james_davis_nicoll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2013-05-30 12:34 am
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2013-05-30 12:34 am
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We also should never forget Card's "Salman Rushdie had the fatwa coming" pronouncement.
Try as I might, I can't think of one instance where an artist has demanded public funding for their work as Card claims. Can anyone else?
Yeah, Card wanted to privilege religion at Rushdie's expense, but Rushdie's story is every bit as valid as Mohammed's or Smith's is.
One of my colleagues is one of the NEA Four (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEA_Four), which I suppose is the sort of thing he's thinking of. He's tilting at a windmill that was torn down years ago, though.
But if you write down that you are telling a story out loud, than that's a "framing device".
It's quite understandable as a consequence of how Western militaries are organized. A captain leads a company of soldiers. A colonel leads a battalion or regiment of soldiers. A major leads an orderly. And nowadays sometimes not even that, what with the rise of email and word processing.
This means that an officer that retires as a major is likely to be disgruntled at his fate.
This means that an officer that retires as a major is likely to be disgruntled at his fate.
Yeah, I chortled a bit at that.
" in English, where our real present is present progressive" HUH?
For what it's worth, I had some great English teachers. Even the one who subscribed to the Edward de Vere theory about Shakespeare succeeded admirably at getting the students excited about the material.
Thanks. That case seems less about demanding funding per se and more about the fairness of the NEA's process. But it's provides fodder for Card's strawman argument, I suppose.
Yes, exactly. except for the part where it took place a generation ago, of course.
This means that I have an awful lot of imaginary friends.
Yeah; not everyone's parents were screaming "OH GOD! OH GOD!" at the moment of conception.
His point about jokes and anecdotes is premised on the notion that past tense is "the voice we use for truth." But solemn vows ("I do"), affirmations of faith ("I believe in one God"), and claims of identity ("I am Iron Man"), are all typically made in present tense.
So now that gay marriage is legal how's his armed revolution thingie coming along?
Does one of them live in the sky and smite people?
I'm sure that what he meant was that there is no true human being without religion.
Edited 2013-05-30 18:29 (UTC)
But you don't need a framing device--you could have the whole story be the monologue of some guy at a bar.
Wow, I hadn't run into that particular bit of nastiness.
All of which are spoken statements, not narratives, and he's admitted that the perfect tense is perfectly natural for that sort of thing.
You're trying to split hairs. It's quite clear that the medium shouldn't be taken as distinctive here. So whether it's written or spoken, a narrative is a narrative. And that "spoken" refers to talking like in an interview... even though this one is recorded by writing it down. Which is my point... he isn't telling a story or narrating in the interview, so his use of perfect tense isn't hypocritical. The guy's a crackpot with a lot of weird ideas and bad logic, but I'm not going to go out of the way to make up flaws in his consistency that aren't there. There are more than enough that are.
Our real present is being present progressive.
Kids today with their backwards baseball caps and their Pet Rocks!
Oh, retired Colonels have a similar reputation.
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