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Chapter 1

#54: Oct. - Nov. 2008 (Fiction)
WildCityWoman
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This is odd the way she writes it from the author's POV in spots - for instance . . .

(For that was the way his mind worked now, in violent see
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Thomas Hood
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WildCityWoman wrote:
Thomas Hood wrote:A Nest of Reptilian Humanoids

Carly ought to be here.
Carly, I'm going to lay off this thread. Like you said, I've a cop mentality, and these Bloomsbury people are bad -- really, really, really bad. But I don't want to create negative vibes, so I'm going to sit this one out.

Anyway, I am curious . . . why are you identifying this reptilian thing (Moore and Bloomsbury) . . . is this something we talked about?. . .Some philosophy or ethic I was on my soapbox about?
Yes, the Bloomsburys are responsible for the belief among the ruling class that government can control the economy through manipulation of interest rates (e.g., Fed cut yesterday) and the money supply (constant systemic inflation). In other words, economic totalitarianism, just like the old Soviets, only more clever. The current economic chaos is a product of reptilian Bloombury thought.
I tend to forget things these days - gonna' be 65 in December, and you know how it is, eh?
But there's so much more to remember! :)

Tom
Last edited by Thomas Hood on Thu Oct 30, 2008 11:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Robert Tulip

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Thomas Hood wrote:A Nest of Reptilian HumanoidsCarly ought to be here. Orlando is a product of the Bloomsbury Group. I had no idea how predatory, deceitful, and venomous these people were -- all of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsbury_Group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_ ... om/sex.htm Well, I wanted to read something different and learn things. The philosopher G.E. Moore provided the intellectual defense for Bloomsbury decadence:
. . .what made Principia Ethica so important for Bloomsbury was Moore's conception of intrinsic worth. For Moore intrinsic value depended on an unanalysable intuition of good and a concept of complex states of mind whose worth as a whole was not proportionate to the sum of its parts. The greatest goods for Moore and Bloomsbury were ideals of personal relations and aesthetic appreciation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsbury_Group
Tom
Wow Tom, tell us what you really think. This post makes me think that reading Orlando is worth while. I studied GE Moore's "book" Principia Ethica in my undergraduate philosophy degree, and found it nauseatingly vacuous - as I recall he basically says we can have no idea what goodness is. Utterly lost in depravity, but the real tragedy is that this monster remains respected by so-called analytical philosophy. Rather like AJ Ayer and Foucault, both so totally up themselves with sophisticated language games that they saw philosophy as a way to excuse their total amorality. A picture of Bloomsbury. The trouble with decadence is that some one else pays the bill, both for the debauchery at the time and for the squalid consequences.
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I've only read Chapter 1 and part of Chapter 2 of Orlando. If I keep reading, will I find out what any of this vituperation against Bloomsbury has to do with the book? I mean this as a sincere question. What is the connection?
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Thomas Hood wrote:
WildCityWoman wrote:
Thomas Hood wrote:A Nest of Reptilian Humanoids

Carly ought to be here.
Carly, I'm going to lay off this thread. Like you said, I've a cop mentality, and these Bloomsbury people are bad -- really, really, really bad. But I don't want to create negative vibes, so I'm going to sit this one out.

Anyway, I am curious . . . why are you identifying this reptilian thing (Moore and Bloomsbury) . . . is this something we talked about?. . .Some philosophy or ethic I was on my soapbox about?
Yes, the Bloomsburys are responsible for the belief among the ruling class that government can control the economy through manipulation of interest rates (e.g., Fed cut yesterday) and the money supply (constant systemic inflation). In other words, economic totalitarianism, just like the old Soviets, only more clever. The current economic chaos is a product of reptilian Bloombury thought.
I tend to forget things these days - gonna' be 65 in December, and you know how it is, eh?
But there's so much more to remember! :)

Tom
Oh, c'mon now, Tommy! At least see it through a couple of chapters.

And I'm flattered that you give my suspicions about government control such clever labels.

Hope you'll at least stick this thing out for a couple of chapters. I don't think I like it all that much myself, but I'm hanging in here, just in case it turns out to be something really good.

..........................................
WildCityWoman
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DWill wrote:I've only read Chapter 1 and part of Chapter 2 of Orlando. If I keep reading, will I find out what any of this vituperation against Bloomsbury has to do with the book? I mean this as a sincere question. What is the connection?
DWill
No, it has nothing to do with 'bloomsbury' . . . it's just that Thomas is still bristling from the last time I was here - when I said he was like a 'cop'.

Sorry, Thomas - you're not gettin' away that easy!

Get busy reading those first chapters!
WildCityWoman
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It's not an easy read; although the metaphors and references to nature are lovely, it makes for a bit too much information on the page, y'know? It's like having so many flowers growing in a garden bed, that you don't really see any one thing well enough to appreciate it.

You have to take each sentence in slowly.

But why not - after all, as one old philospher said - who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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So instead of meeting him, dressed as a man, to run away at midnight, a storm came and she stood him up.

The river got flooded and he stood raging in the tempest as he watched her ship sail away.

We assume she was on it.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp-SYRSy ... re=related

This is the 'opening' . . . the music is lovely.
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All that Bloomsbury group talk sounds so ominous, I've got a different (less sinister) problem with Orlando.

So, before joining this discussion properly, I've got to have a rant on my opinion of Virginia Woolf (sorry, this is might not be so rational). Firstly, I've read two other of her novels- To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway and they got me very confused because she's one of the only female authors I've read who I couldn't relate to at all and didn't like. I found the subtlety of those books unrealistic and irritating. And though they are subtle and sensitive, I feel that they are nevertheless very cold and impersonal in tone (which is so different to most women writers).

Reading Orlando did nothing to change my mind though I quite liked it (until the end in which she reverts from her quirky satirical mode back to her serious mode: boring). But all the same, here's why I find reading her novels difficult: she seems to have a very precise notion of how they should be read. This is just my instinctive reaction though, it's difficult to prove. I found only one more obvious quote in Orlando (in Ch. II):

"For those these are not matters on which a biographer can profitably enlarge it is plain enough to those who have done a reader's part in making up from bare hints dropped here and there the whole boundary and circumference of a living person; can hear, in what we can only whisper a living voice; can see, often when we say nothing about it, exactly what he looked like, know without a word to guide them precisely what he thought- and it is for readers such as these we write- it is plain then to such a reader that..."

It seems as though underneath the good-humored, satirical voice of Woolf's mock-biographer narrator there is another repressed voice- that of an anxious woman, her neck straining with anticipation, determined to have her books read exactly the way she wants them to be read. I feel the pressure of this hidden voice whenever I misread something or read too carelessly (even for something as simple and silly as misreading "cumbersome" as "cucumber", I almost felt Virginia Woolf wince). It makes reading her novels an uncomfortable experience.
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