"The brief history of rock is the evolution of license’s orthodoxy."

Because Korrektiv has the coolest friends on the block…

The Manhattan Lawyer passed along this wondrous screed. It took me back.

“One of my freshman English students, sent to find an example of debased language from the world of the lie, selected an ad for a brassiere promising Sexy fun, 24/7. This is a lot of pressure to put on your urogenital hydraulics. What, no refractory period? No menstruation? No bean soup, no coffee, no long phone calls to old friends, no train trips to the city? It sounds like hell to me: like Paolo and Francesca, speared together for eternity. O anime affanate, / Venite a noi parlar, s’altri nol niega—but someone has forbidden speech. Their burning is all but drowned out by this f*cking music. I couldn’t hear you. What were you saying?”

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Comments

Jonathan Webb says

December 24, 2010 at 5:26 pm

Excellent. Thanks.

Southern Expat says

December 24, 2010 at 6:07 pm

Wow. Korrektiv DOES have cool friends.

Let's recruit the author for a guest-posting gig.

Jonathan Webb says

December 24, 2010 at 10:13 pm

It reminded me of my days in the dorm at St. Thomas Aquinas where we would debate whether rock music was invented by Satan.

Rufus McCain says

December 25, 2010 at 9:49 am

My take-away came at the end: "Dionysus is the god of the mob. The necessary Apollonian redress is a private endeavor."

On the other hand, contra Apollo, we have Christ. Cf. Lynch's Christ and Apollo:

"As for the title, Christ and Apollo. Nietzsche and Spengler have
accustomed us to the contrariety and the pairing of Dionysus and Apollo: energy and form, infinite and finite, enthusiasm and control, romantic and classic. Because I think that in our time we need a new movement toward the definite and away from the dream, I take even the symbol of Apollo as a kind of infinite dream over against Christ who was full of definiteness and actuality — and was on that account rejected by every gnostic system since, even up to now. Even if a little unjustly, let Apollo stand for everything that is weak and pejorative in the "aesthetic man" of Kierkegaard and for that kind of fantasy beauty which is a sort of infinite, which is easily gotten everywhere, but which will not abide the straitened gates of limitation that leads to stronger beauty. Let him also stand for a kind of autonomous and facile intellectualism, a Cartesianism, that thinks form can be given to the world by the top of the head alone, without contact with the world, without contact with the rest of the self.

"On the other hand I mean Christ to stand for the completely definite, for the Man who, in taking on our human nature (as the artist must) took on every inch of it (save sin) in all its density, and Who so obviously did not march too quickly or too glibly to beauty, the infinite, the dream. I take Him, secondly, as the model and source of that energy and courage we again need to enter the finite as the only creative and generative source of beauty."

Merry Christmas!

J. D. Daniels says

June 16, 2012 at 7:30 am

Sir —

I look forward to reading William F. Lynch’s “Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination.”

Yours
JDD

lickona says

June 16, 2012 at 10:25 am

Mr. Daniels – thanks awfully for stopping by. Dew Drop Inn again sometime; you might enjoy the company.