films, BTW, appear to be based on a stage play, or on earlier
films, and not the book directly. There may have been an exception or
two, but, if they copy the book, they are long, boring, and praised
only by high-level intellectuals.
Unlike, say, Stoker's /Dracula/, which was written by someone who at
least knew how to do it.
On 7/4/2024 12:02 PM, Paul S Person wrote:
On Wed, 3 Jul 2024 18:00:30 -0000 (UTC), Don <[email protected]> wrote:
<snippo RC attempt to defend Queen Victoria and so their hatred and
contempt for anything that has happened since>
<you lost, guys (and I /mean/ "guys"), get over it>
All I remember of /Frankenstein/ -the-book was how hard it was to get
through. And so a pain to read.
Few books written by 18 year olds are page turners AND well written.
It was a first novel, and it shows.
pt
On 7/4/2024 12:02 PM, Paul S Person wrote:
On Wed, 3 Jul 2024 18:00:30 -0000 (UTC), Don <[email protected]> wrote:
<snippo RC attempt to defend Queen Victoria and so their hatred and
contempt for anything that has happened since>
<you lost, guys (and I /mean/ "guys"), get over it>
All I remember of /Frankenstein/ -the-book was how hard it was to get
through. And so a pain to read.
Few books written by 18 year olds are page turners AND well written.
It was a first novel, and it shows.
Cryptoengineer <[email protected]> wrote:
On 7/4/2024 12:02 PM, Paul S Person wrote:
On Wed, 3 Jul 2024 18:00:30 -0000 (UTC), Don <[email protected]> wrote:
<snippo RC attempt to defend Queen Victoria and so their hatred and
contempt for anything that has happened since>
<you lost, guys (and I /mean/ "guys"), get over it>
All I remember of /Frankenstein/ -the-book was how hard it was to get
through. And so a pain to read.
Few books written by 18 year olds are page turners AND well written.
It was a first novel, and it shows.
I liked it when I read it at age 14. It was mostly filled with long digressions about the nature of life, which I found interesting although
I might find them less novel today. And it was not a large book.
--scott
Cryptoengineer <[email protected]> wrote:
On 7/4/2024 12:02 PM, Paul S Person wrote:
On Wed, 3 Jul 2024 18:00:30 -0000 (UTC), Don <[email protected]> wrote:
<snippo RC attempt to defend Queen Victoria and so their hatred and
contempt for anything that has happened since>
<you lost, guys (and I /mean/ "guys"), get over it>
All I remember of /Frankenstein/ -the-book was how hard it was to get
through. And so a pain to read.
Few books written by 18 year olds are page turners AND well written.
It was a first novel, and it shows.
I liked it when I read it at age 14. It was mostly filled with long >digressions about the nature of life, which I found interesting although
I might find them less novel today. And it was not a large book.
The
mother of young Pentheus, the king of Thebes, listened to
the music of
undoubtedly thinking.....
Don wrote:
This is an excerpt from a talk given by Dr E Michael Jones at a high-
school commencement ceremony in June, 1995. It pertains to Mary
Shelley's motivation to write _Frankenstein_.
... By separating procreation from love, by accomplishing
procreation in the laboratory and not where God intended it,
which is to say in marriage, Frankenstein created a monster,
whose major work was death and horror. Which leads us to
answer our question about why a young lady connected with
the cream of English society at the time, people of
undeniable talent and seemingly unlimited promise, would
write a horror story as the best evocation of their lives
together. It is because sex disconnected from the moral
order leads to horror. This is not a new story, although it
seems to be a story that each generation has to learn in its
own way. Euripedes said something similiar in the Bacchae
thousands of years ago. As soon as the Asiatic god Dionysos
became an object of worship in any State, someone is going
to die. Sex disconnected from the moral order leads to death.
As soon as the women leave their looms and go off to dance
naked on the mountain side, horror is soon to follow. The
mother of young Pentheus, the king of Thebes, listened to
the music of undoubtedly thinking that she was engaging in
some form of liberation. When the intoxication finally wore
off, she found herself sitting with her son's head in her
lap, and in answer to her father's question about what she
saw, replied, "I see horror; I see suffering; I see grief."
...
... If you carelessly bring life into the world without
regard to the moral law (which is another definition of
sexual liberation) you invariably create monsters which
will return and destroy not only you, but your friends
and family, indeed, your entire culture as well.
Mary Shelley felt this particulary acutely at the time.
She was an 18-year-old girl, pregnant by a man who was
at the time married to someone else, reading the Marquis
de Sade's vision of the future. A vision which had already
led to the horrors of the French Revolution. In gazing at
the pornographic illustrations in Justine, she was smart
enough to understand what role 18-year-old girls were
going to play in the brave new world by revolutionaries
like her father and soon to be husband. "Woman," said the
divine Marquis in Justine, is a machine for voluptuousness."
Sexual license is in its way ultimately just a way of
treating people like machines, and as Mary must have
understood by reading Justine, the fate of female machines
was not a happy one. The trajectory of his novels is the
trajectory of pornography itself. When sex is separated
from the moral order, someone ends up getting tortured
and killed.
Frankenstein is a protest against the vision of the
world proposed by the Enlightenment, whose vision was
proposed in explicit terms by the Marquis de Sade. It
keeps getting retold because we still live in that world.
The protest is still necessary because the Enlightenment
is still with us in the form of in-vitro fertilization,
and test tube babies, and an $8 billion a year pornography
industry. In his latest encyclical the pope denominates
this world of the Enlightenment, the "culture of death."
<https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/frankenstein-10806>
mother of young Pentheus, the king of Thebes, listened to
the music of
of what? of whom?
undoubtedly thinking.....
Jones seems to be a nutbar.
[quote]
CULTURE WARS/FIDELITY PRESS
South Bend, Ind.
E. Michael Jones, a former hippie who says he spent his honeymoon stuck
in traffic while trying to reach the 1969 Woodstock Festival...
[/quote]
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2007/12-anti-semitic-radical-traditionalist-catholic-groups
Scott Dorsey wrote:
I liked it when I read it at age 14. It was mostly filled with long
digressions about the nature of life, which I found interesting although
I might find them less novel today. And it was not a large book.
--scott
Hmm, maybe I will read it again. It was more than 20 years ago that I read
it so it would be interesting to see how it has aged. Given all the AI-hysteria I think it fits nicely with the spirit of the times. ;)
D wrote:
Scott Dorsey wrote:
<snip>
I liked it when I read it at age 14. It was mostly filled with long
digressions about the nature of life, which I found interesting although >>> I might find them less novel today. And it was not a large book.
--scott
Hmm, maybe I will read it again. It was more than 20 years ago that I read >> it so it would be interesting to see how it has aged. Given all the
AI-hysteria I think it fits nicely with the spirit of the times. ;)
poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world."
- Mary Shelley's husband Percy.
Hyperbolized hysteria's in the heart of the beholder.
Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil seems smitten with Singularity in a style
somewhat similar to _Rapture of the Nerds_ (Doctorow & Stross).
Though Dr. Hinton is impressed with Mr. Kurzweil's prediction
that machines will become smarter than humans by the end of
the decade, he is less taken with the idea that the inventor
and futurist will live forever.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/technology/ray-kurzweil-singularity.html>
The _Washington Post_ has been joined at the hip with her sister paper,
the NYT, ever since the publication of the Pentagon Papers. They have a gentlemen's (or lady's if you like) agreement to coordinate front pages
with each other.
Anyhow, the NYT's sister sneaks in a small snark about Kurzweil's
IQ:
Perhaps the shape rotators [such as Kurzweil] are convinced
that computers can outthink us because their own minds are
so impoverished.
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/06/26/singularity-nearer-ray-kurzweil-review/>
Then there's this guy, who's mad as hell and isn't going to take it
any more:
<https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/>
Danke,
On 7/8/2024 4:14 PM, D wrote:
On Mon, 8 Jul 2024, Don wrote:
D wrote:
Scott Dorsey wrote:
<snip>
I liked it when I read it at age 14. It was mostly filled with long >>>>> digressions about the nature of life, which I found interesting although >>>>> I might find them less novel today. And it was not a large book.
--scott
Hmm, maybe I will read it again. It was more than 20 years ago that I
read
it so it would be interesting to see how it has aged. Given all the
AI-hysteria I think it fits nicely with the spirit of the times. ;)
poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world."
- Mary Shelley's husband Percy.
Hyperbolized hysteria's in the heart of the beholder.
Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil seems smitten with Singularity in a style
somewhat similar to _Rapture of the Nerds_ (Doctorow & Stross).
Though Dr. Hinton is impressed with Mr. Kurzweil's prediction
that machines will become smarter than humans by the end of
the decade, he is less taken with the idea that the inventor
and futurist will live forever.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/technology/ray-kurzweil-singularity.html>
The _Washington Post_ has been joined at the hip with her sister paper,
the NYT, ever since the publication of the Pentagon Papers. They have a
gentlemen's (or lady's if you like) agreement to coordinate front pages
with each other.
Anyhow, the NYT's sister sneaks in a small snark about Kurzweil's
IQ:
Perhaps the shape rotators [such as Kurzweil] are convinced
that computers can outthink us because their own minds are
so impoverished.
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/06/26/singularity-nearer-ray-kurzweil-review/>
Then there's this guy, who's mad as hell and isn't going to take it
any more:
<https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/>
Danke,
Rapture of the nerds. I like that! I will steal it! =)
You might want to have a chat with Cory Doctorow....
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=rapture+of+the+nerds
pt
I enjoyed Frankenstein. Great book!
Robert Carnegie wrote:
Don wrote:
I see a difference between Freud's idea that sons
First, a review of previously posted postulates. The Oedipus complex
manifested within Perry Rhodan's son, Thomas Cardif is a straight
forward "I want to kill my father" impulse.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> At Thora's funeral a foreshadow hints at Cardif's intentions to fully
indulge his Oedipus complex (whose usage in this context is shown below) >> and kill his father. Thus the tragedy begins and metastasizes.
Freud was absolutely obsessed with changes that take place in
our minds as we move from childhood to adulthood. When we are
children, Freud suggests, we are fiercely devoted to our mothers,
because they nurture and protect us. Anything or anyone who gets
in the way of this devotional love becomes, in our irrational
baby minds, a threat that should be eliminated-even if that
What I've just described is a version of Freud's famous Oedipus
complex, in which a male child, echoing the actions of the tragic
Greek king Oedipus, wants to kill his father and marry his mother.
<https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-uncanny>
------------------------------------------------------------------------ >>
Next comes Priestley's thoughts on /Oedipus Rex/.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> PR's Thomas Cardif affair was treated as an /Oedipus Rex/ adaptation by
me in Lynn's recent review of 67 "Interlude on Siliko 5." And it turns
out Priestley mentions /Oedipus Rex/ in _Man and Time_. And, his words
work better than mine did:
But the reason for writing plays in this form has nothing to do
with the Time element. It is because their action works like a
coiled spring, producing an effect both of increasing tension
and dramatic inevitability. In plays of this kind (of which
perhaps the supreme example is the /Oedipus Rex/ of Sophocles)
we are made to feel that the characters are helpless victims of
fate.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ >>
Now for something new - a person posits how the movie _Chinatown_
contains complex components comparable to /Oedipus Rex/.
Analysis and interpretation
A modern Oedipus Rex
In a 1975 issue of Film Quarterly, Wayne D. McGinnis compared
Chinatown to Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. He suggested that a
"wasteland motif predominates in both works", in which a
character (Noah Cross in Chinatown and Oedipus in Oedipus Rex)
uses "a plague on a city" to get into public power and then
harbor corruption. McGinnis wrote that both works allude to
"a sterility of moral values in its own era": of Athens in
"a time of intellectual upheaval [...] after the heroic battle
of Marathon" in Oedipus Rex and of America in the Watergate
era in Chinatown. He also argued that in the film, director
Roman Polanski splits Sophocles' Oedipus into two morally
polar figures, with the film's protagonist Detective Jake
Gittes paralleling the "good" Oedipus: the one uncovering the
source of corruption. McGinnis asserted that after "confronting
the web of evil perpetrated by Cross [...] Gittes is the Oedipus
whose success, to the use the words of Cleanth Brooks and
Robert B. Heilman, 'has tended to blind [him] to possibilities
which pure reason fails to see'". McGinnis concluded that
"There is finally pity for the doomed, ignorant Gittes, just
as there is pity for the blind Oedipus in Sophocles", however,
"Gittes' real sight, like Oedipus, comes too late".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)>
(is it just sons?) love their mother and resent their
father, and the supposed actual history of Oedipus,
whose actual father orders the kid taken away
to be abandoned to die, since he, Oedipus, is destined
to kill his father and marry his own mother (what?!)
A twist is that Oedipus instead is adopted, doesn't
know that - the adoptive parents deny it - and does
know about the destiny, so to try to protect his
not-real parents in Corinth, he heads for Thebes -
and runs into his actual father (a road rage incident)
and then his mother, and destiny takes its course.
One reading of this is that when the gods hate you
with or without good reason, this is very bad.
As far as Oedipus knew for most of his life,
he loved his father. Who was not the man, Laius,
who arranged his murder as a baby, and then drove
a cart over him in an argument at a road junction.
Laius seems to be not much of a loss, even excluding
a rewrite where he raped a male student which
apparently makes everything else fair punishment,
of Laius. But Oedipus didn't consciously resent Laius.
Perhaps he did unconsciously recognise and resent him?
Anyway, which way is it with Thomas Cardif?
He knows that Perry Rhodan is his father, and he
is against Rhodan? That's more like Mordred - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur%27s_family>
Although Mordred's parents may be siblings -
that wasn't in the story originally, someone "sexed it up".
And then Mordred gets a prophecy and Arthur supposedly
tries to kill any child born around the given time.
You know, like Voldemort did.
My original post inadvertently intermingles ideas.
An Oedipus complex is a psychoanalytical term. It involves a child's hostility towards the parent of the the same sex - a son who wants to
kill his father.
My first snippet shown above pertains to psychoanalysis practice.
Thomas Cardiff suffers from an Oedipus complex and wants to kill his
father Perry Rhodan.
Mordred also suffers from an Oedipus complex. Ergo, Mordred wants to
kill his father too, King Arthur.
OTOH, /Oedipus Rex/ denotes the Athenian tragedy by Sophocles. The
second and third snippets appearing above apply to /Oedipus Rex/.
Danke,
In the Sopocles play, Oedipus has no desire to kill his father; in fact he's >fleeing the area where he thinks his bio parents live to avoid that fate, when >he *does* kill Laius (who he does not know is his father) in the first >recorded incident of road rage.
Nor does he know that Jocasta is his mother when he marries her, as a
prize for getting rid of the Sphinx.
Oedipus doesn't have any of the motivations described in Freud's 'Oedipus >Complex'.
On Fri, 12 Jul 2024 13:45:21 -0000 (UTC), Don <[email protected]> wrote:
In the Sopocles play, Oedipus has no desire to kill his father; in fact he's >> fleeing the area where he thinks his bio parents live to avoid that fate, when
he *does* kill Laius (who he does not know is his father) in the first
recorded incident of road rage.
Nor does he know that Jocasta is his mother when he marries her, as a
prize for getting rid of the Sphinx.
This is because the point of the play is that "the gods" are cruel and remorseless. Oedipus is their victim, not a villain. This is, after
all, /tragedy/, not crime drama.
Robert Graves somewhere asserts that the winning plays (well, the
tragedies) each year (and those we have were all winning plays, that
is why they survived) were treated as /theology/. The Sophocles
contribution to Greek pagan theology must have been very much a
downer.
Oedipus doesn't have any of the motivations described in Freud's 'Oedipus
Complex'.
IIRC, Freud asserted that the Oedipus myth was a /product/ of his
complex, and so "proof" that it existed way-back-when.
When I read the volume /Freud/ in the /Great Books of the Western
World/ collection I formed the theory that his was a formal system: if
you replaced "sex" with, say, "eating corn flakes with milk for
breakfast", then nothing would change except that "sex" would become a sublimation of "eating corn flakes with milk for breakfast", as would everything said to be a sublimation of sex by Freud.
IOW, I concluded that Freud's theory was founded on sex because Freud
was obsessed by sex. And for no other reason.
But that's just me. And very much IMHO. Feel free to disagree.
Freud himself, in /Civilization and Its Discontent/, asserted that all
the problems he was investigating was a result of Western culture (ie, Victorianism). People not raised in that culture, including anyone
below the upper middle class (which was good, as they could not
possibly afford the fees), was free of them.
The whole production, IOW, is a result of "high culture". Which rather
raises the issue "how stupid do you have to be to adopt a 'high
culture' that drives you and your children insane?".
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