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Tumbrils, whole no. 7, May 1946
Page 2
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Page 2 TUMBRILS, No. 7 ----------------------------------------------- tions to the consideration of it requires many volumes; its scope is such that it has something vitally important to communicate to each new culture that considers it and in nearly every category in which such consideration may be attempted. The Commedia, for instance, has been rendered well-nigh as esoteric as Finnegans Wake by the time-lapse between it and us -- and yet it is still worth our while to do some research on the identity of the damned for the illuminating view it gives us of Tuscan culture. Who cares about Tuscan culture? Most of us, even if unknowingly. It was so like our own politically that its views in that field, as summarised by Burnham, have had very disturbing contemporary effects. We wasted an astronomical number of lives attempting to surpress the unsurpressible economic background of the Commedia's ethic; and, needless to say, its aesthetic -- even its technique - has time and again swung a gigantic axe at more recent beanstalks. What price a squib from the Divine Comedy? that is to say, what would it be worth in our VAPA universe, or anywhere else except in text or context? Presuppose a Vanguard if with the personal qualities and the environmental influences to take Dante as the paramount figure in his cosmos, and Dante's commentators and men-of-like-mind as satillites. (This is not impossible. Even slans have their E.E. Evanses.) Such a member would present us with a publication filled with side remarks, demonstrations, pomposities, sneers, shouts, moralities and lengthy or terse snippets from Tuscan writers and their inheritors. We would find all these unshakable no matter how strong our protests; the weight of Dante himself would hammer flat any of the minutiae, no matter how reasonable, we might oppose to this member's world-view. In effect, we could not argue with this member from the beginning, no matter how visible his own blindnesses, unless we could cope with the unvanquishable genius of Dante, who will always remain moe satisfactory to our hypothetical VAPAn. Spengler, Joyce, Dante, Marx, Sophocles, Homer, Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, even Charles Fort -- these men remain real giants in contrast to the rest of us, and even their errors are oppressively gigantic. Half of the indignation those of us who are partisans of such men feel, at what seem to us to be the stupidities of our opponents, is based in nothing sounder than an intimate sense of the contrast between the specific nature of the criticism and the universal scope of the criticized. It is such a subjection that can turn one Vanguard magazine into something like a Little Gems From The Classical Era, and another into a K'TAOGM-M. THREE-DOSHES REVISITED or, The World of non-Inwit This is the issue that was supposed to have gone back over the mailings and considered some points brought up by members which went unmentioned by me at the time but which I still consider worth discussing. (Take a breath, Blish.) I discover, however, that to do this properly -- and particularly to deal with the Emden's remarks on musical subjects -- I'll need a good deal more than four stencils, and I am still sufficiently under the Wollheim cloud (now no bigger than a man's hand, counting the warts) to prohibit that. Maybe next time. PM typo deluxe: a recent issue declared that the Lilienthal report is intended to provide a "-skeletal procedure for handling the atom bzomb.-" Or, The Case of the Hungry Typo-Lice. Somebody, by God, has asked me for a bibliography on Eblis in Bakelite -- a Vanguardif, furthermore. In the course of compiling it for him I succeeded in ramming it down the throats of Larry and VKE, too, by trapping them in a corner of Fort Wit and standing over them while they read it. "My eyes hurt," Larry complained. "My doctor says I shouldn't read anything, or would if I'd asked him whether or not I should read, if I had a doctor." "Read it," I said, grimly.
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Page 2 TUMBRILS, No. 7 ----------------------------------------------- tions to the consideration of it requires many volumes; its scope is such that it has something vitally important to communicate to each new culture that considers it and in nearly every category in which such consideration may be attempted. The Commedia, for instance, has been rendered well-nigh as esoteric as Finnegans Wake by the time-lapse between it and us -- and yet it is still worth our while to do some research on the identity of the damned for the illuminating view it gives us of Tuscan culture. Who cares about Tuscan culture? Most of us, even if unknowingly. It was so like our own politically that its views in that field, as summarised by Burnham, have had very disturbing contemporary effects. We wasted an astronomical number of lives attempting to surpress the unsurpressible economic background of the Commedia's ethic; and, needless to say, its aesthetic -- even its technique - has time and again swung a gigantic axe at more recent beanstalks. What price a squib from the Divine Comedy? that is to say, what would it be worth in our VAPA universe, or anywhere else except in text or context? Presuppose a Vanguard if with the personal qualities and the environmental influences to take Dante as the paramount figure in his cosmos, and Dante's commentators and men-of-like-mind as satillites. (This is not impossible. Even slans have their E.E. Evanses.) Such a member would present us with a publication filled with side remarks, demonstrations, pomposities, sneers, shouts, moralities and lengthy or terse snippets from Tuscan writers and their inheritors. We would find all these unshakable no matter how strong our protests; the weight of Dante himself would hammer flat any of the minutiae, no matter how reasonable, we might oppose to this member's world-view. In effect, we could not argue with this member from the beginning, no matter how visible his own blindnesses, unless we could cope with the unvanquishable genius of Dante, who will always remain moe satisfactory to our hypothetical VAPAn. Spengler, Joyce, Dante, Marx, Sophocles, Homer, Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, even Charles Fort -- these men remain real giants in contrast to the rest of us, and even their errors are oppressively gigantic. Half of the indignation those of us who are partisans of such men feel, at what seem to us to be the stupidities of our opponents, is based in nothing sounder than an intimate sense of the contrast between the specific nature of the criticism and the universal scope of the criticized. It is such a subjection that can turn one Vanguard magazine into something like a Little Gems From The Classical Era, and another into a K'TAOGM-M. THREE-DOSHES REVISITED or, The World of non-Inwit This is the issue that was supposed to have gone back over the mailings and considered some points brought up by members which went unmentioned by me at the time but which I still consider worth discussing. (Take a breath, Blish.) I discover, however, that to do this properly -- and particularly to deal with the Emden's remarks on musical subjects -- I'll need a good deal more than four stencils, and I am still sufficiently under the Wollheim cloud (now no bigger than a man's hand, counting the warts) to prohibit that. Maybe next time. PM typo deluxe: a recent issue declared that the Lilienthal report is intended to provide a "-skeletal procedure for handling the atom bzomb.-" Or, The Case of the Hungry Typo-Lice. Somebody, by God, has asked me for a bibliography on Eblis in Bakelite -- a Vanguardif, furthermore. In the course of compiling it for him I succeeded in ramming it down the throats of Larry and VKE, too, by trapping them in a corner of Fort Wit and standing over them while they read it. "My eyes hurt," Larry complained. "My doctor says I shouldn't read anything, or would if I'd asked him whether or not I should read, if I had a doctor." "Read it," I said, grimly.
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