Dan Schneider on Good Faith, Stupidity, & The Internet- Part 3- The Persistence Of Idiocy

As I begin this third exploration of Internet stupidity, in a continuing series, I reflect on some of the emails I’ve gotten in the many months since I posted the first two; one on the failure of dialectic online and the other on sociopathy online. The first piece saw me dissect general online failings, while the second piece had me revisit right wing blogger Dean Esmay, whose idiocy I have tackled, like that of Wikipedia, several times before in essays. Why? Well, I do it for a simple reason, and one that will manifest itself as this essay unfolds. The Internet is in many ways, an ephemeral place. There are websites that simply fold up and go away, as well as those which alter information posted on them, and sometimes websites that do both; as I will demonstrate. Thus, I do these essays for future generations of online readers, on the Internet, or whatever medium eventually subsumes and displaces it. This is because too many online denizens try to hide their identities and mask the real vulgarity and baseness of their opinions.

These essays serve then as historical documents to counterbalance the inevitable claims of many who will come later and state that things were really not as bad and/or stupid back in the early days of the Internet. First up, let me tackle some idiotic website posts that have sprung up regarding opinions of mine, and debunk them. I will then get more philosophic and take on people who may or may not be idiots (in the sense of being nasty Internet trolls), but who are still ignorant. Then I will take on some of the idiotic emails I’ve gotten in the last year or two, and end with a couple of classic cyberstalkers and Internet trolls.

Perhaps the most amusing sort of idiot online is the wannabe hipster, who thinks he’s smart, but whose every utterance reveals cluelessness. I’ve dealt with many folks who were Right Wing Christian wackos, Left Wing atheist loons, hipster white boy ghetto wannabe poets, etc. But, perhaps one of the simply dumbest drooling troglodytes was a guy who ran a website called The Weekly Johnson. No, don’t even try clicking on the link- it’s been dead for a couple of years. It was the typical sophomoric humor site that really did not stand out in any way. Despite claiming to have several contributors, the old site did not even byline its articles, so that readers could not even tell which moron typed which piece. For some reason, these morons came across Cosmoetica and, despite it standing for everything they supposedly wanted their shitty little website to be, hated it. And, of course, they hated me in the process. Why? Simple. As I stated, Cosmoetica and I stood for everything they supposedly wanted their shitty little website to be. Ain’t envy a joy?

Fortunately, even though no one actually read their little site, and it faded into the past, one can still read their eternal stupidity thanks to the trusty old Internet Archive. The post on me was dated 2006, and can be found here. In a rare display of intellectual flexing, the morons decided to title the post Dan Schneider: Douche Bag. Of course, the real question regarding the title is which word was more difficult for its anonymous author to spell and understand? Douche or bag. As usual, I will quote from the idiocy, then translate it and interpolate commentary of my own. And they’re off:

Dan Schneider is apparently some type of everything-critic who moonlights as a terrible poet.

Note the assertion of my terribility as a poet without any back up. This’ll be important later on in this essay, for another idiot will claim my criticism consists of declarations by fiat. Naturally, this is not so, as this annotation proves, but note all of those who actually do it. None are me. Excelsior

The opening line from Schneider's critique of Edward Hirsch:
Edward Hirsch is 1 of those, at best, mediocre poets that has ensconsed himself into a position of some power in the small, incestual world of poetry.
Yes, you're right. He did spell "ensconced" wrong, and no, "incestual" is not a word.

Now, either the assertion about ensconced is incorrect, and just a sad attempt to use lies to misrepresent the truth, or the idiot who wrote the piece was a regular Cosmoetica reader who likely read the piece within days after its posting, for I usually correct typos within a few days. One way we have a liar, the other an obsessive. Again, another pattern that will emerge as I go on about these sorts of online idiots. As for incestual, it’s called a neologism. One can construct new words to fit in places where no accurate word exists. This is what intelligent people do. The word incestuous, as example, too often refers to merely the sexual act between close relatives, whereas incestual- clearly a derivative, lacks the sexual connotation, and placed in the sentence, where it is, clearly implies an artistic or intellectual equivalent of the sex act. That the anonymous typist of the piece cannot wrap his mind about this says much of his intellect, or its lack.

The opening line from his critique of Raymond Carver's Cathedral:
I first encountered Raymond Carver’s writing as a poet many years ago and was singularly unimpressed.
He starts off every review this way, and it's why I felt comfortable using the opening line I did for this "review," to use the term loosely.

Now, even given a wide rhetorical berth, does anyone believe I start off all my reviews with stating I was not moved by a poet, poem, film, book, etc.? And, what exactly does this mean?: ‘it's why I felt comfortable using the opening line I did for this "review," to use the term loosely’. Now, look at the opening line: Dan Schneider is apparently some type of everything-critic who moonlights as a terrible poet. Really, look at it and connect it with the previously quoted line. Is the anonymous ass trying to state he’s comfortable calling me an everything-critic? If so, does he not realize the term is a compliment? Thus he is undercutting his own attempt at sardonism. Or, is he comfortable with calling me a terrible poet- a claim he did not back up, and which the claim of comfortability adds nothing to? Obviously, even the typist is unsure.

Then he really goes and hangs himself with another claim that will emerge again and again from these cyberstalkers and obsessives

I realize that no one knows who this clown is, because he's very deservedly unknown.

Again and again these obsessives claim that nobody knows who I am and nobody cares, even though my readership over the years is approaching 150 million, and nearly 7 billion hits have been totaled for my over 1300 webpages. To them, I am unimportant, yet they devote large portions of time and their lives trying to make as many other people aware of my lack of import as possible. Logically, if one really believes something is bad or not worthy of greater renown, one ignores it. But, these sorts do not because a) they know I have a large readership and b) hope that their idiotic pieces condemning me, the site, or an individual piece, will get some of my readership when people Google me or Cosmoetica, because c) they realize that it has had a strong effect on the online arts world. Granted, I’m under no illusions. Cosmoetica may be in the Top 5 or so arts websites in terms of online traffic and popularity, but that’s because, amongst the 20-50 million online arts websites and blogs, my site might snag anywhere from one tenth to one half of a percent of the traffic. In truth, probably 99.5% of online arts denizens have never even heard nor stumbled across the site. But, given that those 99.5% of other readers’ attention is split another 20-50 million ways, that does make Cosmoetica a relative giant. Another factor against Cosmoetica is that while it is very strong in terms of readership, it is weak in terms of linkage, for I do not play the incestual arts game. The site’s popularity is built solely on its own merits, not the reflected sheen of sites connected to celebrities or large newspapers. I doubt the anonymous moron who typed this stuff can even grasp such facts, since his own shoddy website is long history, but he did know and obsess over me, like so many of these idiots, and this only happens when a site pr person gets popular online because so small a percentage of most folks are so unbalanced. The vast majority never comment on anything, They are the lurkers who outnumber the trolls by about 999 to 1. It is an online truism that anytime the criticism received is less than a 99-1 % margin the site has more fans than haters. This is because almost every person who loathes something online feels compelled to comment on and condemn it, whereas most of those satisfied with something do not. It is far easier, in other words, to rile a troglodyte than move a bystander. In short, it takes a great deal of online popularity to get the great numbers cyberstalkers I do, since so small a percentage of websurfers are unhinged.

Rest assured that he hates everything and glares down from his tower of stupidity upon every writer or thinker or anything that has ever existed ever. I'm not saying the dude (who I imagine is fat, although it's admittedly just a theory at this point)has to like everything he reads, or pull his punches when reviewing respected authors. I'm just saying that his idiotic tendency to pass his judgment calls off as statements of fact (Finnegan's Wake is "utterly unreadable," Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is "unimaginably bad"), shitty, error filled writing, impossibly high opinion of himself and raging boner for being a provocateur make him a douche bag.

Look at that first line- the idiot cannot help himself. Because he is so filled with rage and bile he pawns it off on me. I must ‘hate’ the things I criticize. It does not occur to him that I love the art or thing, and demand better from its practitioners. No, everything to such troglodytes is borne out or personal emotions. Why? Because everything they do IS borne of such personal emotions, and they cannot imagine others operate on higher planes. Then, on to the ad hominem parenthetical. Given I’m 6’1” and weighed 195 at my most, I’ve never been remotely fat. But, why stop a good slaver when a Neolith is involved?

Now, look at this: the typist claims that my opinions of Finnegans Wake and other books are statements of fact. Well, yes, they are statements of fact about what I have painstakingly detailed, unlike the by fiat nature of the typist. He then calls my writing shitty and error-filled, even as this very paragraph of his has a typo: see point)has (sic). It’s this sort of unreflexive and laughably bad sort of criticism- note he still uses the subjective word like in this paragraph, rather than an objective phrase like think it well written- that show the typist to be a boob of the first order.

Now, note how I have detailed and analyzed the idiot’s writing. Then read this:

He's never met Eggers, but he's "vapid." Oh, but he's read Eggers, you say. Well, I've read Schneider, and he's a pompous blowhard. And a bloated sack of his own superheated ego, amongst other things.

Putting aside the fact that I detailed Eggers’ writing- not personal- flaws in my essay on him, as shown here-

On to the book’s tale: the first 30 or so pages follow his mother’s death by cancer. She pukes, she excretes, she spits, and this is supposed to invoke sympathy as Eggers describes how wretched his dying mother is. Then, before she finally kicks off (at which point the reader is delighted) his dad drops dead. Dozens of pages in and this is all that has happened, save for some banal conversation, and finding out he comes from an upper middle class, if not wealthy, family. Eggers has an absolutely tin ear for conversation- both in its content and in its utterance, plus he has no idea how conversation serves narrative- to push it along. I.e.- conversation is usually only superior to narration if it can capture the specifics, emotional intensity, or the essence of the moment or narrative better than a narration could. Also, conversation has to be interesting enough to stand on its own. Real banal banter is not good writing. Good conversation is written to be read and reread with appreciation, yet to fool the reader into believing someone might actually be profound enough to say what they say, even if unwittingly.

Now, I’ve taken a snip from a longer exchange, but this is typical of the conversation, one designed to show the relationship of Eggers to his baby brother Christopher (Toph). About 40% of the book is literally devoted to conversations of this depth. The fact is that most vapid people are vaguely aware of their state, and reveal the depths of their vapidity by trying to cover it up with poorly advised forays into bad philosophy or polysyllabicism. Eggers is not even clued in enough to recognize this point.

-the idiot cannot get past ad hominem in response. That, in itself, is a de facto cession of an argument. But, even ignoring that loss, show me a comparable selection from my writing and a comparable detailing of its flaws in the piece (quoted in full) by the typist. There is none. So, when I opine, because I go to great lengths to elucidate something pro or con, my claims have more weight and value than the by fiat declamations of an anonymous idiot. Period.

He writes about politics, religion, science and art with the same whiney ferocity.

And movies. On The Life Aquatic:
The CGI effects of the sea creatures, however, are particularly bad and phony looking. Not for a second do they convince, and this does not enhance the comic aspects, only tip off that the rest of the humor is as phony as the effects.
It’s not CGI, genius, it’s claymation. It was decided to use claymation and not CGI specifically to achieve the look you describe. Don’t like the effect? Whatever, awesome. The point is it wasn’t an accident, Dan, and you’re so eager to shit on people that this never occurred to you.

Uh….no. In his zeal to try to be hipster, the anonymous typist obviously never watched the film and its DVD special features. While there was claymation, there were also computer graphics, as pointed out in the special effects segments. That D’oh! you hear is not from Homer Simpson. But, to use the idiots own word against him, he’s so eager to shit on people that this never occurred to him, to actually investigate the making of information on the DVD.

Then, the piece bizarrely ends in almost mid-sentence (I’d say thought, but who’s kidding who?)- this ‘piece’ is gas the anonymous typist got from a bad Papa John’s pizza.

As his wikipedia page points out, though, he’s totally famous. I mean, just check out the kickass Minneapolis City Pages article about him from almost a decade ago at the bottom of the entry.

So, I guess the anonymous typist’s real point is that he wishes he had a Wikipedia page (with a capital W) on him, as well as a biographical article. Ah, great, another loser with dreams of fame. As if either of those things has even remotely helped me and my writing career. Of course, Wikipedia is a typo, sans the capital W. What was that he typed about ‘error filled writing’?

Nonetheless, as shown, garbage like The Weekly Johnson dies. Its contributors were thus freed back to their super-cool weekly daisy chain. But, thanks to the Internet Archive, there is still proof of its idiocy.

Of course, not all idiocy is generic, like on The Weekly Johnson. On a blog called Critiques Of Libertarianism, I got a thumbs up from the blog owner for my review of Michael Shermer’s The Mind Of The Market. My review actually got Shermer, who had agreed to be interviewed in my Dan Schneider Interviews, to bow out because I would not kiss his ass, even though I gave the book a balanced, mild recommendation, but took apart its many economic fallacies. Of course, there is a troll that cannot help but embarrass himself over the course of 82 comments. Naturally, I pointed out all his fallacies and idiocies, as the semi-anonymous John gutted himself, claiming my writing was incomprehensible: ‘Incomprehensible: "What The Mind Of The Market is, in reality, is a secular humanist manifesto that bizarrely tries to wrangle that idea onto a foundation of economic sophistry. Why? That's not the purview of a critic; only how successful the writer is in that exercise has any bearing. ...it is also, at its center, a screed, in the positive- a lengthy discourse, and negative- a rant, senses of the term, and, as such, perhaps the most effective and provocative screed since The Bell Curve's defense of racism, in that both were designed to foment argument, and this does it well enough to be recommended as a read, even if substantively, it's mediocre philosophy, and about as convincing as Whitley Streiber's Communion books are in making sane readers believe millions of humans are being kidnapped by extraterrestrials."’

Nothing incomprehensible there. But, note that an ellipsis is used in the ‘quote.’ This is always disingenuous when trying to critique a writing style. Note, as this essay goes on, how generic John’s rants are, to the point that almost all Internet trolls sound alike and think alike, so that the fact that they may, indeed, be separate human beings is irrelevant to the fact that they share a hive mind. But, in fairness to John the troll, even the site’s owner did not know the difference between a complex and run-on sentence, as I pointed out. In the interest of space, here are some of the ‘highlights’ of my denuding of ‘John’:

For the record, self-interest is a hard-wired component of the human condition, a fact not to be lamented or celebrated. The objective is to set up a social order in such fashion that "greed" is channeled to in such a way as maximize collective preference satisfaction. Smith's "invisible hand" (like Hayek's spontaneous order) is a morally neutral recognition of that fact that within a framework of strong property, tort, and contract law, that end will be realized without explicit, intentional coordination of the preferences themselves.

***I agree that one needs to channel human greed for unintended altruism, but the reason Smithian economics failed in the 1930s is the same reason Communism failed in the 1980s: it does not account for human nature- i.e.- human greed will always subvert the myth of the Invisible Hand because the truly greedy, and those who profit, and get ahead (see path dependence) will always try to game the system to stay ahead- thus utterly perverting a free market. See monopolies, Enron, Microsoft, Alcoa, Ford, etc.

This is my favorite excerpt, and, I really bespeaks my original proposition that you have no business pretending to write about political theory:

"the very tort, contract, and nuisance laws are things that emerged, by and large, long after Adam Smith."

The basic laws of tort, contract and property is founded upon a body of English common law whose history can be traced back eight-hundred years.

***Actually, you show how you utterly do not understand the fundamentals of language. I wrote: 'by and large' which is utterly in synch with your term 'basic.' That you see a disagreement where clearly I take the same position shows your deliteracy in full force. You simply have no reading comprehension. Now, stretch that out, and the term basic means:

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/basic

1 a: of, relating to, or forming the base or essence : fundamental basic truths b: concerned with fundamental scientific principles : not applied basic research 2: constituting or serving as the basis or starting point a basic set of tools3 a: of, relating to, containing, or having the character of a chemical base b: having an alkaline reaction4: containing relatively little silica basic rocks5: relating to, made by, used in, or being a process of making steel done in a furnace lined with basic material and under basic slag

That one would conflate a Medieval fundament with the complexities of modern international law, as if there has been no growth nor change, is laughable, and shows how little you understand economics.

BTW- I think it's great that folk like you are online, for every word you type will be used by cyberhistorians for centuries to illustrate the troglodytic state of the masses from time immemorial.

'That you would conflate that with unspecified 20th century "regulations" is, again, more evidence that you just dont know what you are talking about.'

***Yeah, geez, I didn't have time to type out the details of most modern trade agreements, interstate commerce laws, and international treaties. Damn, but go 13th Century!

The same sympotomology of your ignorance is to be found in silly statements like, "there is really no free market" because, hey, you have to have rules enforceable by government to make the system work in the first place. Duh. Thanks for articulating both the obvious and unintentionally reiterating your complete and utter lack of knowledge as to the fundamental, guiding principles of a capitalist social order.

***You're welcome, because you have shown you cannot even grasp simple definitions of words. Glad to lead you back to reality.

At one point, A second name used by John trolls in, and the site owner shows how easy it is to use a second fake name. Then, John states this (my replies bolded):

John:

Cosmo. I've decided I'm just going to call you "cosmo." Your rebuttal is stupid. I still don't know if you are the author of the "review of Michael Shermer's The Mind of the Market." Are you??

***Add masochism to sciolism and sophistry. Let's see, am I or am I not the writer of the article. Where is Johnny Carson when you need him? And stupid? I'd say the odds are 3 to 1 against you're even being able to define that word.

Secondly, no... property law, contract law, and tort law did not emerge in their present form "post Adam Smith." Squares aren't circles. A party dress is not a coffee table. New England didn't win the Super Bowl, and contemporary American property, tort, and contract law did not materialize in present form over the last 60 years.

***Note how you quote I say 'post-Adam Smith' which would be post-1800 or thereabouts, and you then reduce it to 'the last 60 years.' Where did you get that quote, 'the last 60 years?' I dare you to show me where I typed that anywhere. If you cannot, then there is no reason for me to refute it, since you have not even made the claim. But, the vast majority of all laws, property, trade, criminal, civil, etc. have been crafted in the last 2 centuries. And before you sophize, I stated, 'the vast majority' and 'the last 2 centuries.'

Mike, I'm not John Lott - who is kind of a weirdo, to be honest. I will say that your contention that I won't "allow" common ground for discussion is totally unfair. I will, and have tried desperately to focus the discussion and establish a recognized foundation for the meaning of terms like "capitalism" or "communism." Tell me what proper grounds should be...I'll either dispute it as a proper foundation, or we can agree and take it from there.

***In fact, you have not read the book, by your own claim, and have not honestly addressed any of the book's points, which I raise in detail (am I the writer or not?), nor my debunking.

I'd really prefer to advance the ball instead of arguing about what constitutes a run-on sentence or is a "dichotomy."

***Then don't raise the issue of dichotomy, and claim any of the other posters did. Then, of course, you'd have no masturbatory fun while watching those grown men in tight pants on the gridiron.

You seem the content with the latter, when you aren't plaigarizing the opinions of others, passing them off as your own, and making personal attacks.

I really think your main problem is that when you took on this task of "refuting libertarianism" with your lame website some years ago, you honestly thought you were arguing with the equivalent of creationists.

Well, Creationists are deluded, but most of them seemingly act honestly, something you reject from the get go. But both positions are dogmatic and divorced from the real world.

At this point, it should be stated, the comments are only about halfway done. Yes, these trolls live in their own worlds. Then John lets his alter-ego, Geoffrey Macomb take over- but note his writing and dialecvtic styles are the same. This is what is so hilarious about these folks- they literally do not realize their styles are like fingerprints, much less their IP addresses- more to come on that later in this essay. From my argument with Geoff/John (my replies in bold):

Dan, if you put two ideas on a spectrum, one at the left and one at the right, then you have, regardless if it’s intentional or not, two mutually opposing “things”, hence a dichotomy.

Not if you understand the definitions of dichotomy and spectrum, for spectrum includes a rainbow of choices between the two, hence there is no opposition, but a plenum.
Now, since you are going down the same willfully ignorant path as John, should I just call you out as John, or will you be man enough to admit to sockpuppetry?

And your dichotomy was false in that Capitalism does not belong on one extreme while Communism resides on the other. Period. End of story.

As stated above, if you actually read, and esp. the example where I speak of reviewing a B&W film:
'Let's see, if you watch a black and white film, and review its cinematography in choice hues of gray, rather than dazzling color, do you really think it's appropriate to fault the film for its lack of color, or- dammit all- take what is given, and go on about the b&w cinematography?
That is a metaphor, John. Can you handle it?', you will have to acknowledge that I was dealing with Shermer's dualism and dichotomy. I debunked it, and later added that neither are extremes, and provided examples of both that surpass Capitalism and Communism, or did you miss that in your metamorphosis from John to Geoff?
Period. End of argument.

As to the other lies, I don’t really feel like re-reading the posts and trying to decipher what you consider a lie and what you consider a distortion and really have no other interest in this debate beyond yelling from the peanut gallery whenever the mood strikes me. So, if this is the climactic end, I have to say, I’m rather disappointed.
Geoff

Glad to see that you have, with your own words, defined yourself as a troll. Now, just admit you/John are, and take a long nap. Reading polysyllabic words must tire you.

I then commented: ‘Interesting how both John & Geoff removed entire posts. Likely because it would have given away their similarities. This is why threads like this are fun, because chuckleheads, given enough rope, always hang themselves some way or the other. BUSTED!’

Dan,
The problem is you use the word “extremes” which pits communism against capitalism, which suggest a dichotomy rather implying a continuum, but if you meant for it to be understood as a continuum, fine then so be it. I don’t overly care.

Manifestly you do care, or you would not keep harping on the point.
Here is the quote: 'I always find it amusing how Free Market theists, like all fundamentalists, conveniently ignore contrary evidence. World economics, as shown since World War Two, requires true moderation to succeed, because the extremes appeal to the worst in the human animal- Capitalism to greed and myopia (see global warming), and Communism to laziness (see they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work). But Shermer, the Free Market Evangelist, does not see this'
I refer to free market theists, aka Shermer, and later name him by name, clearly delineating that he is the person who has drawn the sliding scale. I also then use the word extremes. One cannot have an extreme without a mean, just as North is pointless w/o a South. If one speaks of 'extremes' there is logically at least one mean. Two extremes plus one mean equals a minimum of three reference points. The prefix di- in dichotomy means two. Therefore, I in no way, shape nor form implied nor directly stated a dichotomy. You, John/Geoff did and do. It is simpleminded folk like you and Shermer who cannot see grays. That's your problem, not mine.
Just as your inability to understand definitions or Latinate derivations is yours alone.

The problem is when you criticize John for his “distortions” and don’t take into account that you yourself (based on what I read on your site) are famous for distorting facts and interspersing your opinion whether they are vile or blatantly dishonest in everything you write. You my friend are a hypocrite.

If one cannot even understand what the word dichotomy means, or its use in action, your opinions on honesty are laughable, espe. coming from one who has trouble remembering which online personality he is.

I give you a small excerpt of what you wrote about Reagan in 2004: “Then, the bastard had to die on 6/5/04. Rather, his body died. His mind died about 30 years earlier, due to Alzheimer’s Disease, although the family only publicly admitted it when they could no longer hide the fact, nor stench from his diapers, in 1994.” If this isn’t vile and just plain stupid, then I guess I don’t have the first clue about what is,

So, just like John, you are backhandedly admitting your ignorance. Another slip in front of the mirror, Jeoff....or is it Gohn?

and I have NO doubt that if I actually had an interest in reading Shermer’s book, I’d find plenty of distortions, misquotes, and blatantly dishonest opinions interspersed thorough-out your review.

And like John, you have not read the book, and unlike him/you, I actually give direct quotes. But, I thought you do not 'overly care.'

Unfortunately though the mere thought of Shermer and the Market of the Mind makes me fall asleep.

But you're pretty wide awake. Funny how all these sciolists who 'do not care' and are 'bored' feverishly type away, and cannot resist getting bashed by smarter folk, because it's really the approbation of others you/John want, because you do not get it in real life.

Although proving you an idiot might actually be worth the time spent in sheer boredom.

Off to a poor start, as I've already proven you an idiot, and a dishonest schizophrenic one at that.

But back to John, his criticizisms and your claim that he distorts what you wrote. I have to say that I don’t agree with you, I will even go so far as to say that John has been overly honest and patient regarding this whole affair.

What you don't realize is that folk like you/John are a dime a dozen online, and I've pummeled better schizoids than you two/one. You are like gorillas with sign lingo. You have a limited repertoire that reveals the two of you are one. You see, writing styles are like fingerprints to those in the know, and I know you, my friend. The banana in your pants notwithstanding. You boxed yourself in by revealing too many of the limitations your alter-ego shares. It's a common technique, one you, as an unoriginal, fail to realize.

But despite anything I say here and now you’ll still believe you’ve been wrongly characterized in John’s posts and he was unjustified in doing it, so then all I’m left with is asking you, on behalf of the many others you’ve done the same thing to, how does it feel?

I've never lied nor distorted, but to the schizoid the normal seem strange. Like that old Twilight Zone episode where the bandaged girl thinks she's ugly, only to be a superbabe in a world of gargoyles.

For the rest of you, I encourage you to read the crap Dan Schneider has written about various people and subjects on word.

Again, thanks for the props. I'm sure you/John will be feverishly devouring every word, in between your bouts of carelessness and boredom.
Damn, this is fun. Forgive me for picking on the mentally ill, Lord!

Naturally, after pummeling Geoff, the John side of his personality re-emerges to defend the ‘other’ poster. And I humiliate him again:

Gohn/Jeoff:
Do you really think your morphing back to the other side and continuing your logorrhetic mishmash of nonsense is a winner?

'Cosmo: One cannot have an extreme without a mean, just as North is pointless w/o a South. If one speaks of 'extremes' there is logically at least one mean. Two extremes plus one mean equals a minimum of three reference points. The prefix di- in dichotomy means two. Therefore, I in no way, shape nor form implied nor directly stated a dichotomy.
Translation: When I spoke of "two" things i really meant three. Two is not the same as three. Therefore, there is no "dichotomy."
In other words, there is no "dichotomy" between a genius like me and a intellectual plebe like cosmo, because there are average people like Geoff who fall in the middle. Great "logic," cosmo. Give me more.

No, I actually spoke of more than two things, there was no specific, although 'more than two' starts with three. Again, it's called reading. Had you controlled your schizophrenia well enough in grade school you would have passed basic grammar. But you and You fall nowhere in the middle, save for a rubber room. And still not a single comment from either of you one that shows a hint of intelligence. And no need to declare victory. You didn't even show up for the rumble.
But, don't worry, the banana still works.

John then resorts to incoherent mimicry, and trying to invert the two first letters of my name and Cosmo, as I did Geoff’s and John’s. This drives him to reply, as Geoff again, and then the site owner declares he found my review interesting and well supported. I replied:

Mike: It's funny, but in everything from the mau-mau style at first to his reversal of the first letters in the appellations, John utterly proves my point, and with his on-again, off-again Geoff act, he does too, always chiming in perfectly with the expected responses.
Unfortunately, folk like John/Geoff, are so blindered by their own sill grandiosity, that they do not realize that there are thousands of deluded folk like him out there, who use the same 'Na-na, stick out the tongue, and give a raspberry tactic, only to immediately assume the 'other demeanor/personality' which congratulates the puerile half on how sane and rational they are, even though no other thinking being does.
Just look at how utterly Pavlovian John's/Geoff's replies have been, and the more I stare him down the more agitate and frustrated he gets.
The lesson you, Mike, should learn, is never have pity on these sciolistic sophists. Mock them ceaselessly. My wife was once on a Sylvia Plath e-list, and got cyber-stalked by a Finnish girl who we believe ended up killing herself, as several other people emailed us in regards to her stalking them.
Of course, like John/Geoff, this deluded girl also assumed personalities and claimed she was other people. But, their urges to lash out are like facial tics, and even applying a prosthetic cannot hide it.
Thus, I'm sure, in Pavlovian fashion, Geoff/John/Jim/Mr. Hand, will make a few more appearances....unless I am using reverse psychology, and goading him into silence.
The precipice awaits the deluded one.
I say, push until they do a Wile E. Coyote.

I later write: ‘But, John pseudonymously will have his bit of glory when his rants are used as illustrations in my varied essays on early Internet sciolism. This a joy that even Mr. Hand cannot give him, try though he may.’ Well, here it is, John-o! Get your hands a-wankin’. Totally beaten, the thread ends on this 82^nd post, by me:

Wherein John-John, now totally infantilized, decides that by airing a demonstrably stupid statement, detached from reality and history, for the 17th time, will now engender any reader without life enough to have read this far, will somehow impress said reader, who will have miraculously glided over his past follies. Witness:

'Lowering prices to drive out competitors isn't a very effective mechanism for the creation of monopoly since, in the end, there is an endless supply of upstart competitors and the would-be monopolist can only sell at below market rents for so long before he has to recoup his investment.'

Wherein Mr. Hand again babbles, distorts, and flat out lies, because he has no ability to cohere an argument:

'A couple of times during this excruciatingly long screed, cosmo falls back on "income inequality" as a failsafe retort to Shermer's position on this issue or that issue. Shermer argues that economies are not zero sum? Well, says cosmo, what about income inequality? Shermer argues that the overall standard of living is better today than ever before...well, says cosmo, what about income inequality? Cosmo suggests that present-day income disparities are directly correlated to the "happiness" of a population, irrespective of how much better off they are relative to the people of times past. Cosmo provides no support for this contention, but it doesn't stop him from asking if its "really that difficult to understand.".

This inarticulate and distorted babble thus falling perfectly into Mike Huben's prior iterated claim that 'Look, it's obvious that his every attempt to claim intellectual dominance is based on feeble rhetorical fallacies. He's compensating for something embarassing, though his arguments are embarassing enough. He adopts Humpty Dumpty's position on the meaning of the word dichotomization, and expects us to take him seriously?'
Yet, John blithely does not even care that his Pavlovian responses have lost any vitae.
Totally lost and defeated in arguments of substance, several paragraphs of misdirected and silly ad hominem follow, admixed with ample displays of bias and bigotry, and John has to again show his utter inability to have an original thought, muttering, 'Memo to cosmo: Greenspan was a devotee of Ayn Rand and a self-described libertarian,' clueless to the possibility that people can claim what they are till hell feezes, but their actions speak louder than their words. Of course, from a wannabe intellectual-cum- masturbatory schizophrenic troll, not any more is expected.
Thus, shorn of any claims to intellect, John sits and waits, as hours pass before he can muster another feeble response- will it be simple inanity or nasty deceit? In a rare moment of daring, John says, let it be both. So he types, as the girls giggle at his clammy hands:

The interesting thing to keep in mind, once again, is not so much anything John said in the exchange, since a) he did not read the book, b) he lied at every turn, c) he strawmanned, and d) he used different pseudonyms, but that it does not really matter, because he is as generic as they come, and, as I will show, later in this essay, ALL trolls are one and the same person, at least intellectually, although they may have separate bodies. The interesting thing that really shows what an idiot John and his personalities are comes from this thread; which links to a review of Shermer’s book which, in toto, says much the same things as mine does, but which is larded with bad writing, and not nearly as thorough as mine.

Not all political idiots are so obtuse. In fact, in the course of my piece on Shermer’s book, I ripped a political hack named Rudy Rummel. I wrote:

But, while someone like Adam Smith, right or wrong, is a reputable ‘authority,’ Shermer too often invokes less scrupulous authorities, if not outright charalatans. Near the end of the book he touts the <ahem> ‘political scientist’ Rudolph Rummel, whom Shermer misnames as Rudolf- one of quite a few misspellings and misattributions in my review copy, which I hope will be weeded out in the published version of the book. The problem with the touting of Rummel’s claim of the ‘democratic peace theory’- that democracies do not make war upon each other is that, well, it’s demonstrably false, and has been well debunked for some time. The claim was first propounded by anti-Communists in their zeal to rightly reveal the horrors that folk like Stalin and Mao wrought upon their peoples. Unfortunately, even a cursory glance at the list of wars that supposedly do not include two democracies elicits a strained ‘moving of the goalpost’ sort of definition, both before and after the wars. The American Civil War (at least half the nation considered itself a separate entity), the Spanish-American War, and even World War One, are vivid examples of where democracies fought bitterly. Some were limited democracies, but one could argue that America was not a true democracy until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Plus, aside from the three big American-involved conflicts, there are many lesser known wars about the globe that debunk the claim.

Even worse though, is Rummel’s backhanded coinage of the term ‘democide’- a faux neologism that most reject because it is so closely related to ‘genocide’ that there really is no valid reason for Rummel’s term, save for his own ego in wanting to be thought of in a league with Raphael Lemkin, the coiner of genocide, and many other genocide scholars whose work Rummel’s parasitically feeds off of. While this is certainly not on par with literary plagiarism, for Rummel’s statistics are often his own odd brew, sometimes wildly at odds with better researched information, nonetheless there is an unpleasant taint associated with such actions, and this evinces why Rummel is to ‘political science’ what Immanuel Velikovsky was to astronomy. It should also be noted that Rummel also long and falsely publicly claimed he was considered for a Nobel Peace Prize, then retracted the claim. Rummel, however, is not the only dubious figure the book references, albeit he is the most troubling. The press kit for the book also contains a blurb from the Deepak Chopra of ‘political science,’ Dinesh D’Souza, as well as plaudits for that seventh rate William F. Buckley knockoff, George Will.

In response, Rummel wrote a tepid reply on his now-defunct (sense a pattern?) blog. It is no longer available, not even on the Internet Archive. But, Rummel nor his commenters, refuted my claims, either on his personal dishonesty nor on the fact that there were two democracies in the wars.

Carlo Parcelli

Of course, political nonsense is all well and good, but most of my haters come from the arts, not piss poor humor sites nor political blogs. I’ve written of poor old poet Black Jack Foley. Unfortunately, like many of the other sites I quote from in this essay, Foley seems to have been kicked off the staff of the Alsop Review- all his articles are down. On the other hand, he does have a poorly edited Wikipedia page. Great shock, eh, after one reads his poetry? Like many other of the folks obsessed with me, Foley’s fallen off the radar after just a few years, as Cosmoetica cruises on. Nonetheless, a kid named Carlo Parcelli, a friend of Foley’s, decided to write a piece about me and my site that is as equally inane as anything Foley ever wrote. Here is a point to bear in mind- in fact, two points. First, after I dissect his rant, notice the similarity it shares with the rant from The Weekly Johnson. Second, I will compare Parcelli’s ‘poetry’ with mine, and the utter inferiority of his verse will be evident. Third, notice the utter generic similarity to the piece written by the anonymous humorist for The Weekly Johnson- assertions by fiat, no analysis, much less evaluation, and poorly worded and edited. And, fourth, Parcelli leaves out one crucial fact in his piece like, The Weekly Johnson piece, apparently written in 2006: that is that in late 2005 or early 2006, Parcelli submitted poems to me for posting on Cosmoetica. Because they were near-doggerel I, naturally, declined, and offered my criticisms. Unfortunately, the submission being four years, two computers, and several email services, ago, I do not have the poems and submission any longer. But, when one reads the piece, one can easily discern the puerile ‘revenge’ meme present, especially in his ascription of his own motives to me, as well his envy.

To his credit, though, he trumps the Johnson piece alone with a semi-inventive title: The Schneidercentric Poetry World Of Dan Schneider: Cosmoetica Vs. Planet Earth. Note that I will leave the sloppy editing and cheap formatting from his site intact. Onward:

There�s cranky. And then there�s Dan Schneider. Dan is a guy who just can�t let it go. It sticks in his craw. It pisses him off like kids leaving garbage on the front lawn or telemarketers calling during dinner.

Note how, like so many others, they start off by imbuing their argument with emotions, and claims of emotion on my part when, any quick read of a random selection of essays shows, above all, wit and verve and intellect. And, of course, like so many others, this assertion is not given any proof.

And what is Dan pissed off about. Taxes? Nuclear war? White slavery? No. Its poetry, no less. Poetry? Yeah, fuckin� poetry. Can you believe it?

Note, I left in the lacking apostrophe at Its poetry. But, even though I’m not pissed, and never have been; I merely tweak the bad poets out there, even if I, or anyone else, were pissed off at all the bad poets who get poetry published vs. the quality poetry that is unpublished, why in any rational sense, would that not be something that angers? So, Parcelli’s whole point, given he is a ‘poet,’ is pointless. Who should get emotional over poetry? Firemen, plumbers, dog-walkers?

And why is Dan pissed. Well, because no one will recognize that he is the �great poet� he has proclaimed himself to be. And as proof he has made it his mission to attack the current cr�me de la cr�me of the poetry world.

The first sentence is lacking a question mark. And, again the ad hominem claims about my anger over non-recognition. Well, like so many others, it’s a bit absurd to use the non-recognition claim for why I write essays when my website is one of a handful of the largest art sites in the world, traffic-wise. Then he states I attack the crème-de-la-crème of the poetry world. In fact, most of the poetry I dissect comes from poets who are little known today, even in the poetry world, and certainly only a handful of the living and dead are known to the general public. I even take on poets solely known online, as I show no bias to medium.

The sad fact is personal and ad hominem or not his attacks are generally thoroughly justified. What�s astonishing is that the mainstream poetry world has given him so much grist for his mill.

Given that most of my attacks are point on the writing, with the occasional humorous tweak, that does not constitute ad hominem. Then, look at this- Parcelli actually admits my essays are justified. What will become clear is that Parcelli is not really angry at me because he disagrees with my opinions but because he wishes that he was me, as a poet and critic, and that he had constructed something as well read as Cosmoetica. Envy, not ignorance (generally) is Parcelli’s motivation. And, in a sense, it was also a good part of the motivation for the Johnson idiots, since their website could not stand the test of time. Onward Parcelli rants:

To merit a �This Old Poem� mugging by ex-gang member Schneider there are four sins the poet getting thumped must commit. These are Schneiders� cardinal sins and he repeats then ad nauseam for virtually every contemporary poet he attacks.

His four cardinal sins are sloppy enjambment, use of clich�s, lack of concision and the stated or implied fact that they are not as �great� a poet as Schneider is.

Ok, so an easy fall back in to ad hominem; as if my teen past has anything to do with the bad poetry of those I’ve reviewed. The first three claimed sins are correct, although there are a dozen or more other ones neglected. As for the fourth- guess what? More ad hominem. Have I ever compared a poem someone wrote to one of mine? Of course. So? I’ve also compared the great works of others to inferior poems, books, films, and essays. Yawn.

The astonishing thing is that Schneider�s poetry and the poetry of people he claims to admire are virtually indistinguishable from the poetry he criticizes.

It turns out that Schneider�s imaginative range is as narrow as his critical one, a truly provocative position for someone making the claims Schneider makes.

An astonishing claim to make, from Parcelli, but let’s examine it. Here is doggerel from Andrei Codrescu, and some more from Li-Young Lee, online doggerelists Sarah Fox and John Colburn, and Gary Soto. I chose these four essays utterly at random. Now, let us compare them with four of my online poems, again chosen utterly at random: The Gross Clinic, The Symbol, The Twin Towers Canon, and Siamese Reflection. Now, even a quick glance at the poems in question shows my poetry’s superiority in metaphor, technique, phrasing, technical and structural complexity and technique. Let’s see about my imaginative range: I do a double star sonnet that is bound together in the middle, so that visually the poem, on famed Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, approximates conjoined persons. Hmm….I guess that sure cannot compare to Gary Soto’s formless ‘poem’ on eating lunch. Or compare John Colburn’s formless and overwrought ‘poem’ on brainwashing the skyline to my double canon sestina on the Twin Towers, with the actual higher tower being in the primary position, reading-wise. And, I might add, the prescient poem was written before 9/11, That tragedy only heightened the poem’s power.

So, what exactly is Parcelli trying to prove? That he has no clue what constitutes quality in poetry? As for his own ‘poems,’ well, we’ll get to that in a bit.

Now, at this point one could say �Okay buddy. Back this shit up with some concrete comparisons between Schneider�s work and those he criticizes.�

Schneider can take a hopelessly discursive and sentimental poem like Amy Clampitt�s Hermit�s Thrush and turn it into a hopelessly impressionistic and sentimental shorter poem, but is this an improvement and frankly why bother? Besides, Clampitt does create little impressionistic bon bons like her poem �Fog� and with far more �lan than Schnieder�s crampy squats.

Oh, really? Note how Parcelli rhetorically makes a claim to provide proof, then does not back it up. And, he even misspells my name. How is my version of Clampitt's poem ‘hopelessly impressionistic’? Look at it:

There is nothing impressionistic in the piece. I doubt Parcelli even knows what the term impressionism means. It is also shorn of sentiment, and the clunky music of the original. As I stated there: ‘it ‘shows’ what AC’s version tells (& tells’)’. Now, just as I have shown that Parcelli, like the prior idiot from Johnson, cannot back up their assertions, Parcelli claims this of me. Yet, in just reading this far in to this essay, I have backed up dozens of points, as I do in my other essays, Granted, obvious clichés are not going to make me footnote the hundreds of poems they’ve appeared in before, but I clearly back up what I claim; something Parcelli and others are unwilling and unable to do. He claims:

But that�s just one example. Where else does Schneider belie his kinship with those he criticizes? Most of his claims of poor enjambment, concision etc. are by fiat or are hopelessly subjective, based on interpretation as presented as fact. I would say that �claims of greatness� are also, at such close quarters, open to interpretation and best left to others like the unborn.

This is a beaut of a claim- note, Parcelli claims my claims are subjective, even as I painstakingly explain them, and then he utterly gives up the ghost on the task of criticism by stating: ‘�claims of greatness� are also, at such close quarters, open to interpretation and best left to others like the unborn’. Then why the hell have you written this piece, or any others? It makes no sense.

Besides, let�s leave it to our readers to decide the relative merits of the poetry that Schneider addresses on Cosmoetica.com , including his own.

With some poets like Pound and Zukofsky, he�s just out of his depth. Its obvious he�s never read The Cantos or �A�. He picks easier targets.

Well, I have read both pieces of crap- and keep them in mind when you read Parcelli’s ‘poetry.’ But the essence of his criticism is that I dared not do a This Old Poem on the two poems mentioned. Well, no, I dare not, and for a simple reason- both are book length poems of several hundred pages in length. The TOP essays deal with poems a page or under in length. Hmmm….Parcelli could not even reckon that?

Even his criticism of Noam Chomsky exposes Schneider�s soft underbelly. He claims as a linguist Chomsky has no place in presenting his insights into U.S. foreign and domestic policy. But I thought that was what democracy was at least in part about, citizen participation.

Further, the notion that Schneider could overwhelm Chomsky�s vast, decades long knowledge of U.S. foreign policy in a debate is delusional at best. And Dan, Chomsky did debate old lizard jowels, William F. Buckley, and so flustered Buckley by refusing to cop to his fictional conditionals, e.g. if this then that, that Buckley threatened to punch him.

This is another absurd claim. I never stated Chomsky had no right as a citizen to express his opinions. In my review of a film on Chomsky I wrote: ‘if he is a linguist, and tops in his field, why in the world would anyone care what he has to say on anything outside his field of expertise? I am a great writer and poet, but does that qualify me to speak on who was the greater sculptor, Rodin or Michelangelo? No, it’s outside my area of expertise….’ Note, I was not questioning Chomsky’s right to opine, merely why anyone would listen to a man so clearly out of his depths. But, why be accurate when strawmanning is so much more fun? As for debates, anyone reading this, or similar essays of mine, and watching Chomsky in that film, who does not realize I’d massacre him, is delusional. And, note, I never claimed I had superior ‘knowledge of U.S. foreign policy in a debate.’ But, I will state, that even as a layman, I could do better than someone ‘seeing conspiracies everywhere, and having glazed eyed coeds nod in bewildering approval of the most inane and outrageous things he’d say, rather than being on linguistics.’ And, as for threatening to punch Chomsky, no. Go Google the supposed threat- it was a comic play off of the real threat that Buckley made to writer Gore Vidal when Vidal kept calling Buckley a fascist. So, Parcelli is still oh-fer in his essay.

Now, recall when I claimed ‘Envy, not ignorance (generally) is Parcelli’s motivation.’ Here we get its display:

Then there�s that matter of paranoia. Schneider claims that he and his wife have received �personal and legal threats�, even death threats, presumably from people in the poetry world or that most dangerous of constituencies, poetry lovers.

No, not poetry lovers, but deranged online sickos, who are even worse than the folks, like those I display in this essay.

Ironically, for equally inflammatory pieces in FlashPoint, I have received no threats legal or otherwise. What am I doing wrong? I�ve been accused of everything Schneider�s detractors accuse him of and more. A few folks have threatened me with bodily harm but nothing very serious. Poets by and large tend toward gentleness which is why we get the kind of poetry Schneider in most cases legitimately attacks.

Look how desperately Parcelli wants to have the experiences I did. What he cannot wrap his mind around is the fact that his writing does not inflame others to passions for several reasons: a) it is not good. b) it does not make correct assertions (witness this ‘essay’). c) Flashpoint, while still online, unlike several other websites previously mentioned, is sputtering, with just a few issues in the last few years. In short, few read it. In almost13 years online it is significantly shy of a million hits. About 830k at this writing, or just under 64k per year. Actually, not bad for a poetry website. In almost 9 years online, Cosmoetica has almost 147 million hits to its front page alone. That’s an average of about 16+ million a year. Doing the math, that means Cosmoetica is 250 times as popular. And, if I tally in all the pages hit on my site- over 6.4 billion- or 711 million a year, that means Cosmoetica is about 11,000 times more popular. Good sense (I’ve abandoned the notion of common sense, for if common it would not have to be pointed to so often) tells someone that there are likely to be a few dozen seriously deranged nutcases in those 10,999 extra visitors I get for every single visitor to Parcelli’s website, no? So, what Parcelli is doing wrong is not giving the reading public intelligent writing; something they are starved for. Do more of it and you might get a bit higher ratio of the readers my site’s gotten. It’s that simple.

But, look at what passes for humor with folks like Parcelli- see the name of his organization:

Further, I�m associated with the Assassinated Press, a rather vulgar and vitriolic �parody� of American foreign policy and, aside from a couple of phone threats and a constant litany of adolescent pranks and attempts to disrupt the site, there has been nothing to genuinely fear even from the extreme right or the kleptocracy.

Dan�s claims, which I can only assume are true, have made me completely reassess FPs & APs roles as provocateurs.

Ooh, Assassinated- like a play off of Associated. Wow, really funny. And yes, one is hardly a provocateur if no one is reading you. That’s if provocation, and not amelioration and edification, is what you want to do. But, since we’ve seen how badly Parcelli wants to mimic Cosmoetica’s successes, what the next tack? Of course, imbue his own flaws on to me:

Dan wants recognition. The claims on his site cry out for it. His claims of greatness come so often they take on the tone of special pleading, even whining.

So, let’s get this right. If one admits the obvious- like my poems being superior to the bad poetry that I dissect in essays (again, see above), this is evidence of crying out for recognition? Obviously, Parcelli knows little of history, for greatness gets its due in time, once idiots like Parcelli go the way of the dinosaur. See Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions for a good parallel to what goes on in the arts. But, let’s add this fact in, too. It was Parcelli who submitted his poetry to me and my site for approval, not the other way around. It was he who wanted my recognition. In fact, this essay must be giving Parcelli a boner even as he reads it. This is typical of people who claim my site is bad, irrelevant, etc., yet obsessively read it. Cosmoetica’s masses are the silent lurkers of the Internet, but it’s folks like Parcelli that actually link to it and improve its chances of being stumbled upon.

Then we get Parcelli’s Leftist political nonsense emerging (as if it was not already apparent with his lipsmacking over Noam Chomsky):

And then there�s the energy he puts into his site. But this will only take you so far. Witness the years Kent Johnson has wasted on his Yasusada fraud. Years better spent doing whatever it is Johnson does.

Or take the Language poets who exerted so much political energy in asserting an idea of poetry that none of them actually believed in and few adhered to. What more pathetic scene than to see those three old lovable frauds Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman at Silliman�s recent publication reading for his opus, The Alphabet, before an audience of perhaps 35? I�m certain Dan wouldn�t be happy with that.

Then there�s Flarf or whatever it is Mark Wallace is doing, putting politics before the product. Or Dana Gioia hawking reactionary poetics with Laura Bush like he�s still hustling the shit manufactured by General Foods when he was an avaricious young VP there.

The irony is when I show you Parcelli’s poetry, in a bit, his taking on the rest of these poetic frauds will show that he has ‘kinship with those he criticizes.’ As for Silliman, why would I care of his coterie of no-talents? Unlike Parcelli, I am interested in the arts, not the posturing and politicizing aspects that infect most art. Yet, somehow, the energy (much less the excellence) I put into Cosmoetica is on par with these folks? Multiply all the people who have read the poems of all the people mentioned in these three quoted paragraphs, and multiply it by a few thousand, and that’s the number of folks who have read the good and great poetry (mine and others) on my site. It’s also why, unsurprisingly, it was Parcelli who submitted his poems to me, and not the other way around. Yet, delusively onward, Parcelli rants:

In essence, that�s what Dan Schneider is doing. He�s blasting out a place for his work to gain some eminence. This explains why his targets are generally people writing in the same vein he does. Just by fiat, Dan says he�s better. And in many cases, it would be disingenuous to say he�s not, so �hide bound to shit town� is the art form today.

Foetry.com was right. The poetry world runs on fellatio like so much else in this culture. But, Dan, if you want recognition, you�re going about it the wrong way unless you think you can overturn the whole order.

So, yet again, Parcelli falls back on his by fiat declamations, then turns them around against me. I’ve shown the superiority of my poems, and that they are in no way in any vein like those I criticize, but damn if Parcelli is not going to keep the lie going. And, by the way, I noted the role of fellatio in modern poetry long before Foetry.com existed. And, like the other previously mentioned defunct websites, Foetry is dead for over two years, while Cosmoetica keeps humming along. And, history shows that, ala Kuhn, great art is always going to overturn the whole order, but it takes time, once someone is safely dead, usually.

But did you know that mainstream publishers publish poetry because those volumes inevitably lose money and provide the company with tax write-offs?

No shit? Again, since I am interested in the art, not merely hawking my name, why would I care? Of course, this is written that way because Parcelli cares, very much, because he so desperately wants to be a famous poet.

Regardless, I promised a looksy at Parcelli’s poems, so here goes. Here’s a piece from Eschatology Of Reason: The North Tower:

Then there�s Flarf or whatever it is Mark Wallace is doing, putting politics before the product.

Is it any wonder that so few people take modern poetry seriously? I mean, Parcelli is doing the same randomized, unmusicked prose broken into lines and typed randomly across a page that the poets he condemns do. And, try to reckon what those 9 lines state. Now, let me give you two sets of nine lines from similar poems by myself, for comparison. This from Siamese Reflection (pardon the formatting problems):

done to all touch, as I touch your fingers,
and dream of the foundering hulk of blue,

                            bound for my body, content to linger,
                                     unifying the quarters of my heart,                               as it spoils, the younger, nicer dream,
                                     which connect with yours, now devoid of love,          the one from which our bodies have spilled,
                                     and life, sunk low in your still auricles,                        into this world, one hand grabs another,
                                    where nothing of me is, and nothing feels,                   as this thought abounds, my silent brother:
                                     as if I am, less than your death's last part.                   The dead do not realize. They only seem.

Unlike Parcelli’s anomic wannabe The Cantos, larded with classic bigwordthrowingarounding that makes little sense, my verse actually says multiple things in multiple ways, shorn of clichés, with great music, and the lines’ placement on the page have real meaning.

Or, let’s look at nine lines from the North Tower sestina in The Twin Towers Canon:

like the future, itself, which can never grow smaller,
the murmurs of tomorrow, which gets us through this night,
nothing but a part of our love, which can enter,
and recede, with your kiss. You are that hope, which I pull
on in the breeze of adventure, which dares to alight,
on your being, as your eyes disavow the skyline,

as the east meets morning. The skyline would grow smaller,
without you, if our love were to pull, as the night,
what kind of love could it light? Or a new love enter?

Man, how dare I say my poetry is better than Parcelli’s? Here’s another snippet from that long poem, this subtitled Eschatology Of Reason: Shaping the Noise:

Boy, just sort of brings you to tears, doesn’t it? And, recall Parcelli’s shot at the political crapola of the other poets? Well, check out this masterpiece, carved from the same unending piece of doggerel:

This sort of writing can only inspire laughs at wannabes like Parcelli. Is there any wonder why I turned down his submission all those years ago, and why he was obsessed with attacking the man and site he so desperately wanted approval from? Of course, this was so even before I got online. A decade ago, in the City Pages story where I first admitted to the interviewer that I was a better poet than Walt Whitman, I created a flurry of responses to the paper. Over 120, and all were positive, save the 15 negative pieces they posted. And, of those 15 negative responses, all of them were from people who, at one time or another, sought my approval for their poetry, or resented the fact that I was a better poet than they were, and moved more people at readings. Like them, I rejected Parcelli’s submission, and likely gave good advice on how to improve his verse. Or, I may have even stated the obvious, that he lacked poetic talent and should not waste his life. How dare I be honest? So, he tries to imitate me, at least in what his limited mind can see that I do- be a provocateur. Be outrageous. Of course, I actually elucidate art to many people- I tear down the walls between high art and the layety- almost the exact opposite of what critics in literature and film these days, do. They try to construct walls about their art forms, and develop a priesthood. This is where Parcelli’s frustration and anger stem from, as well as his lack of critical wit and insight.

But, like so many other online cyberstalkers and obsessives, Parcelli lives on his own planet, while I live on planet Earth. His is a world where ‘poetry’ consists of self-conscious bigwordthrowingarounding and banal quotation that lacks music, logic, and does not even have the fall back of being Negatively Capable, making logic out of something that seemingly is illogical, at first blush. But, for every Parcelli, a Cosmoetica rejectee who seeks to vent his spleen in a dishonest screed, there are a thousand or more silent folk that mostly agree with Cosmoetica and me. These are the lurkers. But, occasionally, there are folks who disagree with me and, at first, at least, seem like reasonable people. They email or send me a link to a post they’ve written, where they try to tackle some subject I’ve opined on. Usually they are in way over their heads, even from the get go. Sometimes, they even unwittingly agree with what I’ve stated, but are so obtuse and/or set on arguing for argument’s sake, that they cannot even see that point!

A few months back I got an email from a fellow who called himself the Vermont Poet. He sent me a link to an essay he wrote in contra to my seminal essay
Politics & Theory: Robinson Jeffers, & The Metric Fallacy. As you will see, I am willing and able to dismiss the essay, logically and historically, rather easily, but I will indulge some of the points Vermont Poet makes, simply as an educational boon to my readers, and because he actually does link to Cosmoetica. Unfortunately, as in most such cases, after a few tepid replies, and my general lack of enthusiasm over the piece, I dismissed it rather blithely. The next email I received from the Vermont poet had an attachment and was four to five times the size of the prior email. This said to me a) the man was raging and sent a virus, or b) the man had written a book length screed that took him hours of slavering over, which, in sum would state: I hate you. So, I deleted the email without reading it nor opening the attachment, and also deleted the few prior emails, just as a precaution. Naturally, someone like Carlo Parcelli would long for such idiotic replies, but having had more than my share of them, I did not.

Anyway, herein the text of the Vermont Poet’s essay (note his anonymity- you have to really look to see his name is Patrick Gillespie):

Critiquing the Critic: Is Meter Real?

In the course of writing another post, I stumbled across Dan Schneider’s essay Robinson Jeffers, & The Metric Fallacy. The essay itself was so stuffed with ludicrous and fallacious arguments that I can’t help responding.

Ok, here is a poor sign of things to come. Note that he does not even get the title of my essay correct. The correct title is Politics & Theory: Robinson Jeffers, & The Metric Fallacy. And, there is a reason for the Politics & Theory portion that is largely missed in the Vermont Poet’s essay. Yet, this casual inaccuracy is reflective of most of the rest of the post.

Ostensibly, Schneider’s essay is a defense of Robinson Jeffers, but for the first 1867 words (counted by WordPerfect) Schneider only mentions Jeffers’ name twice, and this is in last 75 words. So Schneider’s essay is really two essays, the first being nothing less than a diatribe. And even after reading the essay as a whole, one isn’t quite sure how the diatribe is a defense of Jeffers. But it’s the first part of the essay I’ll be responding to.

Note how VP gives a false impression of the essay. First, he tries to imply that because the first portion of the essay discusses metrics this is somehow an abnormality. Yet, most essays, formally speaking, often preamble their subject matter with backgrounded history. So, what I am doing is very much a Classical feint. Either VP is ignorant of this or willfully disregards it in place of bias. Then he calls it a diatribe. Technically, he is correct, using the ancient meaning of the term, as a lengthy discourse. But by framing the term with ‘nothing less than,’ VP is clearly disparaging the essay by using its modern meaning: bitter or abusive writing, or satirical speech. But, look at his quotations of my essay, and it’s clear that everything I state is reasonable, not bitter, abusive, and only mildly sardonic. He goes on:

What if someone actually said to you that all music was composed of just 2 notes? Or if someone claimed that there were just 2 colors in creation? Now, ponder if such a thing were true. Imagine the clunkiness & mechanicality of such music. Think of the visual arts devoid of not just color, but sepia tones, & even shades of gray.

Schneider immediately frames his argument as a choice between absurdity (metrists) and reason (Schneider). How absurd to think that music would be composed of two notes? Wouldn’t it be a fool’s errand to disagree with him? Schneider would like you to think so. This is called framing an argument. Politicians do it all the time. The Republicans are especially good at it. Who could argue with a Clear Skies Initiative or who could argue with the No Child Left Behind act?

Of course, now VP tries to claim I am biasing a reader, even though I have shown him clearly guilty of the very thing he accuses me of. He frames his argument by implying my essay form is anomalous and that it is nothing more than bitter writing. He then claims an absurdity in itself, and one which I shall shortly totally and historically debunk. He claims I am framing the argument between absurdity and reason. Of course I am. The only problem with the claim is that ‘there is nothing wrong with that!’ This is because when there is an absurdity and a reasonable argument, there is no reason NOT to point this out. Onward:

But what metrist has ever asserted that meter is composed of just two discrete stresses and that, furthermore, these two stresses are precisely the same no matter the context? None, unless there’s some fusty nineteenth century pedant I’ve never heard of. Even the fustiest recognized that the markings used in scanning poetry were a relative indication – symbols and nothing more.

Now, here is where we get to the definitive debunking of all that VP states, and which renders the rambling prose and vacuous defenses that follow obsolete.

Amazingly, VP asks, without tongue in cheek, ‘But what metrist has ever asserted that meter is composed of just two discrete stresses and that, furthermore, these two stresses are precisely the same no matter the context?’ He answers none, but the truth is that it is nearly ALL. VP backsteps slightly by stating he’s never heard of such a claimant, but this really goes to the heart of his artistic ignorance. I will now disprove such by using two definitive texts. The first is from Webster’s Universal Unabridged Dictionary (1964). In reference to meter (meaning poetic metrics, no other usages of the term):

1. (a) rhythm in verse; measured, patterned arrangement of syllables, primarily according to stress and length; (b) the specific rhythm as determined by the prevailing foot and the number of feet in the line; as iambic meter; (c) the specific rhythmic pattern of a stanza as determined by the kind and number of lines.

But, if that is not enough, I will go to what is considered, nowadays, the definitive Bible on the history and technical aspects of poetry: The New Princeton Encyclopedia Of Poetry And Poetics (1993). It goes on for 14 double columned pages in minutia, but its take on meter is clear from the opening:

The oldest and most important device of Verseform, m. selects one phonological feature of lang. (stress, pitch, length) and reduces it several levels or degrees in ordinary speech (3 or 4 levels of stress; high, mid, and low pitch; various durations) to a simple binary opposition (‘stress’ vs. ‘unstress’; ‘level’ vs. ‘inflected’ pitch; ‘long’ vs. ‘short’) which may be generalized as ‘marked’ vs. ‘unmarked’.

This is very important to note, because from the start of my essay through its end, I am the person arguing that meter is a reductio ad absurdum, it is not real, and it reduces human speech to a false binary opposition. Princeton proves I’m right on that score, and says so in black and white. And remarkably, as you read the rest of VP’s text, you will see he actually agrees that meter is a binary reduction; he just likes it. In essence, he agrees with me, but just wants to argue on the point! As for meter being about ‘relative’ pitch, this is wholly made up by VP. Note that no relativity is mentioned by Webster’s. So, unequivocally, I have shown that VP is wrong, 100% wrong, and done so by pointing to texts that have nothing to do with me nor Cosmoetica, and which long preceded both on this planet. Anything else added by VP in his essay is just then gratuitous hyperbole that is meaningless, because the very font of his argument has been rendered null and void by logic, history, and the guardians of such. It is, as in legal parlance, fruit from a poisoned tree. Anything that proceeds from its flawed (and likely dishonest) premise is just as wrong and illogical as the fundaments that VP bases his whole argument. But, as I stated, I am going to pretend that the two authorities’ defenses of my claims did not exist, just so I can have fun with the rest of VP’s essay, and rip the subsequent idiocies limb from limb, hammering, annihilating, and harpooning them with ease.

Just note how, as with the Johnson idiot and Parcelli, VP imbues his own logical and critical flaws on to me. As I said, people like this, in a sense, are just one hive mind occupying separate bodies. They add nothing to life nor intelligence on the planet. And, if Webster’s and Princeton were not enough proof, one merely has to have hung around stage actors, especially those who have done Shakespeare, and they will tell you that their directors almost always tell them to accentuate the ‘meter’ in their readings. The actors do extensive breathing exercises, and will place themselves at advantageous spots on a stage to best maximize the projective crests and falls of their voice. This is why, actually, Shakespearean drama sounds so ‘unnatural’ to modern ears. It was men like Ibsen, Shaw, and O’Neill, that thankfully liberated drama into modernity by scrapping the folly of iambic pentameter in playwriting. Of course, I never claimed to be the first person to ever argue against the folly of meter; there have been a few to state the obvious, including Robinson Jeffers, but the bulk of the mainstream still clings to the dogma of meter, not as a relative thing, but as the thing. I just proved it.

But let’s examine how Schneider frames his diatribe by altering a couple of words:

What if someone actually said to you that all music was composed [of just 2 beats]?

Well, on the face of it, why not? Any peice of music in 2/4 time is written with 2 beats – a downbeat and an off-beat. Within that binary ground there is an infinite variety of shading. But, when it’s time to dance, everybody knows where the downbeat is. Period. If this weren’t the case, then there would be no such thing as dancing. What if Schneider said the following: No two beats of music are the same (no two are played with the same volume or emphasis), even in 2/4 time, therefore the whole concept of a time signature is absurd. To quote Schneider, to suggest such things to a musician or painter or photographer would most likely engender- if not outright laughter- some strange looks, indeed.

Note what VP does. He immediately goes in to a strawman argument. I actually argued ‘What if someone actually said to you that all music was composed of just 2 notes?’ I did not argue about beats. Notes and beats are not the same thing. So there is no point in the change. Except that VP wants to pretend that he is arguing against a claim of mine, rather than his, because he cannot answer my initial query, as I have shown. To claim that he is correct, VP would have just as likely reframed the query as ‘What if someone actually said to you that all music was composed [of just 2 beets]?’ Changing the single letter a to e in beets would be just as logically absurd as VP’s change, and just as meaningless to my query. Vegetables, of course, have little to do with musical notation; just as beats do not. So, barely into his screed, VP has been shown to be 100% wrong on his main argument, and already resorted to strawman dialectics. As I stated in my essay: ‘For those of you who adhere to the metric fallacy no copious amount of disproof will suffice. You are the Flat Earthers of literature.’ Then, naturally, he accuses me of strawmanning:

For the uninitiated meter is the theory (claiming origin by several cultures) that spoken language consists of 2 primary vocalizations of a sound- i.e.- stressed & unstressed.

First, Schneider’s definition of meter is wrong. Period. Latin meter does not consist of stressed or unstressed “sounds”. Neither does meter in Chinese or Greek. Meter, to the initiated, is the means by which poets organize their respective langauges into predictable patterns. But anyway, the absurdity of Schneider’s assertion makes for an easy straw man. He then states, as though he were the first one to realize it, that “in the context of spoken words, as well as those internal voicings, an absolute plenitude of stress levels ensnares one.”

Yes, and there are an absolute plenitude of stress levels when performing rhythm in music. This doesn’t mean that a time signature doesn’t exist. Meter is nothing more than a kind of time signature. Any Iambic meter could be thought of as a 2/4, 4/4, etc. time signature. It is a binary, Iambic, time signature. A Dactylic meter could be treated as having a 3/4, 6/8, 9/4, etc. time signature.

Think of meter as a time signature and you will avoid the same cognitive trap that Schneider falls into.

Simply put, head upward, and reread Webster’s and Princeton’s definitions. VP is 100% wrong logically, historically, and definitionally. Period. End of story. And, naturally, by pointing the essay to Robinson Jeffers, I am absolutely not claiming to have been the first to note the metric fallacy. So why does VP claim this? Because, he has no way to logically argue against what I wrote, only against his misstatements about what I wrote. This is, definitionally, strawmanning. Onward:

In fact the dualistic notion of mere stressed & unstressed sounds is- in practice by its many proponents- almost always so loose as to be meaningless anyway, as metrics should really redefine its definitions as greater & lower stress(es) (with a plenum of in-betweens), since (obviously) a truly unstressed syllable would be silent. But even that is far too inadequate, for even if you would read this essay aloud to this point- you would, if to tape it on any recorder, really hear at least a dozen stress levels- if not several dozen, were your ear fine-tuned enough.

Having set up and burned down his straw man, Schneider then engages in nothing less than reductio ad absurdum.His argument? Since stressed and unstressed syllables can be read with almost infinite gradation, there is no such thing as stressed and unstressed. But this argument is a red herring. No one denies that stress is subject to infinite variation. No metrist is arguing for fixed stress, but only relative stress.

You notice how all these idiots that choose to argue with me basically try to ape a portion of my writing style, but they always fail. The Johnson kid tried to be poseur tough, but lacked any intellect. Parcelli tried to show off as an intellect, but lacking such, his essay devolved into nonsense. VP, on the other hand, tires using the very methods I routinely debunk, impute them on me, but gets ballocksed up in his own absurd logic. As for stress, I proved that metrics dies at the hand of a third stress level:

Instead I will offer up a simple word that disproves the theory for those of you willing to listen- sorry for the pun. About a decade ago- perhaps the late 1980s, these similar, & other- thoughts of metrics alighted. Perhaps I was watching the late ‘80s version of the TV show Star Trek at the time, or had it in mind. Anyway, I decide that any 3-or-greater-syllabled word should readily disprove metrics. I picked up my Webster’s & opened it at random- yet landed on the word generations.
A nice 4-syllabled word. The dictionary had it diacritically marked as ge¢ ne ra¢ tions, or (stressed-unstressed-stressed-unstressed). But really listen: if you say the word over & over; just this word, mind you, free of context & naked upon the table- generations, generations, generations….it should become clear that there are 4 distinct stress levels. The hardest stress is on the 3^rd syllable ra. The next hardest stress is on 1^st syllable ge. 3^rd hardest stress is on 4^th syllable tions. And the least stressed syllable is the 2^nd ne. Numerically put, in descending stress order the 4 syllables queue up as 2413 or ge² ne⁴ ra¹ tions³ . Go ahead, say it over & again- as naturally as you can & the stress levels I claim should become apparent. Now, the logical argument is that in even a typically lengthed paragraph the actual stress numbering would quickly become unwieldy. True. As well as nearly infinitely complex the longer the piece runs. But here is another truism, long hidden by the Classicist bent- music in language, or poetry, has almost nothing to do with the individual stresses of syllables.

Not unsurprisingly, VP never quotes this portion of the essay. As for his repeated fallacy about no one arguing for fixed stress, two words: Webster’s, Princeton. Again, wrong, yet VP subscribes to the fallacy that by repeating a lie, the lie becomes true after a certain number of repetitions. Now, VP really shoots himself in the foot:

You would get some strange looks from all those musicians, artists and photographers. Indeed. Or try declaiming the line with no stress at all.

It makes sense. The symbols don’t mean that each stress is of a fixed pitch. No, this line could be spoken in an infinite variety of ways – but in all those ways, the syllables would always be stressed and unstressed in relation to each other. This is the way the English language works. What if the actor wanted to emphasize that instead of is in the fourth foot? Then he would speak it this way:

If Schneider is to be believed, such a feat wouldn’t be possible. But it is. And it is because English speakers use relative stress (strongly stressing one syllable while weakly stressing another) to indicate focus.

As mentioned, actors are taught breathing exercises so that their speech can come nearly as close to the diacritical stresses that VP annotates. That he is ignorant of this says a bit. Secondly, look at his bolded and unbolded version of the Hamlet line. Then look at the diacritical version. It’s just an inversion, it’s not a wholly new scansion method as I advocate in my scanning of generations. It is merely stating one stress level and the other need to be reversed. It is not arguing for, as VP claims, relative stress, but FOR fixed stress. He then states this- a classic strawman: ‘the syllables would always be stressed and unstressed in relation to each other.’ Well, no shit, Sherlock, what would they be stressed in relation to: strawberry ice cream, Mussolini’s grave, the Crab Nebula? By emphasizing the line with italics, VP is drawing attention to this as a BIG point he’s making, yet it says absolutely nada! Then he further strawmans by stating that I could not believe in the inversion of a foot n a line of a given metric. Why not? I am the one calling for, as VP admits, a plenum of stress levels. I would find, and expect to find, the very such thing in almost every run of five or six syllables. Again, VP is arguing against his misunderstanding of (to be generous) or misreading of (to lack alms) my essay.

It never fails to bring a chuckle to my face when I read something someone writes that is so screwed up because of the person’s ire toward me over some minor point that, as I state, the person actually agrees with me on, but is too fixated against me to realize. He digs his hole even deeper:

In English, all syllables are relatively stressed or unstressed in relation to each other. Setting aside poetry and metrists, there is a whole field called Stress Linguistics dedicated to the very real and serious understanding of this facet of language. Maybe Schneider would like to argue that Stress Linguistics is a sham? Try teaching a computer how to speak English. The study of stress in language allows the computer to corrrectly identify which words receive stress and which don’t, otherwise they sound monotone and even incomprehensible.

In English, stress is most dramatically realized on focused or accented words. For instance, consider the dialog

In it, the stress-related acoustic differences between the syllables of “tomorrow” would be small compared to the differences between the syllables of “dinner“, the emphasized word. In these emphasized words, stressed syllables such as “din” in “dinner” are louder and longer.^[1][2][3] They may also have a different fundamental frequency, or other properties. Unstressed syllables typically have a vowel, which is closer to a neutral position (the schwa), while stressed vowels are more fully realized. [Wikipedia]

What’s important to understand is that these stresses (unstressed and stressed) can be objectively measured and that the stress is relative. All that meter does is to organize these relative stresses into a pattern: Iambic Pentameter, Tetrameter and Trimeter; Anapestic Pentameter or Tetrameter; Dactylic Trimeter. This is what nursery rhymes do.

Now, having failed to build his strawman, VP descends into what is technically known, in the field of essaying, as , well….mumbling. That is to say, as in when in doubt, mumble. This is just a recapitulation of the strawman he failed to build earlier. Yet, he actually, again, makes my argument over the fallacy of meter, by emphasizing that there are more than two stress levels, which is what meter is about. And, before VP can say it, let me Abbot and Costello him: Webster’s. Princeton. Third base?

From this unpromising beginning, Schneider delves into some real gobbledygook. He places the invention of meter at the feet of “Classical Society’s need for reductivist explanations to fit into their simplistic cosmological view”. The absurdity of this statement is in the implication that “classical society” was responsible for the invention of meter. But meter isn’t limited to the English language. It’s also a feature of ancient Latin and Greek epic poetry. It’s also a feature of recently discovered ancient Egyptian poetry – poetry written long before such a thing as “classical society”. Maybe Schneider wants to argue that meter is a product of a “classical society” within ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt too?

While not this essay’s aim my guess- very plainly stated- is that it was Classical Society’s need for reductivist explanations to fit into their simplistic cosmological view. Choros/antichoros, light/dark, good/evil, 4 (or 5) Elements, etc. There was the need to codify all things known. And this simply stuck (again, the many cultural/political/religious reasons are too varied to delve here.). And unlike the Rings of Hell or the Music of the Spheres, there was no overwhelming accumulation of evidence to its contrary to inspire its shucking-off-from. And by the time the King James Bible, Billy Blake, & old Walt Whitman arrived to successively turn metric verse into free verse, the idea of metrics was so entrenched that its fallacy was needed- lest how does one organize the Whitmanian Revolution if there is nothing against which to revolt? In other words, vers librists have actively promoted the metric fallacy in order to have a hegemony to toss! While one might admire the wicked complicity between the 2 ‘supposedly’ warring camps of poetry, one is still left with the fallacy at the root of it all.

Note, how I make an asides of this, with a number of qualifiers. Still, it’s a reasonable assumption. Note how VP claims, ‘But meter isn’t limited to the English language.’ He says the Greeks, Latins and Egyptians also wrote in it. Great point, correct, and exactly what I meant. But, wait, he just argued that I was wrong to pin it on Classical Society, then admits it. What? And, earlier in the essay he typed: ‘Latin meter does not consist of stressed or unstressed “sounds”. Neither does meter in Chinese or Greek.’ Well, which is it? Or does history morph at VP’s will? From not knowing that almost all cultures have Classical periods to arguing, literally, against his own earlier claims, VP has wound himself into a ball. He states:

Schneider then compares the English language to the gallop of a horse which, when caught on film, turns out to be far more complex that artists previously thought. But Schneider is merely dismantling an argument no one but he, himself, has made. No metrist or Stress Linguist would assert that English is ruled by two discrete stresses. All stress is relative. A true analogy would be to assert that scanning metrical poetry is, in fact, more like the horse’s known gait while Schneider’s characterization of meter is more like the naive artist’s before film was invented.

Scheider’s fundamental ignorance of the artistry behind the writing of meter is revealed when he touts variant feet as proof that meter is invalid.

Therefore iambic pentameter- easily the most common meter is 5 iambs- or 10 syllables- although an elided final stressed syllable or unvoiced extra syllable often occur, & are allowed. Yet these oft-recurrent exceptions (& tacit admissions of the theory’s invalidity) have not seemed to vitiate the metric rules its adherents cling to. Similarly anapestic trimeter is 3 anapests or 9 syllables. Yet with the same exceptions allowed as in iambs one might confuse the 2 meters quite often- especially when they often flout their own prerogatives.

Why a variant foot is a “tacit admission of the theory’s invalidity” goes unexplained. What does Schneider mean by theory? He doens’t tell us. And that’s because…

There is no theory. Poets, during different periods, might have prided themselves in their ability to produce strict, unvarying metrical lines, but all the greatest poets recognized that metrical inflexibility produced monotony. The effect was unnatural. Schneider seems to interpret this as meaning that meter is therefore unnatural and invalid, but the interpretation is absurd. Just because unvarying meter produces monotony doesn’t mean that relative stress doesn’t exist. On the contrary, it proves that it does! And it proves that the best way to reduce the monotony of a too-regular metrical pattern is to introduce variant feet. Also, whether or not one “confuses” meters has no bearing on whether relative stress can produce meter.

Putting aside some major typos here, VP goes off the beam in a big way. Again: Webster’s. Princeton. The metric theory is just that, a theory, because, as shown, it does not exist in the real world. Even VP admits this. It is an attempt to describe the way people speak, in poetry. It simply fails. One can look at an almost infinite array of lines that are lumped together under some metric canard, and see that there are enough variants and exceptions to the rule that, even were one to believe in meter, one would sanely have to question why, since the exceptions likely outnumber the rules. But, having shown meter’s fallacy, why would one reductively adhere to it? And, when something is canonized in the authoritative English Language Dictionary for the masses, and the Bible of poetics, yes, that’s pretty good evidence that the theory is accepted. But look at this: ‘Just because unvarying meter produces monotony doesn’t mean that relative stress doesn’t exist. On the contrary, it proves that it does!’ No it does not. It proves that meter does not exist. Relative stresses are not the whole point of my essay, a plenum of stresses is. To even use the term relative stress is a redundancy. ‘And it proves that the best way to reduce the monotony of a too-regular metrical pattern is to introduce variant feet,’ argues VP. Of course not! It proves that the meter is nonexistent, not that a majority of exceptions has to be introduced to prove the minority of rules. It is really astounding to read such sciolism, but awfully depressing to know that this is 99.9+% of the writing online, across a vast array of topics. Then we see, yet again, how little VP actually read of my essay, much less understood it. Just as he gets the essay’s title wrong, he gets the word I chose as proof wrong. He claims it was generation, not generations.

Schneider then introduces what, to him, is his killer piece of evidence – the word generation.

A nice 4-syllabled word. The dictionary had it diacritically marked as ge¢ ne ra¢ tions, or (stressed-unstressed-stressed-unstressed). But really listen: if you say the word over & over; just this word, mind you, free of context & naked upon the table- generations, generations, generations….it should become clear that there are 4 distinct stress levels.

Once again, Schneider seems to have discovered (all on his own) what the rest of the poetical world has known for thousands of years. Stress is relative. Regardless of whether there are 4 distinct stress levels, the second and fourth syllables will always receive less stress than the first and second syllable. This is what scansion indicates – relative stress. (And I can’t stress that enough.)

Again, VP falls back on to his strawman. As I showed in my essay (and above), there are not relative stresses, but four distinct stresses. Period. This is not relative, save for the broadest meaning of the term on a subjective level. It is a fact, just as there are four syllables. Then he claims: ‘the second and fourth syllables will always receive less stress than the first and second syllable.’ Here I debunk it: invidious. Look the word up in the dictionary and see which syllable receives the stress. In short, as with the claims made for relative stress, VP’s claim on when things receive stress is palpably and 100% wrong. Period. No argument. Stress it all he likes, but he is wrong, and stress does not make a lie a truth. As an asides, one of the more humorous aspects of these sorts of arguments is when I argue with someone who is not just wrong, but absolutely and demonstrably wrong. That invidious means ‘tending to cause discontent, animosity, or envy,’ or the exact reason for VP’s rant, is pure coincidence. Lo, he rambleth still:

But here is another truism, long hidden by the Classicist bent- music in language, or poetry, has almost nothing to do with the individual stresses of syllables.

And, actually, I’m not troubled by this assertion. Schneider says “almost nothing”. Depending on how he defines “music in language”, he could be right, somewhere in between, or maybe wrong. But he doesn’t tell us what it means to him. He only tells us that this “music” has “almost nothing to do” with individual stresses. OK, but what does almost mean? Again, he doesn’t tell us. All we know is that stress does have something to do with the music in language but not everything.

From this point Schneider offers an alternative to understanding the “music of words” in lines. They rest on “rime (in all its varied form & types), alliteration, assonance, enjambment, & in the overall tropes of lines in accordance with the lines directly before & after it.” But what is striking is that Schneider essentially rediscovers (perhaps without realizing it) Robert Frost’s principle of the “sound of sense“. Schneider goes on to described “sharply-sounded lines” and states that “the digression- say, to some warm memory of love- may necessitate or facilitate the abrupt switch in line sound”. In a nutshell:

Simply put, music in verse- or language- depends on the congruence of syllable with syllable, word with word, line with line, stanza with stanza, etc.- as well as each of those congruent units’ emotional/intellectual congress with sound & meaning.

(…) I am possibly the only person going who works on any but a worn out theory (principle I had better say) of versification. You see the great successes in recent poetry have been made on the assumption that the music of words was a matter of harmonised vowels and consonants. Both Swinburne and Tennyson arrived largely at effects in assonation. But they were on the wrong track or at any rate on a short track…

(…) Those sounds are summoned by the audial imagination and they must be positive, strong, and definitely and unmistakeably indicated by the context. The reader must be at no loss to give his voice the posture proper to the sentence.

The parallels and the extent to which Schneider reinvents Frost’s sense of sound is striking. This whole principle of music in sentence sounds, first elucidated by Frost, is profound, but it’s not the either/or situation that Schneider makes it. It’s not either the “sound of sense” or meter. This is an absurd dichotomy dispelled by none other than Frost himself – who was able to combine sentence sounds and meter. The two facets of language work at different levels. Schneider is right to the extent that meter is not, in and of itself, the source of “music” in poetry. When it is used, it is only a part of the whole.

Look at VP. Finally he comes upon something he can barely argue with, yet he tries to ascribe it to Robert Frost, that diehard metrist, rather than to me. Aside from Frost’s misuse of assonance, note how incredibly vague he is in his description, and now read how specific I am:

Rather, the music of words rests upon such things as rime (in all its varied form & types), alliteration, assonance, enjambment, & in the overall tropes of lines in accordance with the lines directly before & after it- as well as the sound of the words in concordance with the emotions the words’ definitions convey. The last 2 examples need some explication. Let us say that the 4 lines of a quatrain (free or formally versed) have a lot of sharp sounds bunched in tight packages at the start & end of the lines. If all 4 lines are similarly formed then the stanza will be musical- if even harsh-sounding to the ear. But if line 2 digresses from the rest of the stanza with long richly flowing diphthongs (2 sounds which blend to one- i.e. the o & y in toy) then- no matter how well sounding that line may be alone, it is unmusicked in context to its stanza or poem.
Now the but….But, depending on the content of the stanza- the seemingly unmusicked digression may indeed be musical because the poem’s speaker may be talking of a violent situation in the sharply-sounded lines, & the digression- say, to some warm memory of love- may necessitate or facilitate the abrupt switch in line sound, & therefore enhance the content of the lines’ words with its switch in sound- especially in contrast with the rest of the stanza soundwise & emotionally. Of course, if any of these coherent elements I espouse is not present then the discordant line 2 may indeed be unmusicked!
Simply put, music in verse- or language- depends on the congruence of syllable with syllable, word with word, line with line, stanza with stanza, etc.- as well as each of those congruent units’ emotional/intellectual congress with sound & meaning. The instant you recognize that 3^rd level of stress in any word, phrase, or line the whole bulk of the metric fallacy is logically toast. Period! Of course, this formula implies a far more complex relationship than the absurdly simplified metric codes. But only if one anally agonizes over such minutia. After all, a slipped or elided sound will not result in an accidental nuclear detonation. And as we have seen even diehard metricists conveniently ignore the many disproofs of their theory which regularly occur. One need only be willing to live with the joyous felicities of imprecision to see that such an approach is far more simple than 1^st blush would indicate- as well as far more accurate a revealer of why poetry works or not. Poems ‘work’ musically when lines form interesting waves & loops of sound & rhythms which arc in near unison.

There’s simply no comparison between Frost’s vague equivocations and my direct descriptions. That VP makes the comparison goes to the heart of his (and many others’) gripe with me and my website: I am bold enough to challenge and debunk things that are wrong and lay out my vision, regardless of how old, famed, or esteemed the supposed authority figure I debunk happens to be. In short, I am seen as ‘lacking respect.’ So, even though Frost’s ideas are far hazier and lazier than mine, he has to be claimed as declaiming it first. Ok, let’s assume Frost meant everything I did. How does VP handle this?:

Where Schneider really veers into the demonstrably nonsensical is with the following:

The answer returns us to the very root of why metrics is such a ballocksed concept. Human beings simply DO NOT think, speak, or even hear things in a rhythmic fashion. There is no innate rhythm to human speech.

Humans do think and hear things in a rhythmic fashion. The unmitigated absurdity of Schneider’s comment is demonstrated by Rap, the Beatles, Schubert and Bach. It’s been demonstrated for thousands of years by every composer who has put music to words. Schneider tells us that the whole idea of a strong and week stress is rubbish, and yet musicians unfailingly match the strongly stressed syllables with the downbeat and the weakly stressed syllables with the off-beat. German is a stressed language like English and Bach was known to rewrite the lyrics of his Cantatas so that the stress patterns (the meter) coincided with the time signature of his music.

Note, VP’s whole refutation of my debunking of meter (aside from Webster’s and Princeton) consists of tying poetry to music. Yet, poetry is demonstrably more complex and difficult to master than music. The words, alone, carry the music, plus they have the tangle of definitions and sentence structure to contend with (in prose or poetry). That music also follows a reductivist trend does not argue against the demonstrated fallacy of meter, merely that there are similar fallacies across human disciplines. As for humans thinking or speaking rhythmically, one merely has to turn on a tape recorder and leave it hidden in a room where two or more folks are naturally conversing. Any reporter for a media outlet will tell you the frustrations of trying to sort out the hemming and hawing, pausing and stopping that occurs in natural human discourse. Music, as with poetry, is an artifice. It comes from the same root as art, itself. VP then dips into absurdity:

But what does Schneider make of rappers? Is he going to tell us that they, of all poets, musicians and artists, “don’t think, speak, or even hear things in a rhythmic fashion”? Rap is nothing if not a thumping example of accentual and accentual syllabic verse. Anyone who has seen 8 Mile by eminem knows that rappers have no trouble finding the “innate rhythm” in human speech. And what about all those children who can pick out the rhythms in Mother Goose – repeating its nursery rhymes over and over and over?

Notice VP’s pattern. He does not make coherent arguments, he just repeats the same thing over and again, or he resorts to the sort of bigwordthrowingarounding and appeals to authority fallacy typical of such loopy pseudo-dialectics.

Moreover, if you don’t want to take my word for it, then consider the science. In an essay called “Perceptual biases for rhythm: The Mismatch Negativity latency indexes the privileged status of binary vs non-binary interval ratios” scientists have demonstrated “that the privileged perceptual status of binary rhythmical intervals is already present in the sensory representations found in echoic memory at an early, automatic, pre-perceptual and pre-motor level.” And here’s another study which refutes Schneider’s baseless assertion.

But what brings me to the science is an article I read several years ago. Humans are predisposed to hear rhythm even where there is none! For instance, humans will hear the tick-tock of clocks as being composed of a strong and weak ticking even when scientists calibrate the ticking mechanism to produce exactly the same tick! Humans, contrary to Schneider’s ludicrous pronouncement, have been programmed by nature to hear rhythm even where rhythm doesn’t exist!

This is really amazing. First, VP spends the bulk of his essay claiming that my claim that meter is a fallacy is wrong, then he cites a study (naturally, the links do not work), which, according to him, humans, ‘have been programmed by nature to hear rhythm even where rhythm doesn’t exist.’ Now, really digest this: he admits that human invent fallacies from reality. Period. Now, note what I stated: Human beings simply DO NOT think, speak, or even hear things in a rhythmic fashion. There is no innate rhythm to human speech. Let’s even grant that the study was correct, and I was wrong on the hearing portion of my claim. So what? There is a difference between perception and thinking- one is unconscious and the other not. Whose fault is it that VP does not understand the difference- his or mine? But, I have read many scientific claims about everything from perception to genetic influences on the senses and mind, and the think and speak portions of my claim are unscathed. As for hearing, note that VP claims humans will hear rhythm when there is none, but uses the clock’s tick as an example. But, does that mean all folk do this? I never have. Most people claim a clock’s tick is monotonous. Rhythm, by its nature, while it may not be grand, avoids monotony to the same level as a tick-tock. So, we are likely getting VP’s once again ballocksed misreading of the study. But, let’s go back to earlier in his piece. Recall how he posited exceptions over rules in metrics? Even if one grants his take on the study as correct, that only proves an exception, not a rule. So, one can see that, when it fits his argument, VP will use deductive or inductive methods to justify any predisposition he has. Onward:

What is Schneider’s alternative. He writes: “Humans speak & even think punctually.”

This may or may not be true. However, this has nothing to do with humanity’s ability to find rhythm in language. Schneider creates another false dichotomy.

Of course, human’s ability to find rhythm in language has nothing to do with the essay’s claim on metrics, and was just a side diversion that VP could not even back up, unlike Webster’s and Princeton. It is VP planting strawmen and false dichotomies. I have been perfectly consistent. Naturally, then, when VP claims that humans’ abilities to think punctually has no effect on VP’s claim that humans think in rhythms, there is a schism. It is one akin to the fallacy that stream-of-consciousness writers proclaimed. He goes on, and just as the essay reaches its meat on Jeffers, his response falters:

But around this time, Schneider begins writing the second part of his essay, his defense of Jeffers.

But if the manifest denuding of this fallacy (& the others detailed) by this essay is not enough to get the Established doggerelists to finally drop their theoretically based & politically motivated vendetta against him & re-recognize Jeffers’ towering mastery, then surely the greatness of his verse should be allowed to stake that claim.

But what Schneider’s diatribe against meter has to do with defending Jeffers is muddled. If, as Schneider seems to imply, Jeffers reputation is being discounted because he didn’t use or couldn’t master meter, then the better approach is to question the legitimacy of his critics’ aesthetics. In other words, is a poem or poet’s greatness truly contingent on his or her use of meter? I say no. Great poetry can be and is written without meter or rhyme; but I say so without making the ridiculous counterclaim that metrical poetry is a sham.

So, we get to the crux of the essay, and all VP can do is reiterate, yet again, the same fallacy. Has it turned into reality yet?

Jeffers was originally a mediocre formalist. His earliest published poems & books are forced, clunky, & melodramatic- in the worst sense. (…) I, too, have gone through that process- although every artist of excellence progresses at their own pace, & in their own way. Like Jeffers I too studied hard (he in college, me on my own) syntax, grammar, metrics, etc. to such a degree that I became an incredibly proficient mediocrity.

Is this the reason for Schneider’s hostility toward and denial of rhythm in language? – because he was a mediocre formalist? When I sit down to draw or paint a landscape, I am a phenomenally mediocre artist, but I don’t launch into a diatribe against perspective, denying its existence and railing against any artist who thinks he or she can perceive it.

So, now, after all the other rhetorical fallacies have failed, VP sinks back into good old ad hominem. It cannot be that I have shown and proven my essay’s assertions, that I state what I do. It’s because of an inadequacy on a personal level. I am a bad formalist poet, therefore I rage against a logical, and disproved, fallacy. As I implied in the piece VP quotes, I was a mediocre formalist. Note the past tense. I am a great poet, formally and in free verse. There are poems of mine that scan perfectly, according to metric nonsense, but not because I was following metric dictates, but because any well musicked poem will, given the reductive aims of meter, scan well. It’s what is in them that matters. Walter de la Mare’s poems scanned almost perfectly, but they were poems that said nothing, and their music is derived not from the fallacy of meter, although the poet likely followed such guidelines, but via the many waves and rhythms that the general dictates of meter also brought into fruition, even if de la Mare was truly unawares of the real source of his poetry’s music. There is more than one path to Nirvana, after all. But, damn it, if one cannot beat one’s opponent with logic, history, and science, well, then let’s attack his character!

The practice of writing meter and the symbols poets use to scan it represent relative stresses and nothing more. Other languages have produced their own meters – such as the quantitative meters of classical Latin and Greek. It symoblizes the fundamental human desire for rhythm even at its most subtle. While it’s not the only source for “music” in language, it is very real and plays a very real part.

I.e.- since the essay has utterly failed, let me repeat my demonstrably wrong claim again, just so that this time it seems more correct. And, just as an asides, whether or not a meter is based in the binary notions of what has been described in my original essay, or some other pattern in another culture, is beside the point. All meters are fictions used to try and get a handle on the music of a poem. My simple assertion is that my method is demonstrably better. And, a quick look at VP's poems, then a comparison to any of mine, on Cosmoetica or off, or earlier in this essay, will show just who the mediocrity is, formal or not. So, yet again, another piss poor attempt at criticism from the poetic equivalent of a Christian Apologist.

Of course, not all of my and my site’s detractors resort to foisting their ignorance for the world to see (I will do that with these essays, regardless). Most will just send me ridiculously stupid emails. Oddly enough, though, as the website’s popularity has increased, the amount of nasty emails has actually decreased, percentage-wise and in actual numbers. Gander:

Over the last several years I’ve gotten so many idiotic emails (probably in the tens of thousands during the site’s existence) that I only hang on to a handful of the most egregiously stupid. Sometimes the emails consist merely of obtuse young people, like this exchange, from 2008:

Dan Schneider-

I'm writing an essay on you and Cosmoetica for a Contemporary American
Poetry class, and I had a few questions I was hoping you could answer.
In the 1999 article Dan Schneider vs. the Rest of the World, you claim
“Modern poetry is so fucking lazy. It’s no fun; there’s no spontaneity,
no joy. When was the last time you picked up a book of poems and
thought, ‘This person really loves language, loves playing with words.'"
Do you still feel this strongly about contemporary poetry years later,
or has your opinion drastically changed? If not, what's needed to make
the necessary changes?
You've received national media attention in the New York Times and Time
magazine. Why do you think you aren't more widely read or discussed in
the poetry community?
How do you respond to the criticism that what you do is only for shock
value or attention and not for the sake of poetry?
Judging by This Old Poem, you view yourself as a knowledgeable critic,
possibly one of the best out there. What are some of the qualities that
make you feel this way? In other words, what are your greatest
strengths?
As a poet, what makes you better than the other poets out there?
You continuously throw yourself into comparisons with other poets.
Others may view this as pretentious and egotistical. Why do you compare
yourself so favorably to other poets? Do you really think you're that
good?
Who are some of the best contemporary poets, and why do you hold them
in such high regard? What makes them better than the Robert Blys of the
world?
Have you thought about refining your attacks and backing off of
attacking authors, focusing on their poetry instead? or do you view
poets and their work inseparable, meaning if you attack one you must
attack the other?
Thanks for your time, I would really appreciate any help you can give
me.

Drew Barringer
-----------------------------
Drew Barringer
Argus Features Editor
Illinois Wesleyan University
abarring@iwu.edu
Cell: 309.830.5313

The truth is that Cosmoetica is quite popular on college campuses, both for the poetry essays and, now, the film essays I’ve written. Youngsters are far more open to challenging the bullshit foisted to them. I replied:

***Why would you need to ask? Has anything been published in the new century that would hearken back to the Golden Age? The real question is what do you think? And if you disagree, point to the reasons why. You change it by celebrating and rewarding quality, not by rewarding those who are friends or cronies. If you model your area on Big Business, this is what you get.

***I have, if you look at my website stats: http://www.cosmoetica.com/Links.htm#COSMOETICA%20STATS%20CENTRAL, more readers than any other contemporary poet, by a long shot. I just do not have the sanction of Academia nor print, yet. Any deeper reasons would have to be queried of those folk, but, look at any of the 60-70 poems on Cosmoetica, then look at the career canons of James Tate, Donald Hall, Nikki Giovanni, Louise Gluck, et al. If you had what they had, and could see what I have online (just a fraction of my total oeuvre), would you want to make obvious your inferiority? You do understand human nature, don't you?

***Look who would make such a criticism, then read any of my essays on poetry or anything else. There's no one in a league, critically, with me. Even in my humorous This Old Poems I provide more criticism with the underlining of a cliché than most 'critics' do in whole essays or books of crit. And what is shocking about humor? It's why Oscar Wilde is remembered today, and Eugene Field is not.

***I am not possibly one of the best out there. I am the best, unless there's another unpublished critic out there. Harold Bloom, Large Marj Perloff, Helen Vendler, William Logan. Google their names on Cosmo and you'll see I've referenced all of them. Look at my essay on masculine poetry, and show me even a single paragraph any of them have ever written that reveals as much knowledge of poetry. And again, unlike them, I'm not a failed writer who turned to crit to leach off the system. As for the strengths, read the essays- they, like my poems or stories, are their best defense and explanation. Brad Zellar, who wrote the City Pages story you mentioned, said to me that I made him a better reader. That's what it's all about. I aim to get people to think independently- be it art, politics, science, etc.

***Read the poems, and you've answered your own query- if you understand the fundaments of the art.

***Reggie Jackson, who hit three home runs on three consecutive pitches in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series win by the NY Yankees over the LA Dodgers, said, 'It ain't bragging if you can back it up.' And, I am not merely good, I'm great. Here's something for you to chew on. 150 years ago Whitman declaimed his greatness, in the face of a bunch of rhymesters and poetasters, as did Van Gogh against mediocre portrait artists. Both were laughed at, yet both were correct, and those who scoffed forgotten. Now, the same sort of folk that did that to them would scoff at me, or another great artist that has yet to get approbation, but the work is the same no matter. Excellence does not depend upon the Appeal to Authority Fallacy. Of course, many talentless deluded wannabe artists claim their own excellence, and it's laughable. This is where you, the audience comes in- even if an audience of one. You need to be able to judge good and bad w/o appealing to nor relying on fools like a Bloom to crib notes from. If you read my essays and criticism, as well as my creative writing, you WILL get better at understanding art. Cosmoetica's immense popularity stems from young kids. I get bombarded with bad poetry and essay submissions- probably 40k+ in all the years, yet post and reply to only the best. I've had countless thank yous from young wannabe artists re: my being able to clarify what art is vs. their stolid professors. And by that, I don't mean that I try to make clones of me or my style. I try to help them elicit what their strengths are and excel at them. Pretense is a word that describes a James Tate or Robert Bly. Egoistic? Of course. But again, I can back it up. Most egoists cannot.

***For brevity's sake- here's one. James Emanuel. Here's an interview I did with him: http://www.cosmoetica.com/DSI5.htm. Again, just read his poems, and compare them to Bly. If you cannot tell why Emanuel is superior, then my question is why are you pretending to care for the art of poetry?

***I have plenty of serious essays. Look at the S&D essays. And all of my TOPs focus on the poetry. However, humor is a Godsend. Few have it and can deploy it well. All of my attacks are artistic, not ad hominem. But, if you produce bad art you are putting poison into the world, and deserve what you get. Look at this essay I did on Thomas Steinbeck: http://www.cosmoetica.com/B288-DES228.htm. This talentless leech got rich off his daddy, and is set on destroying his family name all out of ego's sake. Would it not be better to ask such a man why he's so egoistic? Not to mention helping to keep real new talents out of print?

***One favor, if you publish this in your local paper or mag, please include the URL to my website. You're welcome,

PS: I'll forward this to me e-list, and see if some of the poets and writers I've helped over the years might want to chime in on why they value my criticism. I may be content to let my words speak for themselves, but they may give you further insights. DAN

After this, Barringer disappeared. I never heard from him about the piece, nor did I see it. I emailed him:

Yes I did, and I appreciate you forwarding my e-mail. Thanks for the responses as well. I do have a follow up question though. In Dana Gioia's 1991 essay "Can Poetry Matter," he asserts that the poetry community has become incestuous and closed off, and that poetry is no longer seen in mainstream American print, or at least outside of universities and specific poetry publication. Are universities and MFA programs leading to the downfall of contemporary American poetry, and why do you think poetry has slipped from the mainstream American conscience?
Thanks again, I really appreciate the help,
Drew Barringer

The irony with Gioa's claim is that a) he is/was correct, and b) it apparently did not matter as he has always guided his career on the MFA track, while spending precious little time on the craft of writing. After all, major domo of the NEA that he is, you'd think he'd speak out against the 'system' on a regular basis, were he not benefiting mightily from it.
MFA programs, however, are a symptom- the dumbing down of culture- from Oprah and Dr. Phil to such programs to publishers who make heroes of people who cannot write well- Dave Eggers, James Frey, TC Boyle, etc., to news programs that proffer fluff rather than serious journalism. All of this leads to the idea that people are owed something. Fame used to be a thing earned, but celebrity- being known for being known has replaced it.
When artists' main motive for 'success' is to be known rather than to affect a reader or viewer in ten or ten thousand years, you know you are dealing with crap.
Poetry is off the radar- despite all the BS you hear about Internet poetry or poetry slams because a) all of the above reasons have seen to it that real poets of quality are not judges on the merits of their work- the undeniably objective merits, rather than subjective tastes, but b) more importantly, because there is far more to entertain the potential reader (which is why, w bad poets, they drive away potential readers with poetry aimed for an increasingly incestuous crowd)- from tv to Internet to PC games to film. Film, too, is dying because of the interactivity of PC games. Yet, what is really more interactive than reading, esp. poetry?
Thus, the lack of care for the craft and art serves the purpose of mocking the art form, and making potential readers turn away. After all, if one can mention a James Tate or Nikki Giovanni in even the same breath with a Whitman or Rilke, something is very wrong, and even if the layety cannot go into detail why, even a quick read shows the vast dropoff in quality.

DAN

Simon Stack

Not all exchanges are that cordial, though. Some are bathed in stupidity and cowardice, such as this:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Simon Stack <stacula@yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 3:01 PM
Subject: proust essay

Your article on Proust is perhaps the stupidest piece of -- I can't even call it criticism -- writing-pretending-to-be-criticism that I have ever encountered. The amazing thing about it is that you actually seem to have read the book. It amazes me that someone could actually spend that much time with this great masterpiece and so completely miss all of it's vital points. You seem to come at this book with all kinds of pre-conceptions about what it should be, but you miss the fact that infantile readers such as yourself are thoroughly anatomized within the text. In another era, and if I weren't a coward, I would slap you in the face with a pair of leather gloves and "demand satisfaction." Then you might say, "Shall we say, pistols at dawn?" And I would reply, "Sure, we can say it -- I don't know what it means, but we can say it."

Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:28:07 -0500
Subject: Fwd: proust essay

BS like this self-fucking hermaphrodite, who does not know the diff between atomized and anatomized. DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 5:49 PM
Subject: RE: proust coward

thanks DAN, you absolutely made my day (turning into night now) with this piece of e-mail, it's totally hilarious and has such great entertainment value and is also
very revealing, especially the part where the guys writes:

In another era, and if I weren't a coward,........

you see, he knew he'd never take you on but had to hide (as you know often cowards do) behind a bygone era, but then again you've got to admire the cowardly nerve, because it's not like you can track him down for a dawn-duel. only keep the little wound inflicting pistols at home. i'd loan you one of my machete because people like these need such brutality. now you see why i still hold onto some of my African 'ways'. thanks for entertaining me...totally, twas also golden his ending it with:
And I would reply, "Sure, we can say it -- I don't know what it means,
but we can say it. (see more evidence of his cowardliness)"

Of course, my piece rips preconceptions about the book, and destroys moronic self-importance like his. But I've not the time nor will to educate him and the dozens of other morons who are so lonely that they need my attention. DAN

Three Women

Of course, sometimes the emails are positive, such as in this below exchange over my ripping poseur Internet Bad Boy Lee Papa a new asshole when I interviewed him. The funny thing is that, while I do not doubt the woman’s claims about Papa, the truth is that Papa was depressingly like almost all Academics unweaned from the tit of their schools, sinecures, sabbaticals, and grants, yet she ascribed his arrogance as something special to him:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Janine Schiller <janine.schiller@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 9:03 PM
Subject: Dan's Lee Papa adventure
Dear Dan,

Let me start out by saying I'm not a blogger, I don't read 'em or do much on line at all. I wasn't aware of your work until today when some one showed me your interview with Lee, and I also read your impressions of it and the emails involved. I never write to people I don't know on line but after hearing your trials I felt we were abit akin. I am a former student of Prof Papa's. As a theatrical professional returning to college in my forties for that ever holy degree, I took two of his play writing courses at the College of Staten Island, did an independent study course with him, and worked on a couple of the plays he directed, including stage managing one. I'm so glad you called him out on what he did to you, and himself really. I'll say this for Lee; he has a certain talent, and a vital energy. That said though he totes his rudeness with pride, and it works for him well in his blog I hear, but he blurs the line all too often. I felt he was misplaced in his rudeness to you both in his lack of commitment to the interview itself and very much so in the language he used in his emails. This is a teacher who cursed out students in class, once he tossed some ones play across the room, not to mention other questionably appropriate behavior, I wont go into it all. I loved the way you handled it. You pegged him correctly when you used the word LAZY. This was a prof. who cancelled classes, and meetings and never returned work on time, or with any constructive notes. My last class with him didn't even have any assigned reading. I felt like I wasted my money. Interestingly enough he's like a celebrity on campus, the young students think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but they haven't been out in the world yet. I wonder if their attention has gone to his head. I'ld be as insecure as he is too if I was just barely coasting through tasks instead making my best efforts, and wasting my talent while expanding all my energy finding clever ways to say "I'm pissed off".

Cheers to you Dan. And thanks again, maybe your words of wisdom will get thru to him, one never knows, wilder things have happened.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 4:15 PM
Subject: Re: Dan's Lee Papa adventure
To: Janine Schiller <janine.schiller@yahoo.com>

Thanks.
I don't pretend to know him personally, but if you compare his interviews with Steven Pinker's or Charles Johnson's, or others, it's clear that he really isn't interested in discussion nor exchanges of ideas.
Pinker, who's a huge name, was interested in turning even casual readers on. My wife said she thought he prob waited until 2 or 3 days before the interview, then put together some half-assed answers, and expected me to be happy; even though my website- despite being on art, not lowest common denominator politics, is 10-20x more popular than his site.
The fact is that thinking is hard and people are lazy. I've only had 2 interviews this year and both were disappointments. Hopefully I'll have a few later this year that makes up for it.
Keep reading Cosmoetica though, and let others know.
Thanks, DAN

Of course, most email exchanges are from people far more off the beam than the former student of Papa. Here was an email exchange with a fan of poet Ted Hughes:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rachel Bennett <rachel.bennett@queens.ox.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 8:02 PM
Subject: Ted Hughes piece, http://www.cosmoetica.com/TOP43-DES40.htm

I have never been compelled to email someone because of something they have written on the Internet before but the piece on your website about Ted Hughes (http://www.cosmoetica.com/TOP43-DES40.htm) is so wide of the mark and uniformed that I really had to email.
Initially, I must point out that Song was one of Hughes' earliest pieces, which exists in an earlier version which dates back to when he was 19 years old and was written in the school exercise book of a 15 year old girl he befriended.
But most importantly I feel you dismiss the poetry far too easily and I think it's dangerously misleading of you. A google search on Hughes led me to your page, I know Hughes inside out as I'm writing my undergraduate dissertation on him & I consider myself fairly well read when it comes to poetry as a whole, being in my third year of an English degree at Oxford University, and I can honestly say that Hughes was the first poet I ever read which finally made me understand HOW to read poetry, and this was after being at University for over a year. Your dismissive write up of a very early poem (and, I've got to say, an attack that is puerile and completely fails to grasp the energy and fundamental importance of Hughes' poetic project as a whole, particularly as you pick a very early piece and fail to contextualize it) I fear will prevent people ever reading Hughes if they haven't encountered him before.
Given the impact that Hughes' poetry had on me, particularly as it truthfully made me appreciate poetry as I think it's meant to be read, as something entirely distinct from prose, not an experience which other poetry had inspired before. I had never before encountered a language which was so energetic and which worked so well as poetic language, I'd never grasped the connection between language and meaning and how it could work in poetry before reading Hughes. And I know that reading Hughes didn't just have this effect on me but I have a tutor who concurs and, having encouraged others to read him, I've literally seen Hughes turn people on to poetry who had never bothered with reading any before.
I feel your piece is incredibly irresponsible as you miss the point of Hughes with such arrogant bravado and to so vehemently dismiss a poet so publicly without a proper appreciation of their work or their project I feel to be an excessively negative act.
Can I recommend that you really try and engage with Hughes again? Perhaps put some effort into appreciating what he manages with his language and his poetry which makes him peculiar within his peer group and, I feel, makes him potentially the only real inheritor of modernism. Consider Hughes and his relationship to the structuralist concept of 'force', consider the power of his later pieces and his ability to engender metamorphosis and recommunication or revivification with a more primitive and "natural" real through a language that is dynamic. I recommend Cave Birds as a demonstration of the power Hughes' language achieves towards the end of his career.
I realise you have a reputation for being outspoken but I didn't remotely get the impression that you "know" Hughes and being opinionated without being informed is irresponsible, particularly if you have a website which is so widely read. I don't mean to cause any offence by this email, but I would hazard that if you could make an effort to grasp Hughes you could even benefit from his work. This is just a quick, and perhaps reactionary email, but if you'd like to actually communicate some of your venom for Hughes and attempt to justify it I'd be delighted to offer you the information to change your mind about it.
Best Wishes,
Rachel Bennett.

P.S. I thought Gaudete was fantastic for what it was intended to be, did you grasp the premise behind it?

Ok, at least she’s not nasty. Deludedly sincere, but not nasty. So, I replied (my words are starred and interpolated) with humor that, naturally, went over her head:

***I'll try to adjust the uniform. First, Hughes was a bad poet, and worse person. The essay satirized both. Work on the wit aspect.

***So? He published it. It's a bad poem. Would you alibi for it if he wrote it while having indigestion?

***I know Hughes better. I know poetry better. I've written poetry far greater than Hughes's. I know how to write it, read it, understand it, and more. What you have limned is why you like a bad artist, not an ability to discern why it's bad.

***Oh, would that I could elucidate the masses to such an extent. Unfortunately, there are folk even more stolid and clueless than you.

***Your tutor is not bright, and your appeal to authority fallacy is wan. If you like nature poetry, read Robinson Jeffers or Kenneth Rexroth- both are leagues above Hughes. If you want energy and great verse, read anything I've written. http://www.cosmoetica.com/Skyline.htm#THE%20AMERICAN%20IMPERIUM:%20ORGASMA Any poem will do, but this one is one so far beyond the best that Hughes ever wrote that it is not comparing....apples and oranges....but wholly different art forms.

***I read his oeuvre before you were a fetus. I read it better and more deeply. Your request is silly.

***When you learn to use real words and ideas that you truly understand, and not just regurgitate the drivel your dumb tutor and clueless classmates spew, then try communicating with a superior poet and critic. Until then. lose the thesaurus and grow up.

***I have no venom against Hughes or any bad poet. I have no venom against you or any of the tens of thousands of emails from the ignorant people who have so little in their lives that they feel they have to bitch to a total stranger because his opinion of said poet, poem, film, novel, article, book, political/religious/philosophic opinion, because, as this email demonstrates, you simply do not know what you write of.
But I do worry that so much of your mind is being rotted by the drivel that bad MFA poetasters teach you.
Here is my challenge to you, young lady. Gather up the very best poem that you feel Hughes ever wrote and compare it with a similarly themed poem of mine, on this website or online, and then, with all your vast knowledge and critical acumen, I want you to write an essay on how Hughes' poem is better- due to music, clichés, enjambment, poetic skill, metaphor, etc. And, I will post your essay for the world to see, as well as rebut it and demonstrate why your claims are wrong.
I will do so with objectivity and acumen that will actually teach YOU some things you not only do not know, but have no idea even exist in the delimited realm of art your teachers at Oxford inhabit. Even better, I challenge you to ask any one of the distinguished professors at that most noble of institutions to do the same for Hughes vis-a-vis my poetry.
This is where, Rachel, as they say in the states, you gotta put your salami on the chopping block.

***Gaudette was a bore that was a passable three page poem bloated into a book.

DAN

Note that I herein give her (or her professor) a chance to post her opinions in front of the best read and most informed poetry readership online. Here was her response:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rachel Bennett <rachel.bennett@queens.ox.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 10:21 PM
Subject: Re: Ted Hughes piece, http://www.cosmoetica.com/TOP43-DES40.htm

Thanks so much for responding to me, I appreciate people who email back!
I accept your essay offer, I'll put my mind to it asap and will ask my tutor what she thinks, but I'm sure she'll be game too.
Rachel

P.S. I think Plath is also fantastic and am currently writing a piece of coursework on Eliot, Plath and H.D.
I'm not sure you'd really want to read that (!)
ALSO, I apologize for missing out the 'n' in uninformed
oh, and, I get the impression you like Plath? She published Song, not Hughes..

I replied, knowing full well I’d never hear from her or her professors. Almost a year later, and this was our last contact:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 1:47 PM
Subject: Re: Ted Hughes piece, http://www.cosmoetica.com/TOP43-DES40.htm
To: Rachel Bennett <rachel.bennett@queens.ox.ac.uk>

A hint when you write your essay: avoid words like 'like.' Criticism has nothing to do with subjective states, but objective ones.
I offered one essay- you, your tutor, or a professor. I have many other endeavors, so choose which one of you wants the assignment. DAN

Note how there is not even a glimmer of objectivity that I could know more than she did, that my poems could possibly be better than Hughes’s, even to the point of seriously almost being a wholly different art form. No, stolidity stays fixed. As does her use of the Intentional Fallacy. Not once does she even allow it to enter her mind that she should read my poems first, before even accepting my challenge. One might argue that she and her professor read my poems, saw their superiority, and were embarrassed to write back, but likely that’s not the case. More likely is that she just felt ‘attacked’ and never even showed her professor. The fact is that this gal simply regurgitates the same crap that her professor spews. There is no person she can crib notes from. Of course, she is not alone in this, as I will demonstrate again, shortly.

I also got an email, some time later, from a James Joyce fan, which was in a similar vein to the Hughes fan:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jacqueline York <jacqueline.marie.182@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, May 26, 2009 at 1:20 AM
Subject: To: Dan Schneider

Hello,

I am writing to you in regards to an article on James Joyce's Dubliners, which I found at http://www.hackwriters.com/dubliners.htm. I apologize if this is not the proper e-mail address to do so, but it was the only one I could find. (If this is received in error by someone who knows the correct e-mail, I would kindly appreciate if you could forward it.)
I am not going to attempt to persuade you to like Dubliners or think it is the best thing ever written, I simply believe that you have completely missed many of its points and purposes.
First of all, in your article you mentioned reading Dubliners three times, but I have to ask, have you ever really read Dubliners? I highly recommend purchasing either, (or both), the Viking edition or the Norton edition and reading some of the criticisms that go along with them. Some highlights are Litz's essay on "Two Gallants" Margot Norris' essay "The Perils of 'Eveline'" Robert Scholes' "Semiotic Approaches to 'Eveline'" Harry Stone's essay on "Araby" and Scholes' essay on "Counterparts" The notes in both editions are also very helpful.
Some points I would like to share:
The slavey in "Two Gallants" is not a prostitute. If anything, Corley is the prostitute. There is also certainly no suggestion that she is going to sleep with Lenehan. One of the many points of the story is that while the reader initially assumes that Corley is trying to sleep with the slavey, he is actually trying to get money from her. Since she is poor, one can assume that the money comes from her 'master,' much like the cigars she gifts Corley. Corley, in a sense, becomes the 'prostitute' by using his lies and charms to convince the girl he is seeing to risk her job to steal for him. When we see the coin at the end, (ignoring its symbolic significance), the reader has the epiphany, and puts the whole story together. Neither character is meant to have a redeeming quality, as the story paints a picture of the degradation of Irish society and morality. The symbolic reference to the harp, heedless of its coverings about its knees, speaks volumes of Joyce's point about Ireland at the time.
Aside from this, in "Two Gallants" as in all of Dubliners there is a lot of social commentary on the stale and paralyzed state of Ireland at the time. Another good thing to read would be the letters from James Joyce in his attempts to publish Dubliners. They appear in the Viking edition.
As far as "Araby" is concerned, the boy is not disappointed at the end because all the possible gifts are too expensive. I'm not sure if their prices are even mentioned, (and there is a detailed account of any money that appears in almost all of the stories). The boy is upset because he has turned Mangan's sister into the vision of a perfect woman, and his quest to buy her a gift and win her over into a holy quest. "I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes" or something along those lines. When he arrives at the bazaar the scene is akin to that in the Bible when Jesus witnesses a fleamarket going on in a place of worship. He is disgusted by the simony that surrounds him, the fact that a supposed oriental bazaar simply has reminders of Britain's imperialism on Ireland, and most importantly the conversation between the shop girl and the two British boys flirting with her. It is then that the boy realizes he is not on a holy quest, but is no different from these boys trying to get a girl. Women are not perfect, they are just like this shop girl. The ideals and hopes that he had about life, his 'love', himself, Mangan's sister, and the world are shattered in an instant. As Harry Stone puts it, "He must forgo the shimmering mirage of childhood, dream no more of enchanted days." Bitter, terrible realism is sinking in for the first time, and it disgusts him.
There are also in that story, as in all of them, many important and recurring themes, such as simony, paralysis, repression, idolatry, characters who are separated from their peers for varying reasons, etc.,
Eveline may not be as stupid as you think. She never loved Frank to begin with, (the evidence is in the text), so perhaps running away with him wouldn't have been the best idea. Her story exists as a very clear example of the way paralysis had stricken Ireland and was continuously passed down from generation to generation, often through the use of religion and family traditions. The point is that because she is a passive victim of her life, she never really had a choice to leave in the first place. Eveline exists not so much as a person who can be stupid or smart, but as an archetype for young Irish people and the dilemmas they faced growing up in such a stagnant and ignorant society. She also mirrors Joyce's bride, Nora, who did decide to leave Ireland with Joyce.
I agree to your statement that the characters in "The Boarding House" are pawns, but I would say that Joyce intends them to be pawns of society, or at the very least of Mrs. Mooney and her cleaver. Yes, Joyce's personal beliefs show through here. He never believed in marriage and only married Nora after several years for convenience and legal reasons. It stands to show that this belief was born out of witnessing many unhappy marriages, and people trapped in miserable lives, bound to family, duty and pointless tradition. If Mr. Doran didn't love Polly, then why should he marry her? It is clear that he only does so, at least at this time, because of the pressure from Mrs. Mooney, which she is able to place on him because of society's standards. His unhappiness is confirmed when he reappears in Ulysses as a hopeless drunk.
I completely agree with your assessment of "A Little Cloud."
"The story is a solid one, but by now the whole weight of the book’s depressing tone has started to work against the appreciation of the whole. In a sense, the book starts taking on a negative synergy, in that the individual tales are better, when averaged out, then the whole as a work." (On "Counterparts")
This is an interesting point, but I also believe that it is the point of the novel. In the letters I mentioned above, Joyce states that he was writing a moral history of his country. He says to an editor trying to butcher the stories that "you will seriously retard the course of civilization in Ireland if you deny the Irish a look in my nicely polished looking glass." He admits to writing in a style of "scrupulous meanness." The point is to wake up Ireland, and the millions of others that lead similar lives, by showing them point blank how awful the way they are living is. On their own the stories can be enjoyed, some more than others, but together they have the opportunity to trace the progression of similar characters over time, and to flesh out themes and motifs the way traditional novels can.
In the Scholes essay on "Counterparts" that I mentioned he states: “Connections like these, multiplied many times over, are the principal means by which Joyce has blended his separate stories into an imposing portrait of a city and a whole race of people"
I agree with much of what you said about "Clay" but find your commentary on "Ivy Day" interesting. While I am less familiar with this story than the others, I do know that Joyce once said it was the story in the collection that pleased him the most. Perhaps it too, deserves another look.
I would sincerely like you to read Jane Miller's essay on "A Mother." Yes the Irish Revival is mocked. But perhaps the commentary here extends to the treatment of women at the time, and how any outspoken women who will not tolerate being taken advantage of, is always written off and disliked. Never respected or considered courageous as her male counterpart would always be. Yes, her daughter may miss out on that particular career, but I would hope that she learns a lesson of far more worth, as would Joyce's readers. It is impossible to change the course of a nation if each generation's mistakes are passed on to the next. Out of all the women in the book, I believe her to be the smartest and most respectable. Up until the point of her frustration, she also seems to be the happiest. I read the epiphany, (or sorts--not all of the stories have a real one), here to be "O, there's a fine lady." The point is that Joyce is saying, "Yes. She is a fine lady" without any sarcasm.
Grace is not Joyce's first attempt to "hit religion." He's been doing it very strongly since the collection opens with "The Sisters." If you've missed that, then I'm really not sure what book you've read three times. The big parallel he makes with religion here is to money. Again, echoing the theme of simony from throughout the other stories. At the very end, the priest is comparing religion and confession to accounting records. This one seemed pretty straight forward to me.
"Joyce later added Two Gallants, A Little Cloud, and The Dead, after the original dozen were done by 1905. I don’t think that sort of knowledge really matters since the three tales are rather uneven in relationship to each other, so give no idea of Joyce’s growth nor stagnation"
Lenehan and Corely of "Two Gallants" mirror Little Chandler and Galaher of "A Little Cloud" in many, many ways. Any critic I have ever read remarks on the growth of Joyce's style which can not only be seen through revisions made to stories he finished earlier, but by comparing the style of his later stories to that of the earlier ones. It is my opinion that "Two Gallants" reflects a far greater stylistic ability than an earlier story such as "After The Race," my least favorite of the collection.
"The stories vary greatly in approach, but their tone is too similar, that is- consistently dour, which augured the summation of Joyce as the favorite writer that nobody reads."
The entire point of the stories is for them to have the same tone. Yes, Dubliners is a collection of short stories, but it functions more as a novel, whose chapters tell the tale of the same basic characters but with different names and slightly varried situations. It is purposefully connected in many ways both through symbols, imagery, and character behavior. Dubliners as a whole had one distinct purpose, therefore the stories within it share the same tone, amongst other things.
I believe that Joyce used the details, however mundane they may seem, to specifically reach his audience, Ireland at the time they were written. He references specific shops, songs, streets, political and pop culture references that they would all be familiar with at the time. The effect of this is that the characters appear to be truly a part of Dublin in that time period, as if Joyce simply watched the lives of a few people and recorded what happened. This makes their epiphanies all the more important. An epiphany does not happen sectioned off from real life, but smack dab in the middle of drab, every day routines, which is often part of why it can be painful or difficult to deal with. Yes, a modern reader will not pick up on all of the references, but some small extra effort can attune them to what they mean, allowing them to not only enjoy literature, but learn a bit of cultural history as well. I also do not think knowledge of these references is necessary. Everyone has mundane or boring routines which they must endure in their lives. Including them endears the characters to any reader. By endears I do not mean it makes them like all of the characters, but it allows readers to understand their motives and backgrounds. Not only early twentieth century Irish were plagued with the problems and themes presented in this book. I myself have identified with "Eveline" in many ways. That does not mean that my life is doomed, but by watching hers that is, I am afforded a sort of mirror of what my life is, could be, could not be, etc., This, I believe, is Joyce's central purpose. I also believe that many of the mundane or boring things he included were done so very purposefully. They all have a significance to the point of the story. Joyce commented on the importance of specific language and phrases in short stories because of the limited space.
I agree that it is important to discuss the failures of writers, and not simply say that everything a talented man wrote was brilliant. I am not such a big fan of "After the Race," however, many of the other stories you mention I do like, particularly "A Mother" and "Grace." I think that all of them serve an important and strategic purpose in the collection as a whole. It is especially after reading such flat analysis and commentary on the stories, based mostly on face value and little on any sort of interpretation or thought to literary devices, symbolism, themes, motifs or author's purpose that I wonder where the rest of your commentary came from, or what basis it is founded in.
Just because one does not enjoy reading a particular story, does not mean it isn't in fact a good story.
Please feel free to respond to any or all of this e-mail. I apologize if I at all came across as sounding mean, each person is entitled to their own opinion. Critics will be arguing and creating new thesis on Dubliners probably forever. I am curious to any changes that might appear in your thinking--if any--after what I have had to say.
-- Jackie

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, May 26, 2009 at 6:13 AM
Subject: Re: To: Dan Schneider
To: Jacqueline York <jacqueline.marie.182@gmail.com>

Thanks for your thoughtful email. Usually disagreement is met with raging idiocy. I disagree, and aside from the essay, I'll briefly point out things within (interpolated). I've not much time this week, as my mother died yesterday and I'm busy with wrapping up legal and financial BS, etc. Within:

***1) Forget about like or dislike. If you read other essays of mine, this has no place in criticism. My likes and dislikes (like anyone's) has nothing to do w objective quality.

***I had the Viking edition and read the Norton. Most of the essays imbued things external to the story. New Criticism was often too hermetic, but they were right about reading too much external info into art. Most such points made are regurgitated ad nauseam, which is why criticism is so bad. I deal with the art. Period- not my emotions nor the fallacy of intent. I wd suggest NEVER reading such until well after you have digested the artwork. And I've read Dubliners 4x st thru, and the indiv tales more than once each on different occasions.

***Letters from artists have nothing to do with the art. Again, read these at your own peril, because ARTISTS lie. Art is deception. Many artists try to aggrandize themselves by declaiming great intent in shit art. Social commentary is not art. Art is a verb- the HOW something is communicated. A great idea poorly communicated is bad art. Again, you are trying to bolster the tale by its content, not its execution.

***Again, your argument is a set of prescriptions, not an effective medicine (metaphor). One could say the same thing about themes in far worse writers than Joyce- and Dubliners is by far his best work- such as Dave Eggers or Joyce Carol Oates.

***Look what you've done. You've taken a flaw and assumed it to be an 'intended' flaw, thus making it not a flaw. This sort of 'at all costs' reasoning is why there is no published criticism today of much value.

***It's an interesting tack, and one I've used in a # of books, too. But the point remains only 5 of the tales are really good, the others range from mediocre to bad.

***Again. STOP reading essays. Really read the work. Push YOURSELF to understand art. What makes me a superior critic is that I don't lay out what a film or book is all about. I am not didactic. I just give my readers the keys to unlock the work of art.

***'Any critic'? This is the appeal to authority fallacy. Again, free your mind from such pollutants.

***Again, look how you retreat to a supposed 'intent' of Joyce's. That was not my point. My point was explaining why nobody reads Joyce these days. So, you have imbued something into a claim that I did not make.

***One need not write boringly to comment on the boring. This is another critical trope bad critics use. But, in this whole paragraph, not a word on HOW these styles, themes, and tactics work, just what the intent was.

***To paraphrase you, re: the above bolded, to state that, I have to wonder did YOU really READ my essay? I do not deal with intent, only the art.

***Agreed. Which is my point re: your likes and dislikes. I deal with quality or its lack as a critic- the objective stuff, not the subjective.

***Here (attached) is the ms. of a book I did with a structure similar to Joyce's- but it's a much better book- better individual tales, better integration of characters, esp. by book's end, and far more diverse in tone, themes, and structural approaches. Joyce hit a few home runs in Dubliners, but NEWTOWN is what Dubliners hoped to be.
Thanks, DAN

And the ms. I sent her is indeed, a better book than Dubliners, and, like the prior emailer, I have yet to hear back from this woman- either in a brief email or in an analysis of the book, despite my great favor of sending her my book. Here was her only reply:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jacqueline York <jacqueline.marie.182@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, May 26, 2009 at 7:26 AM
Subject: Re: To: Dan Schneider

I am very sorry to hear of your mother's passing. I do look forward to reading Newton, and will respond to it and your comments on my e-mail when I have finished.
Again, I am sorry for your loss,
-- Jackie

Well, I guess small solace can be found in the fact that she also was not nasty, just dense.

But other emailers, like Dean Esmay or the above referenced Vermont Poet, simply cannot resist being assy, and resorting to either screeds or sending viruses. The following exchange was with a hipster wannabe poet who claims to want hard criticism, but, like so many others, just wants an ego stroke. He does not even appreciate that his is one of the few poems from hundreds I get that I actually respond to, due to talent, or in his case, an initial seeming genuineness:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Cosmoetica Poems" <cosmoeticapoems@gmail.com>
To: "dave crish" <dcrish@consultant.com>
Subject: Re: poem for "Vers Magnifique"
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:55:27 -0500
*Interpolated:*
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:38 PM, dave crish <dcrish@consultant.com> wrote:

dan,
vivid summer to you. i came across your entity while perusing wikipedia's entry on glendale, queens (my current home). succinctly, what appeals to me of your way is that you became from the street and not the campus. likewise, i arrived back in NYC 4 years ago via the hitchhike. i lived on the sidewalks for some time to make my way up through the shelter system. i eventually found myself a little palace off cooper in glendale. a block from the cemeteries, i couldn't be more comfortable in new york city. Just far enough from the bloodless wheedlings of williamsburg. below, i've extracted an excerpt from the work i've brought to close in the last few weeks. the total work is entitled "voce d'ave." i haven't a title for this "vers" as it exists as a parcel of the total work which is one streaming line.
there is more where this came from.
if you don't find it suitable, i would appreciate any word you might give. and don't be gentle. my hide is thick, my backbone firm. i would value your word. from the little i know, you seem like my type of guy. more a pirate than professor.
good luck,
daveo

****First, I'm not a pirate. I simply value good art, and art is about communication. Despite years of PoMo and PC, people still have not gotten that there is no such thing as non-narrative art nor non-representational at. The thing is representative of itself, and its narrative is what it conveys, regardless of what someone else might imbue. Most bad art fails because it says nothing in any way that is good, unique, nor deep.**

Through Dorian’s portrait to Times starking presence in shade on nation not
bright so much as blinding. Setting soil per emaciating me smoking lights
insip as the midtown Id. I strolling knowing both the tourist and the
vogue. A tertium quid amid migrated strivers, statues few, the wing-tipped,
plain weighting, prating and urbane natives unknowing where Idaho is.
Comprising deluge, these city types, profusing styroscrabble. And to you,
frangible village hommes - we well aware your remarkable literacy, le cured
“knowing” forged in non-generic café. You can’t be bothered by we della
philistine set, ununctuous. Y’all provincial Parisians fed up with Right,
righting photos per presses slim, McSweened, melancholic designers spouting
micro projets, pop, cogitating frail a swathing type, ossifying hiply.
Quite smothering ictus.

****I can conceive a narrative in this, but it's a mess. It's babble that means something to you, but not to me- at least not anything of depth. Angst, ennui, pop cultural detritus, and neologisms that are unneeded. Part of what makes an artist good or great is his/her uniqueness. Put simply, this writing could have been crafted by any number of hipster kids who think they are cool in less than a minute’s typing. In supernatural circles this is called automatic writing. There no music, no alliteration,
assonance, rime, no structure; just lazy burble. Flarf poets do this, PoMo poets do this, hipster poets do this. What is uniquely Dave Crishian about this? Again, I've seen this sort of styleless, formless, unedited writing tons of times. Yawn. And, if you tell me that you actually labored over this- that styroscrabble or ununctuous are 'key' words that 'change the meaning of the whole thing,' you must take most readers for fools.
Art is work. Good and great art is hard work.
Poseurs need not apply.
I am a writer, poet, critic, artist because that is what I do. I am thus if I shit, fart, piss, burp, or scratch my ass. I don't have to dress some way, just produce great art. It's that simple (theoretically) and that hard (really).*

Naturally, the guy did not even bother to read my advice, and within hours submitted more doggerel:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: dave crish <dcrish@consultant.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:38 PM
Subject: per "Vers Magnifique" #2

dan,
in wake my initial offering, i provide another. find below.
best wishes,
daveo

Between Svalbard and Rarotonga, here, Hesperides new where became those fifteen minutes of fame, two. And where brewed our bestia triumphans about the promise land – or, is that promised? Perhaps, the promisING land made of or for equal ops?, who could say so slagged of democratic agitprop and cocks fatted ersatzly. And may I say spangled.

I prepped for my coming visit to inc by plaining the charms, dimming aura so making me parfait for the sure-to-be micro vacancy. Quite conscious th’economy, me, ably living in moderate penury. Of course, it’s only poverty if you’re married.
All the while, I discovered through perusings literaire that what I was seeking is here where error veritate simplicior, thank heavens. To more concrete matters, I came across an entry in a publishers’ directory writ by a “fiction” agent opining that clarity a sign of, both, competence and confidence. Margaret said this sans elaborating, thus, I drew nihil along preening blur blasé to rue through airs thick as Dublin’s demimonde. My outlook broad as, dear, it could be. Beting alpha feting way as, god, it should be.

***See the above. Joyce's greatest crime against literature is debatable: was it his own slide into irrelevance from the often brilliany Dubliners to the piss that was Finnegans Wake? Or was it inspiring legions of talentless hacks to plunge off the cliffs with him, as the Pied Piper of putrid poesy and prose?

Do you want to be an artist or just be cool? Even if you really want to be an artist, there's a less than one in 100,000 chance that the stuff you do will have any relevance, much less make it past a century w/o being buried under the mass of similarly bad artists.
I don't care how you spend your life if you are not making great art, so the query comes to you- do you go for it, or do you satisfy yourself with conning gullible artsy chicks with poseur crap? Good for your penis, perhaps, but not for the rest of us.
DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: dave crish <dcrish@consultant.com>
Date: Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 11:20 AM
Subject: Re: poem for "Vers Magnifique"

dan,
thanks for the insights. i'll value it. expect more from me.
daveo

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: dave crish <dcrish@consultant.com>
Date: Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 11:47 AM
Subject: (response) Re: poem for "Vers Magnifique"

dan,
i see what you're saying by calling this pass a "mess." could use a little sanding (or a torching). who's to say. regardless, i sent another tiny pass over last night (subject line: "poem for "Vers Magnifique #2"). slightly clearer, if i could say. i'd be curious to obtain your assessment.
it's of most interest to me regarding the pass here to hear that you see quite a lot like it. certainly something to perpend.
love or detest it, dan - i appreciate the weight in reply.
daveo

One can almost feel the bubbling boil of rage within. Without my reply, I soon got this, more predictable and laughable shit:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: dave crish < dcrish@consultant.com >
Date: Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 12:09 PM
Subject: poem per Vers Magnifique #3

dan,
again, not knowing anything you've crafted (you're probably not as popular or groundbreaking as you think), i discern an underlying peevishness in you. i'm not to say that you're on point, way off or where else in your assessment. after all, it's why i sent the passages - to obtain an assessment from one who has seen much.
my imagination has spawned of you a disgruntled, carbuncled cockscraper sipping daquiris stirred of his own spoiling semen.
i bet your energy could be better spent making "great art", dan. your replies, whilst weighted and appreciated, gave me a cramp. and not the content.
nevertheless, i will be casting more to your way.
perhaps you're just the counterpoising influence i require to get on to making "great art".
sincerely,
daveo

It is interesting to note that this emailer never read anything on Cosmoetica, yet expects me to act as his tutor. As I have a real job, I was at work, and received a third email from the wannabe bard. Note his passive aggression and lack of even understanding the meaning of ad hominem:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: dave crish <dcrish@consultant.com>
Date: Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 2:09 PM
Subject: note for Vers Magnifique (#5)

dan,
hello once more.
no hard feelings about your ad hominem rants on my segments. as aforesaid, these winds - however polluted - are necessary if one's to grow high and hard. i could probably use more of thoughts from assholes like you.
constructively, i don't know any of what you've done poetically. i came across your name as a link while wikipedia'ing "glendale." in my cursory researches, i see your website is rather popular. something to be proud of, i suppose.
i see at one time or other you thought that "the younger generation needed to destroy the old" and/or "trees needed to burn to save the forest." i wonder if you still see yourself as part of that younger generation.
more seriously, do you have any collections i might look into? i imagine your provocative tenor much have some basis in talent. also, do you still live in the ridgewood/glendale corridor? if so, maybe we can convene for a drink one day. i'm presently living in merry glendale - right off the graveyards.
keep me up to day, add me to mailing list, whatever.
and again, i appreciate your excoriations. thew only way to improve one's swordplay is to, well, swordplay.
take care, dan,
daveo

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 4:15 PM
Subject: Re: (response) Re: poem for "Vers Magnifique"
To: dave crish <dcrish@consultant.com>

Do you go to poetry readings, or go to MFA writing classes?
Both in NYC and Minneapolis I saw 100s of poets who would get up and just spew from whatever first came into their heads. Robin Williams can be funny doing this, but look at Def Jam 'poets'. Art is not about merely expression, but communication.
There needs to be receivable stuff for others. Not that everyone has to get it, not that you have neon signs pointing at 'the meaning' or 'the BIG POINT', but that it is reasonably intelligible.
Suppose I wrote a 10 line poem about a puppy I had as a child, and you said to me it was a great metaphor for the occupation of Poland by the Nazis, and another guy told me it made me think of his wife's warm pussy, and a woman said it made her question God's reality.
Not that a great poem might not be able to be all those things, but if the poem is a simple rhyme about Butch my poodle, then the other interpretations are crazy.
Now, reverse that. How many times have you read or seen a piece of art that was clearly one thing, yet the artist and his sycophant claimed it was a myriad of others things?
Art having multiple meanings can be good- it forced reread or re-experience. But art with infinite meanings means nothing. If it means everything it means nothing.
Now, if you've read Whitman's poems, Plath's poems. Hart Crane's, Langston Hughes', and John Donne's, you will note that it's awfully hard to confuse them- in terms of form, content, structure, etc.
Aside from communication, great art is unique. And the only way to uniquity is thru practice. Here's what to do: steal, steal, steal.
Pick 4 or 5 poets you like, admire, or think great. Then mimic them. Learn how Plath can get away w screechy melodrama, or Whitman w braggadocio, or Crane w sublime music.
Take a line of theirs- say, the dog went to poo (just a made up line). Then make a rime line for that- the log went in blue, or something. Try playing (having fun) w words. Words have meanings, and changing a word changes the meaning of a line or poem. When something is all scattershot, like your 2 pieces, it means nothing.
Then revise it until it works. Work on all the techniques you see of the poets you admire until they become second nature to you. Then, after some more time, their second nature becomes your first nature, and voila- you have the Dave Crishian 'style.' Presuming of course that there's any of it to come out in the first place.
DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 4:17 PM
Subject: Fwd: poem per Vers Magnifique #3
To: dave crish <dcrish@consultant.com>

You need more daiquiri scrapers.
DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 4:18 PM
Subject: Re: note for Vers Magnifique (#5)
To: dave crish <dcrish@consultant.com>

I live in Texas. That quote was not mine. I don't think in such trite terms. Look on my website for poems.
DAN

Then, like the Vermont Poet I took apart earlier, this guy’s next email was 4-5 times the size of the prior email thread, and had an attachment, meaning it was a virus or an emotional rant. Like the Vermont Poet, I deleted the email unread, and filtered his email.

Then there are emails that have venom, but not venom directed at me, or an essay I’ve written, rather at merely my take on another artist, Zhiwei Tu. Recently, I had this increasingly bizarre email exchange from the brother of a person on my website’s email list:

Now, it is important to note how Vladimir uses all of the same fall backs on logical fallacies, strawmanning, and other techniques, like ad hominem and simply ignoring queries he has no answer to. Also, look at how he values supposed ‘intent; in art over the final product, or execution, and how he makes sweeping assumption about intent, and cannot even see that there are many reasons why someone will do an artwork one way. It’s the end result that matters, not the intent. This is what I mean by the hivemind. Vlad is only 22, but he’s well on his way to intellectual oblivion.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 6:47 PM
Subject: Re: Alex
To: Alex Sheremet <alexey.sheremet@gmail.com>, sundu01@gmail.com

Alex: Ok, it was just such an odd statement I wondered if my leg was being pulled.

Vlad: Tu's art is not a ripoff of Impressionism. If you look at much of his work, you'll see it varies from portraits to epic murals based on Chinese history to depictions of persons in moments where they are not in set poses. The first two paintings mentioned in his interview, on the Farmer Girl and the Guy in rainsuit, are striking, even more so in person. Looking at it from a small distance, the glops of paint are every bit like a Pollock, but then there is this coherence into vague form, sharper form, then an explosion of human facial expression that is detailed. One can imbue into it a bit, but then there is also a definitive moment. It's as if a mix of Modernism with, at the center, a Rembrandt-like precision.
There simply is no comparing the silly glops of a Pollock nor the dull monochromes of a Rothko with Tu's artistic skill. No child could easily fool an art critic into thinking the work was made by an adult. Tu's art does not depend upon the whims of the percipient, but on the vision and skill of the artist. A good comparison would be to also use Andrew Wyeth's famous Christina's World, where a lower quadrant of the painting is a typical AbEx scene, but then it is subsumed into the dry, grassy hillside upon which the titular girl lays.
Tu actually is more daring than Wyeth, because he uses much of the things these prior movements and artist did, and does so in a single painting. I never painted, but one does not have to be a musician to tell a great musician from a hack, either.
Simply put, if a layman can paint a canvas in a short time and an expert cannot tell the difference between it and the work of a Master, you are dealing w a fraud. There is no such thing as non-narrative nor non-representational art. Pollock's paintings are very representative....of drips and streaks. Yawn. Rothko's represent color. Wow. It has the intellectual heft of a kitten's fart.
Tu's paintings work on kinetic, aesthetic, historic, and Classical levels, as well as admixing them into interesting combinations. That is the mark of a great artist. Does this mean all his paintings are great? No, but the two I saw in person immediately were- they strike one like the best Hopper paintings do. And I'd say a good 15-20% of those I've seen have strong arguments for greatness.
Alex mentioned his arguments w you when he spoke with me and my wife, and it seems you are much more of an in the box person. Great artists not only push boundaries, but they change boxes. Tu does both.
DAN

Vlad then wrote a tome, to which I replied. Note the contradictions wherein he declares one thing, then in the next breath, refutes himself:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 4:29 PM
Subject: Re: Alex
To: Vladimir Sheremet <sundu01@gmail.com>

Interpolated:

***The terms 'great' and 'professors' rarely should be used in the same sentence. Didacts are even farther removed from the artistic process than critics.

***Except that in all the Impressionist works I've seen there is nothing like the explosion of form and the definition of moment that Tu's best works embody.

***So what do you have to say? Thus far you've fallen back on the appeal to authority fallacy- unnamed great profs and Delacroix- hardly a great painter in the league w Picasso, Rembrandt, Frederic Edwin Church, Matisse, or even Georgia O'Keeffe.
Fuck 'originality'- excellence is what counts, and Tu's best paintings exhibit a wide range of excellence, from the raft painting which shows much of the motion of Cubism, but in a more real setting, to portraits of dancers wherein the tension can be seen in their fingers.
Also, you wrote of Tu, 'He is like a poet who takes cliches from various great poems and sticks them into his own work.' Then you quote a string of clichés from a 3rd rate painter like Delacroix: 'If you cultivate your soul it will find the means to express itself. It will invent a language of its own far better than the metre or the prose of this or that great writer. What! You say you have an original mind, and yet your flame is only kindled by reading Byron or Dante! You mistake this fever for creative power when it is really only a desire to imitate…' C'mon Vlad. And I didn't even touch the first quote. This is Art 101 for Dummies you are quoting.

***First, Tu did not call himself anything, in the interview, or elsewhere. I did. And it is for me and others to decide.

***Could it be that he has an aesthetic preference. Look at the leaps you've made, revealing your own biases. I will say, you probably do get good grades from your profs, because your thinking and analysis is as delimited as your typical prof. This is why MFA writing programs are so deadly, film schools produce hacks, and art schools produce worse.

***You have yet to analyze a thing in Tu's work. You are analyzing what you wish his paintings were, in your own biases, and finding them wanting for pseudo-historical reasons that no one else will care to. Your mindset is that of the poetry critics who sneered at Whitman because he did not write in formal metrics, save that you are looking at him as some sort of throwback. It reminds me of an idiot who ripped a poem of mine that appeared in a paper because it used the word limn; as if a word could not be revived and used outside its old Romantic setting. One innovates by juxtaposing familiar things w those unfamiliar.
Thus far I have not seen nor heard an original thought nor comment, just a robo-crit from an art student seeking to get good grades from a professor who failed as an artist.

***Look at what you just did. You reveal your own bias right there- against realism (even though the painting clearly is not realistic, but a fusion of Ab Ex and Realism, with a hint of kineticism tossed in).

***How is it dull? Because you don't like the color scheme? Look at all the subjective wording you've used in this email. Ok, you don't like the painting. So?

***I could use these very same rhetorically subjective queries and ask them about any painting in any given -ism and all it would do is reveal a subjective bias.

***And what do you define as harmony and unity? The colors in the foreground certainly unify the light source seen outside, in the background with that on the face of the girl. You do not even comment on the motion in the painting- the sweep of greens that define the motion of the arm. Why? Because you are so intent on giving a dull textbook rendering of a critique that you cannot even see things that you have not been taught. Great artists do not have to learn such things, they just need to learn how to use them.

***Which is what your criticism has been thus far. It has been that of a little boy sticking his tongue out at something his parents like, simply because he is angry and jealous that they noticed it and not the cute thing he did.

***And the effect of a monochrome canvas is? And its ideational quality is? And its historical and technical heft is?

***Music is narrative, not representational, so you have gone off on a tangent of your own making. Sometimes the narrative is emotional, but there is always a narrative, be it a Satie piano etude or a bluesman's repetitive wails that end in a banjo strum.

***I did not posit the Mona Lisa as a great painting, but there is a scene, there is a figure, there is a certain look (depending on which version of the Lisa you are speaking of). Now there is a trite work. But, for whatever reason it has stuck around. That said, there is far more heft than anything Pollock or Rothko offered. Compare, as example, both of those frauds to far better contemporaries, like Freud or Bacon, and even though I do not rank them up with Goya, they have far more heft and daring than Rothko and Pollock, because their paintings have deeper narratives and represent something that does not have a sub-Bazooka Joe moment.

***If you look at the scope and arc of Tu's career he has clearly evolved. Maybe not as you'd like. Again, so? As for kinetic, again, just look at the girl's body- it is in motion. You use words as markers for dilettante conceptions. Kinetic and aesthetic do not mean merely what you or some critic or prof prefer- they are words without subjective biases. You may not like the kinetcs and aesthetics of Tu's work. Again, so? But they exist.

***Look at how you contradict yourself but do not realize it, because you are so invested in accepting the pabulum others feed you that you do not think:
You type: 'Real artists don't know where they are headed, because unlike craft or illustration, there is no pre-destined goal in mind.'
One sentence before you type: 'Real artists do good work and evolve towards a contemporary aesthetic, not sit behind their easy-to-follow classical cliches, walking on paths carved out for them hundreds of years before.'
So which is it, Vlad- do real artists have no goal, or do they evolve toward a contemporary aesthetic- i.e., that which Vladimir Sheremet declares and likes?
This is where you should have the Homer Simpson moment and go, 'D'oh!'
Think for yourself, fuck the fossilized minds of professors who have not got a clue, and get on the ball, lest you become a fossil yourself.

***Well beyond a little boy who cannot even realize his own animadversions, hypocrisies, and plain old twisted logic.

***I don't know why Alex wd have told you that. I have never been a painter, but the visual arts are infinitely less complex than literature, which is as close to abstraction as humans can get, barring the genetic development of telekinesis. So, it's not that difficult to deal with the same old tired self-justifications and myopia (and self-refutations) from an aspiring visual artist when I've dispatched many a literary poseur.
DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Vladimir Sheremet <sundu01@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 8:03 AM
Subject: Re: Alex

There is one thing that I forgot to ask and add. You said that "Tu's paintings work on kinetic, aesthetic, historic, and Classical levels, as well as admixing them into interesting combinations. That is the mark of a great artist." You used a lot of words like "kinetic,"striking," "coherence into vague form, then sharper form," "explosion of human facial expression that is detailed," but unfortunately, this does not tell me anything about why it is good. They are purely descriptions of works, not analyses, and descriptions that can be used for a multitude of very bad paintings (I can have an "explosion of human facial expression," but it can still be a very bad painting, and more often than not, it is). I'd like to know, specifically, how this proposed mixing of thematic elements is made compelling. You can mix subjects all you want, but are they mixed creatively? How is the thematic, or conceptual, or even subject matter, reinforced formally? Is there a play on classical elements to make a contemporary statement, or is classicism simply regurgitated with a slightly more contemporary subject matter? The paintings have subject matter but nothing in terms of creative use of paint, composition, color, space, etc., so I'm wondering why you think that Tu "pushes boundaries" and "changes boxes."

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 4:41 PM
Subject: Fwd: Alex
To: sundu01@gmail.com

Vlad: I am not trotting out textbook clichés. I am writing for a general public. A good critic does not build walls around art, and then moat it away from the masses so only a priesthood can interpret it. A good critic melds the high and low.
When I review a film I disdain filmschoolspeak for this purpose.
When one mixes the old and new, such as the historical and mythic elements in Tu's raft painting, as well as the mix of styles, one is doing something new. As for greater analysis, it was an interview, not a review.
As for analyses, it's odd that you should ask since there was not an analytical sentence in your prior email. And, were I to analyze a painting, or suite of them, I would not lard it down with the clichés you use so freely, but cast them in terms that layfolk could understand.
Take the Frontier Girl. The explosion of the child's face comes out of a background that is kinetic, abstract (small a), small i impressionistic, and a couple of other -isms I could cull (such as from http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/Arts/painting/paint-movem/paintmove.htm). But this is the self-defeating sort of high brow dilettantism that dissuades folks from art. That the face is so realistic, that the clothes are so large (likely her mother's), that there is a plaintive look of fear (perhaps violating family rules), that it is set, likely in the 1800s, when a different set of mores and values from today were present, that she is in front of what looks to be an oil lamp, yet the light source is elsewhere- (perhaps she has been discovered?), all place this scene in a moment that is interesting and unique. It is not a portrait, it is not a posed moment, but a realistic narrative moment that is played off of a daring mix of styles. Well, that says a hell of alot more than any Pollock drip or monochrome painting from Rothko ever did.
On a side note: cool the sibling rivalry stuff. It's not worth it.
DAN

Vlad then replied, first small, and then in an even longer tome, to which I replied. But, again, note how much Vlad’s mind’s inabilities mirror those of the emailers and online people I detailed earlier in this essay:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Vladimir Sheremet <sundu01@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 9:12 PM
Subject: Re: Alex

Alex informed me that I sounded rude in my first e-mail. I am sorry if I was. I interpreted your "in the box" comment too strongly and replied harshly when I said the same about yourself, Dan.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 2:51 PM
Subject: Fwd: Alex
To: Vladimir Sheremet <sundu01@gmail.com>

Oh boy. Sententiousness comes to mind.
Interpolated:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Vladimir Sheremet <sundu01@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 8:31 PM
Subject: Re: Alex

***The terms 'great' and 'professors' rarely should be used in the same sentence. Didacts are even farther removed from the artistic process than critics.

***I did not say that, you assumed that, just as you assumed Tu's motives for his paintings. You are very assumptive. But, when the didact you revere makes you start spouting the worst sort of flowery clichés about art, it makes all your claims about Tu's clichédness, well, just silly. I never talk about the work of someone I've not encountered.

***Except that in all the Impressionist works I've seen there is nothing like the explosion of form and the definition of moment that Tu's best works embody.

Again, vague words that don't tell me anything. Care to be more analytical than descriptive? His work is without form.

***The definition of moment is as I described earlier- with the girl, caught in her moment, as a light intrudes from an anterior position from the viewer. If one actually knows the definition of words, and reads them, it is quite simple to figure them out. But, if one is thumbing a specialized thesaurus and looking for buzzwords, the obvious will often be missed. It's actually a very specific statement. Now, I could wax on about how, like the futurists, Tu exhibits a slight dynamism in the motion of the oversized sleeve of the garment the girl is wearing. But, to the average reader and viewer, this will tell them ZERO. But, if I talk of the explosion of form referring to the sleeve, a viewer can look at that and see the movement and the form. As I said, critics take down walls that elitists try to construct to insulate themselves from criticism.

Fuck 'originality'- excellence is what counts, and Tu's best paintings exhibit a wide range of excellence, from the raft painting which shows much of the motion of Cubism, but in a more real setting, to portraits of dancers wherein the tension can be seen in their fingers.

I quote Delacroix because he said it better than I care to compose myself. It is a quote that stuck with me since I read it over a year ago. "Excellence" means very little if you are simply an imitator. If I can copy Rembrandt excellently, what does that make me? "Tension in the fingers" means absolute shit to me if the painting is boring, formless, and uncreative. There is nothing to commend in those works.

***So, clichéd crapola that means nothing and is sentimentalist tripe w/o any intellectual foundation is BETTER than you can do? Ok, one cannot say that you lack a vague awareness of your limits. But, then why try arguing if you can do no better than banalities? Tension in the fingers is the first thing that any viewer will notice in the dancer painting referred to. Here is what art students who have swallowed the Kool Aid do not get- people who view art see things without the blinders that you inflict on yourselves. Your argument reminds me of the rapturous masturbations that pro-Jazz enthusiasts will spout over any long, dull riff. There is good and bad in any -ism. The reason why an Andy Warhol, for example, will long be recalled after a Pollock is gone is because he knew the soup cans he foisted were shit, and was aware of the fraud that is Modern Art, at least since Duchamp (his predecessor) and his urinal. As for Rembrandt, no one is saying to copy him, that would be plagiarism, but steal from him, certainly, and any other great painter. That makes you SMART! You will likely learn more from Rembrandt than the cliché-lovin' prof you adore. And Tu's work has form, is creative, and boring is an emotional and subjective comment that has no real dialectic value.

***Also, you wrote of Tu, 'He is like a poet who takes cliches from various great poems and sticks them into his own work.' Then you quote a string of cliches from a 3rd rate painter like Delacroix: 'If you cultivate your soul it will find the means to express itself. It will invent a language of its own far better than the metre or the prose of this or that great writer. What! You say you have an original mind, and yet your flame is only kindled by reading Byron or Dante! You mistake this fever for creative power when it is really only a desire to imitate…' C'mon Vlad. And I didn't even touch the first quote. This is Art 101 for Dummies you are quoting.

Why does it matter if I quote cliches from Delacroix? I quote them for their truth. Stick to the arguments that are being made.

***Quoting a clichés from another person, even if you believe them says that you lack the ability to even process the ideas and frame an argument yourself. It goes to the core of your ability to grasp and conceptualize. If the best you can do, when smitten with a gal, is tell her not to break your heart, she will think you are not quite deep. So, if you are quoting them for their truth, then that is not an argument you are making? Again, in one breath you say A and in the next you say B. As for the intellectual posit of the quote, it's nonsense. I've known many fine and intelligent folks who utterly lack any creativity. Creativity is something apart from mere intellect. There are, in fact, 3 types of intellect: the Functionary, that all have, the Creationary, that less than 1% have, and the Visionary, that even far fewer have. Many a Mensan lacks creativity, much less Visionary gifts. So, again, Delacroix's quote was pabulum meant to gull the masses, much like the idiots who sucker wannabe writers into dropping shitloads of money so they can be Emily Dickinson or Ernest Hemingway; except for the reality that creativity cannot be taught.

***First, Tu did not call himself anything, in the interview, or elsewhere. I did. And it is for me and others to decide.

***You cannot be this dense. You must realize that HIS website is really a website that is a business portal designed by others to sell his work? What are they gonna say- buy paintings buy a nice guy who makes swell pies? In fact, Tu has no cyberskills- his assistant had to send and make links for me to link to his work. If you read the interview and other stuff online, he is very self-effacing and humble- to a fault.
Vlad, these sorts of comments show one of three things- a) you are being disingenuous thru and thru, b) you are not that bright, or c) both.

I sure do get good grades from my profs, but I do it by spending my mornings, afternoons, and evenings painting in school. Again, what do you know about the thinking of my professor?

You clearly said nothing about my analysis, simply brushed it off as "delimited." How about you give it a reply, or have you nothing to say? He doesn't have a "preference" for a style, but a very vulgar fetish in which his anatomy is glued to behinds of past masters. Could it be that his "aesthetic preference" is simply his brainwashing at classical Chinese schools? (I have Chinese professors who tell me all about that shit.) You still offered no comment on that... I will admit that I have a bias, but that is for creativity. Tu has none. Again, since you seemed to have conveniently missed my points, the brown Renaissance aesthetic had meaning behind it. It was their version of contemporary painting, using the limited tools but wide knowledge that was available to them. Tu has no meaning, only a fetish for what those artists did. He is an imitator, taking the easy road down, and because of that he falls flat on his face. Tell me what the brown aesthetic does for Tu, besides looking like a washed-out, elderly student. And please do not speak about my "biases" until you correct your bias towards cornball, brown-palette painters and hatred towards abstractionists. Deal?

***I don't doubt you are an A or A+ student. Again, so? Valedictorians and salutatorians have been shown in studies to perform far worse out of school than average folks because school is a different reality than life. After all these words, you have again stated nothing that shows you have an original thought or opinion.
As for the brown palettes of some paintings. In the Frontier Girl the tone should be obvious. It is an American painting, on the frontier. To average folk this conjures up the Old West. Verdant tree lined streets do not come to mind, dust and desert hues do. Also, in the raft painting, set on one of China's main rivers, the likelier explanation is that, since China's rivers are more notoriously muddy than the Mississippi, he would have chosen what color to represent the mud- teal? Good sense, and a look at the titles, would give a viewer ample reason to get why the palette is used, rather than your 'cornball' reason. A reason which is based wholly on your subjective claims, and far less specific than tension in fingers.
Yet again, not a single statement that is original to you, and not something regurged from a lecture or textbook. Personally, I don't particularly like Tu's larger canvases, but the stuff that is good is very good. I'll tale Hudson River school canvases any day. I like Ashcan paintings and early American realists like Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. But both of them had great paintings and so-so paintings. There is no proper way to do any art. Excellence is the only thing that is revolutionary, when sustained. In that sense, the greatest artists are necessarily the most revolutionary. 'Originality' is overrated. There is this wack job wannabe poet named Bob Grumman- Google him. He's a bad poet, but tries to compensate for his lack in real poetry by putting words into mathematical equations. Now, he's not the first poet to use math in poetry, but, indeed, he is likely the first to divide a tree by ignorance and get a remainder of lachrymose. But, so what? It's nonsense. It has the intellectual heft of a kindergartener's finger painting.
I like Precisionism, most of all, but like and dislike are diff axes than good or bad. There are good and bad Precisionist paintings. Same w Photorealism, or any other school. You have clearly revealed a bias toward one way of thought, and that is toward the later schools because they are....later schools. But art goes in cycles. Your ideals are like those of bad poets who write free verse and scorn rhymed poetry. Why? Usually because they are bad at it and can only write their doggerel in prose broken into lines w no justification.
But, even if you were correct that Tu was somehow backward (ignoring his constant mix of -isms great and small into newer styles), that would not, by an iota, take away from the immediacy of why the Frontier Girl painting arrests viewers who first see it- and that is the narrative dilemma, and the mystery of the light source, and the dynamism of the moment that, were it a photo, would be blurred with motion. A reasonably intelligent viewer will get all this, but a boxed in art student will not, because he will have trained himself to value the minutia of art that means little to the notion of art (as a higher form of communication), rather than the objective and obvious ways that a work will succeed or fail.

Thus far I have not seen nor heard an original thought nor comment, just a robo-crit from an art student seeking to get good grades from a professor who failed as an artist.

Again, I see that you resort to attacks upon me and my professors instead of actual arguments. (About my professor being a failed artist, he owns a studio in Manhattan, a house in Pennsylvania, and shows regularly. If you are talking about monetary success, please tell me how much money you made off of your poetry and we'll talk further. If you are talking about purely artistic success, again, you do not know him. Please stop sounding so bitter.) My argument that you cared only to respond to by name ("pseudo-historical") talked about the creative reasons why Impressionists painted the way they did. Why the strokes looked the way they did, the colors, the compositions, etc. If you have an argument against that, since you deem it "pseudo-historical," I'd like to hear your response to it, not your meaningless labels. Why is it pseudo-historical? The Impressionists painted like that for a reason. All that Tu does is appropriates their style for his own uncreative mess, without reason, without effect.

You may not appreciate originality, but keep in mind that virtually every era in Western painting was a creative reaction against the previous, or at the very least, a creative reaction against something else. So while you may have a different view of how art transpired, art history does not.

***I'm not bitter; I'm pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. And, at least I got you to be honest about your values and their Materialistic base. But, again, you have not analyzed, but dodged and tossed out the canard of being attacked, even as you have done nothing but attack art work that you cannot give any coherent reasons for artistic failure. As for why Impressionists did or did not paint one way, or obsess on cow dung, is IRRELEVANT to Tu's work. Maybe it'll make a sexy female student in your art class moist. Again, so? I lack a vagina so I am dry by it. As for why Tu paints some way, there is likely a reason, but as a critic and art viewer, reasons and intent are meaningless. The end result is, and, in the major paintings we've talked about, he has succeeded.

I love representational art, as long as it is not an imitation of the past. (I never said anything about realism, but realistic space.) Pictorial space is a formal problem that Tu deals with very poorly, and you have not replied to my criticisms of it (of course, only called me biased). The question is, "How can I depict space in an interesting way?" The space is typical, obvious, 1:1, without thought, without artistic sensibility. He may be able to get away with such a corny depiction of it, but what else does he have to fall back on? Impressionist strokes, poor composition, and meaningless Renaissance browns? He has nothing and no interesting space. Boring.

***If a realistic or representational artwork is what those words claim, guess what? A still life will be a still life today, 500 years ago, or 1000 years from now when painted on a Mars colony. Your claim is illogical. How is it corny? That word means nothing. Perhaps he could have played around with perspective more, but to what end? So that a budding art student who likes to quote clichés from a professor is happy? You are the person who was seeking reasons, but only if the reasons emotionally suit you. Why, for example, would the doorframe behind the Frontier Girl need to be 40% larger than it would be in a normal perspective? If it were, there might be a reason, but as I said in an earlier email, you are judging not Tu's painting, but his painting as YOU want it to be. I might have preferred to see a chihuahua pup in the background. But it's not. Does the painting get demerits for that? As I stated, it presents a dramatic and narrative tension. The look on the girl;'s face, the fact that it is highlighted and arises out of a background that is partly Impressionistic, but also with elements of Futurism, is enough to satisfy most. What you are arguing for is ornateness for ornateness's sake. Fine, there is your calling. Star an -ism called Vladism, where works only succeed if they have elements in them that are inappropriate and redundant, just because Vlad Sheremet thinks they're groovy.

***How is it dull? Because you don't like the color scheme. Look at all the subjective wording you've used in this email. Ok, you don't like the painting. So?

Subjective wording? I described the painting as it actually is. I talked about the meaningless colors, the corny, obvious way that he went about unifying the painting, the meaningless Impressionistic technique, among other things. You are not replying to my criticisms or defending the work in a way that shows me that you even read or understand my arguments, as you only reply with brush-offs. It is dull because it is a simple-minded regurgitation of the past and very lazily-executed and poorly thought out. If you want me to repeat those previous arguments, I'd rather you just read them again.

***How is any color meaningless? It is green or not, meaning it can be any other color. Here is another area where you clearly do not even understand that words have meaning, and this reveals you are robotically tossing about terms simply because you've heard them tossed around by others. Meaningless color has no value as a statement on anything, unless we were talking about colorizing black and white films. Corny has no meaning. And I gave you two likely and valid reasons for the browns and earth colors in the two most mentioned paintings. Your assumptions are that Tu was somehow aping painting styles rather than there being reasons other than that that could justify a color. As I stated earlier, a word is not inherently bad or good, but how it's used. Same w color- it's a tool. A hammer is not evil nor good. If I bash you with it it has been used badly, but if I build an orphanage w it it's been used for good. As for Tu's palettes, again, not a single reason, other than your assumptions, why they are 'bad.'
'simple-minded regurgitation of the past and very lazily-executed and poorly thought out'
Well, I've given very good reasons why they are not connected to a past only you claim, laziness has no real qualitative value, and I've shown how the mix of styles and the narrative presented achieve what they do. You my NOT LIKE them, but there is clearly thought behind them.

***I could use these very same rhetorically subjective queries and ask them about any painting in any given -ism and all it would do is reveal a subjective bias.

Of course you can, but those -isms that you speak of happened in the past, the times in which they were invented and used to great effect. This guy is a contemporary painter, and thus, needs to find more creative ways by which to paint, not regurgitate the past. I am not calling for an overhaul of everything artistic here, but this "contemporary" painter has absolutely nothing to show, just the same old song of the nightingale that I've heard before.

***Well, this backwardness you see, I've shown is only because you assume certain things, and ignore others that are inconvenient to your expedient dismissal. This says far more of you than Tu.

***And what do you define as harmony and unity? The colors in the foreground certainly unify the light source seen outside, in the background with that on the face of the girl. You do not even comment on the motion in the painting- the sweep of greens that define the motion of the arm. Why? Because you are so intent on giving a dull textbook rendering of a critique that you cannot even see things that you have not been taught. Great artists do not have to learn such things, they just need to learn how to use them.

You're quite the ad hominem talker. Let's discuss the work instead. I never denied that there is unity or harmony in the painting, in fact, I said that he did create it. However, his method of doing so is corny. If one wishes to create unity in a painting, what more obvious way to do it than to use the same colors and tones everywhere! There is a more creative approach to be found, but Tu could not have been bothered. He took the obvious road in solving a formal painting problem. "The sweep of greens that define the motion of the arm" is a bloated way of saying "the greenery that shares a contour with the arm." Not impressed, Dan. It is not there.

***Again, corny. Has no real meaning, unless you are accusing Tu of velvet clown paintings. Again, you see a problem where there is none. It's like accusing an Ansel Adams photo of El Capitan of solving the problem of verdancy by going B&W, w/o realizing that there are other reasons why B&W might be a superior approach, or why the browns may exist, given the paintings time and place. And, no, the rephrasing of what I wrote is NOT the same thing. I'll give you this, you at least know enough to realize that writing is not your forte.

***And the effect of a monochrome canvas is? And its ideational quality is? And its historical and technical heft is?

But I will still answer. The "effect" of a monochrome canvas is a subjective thing.

***The only subjectivity of such a canvas comes into play if we take the philosophic posit and ask if your idea of red is really red, or is what you call red what I would call green. But, if all you see and call red is what I'd call green, and what Joe down the block would call mauve, its real color is meaningless, because we all are in synch and see the differing colors where they are in each other's world. But, in the real world, where such is poseur posturing, a red canvas will evoke, 'Ah, that's like an apple, or a stop sign, in most folks. A pink canvas will make folk feel calm. A gray canvas will have people seeing color effects if they turn their head too quickly. These are all things shown and proved in studied of folks who were forced to watch colors and record their reactions, as well as having their reactions recorded by instruments. Yes, there will be the psychotic who is inflamed, not quelled by pink, but, yawn, again, so what? It's just a color with no narrative save, 'red....red....still red.' That actually makes Grumman's math poems seem deep.

Its "ideational" quality? I don't know, how about the Mona Lisa's ideational quality? Or a flute concerto from Mozart? Does it matter?

***The strength of it does. And Tu's paintings are certainly more than Leonardo's overrated painting.

It is certainly more original than Tu's regurgitation from the past. His ability to place perfect colors together far exceeds Tu, and his ability to create interest with such little content is a feat greater than anything Tu could hope to do.

Technically, you'd be hard-pressed to imitate Rothko. Don't believe me? Give it a try and send it to me (and until then, try not to speak). But after you're done imitating, it is still an unoriginal copy. Historically, it pretty much does away with content and gives the illusion of formlessness, but is as captivating as anything that I've ever seen.

***Vlad, if you know anything of the business of art you'd know that Abstract Expressionism has probably been the cause of more art fraud than any other movement in history. Why? It's the easiest to fake, and many art historians suspect that the majority of 'undiscovered Ab Ex works were actually done years later by forgers who played on the gullibility of critics who will whatever things they want into any glop of painting, no matter how unskilled. Asking me to imitate Rothko is like asking me to be silent for a few minutes and imitate John Cage. I'd rather imitate Curly Howard's Woo-woo-woo. 'Historically, it pretty much does away with content and gives the illusion of formlessness, but is as captivating as anything that I've ever seen.' This is where any hope that you had an intellect finally coiled down the plughole. It also makes your claims against Tu laughable. Art is about communication. To do away with content would mean to do away with communication, for there wd be naught to communicate. But, of course, there is content, and it is color. It's just that it's content only the senile and retarded might enjoy. Yippee.

***Music is narrative, not representational, so you have gone off on a tangent of your own making. Sometimes the narrative is emotional, but there is always a narrative, be it a satie piano etude or a bluesman's repetitive wails that end in a banjo strum.

Let's see what just happened in this argument. You tell me that painting cannot be nonrepresentational, because the paint alludes to the physical thing, paint. (How mesmerizing of a thought, paint is paint. I think that you are on to something here.) Thus, "just color" or "just drips" make you "yawn." They are nothing but physical things on a canvas, how "boring!" you say. But music, on the other hand, is not boring, although the notes of a violin allude to the physical sounds being created on an instrument. The little sounds, used in a masterly combination, are beautiful! And why isn't it the same thing, you say? Why can't I compare them? The oldest argument about this argument: music has a beginning and end; it has a "narrative."

***Is there even a point to this tangent? I stated that music has a narrative- it can be good or bad, but it is not physically representational.

Do you have anything more compelling than that? So what that it has a narrative? If you saw an abstract painting where your eye travels from spot to spot, which is usually how it is with great painting, anyway, then what does that make your argument? Or, if I painted a long, thin abstract canvas and made it go around a large room, and you had to walk around it bit by bit, from beginning to end, you would grant me that, given the abstract painting is good, it is good art, comparable to fine music? Probably not.

***The narrative has to be compelling; the fact of it or its lack is outside the scope. It's like arguing about gravity's effect, but on the actual typed word 'gravity.' It has no meaning.
A narrative is not when one's eye goes from point a to b. A narrative is, in the Tu painting, what I described about the moment, what it implies about the moments before or after the moment captured, and on past it. In the Mona Lisa the narrative could involve the background, the Lisa's clothes, her smirk, her eyeline, etc. Not that there's a groovy button on her blouse that makes you think about Reeses Pieces. So, here we have gotten to a crux. After all this you have demonstrated you did not even know what is meant by narrative in art. Yet you dismiss it. Why? Because you do not understand it. And this is what you've learnt in college? To dismiss that you cannot understand.

You certainly don't have to posit it as great, but neither are Rembrandt's self-portraits? Freud is much farther from Trash than Tu. But I'd rank Rothko the better, more original, and more daring painter. Freud took the human form, put it back into (usually) "regular" pictorial space, and made it a little revolting to look at. That is my opnion of Freud. As for narratives (hmmm... I thought painting didn't have any), I can see the influence of the written word on your thinking about a completely different artistic language. Talk about bias, you have a bias for paintings that "represent" something, whatever trash that means.

Talking about representation, you have still failed to defined what Mozart's Clarinet Concerto means or represents.

***As for Mozart, I'd have to listen to it to have an opinion. I have no bias toward paintings that represent anything, unless we acknowledge that all paintings are representative, otherwise they are not paintings. Pollock's paintings (the later ones) represent drips. That's hardly more daring than putting the human form into various new settings. Freud, like him or not, was far more daring with forms. Was Pollock more 'original' in the sense that no one else before thought of something so vapid artistically and intellectually? Yes, I'll grant that, he was originally stupid. That's hardly a thing to beam over.

From the website, his evolution is very limited. As for "kinetic," that is another bloat word for something as simple as a moving body. You are only using such words to disguise the fact that there is nothing else that can be said about them as formally creative.

***As opposed to corny?

Instead, you opt for unnecessarily bloated descriptions of a work that has nothing there. Yes, the moving body is there? So? Tell me what is creative about it. Tell me why it is well done. Saying that something is "kinetic" doesn't tell me shit. I don't like the aesthetics because they are corny, not because I don't like that type of work. I don't like the aesthetics because the composition is merely fair. And that is objective, not subjective. Why is it corny? You can reread what I wrote earlier.

***It's far more creative than drips or monochromes because the works tell a tale and evokes an emotion that can be replicated in many. I guess one can say that Pollock and Rothko do, too, but 'huh? and yawns are hardly what one wants for a response. And this is why most people laugh at Modern Art- be it Ab Ex or novels that lack punctuation and are just verbal diarrhea.

***Look at how you contradict yourself but do not realize it, because you are so invested in accepting the pabulum others feed you that you do not think:

You type: 'Real artists don't know where they are headed, because unlike craft or illustration, there is no pre-destined goal in mind.'

One sentence before you type: 'Real artists do good work and evolve towards a contemporary aesthetic, not sit behind their easy-to-follow classical cliches, walking on paths carved out for them hundreds of years before.'

So which is it, Vlad- do real artists have no goal, or do they evolve toward a contemporary aesthetic- i.e, that which Vladimir Sheremet declares and likes?

Think for yourself, fuck the fossilized minds of professors who have not got a clue, and get on the ball, lest you become a fossil yourself.

Please read between the lines. The great artist does not know where he is headed, but he is constantly evolving towards a contemporary aesthetic. That is a pretty inclusive label.

***It is also biased and depends upon what you define as contemporary. Again, one can use Middle English words in new ways. I've shown that Tu uses differing old schools in new ways. You just don't want to acknowledge it because you want to define a color scheme as being for your reasons. Again, so?

The artist doesn't know what the work will look like or what the subject will be, but he strives for something contemporary, to be of the times, not stuck in the past--in other words, not corny. Instead of trying to find little meaningless things like this, how about you actually propose an argument, taking about the work formally, about why it is creative or good and not simply recycled formalist ideas with a slightly more contemporary and personal subject?

***This idea of new, new. new, as in totally new, not new by recycling the old, is precisely why most art has become so delimited from the masses that it is dying. Enjoy your priesthood, but note that even the choirboys have left, so no fun on Saturday nights with them.

***Well beyond a little boy who cannot even realize his own animadversions, hypocrisies, and plain old twisted logic.

I have not seen it yet. You mean your little attacks and refusals to argue? Or you bringing up the same discussions that I have with my college peers? They at least argue (and certainly don't come across as bitter as you are).

Of course the visual arts are "infinitely less complex," you're a fucking poet. (I'm biased?) I at least don't have the arrogance of criticizing an art that I have little knowledge of, and especially an art that I don't practice personally and so cannot truly compare to painting... You "dispatched many a literary poseur"? You think very highly of yourself and your accomplishments in life, so I commend your self-esteem, but not your arrogance. Please, don't let me remind you of the physicality, space requirements, and hours it takes to just begin a painting. One must have some passion to drag six foot paintings on the subway, hide from security guards in the bathroom in school while painting, and haul fifty-pound bags of marble for several Manhattan blocks before I can even begin to paint. You sit quietly behind a desk with your fingernails clean and your tea by the writing light. How pristine! And I'm not even talking about art yet. Just leave it alone if you don't know what you're dealing with, that's all. There is nothing wrong with saying that you just don't know about an art that you are so obviously, painfully clueless about.

***Yes, painting is harder because it builds one's biceps by lugging things around. Vlad, if only I thought you were for a moment not being serious. Give it up.
Writing is the highest generalized art form- it does more w less. Visual and aural arts have had 100s of millions of years to attune the senses in humans. Language is less than 10k years, and less than 6k written. It is squiggles on a medium. Period. Even a dull person must be able to translate the meanings. It takes the speed of light to get the smirk of Mona Lisa, but try to evoke that w words. It is FAR more difficult. Music and sounds subliminally affect the mind, so music has a HUGE headstart on the ease it can effect a cry, say. But try to get someone to weep with words.
Also, when someone wants to describe the height of a thing, they evoke terms like 'like poetry, poetry in motion, or 'he's a poet w numbers, music, ideas, a basketball (Michael Jordan). No one called Jordan's slam dunks painterly. Period.

***Vlad: I am not trotting out textbook cliches. I am writing for a general public. A good critic does not build walls arounf art, and then moat it away from the masses so only a priesthood can interpret it. A good critic melds the high and low.

But I wasn't talking about your interview. Alex told me that there is this painter you liked, I saw it, thought it was garbage art, I told him, and he told me to e-mail you.

***First, I said he was a great painter. I have elucidated why, but you have erected such biases that you cannot accept that they could be wrong. And, as I said, while I admire Tu's craft, I don't particularly LIKE his work- you have to get beyond conflating good/bad with like/dislike.

***When one mixes the old and new, such as the historical and mythic elements in Tu's raft painting, as well as the mix of styles, one is doing something new.

The formalism is the heart of the work. Styles changed based on formal ideas, and usually not the subject matter. I can paint an altarpiece, for example, but it only matters how I paint it, not what I'm painting, when we speak about quality. Formally, I can speak about the Raft exactly the same way. The subject is certainly strong, but its abstract framework, and neither any of its formal qualities, are able to hold it up for long. There is an interesting perspective, and I'm sure that I should probably see something this large in person, but from what I can tell, it is the same lazy formalism as before. It is merely compelling as an illustration. But it doesn't push formalist boundaries and neither does it work as a creative, contemporary work. And I can tell by your pandering to "historical and mythic elements" that it is your love of literature that is blinding you. That is your bias. Illustrations are often conceived for books and poems, and it makes sense that you like that kind of shit. But it is not good painting. Good painting has to be creative on a formal level as well.

***And it clearly is. You either refuse to recognize the mix of styles or cannot see them. Either way, the flaw is yours not Tu's.

***As for analyses, it's odd that you should ask since there was not an analytical sentence in your prior email. And, were I to analyze a painting, or suite of them, I would not lard it down with the cliches you use so freely, but cast them in terms that layfolk could understand.

I did not know that I had to provide one first before you can tell me something about it. Are those the rules? I simply asked you to tell me why you thought they were good paintings, and not in generalized, "kinetic" terms. And I was never referring to your interviews.

***And I did, in clear non-textbookese. That you have difficulty w reading comprehension, again, is a flaw w you.

***Take the Frontier Girl. The explosion of the child's face comes out of a background that is kinetic, abstract (small a), small i impressionistic, and a couple of other -isms I could cull (such as from http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/Arts/painting/paint-movem/paintmove.htm). But this is the self-defeating sort of high brow dilettantism that dissuades folks from art. That the face is so realistic, that the clothes are so large (likely her mother's), that there is a plaintive look of fear (perhaps violating family rules), that it is set, likely in the 1800s, when a different set of mores and values from today were present, that she is in front of what looks to be an oil lamop. yet the light source is elsewher- (perhaps she has been discovered?), all place this scene in a moment that is interesting and unique. It is not a portrait, it is not a posed moment, but a realistic narrative moment that is played off of a daring mix of styles. Well, that says a hell of alot more than any Pollock drip or monochrome painting from Rothko ever did.

Illustration. You love that shit. Cornball painting that doesn't know what to do with itself except create a cheesy narrative. "Maybe she was discovered?" Oh shit! The pure, raw emotion of it all! The suspense! Reads a lot like a story, maybe a little like a poem, but tells me everything about your literary background and bias.

***Versus 'red, and, oooh....orangey.' Reads like a cherry Alka-Seltzer. Love that fizz.

Placing "this scene in a moment that is interesting and unique" can be any painting. What is so interesting? The story that you read from it? What about its formal qualities? It is an arbitrary mess. What daring mix of styles? Why are they mixed? Where is its courage, exactly? In the Impressionist handling, the Renaissance browns, or the repetitive tones and colors? The awkward form? The conservative, pre-destined path that Tu follows? You are only describing its subject matter. Where the fuck is the form? It is obvious that literature not only informs your interpretation of visual art, but also dominates it. That is exactly why abstraction, because of its historical continuation and re-interpretation of form is accepted among good painters (who all deal with form, not illustrative narratives) but not you, who must have a literary narrative because you're a poet. You do not even see form. If you did, you would not find Tu's mess compelling, but utter garbage instead.

Dan, I did not know that this was a conversation between you and your students/followers. To everyone else that replies, I think it unfair to have to answer to all of you, so I will not do it. To Dan's students going on about Alex and comparing him to me, please close your mouths, shut the books, and look at a painting instead. Until then, read the arguments instead of cheerleading.

***I have no students, but I always conduct email exchanges with the dumb, gullible, and naive in public so that BS claims cannot be made about what was said or not.
As for what to say? Please do no waste my time, Vlad. You clearly have a long way to go before you even understand art, much less master it. You could do well to listen to your brother. He's got a handle on the bullshit that surrounds most art. But, as you've added nothing to the simple claim that, 'I don't LIKE that painter,’ there is nothing that one can show to one who chooses blinders.
DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 2:54 PM
Subject: Re: Alex
To: Vladimir Sheremet <sundu01@gmail.com>

Don't apologize for an opinion, but be open to more.
If you have the brains of your brother there is hope. What you lack vis-a-vis him is an openness to confront assumptions laid before you.
Newness is not for its own sake, but for a purpose. But, excellent Classicism beats pointless and poor newness any day. Since you cannot even agree on what constitutes a cliche, and in fact suckle them, there is nothing I can doto enlighten you. You will either come to this yourself or not. You do have an advantage, though, in getting to that point. His name is Alex.
Don't waste it.
DAN

And, as with many others, no reply. I guess I should be happy there was, at least, no virus and/or rant.

Sometimes, of course, I get idiots who just want to masturbate to me, like this moron. I don’t get nearly as many emails of this sort as I used to, thankfully, but that’s likely because I stopped replying to them, which tends to drive the cyberstalker set crazy, because they so desperately seek my attention, and are never sure they got it. Also, there’s my email filters which usually cull those larded with curses.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kevin Thomas <dickslaker@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 1:25 AM
Subject: Great Site!

Dear Dan,

I'm so glad somebody (you, perhaps?) put a link to your site on Rick Moody's Wikipedia page. The least common denominator is the method I prefer for self-education, as it doesn't cause me to worry that I might rise above my mortal brothers. Sometimes, though, like when presented with a usage problem, I pick up a dictionary. I wonder if you've ever been led to this elitist recourse during any of your close, thoughtful readings of some of the last century's most overrated literature.
In your review of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, you write, "Before I detail its execrability...". Good use of a
subordinate clause and the proper spelling of its. However, "execrability" is not a word, but "execrableness" is.

You have to love it when idiots don’t even understand the coinage of words, much less when words are in common usage. Or, when he hangs himself by showing he does not understand that a subordinate clause is something that needs something to follow it, even if it has a subject and predicate. The snippet he quotes is not a full sentence, therefore it is not a subordinate clause, and even the full sentence it’s quoted from, ‘Before I detail its execrability, let me opine on the reasons it became a bestseller.’ Is arguably not even a subordinate clause.

Actually dullor is a mix of dullness and stupor, and certainly the emailer proves he’s duller than most.

Yet again, the emailer shows he’s not even up on modern words, as prosist is the standard form, and has been for decades. And, he shows he’s just wrong, unless he confused Eggers’ being a poser with being a proser. Of course, when the stupid try to act as if they are having fun with the learned, it’s always funny. Witness his last riposte where he again affirms his utter lack of understanding even basic writing.

Well, at least he nominally knows who he is! For fun, I wrote him back, and never got a reply:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 7:00 AM
Subject: Re: Great Site!
To: Kevin Thomas <dickslaker@gmail.com>

You make a common error in assuming a) dictionaries are up to date, and b) that neologisms are verboten. Dictionaries are usually 2-4 decades behind in vernacular usage. Why should I limit myself to the approbation of an out of touch dead white male? Execrability is a perfectly fine variant of the term, and more poetic and concise than your variant. Prosist is a widely used term, as is fictionist, in lit mags. Neither word I made up. Dullor too is not a word originating with me, although perhaps the meaning in this case is- such as dullness + stupor = dullor.
Writing actually entails inventiveness and imagination, unless your idea of literature is convo using hey, huh, uh, and wow. DAN

Here is another exchange I had. Unfortunately, the sequence has to be read backwards, as I only had the last email in the thread to post from. But, yet again, an emailer seems normal, only to end up erupting. Like the other emailers mentioned above, his final email was several times the size of the prior one, and with an attachment.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 7:23 PM
Subject: Re: Towards a possible correspondence on the objective judgment of art
To: Tom <tomosisis@gmail.com>

***In PC circles maybe, but as all stimuli enact a response, that's not saying much for at, is it? In fact, all art- and all stimuli, provoke judgment- to move left or right, smile or frown. Those who disdain judgment are the dogmatists.

***Think rationally. If anything- art or not, evokes pain or vomit. that can not be viewed as a success. response is just that, Again, the positive or negative aspect of it is what counts. Again, the dogma is on your side, for it sees no shading.
Seriously, and I say this with appreciation, because you've not descended into the FUCK YOU sort of reply most puerile idiots engage in, but have you really thought any of this through? I mean, you remind me of this lawyer fellow at my MN poetry group years ago. He came for crit, and when all told him a poem was trite, his response was, 'But I like cliches.' Ok, then why bother coming to a group dedicated to excellence?

***Well, no it does not, because definitions of words are not based upon individuals, but masses of people consenting to a common language. Like a law, your ignorance of it is no mitigation if you break it. And, again, a personal like is utterly inarguable. I am not concerned in the least w your nor anyone's likes- not even my own. That is simply not the function of a critic.

***Same applies as clichés- a lack of knowledge is not an argument. But, like the cliché loving guy I mentioned, I have no argument w his preference- just don't try to say it's good. Therein the crux.

***Pomo is actually old hat, nearly 50 years old, and even then the ideas were not new, merely reactions against a dominant ideology. So, nothing new there, either.

***Any sentient being will do, but for objectivity there needs to be assent. I'll assume you know the brain in the pan analogy? If all there was in creation was a brain in a pan that got sensory input about a universe pretty much as we know ours to be, what would be the difference to that brain between what is a delusion and reality. It wd take a 2nd observer to say, 'Hey, your just a blob of glop in a pan that is psychotic.' Barring that 2nd being, there is no way the brain, lacking anything bit though impulses, could verify anything. So, in fact, the very presence of a 2nd observer, to assent to one's reality, as we wd its, is the thing which lends an objective platform. Fuck your AU or the clownmobile.

***1) Of course it's objective, for we have recognized the 2 entities. They may have slightly differing views of a glass of water, but if they acknowledge the glass, bingo. 2) Objectivity in no way correlates to stasis. The fact is we can measure the speed of light. That's not static. 3) You are mixing many different things, and remind me of a drowning man.

***But one wd need a percipient to measure it, and then a second to acknowledge the first is not delusional, and on it goes. I take it the claim about wanting to speak of art was a ruse, since so little of it has emerged. BTW- none of what I've said is in the least bit a stretch, nor controversial.
So, what more can I really state w/o being accused of pedantry?

--Tom

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 6:11 AM, Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok, now you're wasting my time. I wrote, 'Makes no difference; you posited it as objective. It does not matter that it's true or not.'
The fact of any claim you or I or another make is beside the point. Hypothetically, we can agree that any one thing is a fact. If we accept that, 2nd, 3rd, 4th facts emerge as objective. Then, a discipline or field of fact can be established, which allows another discipline, and a 3rd, etc. to be established. This is viral logic via induction and deduction.

Interpolated:

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 6:38 PM, Tom <tomosisis@gmail.com> wrote:

I posited the fact as "objective" based on it's view-point. We can then objectify the rest of the universe from that view-point, but it would be rather silly because we'd only be able to talk about distances from one thing to another (the view-point being that of a measuring instrument.).

***Then we could break down the distance into fractions (be they by decimal or docimal-12) etc. Then the AU- let's call it the astronomical unit, could be used to make larger measurements- light years, parsecs, a galactic mile- to neologize. From there we could analogize and, via observation and analysis, determine other measurements- like weight, mass, age, time, etc, and the whole cosmos comes unlocked.
Again, this is all easy to understand, and not even disputable.

And we wouldn't be able to say whether or not "only 14 clowns could ever fit into a clownmobile" unless we tested every combination of clowns in every clownmobile to see if eventually we'd find a combination that resulted in a 15th clown being squished into a Mini Cooper (or whatever clownmobile you'd like to posit).

***'The fact could be that only 14 clowns could ever fit into a clownmobile. Whatever the fact is, it objectifies.'
That's what I typed. What part of 'could be' and 'whatever' do you not get? I am tossing out the claim as an example; again, whether true or not is irrelevant.
The problem you have is that your opening email made claims that you cannot even back up, and don't seem intent on backing up.
I repeat, 'I'm still waiting for your 'obviously subjective view of art and artistic endeavor.'' If you don't get to that POV in the next email I am not going to waste time replying, although this is a typical example of online stupidity that I may use in a new essay series I've started.

I also disagree with your statement that without an objective reality "there's no incentive to do anything." I've never stated that there isn't an objective reality, by the way. Just that there's no objective way of judging art. I think there is an objective reality, but we have no way of talking about it. All we can talk about are the observations we have made thus far, whether they be observations made by scientific instrumentation or a personal, human viewpoint.

--Tom

***You have fallen in to the masturbatory trap of PoMo and philosophy taken ad absurdam. You talk about something by....talking about it. Evolution gave the simian mind wonderful curiosity, then added higher language abilities to Man. Your emails disprove your statement, whether you recognize it or not. Could all of reality be a godlet's hologram? Maybe, and he/it could be a hologram, but realistically, if it's something beyond out ken- which supernaturalism is by definition, it's not really real, in any quantifiable sense. It makes for interesting argument, and even some weird religion, but nothing more.
Part of understanding this comes with maturity, and an objective fact- your AU, naturally leads to a discipline called mathematics, which can lead to the idea of numerical frequency, which can lead to the notion of a thing- phrase, brushstroke, bit of acting, being overdone, therefore trite or cliched, therefore poor, in comparison to something original or daring. One may, indeed, be comforted by cliches, and I don't deny others there baseline pleasures. But, it is demonstrably reliant on tired tropes, and, by definition, not good. One can argue that cliches can be good, but then one gets into the circular trap of language. It is, however, the human ability (and we are the only known species to possess this) to make Negatively Capable leaps of seeming illogic to connect things that, upon review, go together. This is why we can surmount such Catch 22s. Or, at least, the best of us can. If you cannot, again, don't try to trammel me or others with your limits. They are YOURS, not mine nor any others. And, just as clichés are demonstrable, so are things like a bad line break, poor music, etc., although they are more complex, even as they follow similarly based logical grounds.
Now, I have, in my own words, demonstrated my point. You have not said anything original nor deep- you are iterating long debunked points (and pts debunked long b4 either of us was born). You have scrupulously avoided art & lit q's, in favor of nebulous scientific claims. In short, get to the point, or get lost. Find a dull professor who will be rapt by such puerility. Unless you are 8 or 9, this does not qualify as precocious, but silly, if not embarrassing, for you.
And I am being extremely nice and generous here. Put up or shut up. DAN

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 5:39 AM, Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com> wrote:

BTW- pick up your argument a bit. I've argued such things with 1000s of folk, and have not seen many people who can successfully argue a point, right or wrong, w/o relying on their emotion. So far, you've made not a single point that anyone else has not made. Think outside the proverbial box, if needed. DAN

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 7:37 AM, Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com> wrote:

Makes no difference; you posited it as objective. It does not matter that it's true or not. The fact could be that only 14 clowns could ever fit into a clownmobile. Whatever the fact is, it objectifies.
The very fact you are emailing me is a profession of your belief in objective reality, for if it was not, there's no real incentive to do anything.
Again, none of this is difficult, and it girds our lives.
I'm still waiting for your 'obviously subjective view of art and artistic endeavor.'

DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tom <tomosisis@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 10:14 PM
Subject: Re: Towards a possible correspondence on the objective judgment of art

I guess I will point out that the "objective fact" of the distance from Earth to Sun is actually a subjective fact, based entirely on the view-point of the measurement instrumentation. Einstein stated, when he came up with the theory of Special Relativity, that space-time measurements depend on inertial frame of reference, or view-point. This theory's consequences have been verified experimentally.

--Tom

On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com> wrote:

Every other detectable body can be measured from the reality that the two points of reference definitely exist. The farthest detectable object can then be measured from where it is to where the earth-sun is.
If one agrees that a term is used over and again, far out of proportion to the usage of any other such term, then it is, by definition, a cliché, and a sign of poor, lazy thought.
And, if one has agreed that a unit of measurement exists, w/o any equivocation, or that a numerical disproportional usage of a term in a certain instance exists, then one can set about mapping the rest of the cosmos in relation to that objective fact, or construct a system of detecting clichés from it.
Once one has accepted that there is an objective fact, the logical step is top acknowledge a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc., and from this discovery of facts, science was born. This is why it is superior to religion, which is blind faith. It is falsifiable, and the method used- called the 'scientific method, along with things like Occam's Razor, are what we use to measure all things- from the cosmic to a bad quatrain.
Your admission of the objective fact of distance between the earth and sun totally annihilates any claim that we live in a subjective universe, for one objective fact rents that universe; but the reverse is not true, There can be subjectivity in an objective cosmos.
To claim otherwise is to give into the fallacy of self-limitation; i.e.- because I cannot do a, b or c, no one can, and anyone who denies that is a liar or a cheat. I cant run a sub-4 minute mile, so no one can. I cannot bench press 300 lbs, so no one can. But, my limits are not yours, nor vice versa, and our collective limits do not define the limits of other humans.
If you put in a little thought, none of this is difficult.
So, unless you intend to be disingenuous, was there really a point to be made? Did you really think I was bluffing, as to what I stated?

DAN

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 10:28 PM, Tom <tomosisis@gmail.com> wrote:

Okay, this will be our objective fact: the distance from the Earth to the Sun, when measured from the inertial system of the Earth, is accepted as 1.00 +/- 0.02 AU, or 149,597,870,691 +/- 30 meters. Now, from this fact, how is all "objectified in relation to that fact"?

Thanks,
Tom

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 1:59 PM, Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com> wrote:

It depends on what you mean by objective. If you take an absolutist position that everything is subjective (a Pomo position) then the very point of arguing about it vitiates the very claim, for if all is subjective there truly is nothing to argue over.
However, if one agrees on an objective fact- just one objective thing in the cosmos, all is objectified in relation to that fact, To be subjective, a view must be total, just as purity must be total, A Pacific Ocean's worth of water that is pure is no longer if I prick my finger and drop a single drop of blood into it. It may take an eon to sufficiently thin and 'contaminate the whole ocean, but pure it is no longer.
Most art, however, fails for manifestly objective reasons- and the objective is attained by killing an emotional response- at least initially. A cliche, as example, is the use of a phrase, an image, an idea that is oft used, and used in in an oft used circumstance- a love poem with a 'bleeding heart,' a lesbian poem with water wearing away rock- the triumph of the feminine over the masculine, etc. Now, a cliche can be subverted or inverted, but then it's not a cliche. But cliches are- if one engages an art form- or any human endeavor, long enough, rather easy to spot, provided one has an acumen for such. Most artists do not, and most critics do no, which is why most of both suck. Both often indulge their emotional likes rather than their intellectual recognition of excellence.
Roger Ebert, as example, often speaks of movies he likes. But that does me no good, especially if he likes trite things. I like some trite things- soap operas, pro wrestling, Godzilla films, but I do not claim that they are high art. I like some bad poets and other arts, but I recognize the difference. I also dislike some great art and artists (Robert Frost), but I do not like my aesthetic disdain for Frost's topics and opinions dissuade me from claiming he was quite good more often than not.
Perhaps the biggest pollutant of bias is the political. I recently did a piece- http://www.cosmoetica.com/B743-DES612.htm- on a guy I knew who was typical of the politically perverted mindsets that infest the arts. Just read his rationales and they are ludicrous.
In short, any craft- and art is a form of craft, as well as being more, can be objectively viewed and measured. Will there be room for arguing like quantities- say a bad poet like Maya Angelou vs. bad poet Jorie Graham, or great poet Wallace Stevens vs. great poet Osip Mandelstam? Yes; but Graham vs. Stevens is no contest, and its not only provable, but manifestly so via things like cliches, enjambment, musicality, narratives, etc. A house that is poorly made is objectively provable, as is a bad film like, say, Crash or Brokeback Mountain.
So, do me a favor in your reply, do not veer off into your likes. I don't really care what they are. Stick with things that are objective. And, again, if your only defense is, well all is subjective, then why are you even emailing me?

DAN

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 1:26 PM, Tom <tomosisis@gmail.com> wrote:

Dan,

I have been reading your website (specifically the various Bylines essays) with rapt attention after first finding your review of Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". Leaving my questions on various points made in that essay (as it was written three years ago now) aside for a moment, I'd like instead to address your view on objective excellence in art.

I disagree that any objective judgments of this sort can be made, but before I outline my obviously subjective view of art and artistic endeavor, I was wondering if you'd give me an overview of why you believe objective judgment of art to be possible and how one might go about achieving this. It would be very appreciated.

Sincerely,
Tom Russell

Gotta love it when these people are so desperate for your attention that they think they can sucker one in with flattery, and then somehow I won’t wield intellect against their idiocy.

Of course, they may be better than the seriously deluded fans out there. And by seriously deluded, I mean even more so than the Ted Hughes and James Joyce fans that never replied to me. Over two and a half years ago I had this exchange with a deluded fan of Thomas Steinbeck. There is no online record of her MySpace page anymore, but aside from sexual fantasies about Thomas Steinbeck she also fantasized about John Mayer- the mediocre whitebread singer. As with others, she tries the old flattery tack to get my attention, and the old jealousy accusation- although technically she means envy, however absurdly posited.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, May 1, 2007 at 5:22 PM
Subject: Fwd: Psycho Thomas Steinbeck fan
To: Cosmoetica e-list

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=121312828

Here is this psycho's MySpace account. If you read the post on my Comeuppance- she mispells that and several other words, it's hilarious. She's likely a 41 yr old fatty with a wet spot for John Mayer. Haha. What losers. DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider
Date: Apr 30, 2007 10:13 PM
Subject: Psycho Thomas Steinbeck fan

I'll try a new tack, and wholly ignore her, for as her PS says, I cannot know what she knows. These things get sillier w each threat and or rant. DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lisa Harmon < harmon736@hotmail.com>
Date: Apr 30, 2007 12:48 PM
Subject: writing compliments for dan schneider
To: cosmoetica@gmail.com

I would like to commend you on your writing skills. Never have I experienced such a flood of pure adrenaline so efficiently and neatly spread about 'the' page. Your insights are well thought out, well 'researched' and razor sharp in affect and cutting. Bravo! My hat is off to you sir! I am of course referring not only to your scathing 'book' review of Down to a Soundless Sea, but the all out personal assault you unleashed on the author himself, Thomas Steinbeck. I've never known a critic to be so valiant in their propensity and scrub. Good show! (It was a show, right?)

However, I do have one or two criticisms to set forth here, if I may. Your 'reporting' as it were, is so far from reality it "smacks", a term you seem to enjoy twirling about the tip of your tongue; yes it "smacks' of childish abandon and uninformed peculiarity for such an accomplished writer as you claim to be. Since when do critics 'critique' an author's moral stature, bank balance or choice of friends? I thought I was reading a 'book' review?

Opinions are good to have, and even better to share. And if all you were doing in your four pages of drivel were voicing your dislike of Thom's' writing, I could respect that. But what I found instead was immaturity run-a-muck in a careless 'hunt and kill' fashion for the sole purpose of personal enjoyment and audience gathering. Ironically, you even accused Thomas Steinbeck of prostituting himself with a "ride on the Steinbeck family name". But isn't that exactly what you're doing by slashing a famous name in public in the hopes of drawing a crowd? The only one I see sodomizing the good and honorable Steinbeck name is you.

And running rampant through-out your four pages of trash are the large and looming contradictions. You kick Thom for being a Steinbeck, and then you kick him again for NOT being a Steinbeck. Which is it? You can't argue both sides. And I have to ask, just when was the last time your writing was held up to the John Steinbeck ruler, or when was anyone's, save the son? I can only imagine the torrent of contempt that would devour you if you were ever scrutinized to such a degree.

The difference between your writing and Thom's, is, well, extreme, and could be the reason behind your fits of jealous stabs. I'll use an analogy at a level you may be able to comprehend. It's the difference between sex with a man who flicks beer caps off a woman's titties and sex with a man who moves in perfect rhythm and depth. (Your writing of course represents the beer capped titties)

Even if I'm wrong and you're right (doubtful) and he's a typist not a writer, what courage and noble flight was taken by him in making the effort at all. I don't know many men with that level of courage to move forward in the face of inevitable over-scrutiny and endless comparisons.

I think it's time now to enlighten you my dear boy. So pull up a chair, scoot in close, and I'll reveal what I know. Thomas Steinbeck is a man of greatest integrity and kindness. He is compassionate, caring and the most hysterically funny man I've ever had the good fortune to meet. His writing is soft, sweet and doesn't require the pre-ejaculation tactics of a childish pedestrian ghoul. He waits. He moves about the reader so tenderly it's almost a seductive dance that pulls you in close. After caressing you to the point of no return, he releases you gently on curls and wisps of prose. Or like red wine circling the rim of a glass. When you finally lift the goblet to take a sip, his writing is a complete surprise. Moving one way; then another; with a finish that's smooth and refreshing, coaxing you back for another taste. He's a genius! Though their writing styles are quite different, just like his father, his writing is superb.

How do I know all this about the man? I don't, really. It's a gut feeling I've got. Because of a chance meeting, brief correspondence and gift exchange, I found a 'huge' man befriend the tiniest person (me) for no reason. He took time out of his life, when as you pointed out yourself; he isn't required to do anything at all. He didn't have to acknowledge me, but he did. In fact he did more than that. And that is something for which I will be forever grateful. He even trusted me with pages from his not yet published novel to read and enjoy. A rarity is this kind a wondrous man.

It is quite humorous to me that you mention money in every possible way at least five or six times through out your 'critique'. Using words and phrases such as "money hungry", "smackaroos", "cashing in", and "bottom feeders". In all that Thom wrote to me and I to him, money was never mentioned. Think! He began life with two silver spoons in his mouth, not one. Do you honestly believe writing for money was his intent or concern? Do you honestly believe the difference between ten million and one hundred million on his monthly bank statement really even matters to the guy? Money is a bore of a topic anyway, and never provides the orgasmic pleasures one seeks. This is an obvious elementary fact of life that only the super poor and the super rich have ever been able to understand. For as long as you are focused on all that is 'money', you'll remain a rat in a maze with a racing heart beat and two beady little eyes.

You were right about one thing in your ranting. It is indeed his birth right to sit atop whatever pile of cash his father toiled to provide. And all the childish tantrums in the world will not alter that birth order which was set long, long ago when the stars were mere babies suckling the breast of Mother Cosmos Devine. Although you were effective in the disgusting manner in which you provoke and assault the reader, embedding a visual so disturbing as dried fishies on his mothers thigh, I'd bet all the chips on the table that if your review reflects how you treat everyone in your life, your only experience of diving into a warm and wet snatch has been by means of payment or force.

There! I've provided twice the insight in half the pages compared to your long-winded four. And you know what they say about long-winded men...they've got really short...how should I say it?

Brevity is an art my friend. You either need to find a better art instructor or buy a new paint brush! That's my report!

P.S. You owe the man your most heart-felt apologies Danny boy, for insulting his mother, father and for all the rest of the dung you threw in your four page manifesto masquerading as a 'book review'. I suggest you move quickly and follow my instruction post haste, writing Thom a lovingly apologetic email, as I am not one you'd be wise to ignore. For what I know that you don't, could stop the world in its tracks. (I'm just being honest) And the next time you wield your critics' pen you would do best to avoid Thomas Steinbeck. He is way out of your league.

Of course, I ignored her, and have yet to be graced with anymore of her psychotic wisdom.

But, there are emailers who take Glenn Close’s dictum to heart. They will not be ignored. Case in point was a fellow from the U.K., named Oliver Kamm, who since has gone on to get a gig with one of that country’s major newspapers. But, a few years ago, he decided to display his idiocy for all to see, first with emails that detailed his stupidity, then by trying to harass me via Wikipedia (Kamm has a long online cybertrail of harassing people who do not bow to his self-perceived ‘wisdom.’). Then, after being dispatched, a few months later I got a fellow who claimed to be a fan, wanted to be on my e-list, but then displayed an idiocy and writing style similar to Kamm’s. Were they the same? I cannot prove it, but it’s highly suggestive. Take a look below. One simply cannot deny Oliver Kamm’s self-importantant need to display his idiocy.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Oliver Kamm <oliverkamm@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 12:14 PM
Subject: A humble suggestion

Dear Dan Schneider,

I share with you a concern about the health of our literary culture (http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2007/06/the_cult_of_the.html ), but I daresay our resemblances end there. I was surprised to read in the New York Times that it has been said of you that your "better than Walt Whitman." I was less surprised when I learned the quote was attributed to you. Having perused your poem "Carolyn Forché or Lose the 'Tude, Bitch!" I found myself wondering if Walt Whitman, who came from a similarly uneducated background as you, ever strove to make a place for himself in the literary pantheon by way of puerile, venomous attacks on other poets.
Great poets can come from humble backgrounds, of course, but if you're looking to make a virtue of your narrowness, I would suggest taking the humility of Emily Dickinson as your model.

Yours,
Oliver Kamm

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 2:28 PM
Subject: Re: A humble suggestion
To: Oliver Kamm <oliverkamm@gmail.com>

Think Wilde. Get some humor. DAN

Of course, showing total obliviousness, Kamm, like so many others, actually defines himself when he tries to ascribe characteristics to me. As I said, long ago, in a City Pages article on me, people see their own flaws in me because I give them no quarter. What they think they dislike about me is always changing with the percipient, and their own flaws. Lo:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Oliver Kamm <oliverkamm@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 13, 2007 at 3:12 PM
Subject: Re: A humble suggestion

As Wilde said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." And you, sir, have been perfectly consistent in your puerility.
But the joke here seems less Wildean than Ern-Malleyean. And I'm not sure it isn't on you.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, Jun 13, 2007 at 3:38 PM
Subject: Re: A humble suggestion
To: Oliver Kamm <oliverkamm@gmail.com>

http://www.cosmoetica.com/D10-DES9.htm#James%20McAuley%20&%20Harold%20Stewart/Ern%20Malley

Speaking of puerile, you're not gonna cyberstalk me, are you?
Or, as a person on my e-list stated, when I forwarded your email on for a laugh said, 'How many times have I seen a literati pat themselves in the back when they think they were so original and obscure by telling somebody else to go emulate "Emily Dickinson". Was this nerd smoking a Meerschaum pipe and wearing a tweed jacket when his witless brain sparked this weary old putdown?'
That's 0 for 2, Ollie.
DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Oliver Kamm <oliverkamm@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 2, 2007 9:37 PM
Subject: Stairwell Wit

Your vandalism of my wikipedia page could scarcely be clumsier or less witty, Mr Schneider.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oliver_Kamm&oldid=142150882
I ask that you rectify this immediately.
And by the way, it's interesting that so soon after your accusations of "cyber-stalking" you'd resort to such pathetic games. If you thought you had disguised yourself, you're badly mistaken.
OK

What is funny is that Kamm supposedly dislikes Wikipedia, but cares so much what is on his own page. And note how all of this relates to my revelation of his cyberstalking. Could he be more Pavlovian? And, as I’ve shown, like so many others who claim not to care about my writings, or claim I am obscure, although my website is nearing 150 million readers after a decade online, my words are somehow very valued by him, and my approval is sure sought!

After sneaking on to my e-list, an exchange about the poetry of James Emanuel, and his creativity in using a verb as a noun- thereby showing his creativity (much as Zhiwei Tu does it by mixing styles in painting), set off who I suspect to be Kamm’s alter-ego; one I banned after this exchange, when, like so many others, the next email was several times the size of the last, and had an attachment. Anyway, look for the idiocy, especially when this Len/Oliver shows he does not even know what a word like ‘bathetic’ means, much less what is trite or not. Again, someone with no writing knowledge trying to lecture, but look at the schooling he gets:

On 11/27/07, Dan Schneider wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Len Matuzak <lenmatuzak@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 27, 2007 2:13 PM
Subject: Re: Bukowski Challenge

"Fame's recline" I would term "bathetic." Yes, those two words haven't been joined together before because "recline" is not commonly used as a noun.

*** It's used as a verb.

Playing with parts of speech, is, of course, a poet's prerogative, and can often lead to marvelous compressive effects. Hopkins comes to mind, among many others. Here, however, it comes across merely as a straining for effect, tripping off associations
with the nouns "decline" and "recliner."

***Had it been fame's decline, it wd have been far less original, and bathos is overdone pathos. The very use of recline, even just in the couplet, much less the full sonnet, really has no emotional component- it's descriptive and a metaphor. Also, first you say the couplet is trite, and now it's straining, something that is the opposite of banality. This is a classic feint- claim a, then when that's not tenable, claim b or c, even if in opposition to a.

The poet is in a difficult situation here, because he needs a word that conjures a sense of complacency and yet is strong enough to boldly finish off the couplet with a sense of what the stakes are. The trouble is that "recline" does not do this, but the very novelty of the word only calls attention to how ill-fitting it is.

***Complacency is not at issue. The very word recline means to lie backward, as if a casket, generally, so the implication is that fame is deadly, or enervating. Neither is complacent. This use of recline, therefore, stands in contrast to the word 'living; above it- which makes it more stark than incline or decline. I'd bet this is why Emanuel chose the word. So, if you are basing your evaluation on a misunderstanding of what the very words you object to mean, it kyboshes further extrapolations.

The idea that it is better to do something brilliantly on a small scale than to spread oneself into an expansive mediocrity is indeed a very trite sentiment.

***Well, no, that sentiment may not be novel, but that's a far way from trite. 2nd, that's what you have misinterpreted- see above, not what it says. 3rd- even if we accept #1, a cliché is not just a sentiment, but the 'expression' of that sentiment. If mere sentiment were cliché, then no possible love story nor poem cd be told, for the sentiment is trite. Thus, it is HOW something is conveyed, not WHAT is conveyed, that accounts for a cliché. This is a big difference.

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat. --Theodore Roosevelt

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. --James Joyce

These two quotes have somewhat different inflections, I grant you, but the structure of comparison is "not fresh or original."

***Far better to create one living line
Than learn a hundred sunk in fame's recline

Few comparisons are original. The very use of comparison cannot be trite, though. It's the equivalent of stating an equals sign is trite in math. What Emanuel does is a) use creation as one end of the comparison and b) death the other end. It is a far more stark comparison, and wonderfully phrased. Take a look at TR's quote- and the use of overweening modifiers like mighty, poor, glorious, and gray. JJ, similarly uses boldly, full, and dismal. By contrast, JAE evokes a starker contrast with more restrained and unique modifiers and constructions. I.e.- he gets more with less- the essence of great writing, Len.

I would add this: "Far better" is a very tired construction that is meant to give the couplet the ring of pithiness without actually delivering it.

***Now you are displaying a bias and nitpickiness because the other posits have fallen through.

I would also add that the second line makes little sense. Why is a person sunk in his fame learning a hundred lines? It might make sense to say a writer aspiring to fame is busy learning a hundred lines- hoping, no doubt, to figure out what works so he can ape it. But to wed that to an image of fame "reclining" is meant to introduce some noise into the poem so we won't notice that this writer has little to say.

***Again, contrast- between creation and rote recitation. Between writing and oral recitation. This connection does not even require any Keatsian Negative Capability to get, but, again, you have misunderstood words, and built a proverbial house of cards upon a fundamental misunderstanding of words and how they work in concert.

As I said, I don't know this poet's work. Perhaps in context this line was meant to be a bit of deliberate doggerel.

***That assessment would have more heft if you had displayed an ability to understand what a mere couplet was conveying. Since you have not, there go the ace and his buddies. DAN

Unfortunately, as with most morons, Len/Oliver cannot take his beatdown like a man, and decides to further humilate himself with displaying he does not even understand what a verb is. Then I catch him in willful deception:

From: Len Matuzak <lenmatuzak@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 27, 2007 3:12 PM
Subject: Re: Bukowski Challenge
To: Dan Schneider <cosmoeticalist@gmail.com>

You will have to explain to me how "recline" is being used as a verb besides asserting it. It is being used as a noun, after a possessive.

***Now, for others reading these emails, and who, like Art, claim that I am being emotional. Look at your definition below. Fame is the noun, and recline is used as a verb. It can be seen as transitive or intransitive, depending upon how you interpret it. Or, both. You provide your own explanation, below.

If you don't understand how an expression can be trite and contain a word that is straining, then I cannot help you. This is a false either/or you've set up.

***No it's not. A banality is an easy out. If you accuse Emanuel of straining in his use of a word, then you are admitting that he was avoiding a cliché.

"The very word recline means to lie backward, as if a casket, generally, so the implication is that fame is deadly, or enervating." That is obviously false. A person can recline without it having anything at all to do with death or a casket. Ever been on an
airplane? Since you're so fond of dictionaries:

Main Entry:
re·cline Listen to the pronunciation of recline
Pronunciation:
\ri-ˈklīn\
Function:
verb
Inflected Form(s):
re·clined; re·clin·ing
Etymology:
Middle English, from Anglo-French or Latin; Anglo-French recliner,
from Latin reclinare, from re- + clinare to bend — more at lean
Date:
15th century

transitive verb : to cause or permit to incline backwards intransitive
verb 1 : to lean or incline backwards 2 : repose, lie

***What you do not include in this, is the fact that repose and lie have hyperlinks. Look at definition one of repose: http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/repose

1 a: to lie at rest b : to lie dead <reposing in state> c: to remain still or concealed

And it's not a fondness for dictionaries, but a lack of fondness for misusing words.

Who's misusing words now?

***You are. You have misread the use of words within a couplet, and even misused words you attempt to describe the couplet with- 4 or 5 misuses within 2 lines. Granted, you are at least striving to make a case, unlike Art did for Bukowski, but utterly failing, and big time.

"Now you are displaying a bias and nitpickiness because the other posits have fallen through."

Although I appreciate your ascribing motives to me, it is a lazy way to argue. In a poem, every word counts and ought to be subject to scrutiny. If you want to write this off as "nitpickiness" then I would suggest you don't read poems with sufficient care.

***It's not an ascription of motives, but a recognition of a pattern that you were displaying in the prior email, and continue to display here. You cannot misconstrue, be called on it, then complain when the pattern is revealed. Here is what the exchange was: I would add this: "Far better" is a very tired construction that is
> meant to give the couplet the ring of pithiness without actually
> delivering it.
>
> ***Now you are displaying a bias and nitpickiness because the other posits
> have fallen through.

I.e.- to that point you displayed you did not know the definitions of certain words- things that are not arguable, and also that you did not know that using fewer and better words and getting more from them, as in the 2 quotes you proffered, is what defines excellence on word usage. So, just as you did not provide the definition of the word repose, here you do not provide the full exchange, because if you did, in both cases, it makes my point. This is childish blog level dialectic. But, as I am versed in that, it don't fly.

"a cliche is not just a sentiment, but the 'expression' of that sentiment. If mere sentiment were cliche, then no possible love story nor poem cd be told, for the sentiment is trite. Thus, it is HOW something is conveyed, not WHAT is conveyed, that accounts for a
cliche. This is a big difference. "

I didn't use the word "cliche." You did. So you ascribe motives AND words and then knock them down. Good show. I enjoy watching someone shadowbox with himself, even if it means my points have gone unconsidered.

***That's correct, you did not use cliché, you wrote 'These two quotes have somewhat different inflections, I grant you, but the structure of comparison is "not fresh or original." I would add this: "Far better" is a very tired construction that is
meant to give the couplet the ring of pithiness without actually delivering it.'

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/cliche

If you look, the definition includes trite, hackneyed, overly familiar, commonplace- all synonyms for tired, or not fresh or original.
Now, Len, unless you are telling me you do not know that synonyms are words that mean the same thing, then you know that when I said cliché, I was just using a single word to encapsulate what took you a couple of dozen to express. Right? So, stop trying the semiotic gambit.
Your points were considered ,and defeated, which is why you are trying the semantic two step just described.
Now, show me where this is false: "a cliche is not just a sentiment, but the
'expression' of that sentiment. If mere sentiment were cliche, then no
possible love story nor poem cd be told, for the sentiment is trite. Thus,
it is HOW something is conveyed, not WHAT is conveyed, that accounts for a
cliche. This is a big difference. "
To the other readers. Note how Len has fallen back on dishonest gambits such as not fully quoting, misquoting, trying to semantically dodge issues, and simply not answer things directly. Plus, I earlier showed he misconstrued the definitions of words.
This is one of the main problems, and why folk like a Bukowski get published. Because, if a great couplet, as the Emanuel one in question, can be so utterly misconstrued and dumbed down in an emotion based argument, then, of course, people who cannot fathom great poetry- much less recognize the difference between a verb and a noun, will see heroes in those that garner fame at it antipodes.
There, no emotion, just a machete.

Of course, not all the emails I get are nasty. Sometimes I get requests, and when I reply, I get no reply. Here’s an exchange, read last to first:

Hello, my name is Michael Franklin. I am a poet/painter in St. Charles, MO. I run a local community forum as well, called The Crowded Fire, where in we discuss topics of, well, my interest. Last week we had Howard Zinn as our guest! It is proving to be a successful forum in that it has stirred up much discourse here, which was it's goal. I would like to talk about doing an interview with Dan Schneider in the future.

Thank You,
Michael Franklin

And, as mentioned, no reply. Then, sometimes I will send stuff about, and then get backhanded by bad writers and websites, such as MFA hack Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading. Now, just compare the typical essay at that website with those on Cosmoetica. Here’s my queries and the reply, finally:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:03 AM
Subject: Book Review Submission- Conversational Reading
To: scott_esposito@yahoo.com

Below is a review of The Easter Parade, by Richard Yates.
Please let me know if you want to post it.
Thanks, DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 8:07 AM
Subject: Re: Book Review Submission- Conversational Reading
To: scott_esposito@yahoo.com

Following up.
DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Scott Esposito <scott_esposito@yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 9:06 AM
Subject: Re: Book Review Submission- Conversational Reading

Well, I guess we cannot besmirch hackery with excellence- just click on the link above to my review of the book. But, while moronic, at least Esposito is just a routine hack. There are hacks that are seriously delusive. One of the most otherworldly is Zach Wells, a bald Canadian doggerelist I first became aware of via my wife and writer Anthony Zanetti. Like the essay by Carlo Parcelli, Wells has a boner against me, but does not reveal the real reasons. Back in 2007, Anthony Zanetti was getting into a bit of a scrum with Wells, over poetry and art, and I, in several comments on Zanetti's blog, commented on the lack of talent that Wells had. Naturally, Wells, like Parcelli, just had to retaliate, but like Parcelli, made a fool of himself with several attacks. Zanetti, and some others on my site’s e-list, were back and forth riffing on instances of Wells’ hacker, and then I forwarded this email about, containing many of the links sent to me:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider
Date: Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 8:28 PM
Subject: Silly kid

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wells/poet2.jpg
http://www.quicktopic.com/forum_images/25/62wk3hbyLfKg/image_429.jpg
http://www.quillandquire.com/events/images/496.jpg
This Zach guy is a dilettante par excellence. I love the last 2 photos- can you be more wannabe than the third?
Another: http://www141.pair.com/gmurray/bookninjabackup/essays/images/zachwells.jpg
Ain't he manly?
http://www.danforthreview.com/reviews/nonfiction/starnino.htm
This review contains these trite gems that say nothing:
'A Lover's Quarrel is valuable not just because of the judgments Starnino metes out, but because of the questions and challenges that he raises.'
'To carp on this is to get caught up in quibbles—as Emerson said, "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"—; however, I'd be remiss in not pointing out what I feel to be a couple of significant chinks in Starnino's armour.'
'The catalogue thus becomes a sort of critical shortcut, effectively excluding the reader unfamiliar with the work of these poets and giving the impression of precisely the sort of garrison that Starnino deplores, adding fuel to the fire of critics like Sutherland and Vandervlist who see him as enamoured with a certain type of poetry, published by certain presses.'
'The ending is very strong in my opinion, but the actual simile ("the flat tail-flukes/like the wings of a solitary angel") drifts dangerously close to spiritual kitsch, especially with the use of the very romantic adjective "solitary."'

I love how adjectives are now Romantic- esp. solitary. This is the sort of non-critical 'point' that says nothing, but sounds learned. Like any tool it can be poorly or well used, but to damn it with an -ism is to reveal more of himself than the line's content.

'Like him or not, Purdy's a figure that any serious critic of Canadian poetry—as Starnino unquestionably is—needs to deal with. '
'I've expended quite a few words quarrelling with Carmine Starnino's book. This might give the impression that I don't think much of it and that I'm not much of a friend. But really, by taking issue with some primary elements, I hope that I'm honouring the book's spirit of lively debate.'

This is the Dale Peck moment (see the Rick Moody review)- where he's been ripping the book, but takes it all back to show he's still a man of the system (wink, nod).

'A Lover's Quarrel is a book that should be read. It is both good and good for Canadian literature, which suffers from a surfeit of love and a shortage of quarrel. It will be interesting to see what kind of direction Starnino takes now that he's passed this stage in his "discipleship in the discipline of prose." Here's what I'm looking forward to: more essays on significant non-Canadian poets to complement his yeoman's work on verse within our borders. It would be a shame for a critic with Starnino's skill and insight to become too much of a specialist.'

Note that the review lacks any of Starnino's critical writing, and what is good or bad about it.
This is not the Rain Taxi magalog sort of review, but this kid's 'Advertisement for Himself'.

Yes, a valuable voice to make the din dinner.

Wells had done several posts about me and my interview series, but this is likely the silliest: http://zachariahwells.blogspot.com/2008/02/you-are-beginning-to-sound-paranoid.html. What is so amazing is that Wells, and his acolytes, has absolutely no ability to actually comprehend what they are reading, for the Lopate interview shows the man off as a boob, and Dennett comes off as uninterested in anything but his small purview. Pinker, on the other hand, appreciated the time and effort in the questions, and gave an interview for the ages. Yet, if you look at the link to the pinker piece, Wells calls the queries bad. Yet, Pinker, in fact, went out of his way to do the long interview precisely because the questions were so penetrating. He thanked me for their not being the usual rote nonsense he has to deal with- the sort that ask the same generic questions over and over, and for actually teaching him a useful new word- sciolism.’ And, one of the other great interviewees I did, Desmond Morris, in fact, consented to do his interview, after breaking an over 20 year media blackout on interviews, BECAUSE he had read the Pinker interview, and others, and saw an opportunity to reach out to a whole new generation of readers and science enthusiasts. Really intelligent people, like Pinker and Morris, don’t proffer false dichotomies as answers when given buffet questions. Also, given that Pinker and Morris both appreciated the depth and intellectual heft of the interviews, what does that really say about the intellectual heft of the little boy who was so pissed off over my pooh-poohing his poetry that he had to whine about me in public? Kind of defeats the bad ass poseur mentality, eh? Kind of makes his motto- ‘Saying shit I shouldn't since 1977.’- a desperate plea for attention. No? Then again, without the pose, even more folks would recognize what a sciolist hack Wells is. Oooh, dig the subliminal dig!

Of course, there have been many silly rips on me, both in email and online. In other essays, I’ve detailed poetaster Bob Grumman’s nonsense, such as when he raved about a poem that consisted of the word tundra, alone on a page, because tundra was represented by the white iciness of the background. Problem is that tundra is frozen soil, and not white. Or there was my ripping into the film Gertrud, on the Unspoken Cinema (wherein the detailed hit I put on the morons at that blog is preserved, because the site’s owner was so embarrassed he took down my posts, even though he admitted mine were, by far, the most popular on his website, and brought him many readers he’d never have gotten otherwise), where film school theorist types got ripped, and where I set off one of my most idiotic cyberstalkers (see below)- apathetic old man who hides behind the alias Weeping Sam. Then I got an email request from a guy named Brenton Rossow, who was starting up a magazine called Octopus Beak. The mag never even made it online, but I sent him two great short stories, only to get rejected. So why query someone, get great stuff, and then reject them, especially if the mag never even hit the airwaves? Or, there were the morons at Reason.com, who, like Wells, I tore an asshole into.

Occasionally, there is a fairly good response posted, but even then there is either a willful ignorance of what is being discussed, or a flat-out misconception about the most basic of words being used. In this post, the writer, for example, tackles my interview with James Berardinelli, then tries to parse differences in our opinions of auteur theory (amongst other flawed perceptions). Here is a quote from the piece:

However, it is in their discussion on auteur theory that I find the two guilty of misinterpretation, as both reject the theory with faulty argumentation, albeit from two different standpoints. In one passage, Schneider says:

"Even the term [auteur theory] seems silly nowadays. After all, while there are certainly interchangeable journeyman and studio directors, the bulk of a filmic vision belongs to the director. So, the very phrase is a tautology (...)"

"The whole idea of ‘auteur theory’ strikes me as silly as claiming that the person responsible for a novel is the novelist."

Berardinelli, on the other hand, counters Schneider's rejection of the auteur theory with a completely opposite stance:

"Largely, though, the proponents of the 'auteur theory' seem like egomaniacs. Film is a collaborative effort so to take credit for authoring a movie is the height of arrogance (...)"

In other words, the two critics come at the idea of auteur theory from two extremes, so to speak: Schneider making the mistake of equating a director with a novelist, Berardinelli being guilty of disregarding the director's personal influence on and affiliation to his work. The point of auteur theory is somewhere in between, plus a little different.

Now, really look at what the writer does. He ends up stating, ‘Schneider making the mistake of equating a director with a novelist.’ Yet, look up above that. He actually quotes me stating, ‘while there are certainly interchangeable journeyman and studio directors, the bulk of a filmic vision belongs to the director,’ and ‘The whole idea of ‘auteur theory’ strikes me as silly as claiming that the person responsible for a novel is the novelist.’ So, he literally takes a rough comparison, which is different from an equation (meaning equal), AFTER quoting my claim against that, where I state that the bulk of filmic vision is with the director. Since a novelist is wholly responsible for hs work, my comparison of the two arts is clearly a rough one, and in no way an equation. But, the writer’s whole piece is predicated on this and other such misreadings. Granted, it looks like English is not his first language, but still, why do such folk feel compelled to banter on about things when they do not even have the literary tools to do so?

One might ask Gordo Packard the same question. Who’s Gordo Packard? Well, meet Gordo Packard, Internet Troll! Well, I guess you could if his blogs still survived. But, like so many others, Gordo’s gone the way of all things. Both his personal blog and his political blog, called The Liberal Avenger have bitten the dust, the latter due to unethical behavior in distorting posts online. It was over this incident that I kicked Gordo’s cyber-as around. Even the Internet Archive does not have my asskicking in store any longer, and this was only a year and a half ago. Such for the permanence of the Internet. But, if you want to see what old Gordo looks like, click here. Yes, beneath that circle-jerking shit-eating grin is a Cub Scout Master who loves campouts with his cubs, curling up tight in a sleeping bag, and gooey smores.

But, believe it or not, all of the losers I’ve discussed so far are mere amateurs in the pathetic department, compared to some of the cyberstalkers I’ll profile next

Cyberstalkers

Weeping Sam

Cyberstalkers are probably the most pathetic asses online; even more so than mere Internet Trolls. I’ve had many of them over the years- just Google the name of a psychotic Finnish girl named Sari Sotamaa, who likely suicided a few years ago. But, psychotic young women are not the only types of asses. Some are pathetic old men. I previously mentioned a troll-cum-cyberstalker named Weeping Sam. I first encountered him on Anthony Zanetti’s blog, where I destroyed him whilst arguing over the value of Mark Rothko’s paintings. Just read how hivemind-bound he is with Vladimir Sheremet (above). Also, just compare his dialectic style with that of the Libertarian Troll named John (above). Then take a second look at his wan dialectic over the film Gertrud. Such ass whippings have led Weepy to cyberstalk me across other websites- his writing style so distinctly silly that he’s easily discernible.

He stalks me on a website called No Ripcord. When I reposted my Gertrud review, he did what he usually does- pretend to be several people, even though all the IP numbers are from the same person’s PC. And in this repost, he is so desperate to get my approval and attention that he finally comes through with using his pseudonym, after other posts where I called him out. He even links to another piece I’ll hit, in a bit, where Weepy actually tried whipping up a bunch of morons to display they are even dumber than he is. Another tack he uses, which I’ll show in a bit, is the perverse need to declare that my website and I are not popular and worthless. Yet, if so, then what does that reveal about someone obsessed with such a website and person? In this series of posts-cum-graffiti, the website owner of No Ripcord weighs in. Interestingly, Weepy only weighs in on those films that a self-consciously wannabe artsy type would watch, not any of the smaller independent films or documentaries. This rant shows how obsessed Weepy is, by referencing others of my writings. This is a truism of so many of the folks in this essay- they claim to hate or dislike my writings, yet they obsess over them, whereas normal folk, if they come across something they dislike, or merely think is bad, just click. In this exchange I rip into stolid film critic David Sterritt, and Weepy, who comes alive when I mention his name. But if he really wasn’t cyberstalking, then how would he have known to pop in right away- in less than an hour? Here Weepy cannot even do more than burble, ‘you’re bad,’ like a child. In this take on Vertigo it’s interesting to note the better writing and dialectic of those who appreciated the review vs. those who can offer nada but ad hominem. This offers a good take on when Weepy pretends to be multiple folks, and piles on. There were quite a few other comments, but site owner David Coleman told me he took them down, Especially interesting was the review of The Decalogue, where Weepy even gleefully admitted to cyberstalking. Coleman told me that Weepy put it in his own blog, and added: ‘I mean this guy admitted that he was thinking about your review all weekend. That does hint at a slightly unhealthy tendency toward obsession….it's easy to post a reactionary comment; far less so to post an eloquent argument discussing why you like the film yourself. That's where these cranks fall down -- they never put forward a coherent argument. It's always a snide remark, usually over (as you pointed out) something they've misunderstood in their race to react.’ Then Coleman wrote: ‘What this person thinks is completely irrelevant and any argument will end in stalemate...and potentially an ugly one at that. These parties have already showed that they can't debate without twisting your words...so don't engage them. Weepingsam's last word is so incriminating, that it actually serves as its own riposte!’ And, here was Weepy’s last word: ‘You also have a pretty strange definition of cyberstalking - 4 (I think) interactions (5 now) in 2 years, 2 of them on a blog where I was participating long before you showed up? You may have other detractors, you know. Also - with the magic of RSS, it is possible to cyberstalk hundreds of people at once...’ Yet, a clear look at No Ripcord’s archives shows he followed me to the site when they started posting my stuff. Plus, his last sentence damns him. Coleman has subsequently deleted the worst and most noxious of Weepy’s nonsense.

Of course, aside from his own blogs, Anthony Zanetti's blog, and Unspoken Cinema, Weepy has participated in other online activities, from Wikipedia vandalism to this mind-numbing circle-jerk over me. It’s reminiscent of the old email hate list about me that circulated in the Twin Cities area earlier this decade. What’s hilarious is how these idiots cannot even offer anything of depth on why my essays are so bad. They resort to not only ad hominem against me, but have to attack my wife and her poetry. What’s really hilarious is that, in both their claims against my essays and my wife’s poetry, they actually rail against the best pieces of writing as the worst. Weepy’s name in this exchange is TheManWithNoShame. In chronological order, some of the most hairy-handed gems:

quote:
Michael Bay Is Not the Death of Cinema
There, I said it. Given the recent critical backlash surrounding Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a film which I’ll probably never see, I think it’s time to straighten things out.

What’s funny is that the poster, on eRhubarb, quotes something out of context, wherein the piece states that it is the artsy poseurs, not the crapmongers like Bay, who are killing film, but also the fact that the words were not written by me, but another contributor to the Cinemension blog. Literally, these asses cannot even be bothered to quote the correct person! Here is where Weepy reveals himself:

Haha. I think I've read some of this guy's stuff. He used to write for TSPDT until they stopped using him because he wrote stuff like this about Vertigo on their site: http://www.noripcord.com/reviews/film/vertigo.

Give the Rube credit. He’s the only ass online, from Wikipedia to all these morons who obsess over me (and only a fraction have been touched upon in this and similar essays I’ve done), who realizes that such fora and linkage actually only help spread the word and eventually defeat the ignorance and bile these jokers spew. JamesBondGuy then actually tries to criticize Jess’s poetry. Here’s his wisdom:

Wow! He really told me. Then a clown named Rawlinson writes this great commentary:

His reason? (crickets chirping) Obviously he’s been touching The Weekly Johnson. Weepy then quotes from my interview with James Berardinelli, again, and, amazingly, he obsesses on the part where I kicked his ass over Jacques Rivette and Gertrud. What a coincidence! Later, Weepy masturbates over Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of his favorite critics- another giveaway. Then Weepy reveals himself even further when he quotes great ends to my essays, and just posits them as bad. Why? Because he’s Weepy, that’s why:

I love that line. How can you elucidate manna?
edit* I know his ideas are awful, but some of these reviews are just horrifically written. Ugly, clunky, stodgy prose - especially those stupid turns of phrases. Actually no, that's not the worst thing. Those mind-numbingly banal jingles he uses as a 'witty' send off in every review are like a smug turd cherry on top of the proverbial cake. He seems to do this all the time:
F For Fake: See what a mere work of art can really do?
Blood of a Poet: Ah, such things that dreams are made of.
Spiderman 3: I put my expectations aside, let the film play out, and was rewarded. What a concept!
Werkmeister Harmonies: But, when given a rare full plate, like this, it’s okay to gorge between the famines. Grace is optional.
and my favourite
Au Hasard Balthazar: I give you Robert Bresson!

Now given that the film quote taken is about the artistic manna the film offers, to elucidate it is what ANY critic should do, rather than just give plot points and a thumbs up. But these morons are so daisy-chained that they think that if they toss around epithets and quote from bad critics about foreign films, it makes them intelligent. Yes, intelligent enough to quote from others that are not the person you are writing about, and intelligent enough to exhibit good writing as bad….just because you unwittingly feel a desire to show off your ignorance. Some ass named Pigeon Army then writes:

He's not - he's a two-bit reviewer with delusions to criticism, and he's surrounded by yes men.

Yes-men? Like I’m some sort of general? It’s funny, because it yet again shows the desire for these asses to be known and read outside their echo chamber, and their envy that I am likely the most well and widely read critic of the arts online. A Neolith named Troilus then ends the thread with this comment, which unknowingly encapsulates all the maturity and intellect of the whole thread:

If you squint and read that it looks like he says that it's okay to gorge between fannies. Sexist.

Truly a stunning display of online sciolism and idiocy. It also displays that people only sink to the lowest common denominator when in groups. But, most damning of all is how this thread displays the utter lack of life these people have. On Wikipedia, one can see my stalkers literally have edits going 16-18 hours a day. One wonders, if they have jobs, how they can retain them? In the three and a half so years (late 2004-early 2008) that I posted on political blogs, in arguments, I doubt I came near 1000 total posts in all the blogs I argued at. But, let’s take a look at the number of posts the losers here posted (noting that the numbers are likely higher in the three or so months since this thread ended) at just this forum. Add in the likely higher number of posts at other film sites, like Weepy and his stalking in many realms:

I mean, literally, could there be a more damning indictment of the utter worthlessness of these lives? They are vicarious vermin, so socially maladapted that they can only spend their time at a computer to feel joy. And, as I said, these sorts of folks will be regulars at multiple outlets. And it is amazing how they try to convince themselves that my writing is bad writing yet these idiots are riveted by my words, which evidences its power, something beyond their ken. But, it’s precisely because folks like this exist that the need for essays like this need to exist, to assist future cyberhistorians and sociologists.

Otherwise, who could believe such losers like a Weeping Sam existed? Well, here’s his blogger profile, as well as a couple other gems of his unending idiocy. Here he again obsesses over me and misquotes what I say. Here’s a good example that vitiates his claims that I am just an Internet guy, and therefore unimportant. If so, why write about me so much? And to prove what a bunch of idiots a guy like Weepy attracts, on eof his posters claims a film loses background sound with dubbing. Apparently, this guy has not been around since the sound era and the invention of multiple tracks. One need only listen to Nights Of Cabiria, or other classic dubbed films from the 1950s and 1960s, to see that as patent nonsense. There are many more examples I could give of Weepy’s obsession, but the case is already so damning.

Let me end with a linking between Weepy and another of my pathetic cyberstalkers. This comment was made after my interview at Only Good Movies Blog:

This guy is a huge joke. He has horrible taste…. case and point praising Spiderman 3 while bashing The dark knight, Brokeback, Crash, All Spielberg movies, Blade runner, all other classics, etc. He is also very homophobic, just read his reviews on Brokeback mountain. He is lucky is not a legit respected “real” critic who people know about otherwise he would be in a load of trouble for his gay slurs. He thinks very highly of his own idiotic opinion and bashes legit respected critics. Thankfully he is only an internet guy, meaning he is unimportant and everything he says is irrelevant.

Now look at the earlier poster, and see, just as Weepy chimed in so quickly with the comment about The Decalogue, note how soon after this interview, at Only Good Movies Blog, is posted, he comments on the interview:

Is this guy for real? His knowledge of the films he’s talking about is superficial at best and yet he places himself above pretty much every major film critic of the last 60 years.

And in what capacity does he review for the Criterion Collection? I certainly can’t find anything on their site about him.

This is the modus operandi of another of my Internet stalkers; one who is as pathetically Pavlovian and predictable as Weepy, and, like the rest, their poor grammar and IP #s give them away. They just cannot help making asses of themselves. Whereas Weepy surfaced from the pits of film blogs, this child, a teenaged British fudgepacker named Steven Edmondson, first got obsessed over me from Wikipedia. The density of the queries asked reveals it is the kid, just as Weepy’s writing is singularly predictable. Note how he conflates becoming a pre-release reviewer for new Criterion DVDs with being an employee. Not dumb, but exactly the sort of thing a kid with little or no work history would assume. Of course, Little Steven is sort of Weepy’s antithesis- he’s a teenager with no life. Just imagine what sort of life a boy with no real world life must live: one without girls, social status, fun, sex. But, as I said, had I written something about some thing he agreed upon, he’d likely be one of my biggest fans, and not a cyberstalker. Check out his defunct blog. Had I praised an album of Kate Bush’s, he’d likely be adding links to my writings at Wikipedia, not stalking me and vandalizing pages that reference me (here and here). What’s funny is that when my fans send me these sorts of links I can immediately tell which stalker it is, without even having IP numbers. Weepy, as shown, always has to say how unimportant my website is because it’s online (trying to convince himself otherwise, despite reading my every word) while Little Steven cannot resist referencing my name in the edits; unawares that each mention of my name and website and each link to Cosmoetica, only gets me more hits. Wikipedia, as example, thinks that their programs can fool Google’s bots into not counting references and links to things, but Google’s continually updated bots easily defeat Wikimedia’s outdated defenses.

Now, recall where I showed how Weeping Sam got so desperate for my attention, after I ignored his stalking, to the point he actually stopped pretending to be other anonymous posters? Well, Little fudgepackin’ Steven was so lonely and desperate that he was reduced to an even more pathetic gambit. He not only used his real name, but emailed a bad poem in hopes that I would comment on it. Note the poor grammar and lack of knowledge in poetry:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steven Edmondson <stje.allswellthatendswell@live.com>
Date: Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 11:54 AM
Subject: Vers Magnifique

I am an under-appreciated, (if I may take the liberty of saying so myself), unpublished and entirely unknown poet. I started out writing mostly in sonnet form, and eventually moved onto curtal sonnets, before deciding that rigid attention to form was restrictive and damaging, and rather than pushing forward the medium of poetry, even in a personal sense. All it was achieving was repeating and reconfirming the criticism and partialities of generations of critics, paying lip service to the "past masters", all of whom have been elevated far beyond their means by the critics. What I mean by this is manifestly demonstrated by the name given to types of sonnet. 'Shakespearean', 'Patrarcan', 'Spencerean' and so in, and even the curtal sonnet is closely associated with Hopkins. Form being associated only with specific poets seems to me to be regressive, repressive, if not even a form of vandalism.

There's a lot of variation in my work, but a current form I am experimenting with below is demonstrated by the piece below. I'd be honoured if you could spare some time to take a look, and if deemed acceptable included with the other poets in the Vers Magnifique section of your site. Any criticisms you have would be vastly appreciated but I am aware that I cannot reasonably expect this from you as standard.

Apparently he thought I would be fooled by the dual names presented, or the obviously fawning style, which he hoped would gull me. Imagine his surprise when he finds out that his poem, indeed, made it onto Cosmoetica, but as a piece of mockery, not quality. Will the young boy go Plathian and stick his head in an oven. Dare one dream?

Of course, I have detailed prior Wikipedia stalkers in other essays, but here are a few of the more ridiculous. This guy is so arrogant that he is an admin who violates one of the cardinal rules of Wikipedia- no sockpuppets. Yet, here’s one of several of his. Guys like this are not like my real world stalkers that followed me online, and then to Wikipedia, but merely the anal retentive type that feel like wasting their lives doing nothing of any positive value in the world. Another of them is called Ronz, and I’ll return to him shortly. There are a few dozen ‘names’- although I suspect far less real world people, as one person can have many aliases. Here is another stalker, another teenager, like Little Steven, but this guy may be even more off the beam, if not as obsessed with me. On his user page he writes this burble. When I was first emailed with it I laughed, and knew this had to be a child writing, for I had not seen such nonsense since years ago reading a book on Hitler Youth and how they were forced to write essays on how much they loved Hitler and the Fatherland:

My dream for Wikipedia is that it become recognized as an appropriate and legitimate source of knowledge and all of my edits are performed with this in mind.

For this to take place, Wikipedia must operate with a universal standard of principles. Thus, for example, I am much more liable to judge articles based on the general notability guidelines than any of the sub-guidelines or any precedent that an individual Wikiproject sets.

Also, I am not one of the people who believes that more is better. I don't judge Wikipedia by the amount of articles that it contains, so you won't see me creating dozens of articles a day but on the other hand I'll focus on maintaining the ones that we have. I'm shocked by how many articles we have about simple and broad topics that are neglected in favour of trivial articles about borderline notable entities (most often in the realm of popular culture)!

I have a pet peeve for those who take advantage of other people, and on Wikipedia that translates into spammers and editors with a conflict of interest that harms the project. You know who you are and I will show no mercy in calling you out and dealing with you. I also have an unavowed interest in cyberculture, but I don't let it interfere with my editing habits.

What’s amazing is that, yet again, these editors who stalk and harass me, claiming that my website is not a ‘reliable’ source of information, even when, as example, my Dan Schneider Interviews correct falsehoods, yet they so yearn for Wikipedia- the best example of the Lowest Common Denominator going, to be taken seriously, even as every year it is shown to be a less and less reliable source of information, to the point that most colleges ban it as a reference source. Why? Precisely because of the idiots like Little Steven and the others.

But, as I said, under slightly different circumstances, Little Steven and Weepy could be fans of the site and actively promoting it. The flip side is that I also have fans for whom the coin of chance landed on heads, not tails. They are fans, but, had slightly different circumstances played out, they could be stalkers. Why? Because they invest too much of themselves into my website and writings. Instead of irrationally demonizing me, they go in the other direction and have no real solid basis for liking my stuff, save that they ‘like’ it. Earlier I mentioned an editor named Ronz. A number of my other fans (including many longtime editors at Wikipedia, who became fans when they saw the unjust treatment my website and writings received from the pathological mobs) had shown me the assorted acts of vandalism he had done earlier. Then, a few days ago I received this in email:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 6:50 AM
Subject: How do you do it, Dan?

Hello Dan,

I have been on holiday for several weeks. Enjoyed myself well.
Yesterday I returned and am now depressed. I am a big fan of your website and writings.

Then, tonight I saw more vandalism on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cambridge_University_Press&action=history
Before I left I added back the controversy part of that Cambridge University Press fiasco, where they dismissed you. This information is readily available, and also in the book cited (I purchased it after reading your piece). First they de-linked it months ago because it was linked to Cosmoetica, which they banned. So I sourced it with the actual book, pages, and even ISBN no.
Now, willy-nilly, this editor named Ronz, who is a known Cosmoetica cyberstalker and vandal there, removed it claiming '(rv - per NPOV - no source - appears to be trivia)'.
What is laughable is, given his vandalism, he is pretending he is doing it for no reason connected to you, but he has a long history of vandalizing references to you. Second, I added the link very NPOV, with words like 'claim', etc., so that reason is false. And, it's certainly not 'trivia' when the oldest press in the world distorts information willfully. And who is some person with no life of his own to say? Just look at these vandals; they are online 24-7. I had no time for over a month to re-link it.
The trivia nonsense is just that. Also, I should point out that there are now Cambridge University employees tidying up and removing information that they deem damaging to the University. Look on the CUP and the University pages. I cannot prove this, of course, but I have a friend who works part-time at the library there who has told me this is so, and that some faculty and students are doing this. How is this not spam and POV? Of course they would not want information like the controversy with you to be known.
Forgive me, but maybe I am too high strung, but how do you put up with all these hateful, spiteful, and ignorant people? Cosmoetica is the best example of the Internet being something positive, more than just a porn distributor, and it should be recognized and celebrated as such by any website (Wikipedia or other) that claims to be legitimate. Especially so since Wikipedia's people often claim they suffer bias from the 'real world' presses and institutions. It's like television not celebrating I Love Lucy because Lucille Ball never made it as a film star.
Just thought you needed to know. I appreciate all your efforts. It has made me a better person.
Yours,

Now, note the ceding of self into something that really does not have anything to do with this person. This is the exact thing my stalkers do, as do all of these people mentioned in this essay, who are motivated bizarrely to lash out at a stranger simply because an opinion is not in synch with theirs. As I stated, I just click on to the next website. But people like this cannot let it go, and it’s just a coin flip as to whether they stalk or praise.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 7:08 AM
Subject: Fwd: How do you do it, Dan?

You actually bought the CUP book just because of my shit in it? Wow. Could've saved your money and not given to them asses, cuz nothing in the print differs from what I wrote.
I am actually working on another long piece highlighting the best or worst emails and articles on me over the last 2 or so years (this very essay). Will include that exchange, as well. You cannot personalize such shit. People are ignorant, and there's a limited amount they can do.
The Wikipedia asses, hopefully, will grow up and move on to other obsessions. First, I have never gotten more than a few dozen hits from Wikipedia in any day. I get 20-100X more from Amazon and IMDB links. This is another example of the hubris of Wiki- they think people actually read all their pages. It is just a condensed Internet. Ironically, my links actually bring more traffic to THEM than vice versa. No one goes to Wiki to read up on books or films. The links are usually the most helpful thing about their 'articles.'
That guy you mention is a stalker, and I have a section on some more Wiki asses that'll be in the new essay in a week or 2. Yes, you are right, there's not a single link that you guys, or other people, put that ever violated their linking policies. They know this, so this is why they use terms like NPOV or trivia, because they cannot justify the deletions per their own policies.
But, do not stress about this, or idiots from emails. As time goes on, folks like this will be fans, and be rabidly defending me and Cosmo and links no matter what (which will be a prob all its own). I appreciate your efforts at Wiki and in being a fan, but you need to be objective, too. Do not just accept my opinions. I think you'll find them correct 99.9% of the time, but do not get lazy and make me a 'master' or the like.
What I'm saying is that many of my stalkers could easily be fans and vice versa. Do not be one of those whose fandom was the result of randomness. Understand why a certain film or book is good- not because I said so, merely because I showed you what was there all along. My opinions are not a Midas Touch, merely a flashlight. But, as I tell my wife and others, it takes time for quality to rise. And, as new technology comes into being, it will likely obviate Wikipedia. If I am alive in 2030, so will Cosmo be online. I'd say the chances of Wikipedia being there are less than 10%. Why? Because new tech and a new info source will make it a relic.

And that is so. And, in regards to my thesis about my fans and stalkers being different sides of the same coin, here was the reply- and note the emotionalism over logic:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 9:30 PM
Subject: Fwd: How do you do it, Dan?

You are of course right, Dan.
I have always been high-strung and let bullies get to me. I need to learn to not care as much.
Yours,

Of course, I don’t claim that I am alone in battling the online idiocy of today, but, as one of the more popular websites on line, and the target of many more times the number of harassers and stalkers than other websites, if I do not stand up against such, who will? People often obsess about the great evils in life, but most people do not even stand up to the little insidious evils that constitute tens of thousands of times more incidents.

It can be standing up on big principles, or minutia, such as when I showed that Vermont Poet made points with diacritical marks, yet did not show the 1-12 in stress level that he admits exists. And, even as he tried to defend it he clipped his own argument, because he falls into the metric trap, rather than breaking out of it to properly anoint stress levels per line. He could not even admit the fallacy of reductiveness. Or how about Libertarian troll John? Compare his strawmanning and Pavlovian arguments with those of a Weeping Sam- the hunter who became the hunted. Both have been exposed as deliterate liars and ideologues with all the depth and dialectic originality of a mynah bird. In fact, they are further proof that the difference between great artists and all others in life is the greatest difference in the human sphere.

But, in all their attempts to minimize and marginalize the growing influence of myself and Cosmoetica, all of its critics, stalkers, haters, and the like, have only succeeded in doing the opposite, even as their own websites faded in popularity, or simply ceased to exist. Like so many in the past, the Banned In Boston Effect has only helped bring more readers and fans into the fold. That their hatred is also guided by envy is obvious, from any impartial reading of the pleadings and supplications I get. Add to that the willful distortions, lies, and the general obtuseness, and the case for Cosmoetica, and the reasons behind its slow rise to the top of the online arts heap, becomes plain. While most people may not fundamentally get why it is valuable, its very difference makes it popular; the fact that its fundamental difference is high quality is just fortuity. And when fate smiles, sometimes you just have to accept it, and smile back.

Before I wrote this essay I emailed a number of friends and associates (online and off) about the Pavlovian reaction to this article that many of the folks mentioned in it would inevitably have. And, true to form, some of them did.

Let me start with the Vermont Poet, who in his response revealed a few things that clarified his aims and intentions. A few days after destroying his initial claims and fallacies, the VP wrote a response to my piece. Unfortunately, it was even more out of touch with reality, and a bit more insincere than his original post.

That said, I still find his initial essay ludicrous and stuffed with fallacious arguments. He made many points in response to my own assertions (he lambasted Carlo Parcelli), but most of them are tangential to a definition of meter. For example, he points out that I got the title of his essay wrong, true, and that there are typos in my posts, also true. He accuses me of sending him a possibly virus ridden hate-E-Mail which I don’t remember and which he, conveniently, can’t produce. (I’m calling that one, false.) He also takes issue with how I characterized his arguments. I don’t blame him, but I stand by those characterizations. However, none of this has anything to do with meter itself.

To his credit, VP admits some errors, although while admitting getting my initial essay’s title incorrect, he still glosses over the reason for my title and its import on my piece- the points of which he never even expounded upon in his initial piece; sort of like doing a critique of King Lear but somehow never mentioning the three daughters as having any import to the drama. As for the email with a rant or virus, here is something interesting. VP’s original post was dated 11/8/09, and it read: He accuses me of sending him a possibly virus ridden hate-E-Mail which I don’t remember and which he, conveniently, can’t produce. This is what I had copied when I first read the reply after it was emailed to me by one of my readers, who wanted me to reply right away (as if I have the time to instantly reply to all the thousands of emails or online references made about me or Cosmoetica). I made a little note that I would reply with something to the effect that one should notice how the VP does not outright deny sending the email, and in effect asks me to prove so. Of course, this would have entailed me actually having to have opened the email attachment, thereby possibly exposing myself to the virus. Cosmoetica also has a longstanding submissions policy. The second sentence on the page states: All emails with attachments will be deleted unread, and any threats- personal or legal- will immediately be reported to the authorities. Yet still I get sent attachments. Then, yesterday, on 12/2, when I started this response, I noticed this addendum: (I’m calling that one, false.) This means that someone probably alerted VP to the fact that his original response was rather weak and unwittingly damning. After all, if a woman you’ve never met claims that you raped her, what innocent man would not vehemently deny it? How many would merely casually question the woman to produce evidence? So, did VP have a Freudian slip of guilt shine through, that he later amended, or was it just poor writing. I can accept either one since, as I will show, the VP shows his reading comprehension is not exactly at the highest level.

In the entirety of his response, he provides only two (2) specimens to support his arguments.

In answer to my rhetorical question, ‘…what metrist has ever asserted that meter is composed of just two discrete stresses and that, furthermore, these two stresses are precisely the same no matter the context?’, Dan writes the following:

I will now disprove such by using two definitive texts. The first is from Webster’s Universal Unabridged Dictionary (1964). In reference to meter (meaning poetic metrics, no other usages of the term):

1. (a) rhythm in verse; measured, patterned arrangement of syllables, primarily according to stress and length; (b) the specific rhythm as determined by the prevailing foot and the number of feet in the line; as iambic meter; (c) the specific rhythmic pattern of a stanza as determined by the kind and number of lines.

I don’t see how Webster’s helps Dan’s case. Notice that Webster’s does not assert that meter is composed of two discrete stresses or that they are the same no matter the context. Dan’s original assertion was that:

“meter is the theory (claiming origin by several cultures) that spoken language consists of 2 primary vocalizations of a sound- i.e.- stressed & unstressed.”

Here is where any malice that one might have ascribed to the VP might need to wane, and he may merely be incompetent as a reader. All words have meaning, including those used to define other words. Many philosophers refer to this as the circularity of language or the dependence of meaning. VP states ‘I don’t see how Webster’s helps Dan’s case. Notice that Webster’s does not assert that meter is composed of two discrete stresses or that they are the same no matter the context.’ Here’s how: the quoted definition states, in b: the specific rhythm as determined by the prevailing foot and the number of feet in the line; as iambic meter. On this VP and I agree on. Now, the definition references another term, iambic. It could just as easily have referenced trochaic, dactylic, etc. but the point is that it references another term, meaning that term is part of this word’s definition. So, since it references iambic, let me just get even the online definition of the term from Webster's: a metrical foot consisting of one short syllable followed by one long syllable or of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable (as in above). So, we clearly see meter as defined as having two discrete entities, the stressed and unstressed syllable. Hence, the definition of meter DOES, indeed, back up my assertions 100%, for in defining meter it references clear terms that distinctly and unequivocally claims a binary reality to meter.

Let’s step back and reflect. I mean, really, can VP be serious? Is he joking? I think not. I think stolidity is endemic in his gray matter. Witness:

And this definition, as a very general one, isn’t necessarily wrong. But he then calls that definition into question by writing that:

In other words, (according to Dan) the “plenum” of stresses available in an accentual language contradicts the notion of “2 primary vocalizations”. But it only contradicts if one assumes that the “2 primary vocalizations” can’t be relative (or widely vary in relation to each other). Schneider’s argument only holds water if the “2 primary vocalizations” are discrete and always the same. But, as I wrote, no metrist, to my knowledge, has ever asserted the same (only, ironically, Dan Schneider). All “theories” of meter recognize that stress is relative and therefore recognize a “plenum” of stresses. They recognize that English is an accentual language, and that within the language’s “plenum” of stresses, one stress will always be relatively strong and one will always be relatively weak.

Webster’s definition in no way bolsters Dan’s contention that meter doesn’t exist. Nowhere does Webster’s definition limit meter to two discrete stresses which are always the same. The Webster’s definition rightly asserts that meter is a pattern of stresses (English for example) or lengths (Latin for example).

What is especially curious about Dan’s example is that Webster’s defines meter the way I do(!) and, most importantly, doesn’t question its very existence.

VP then does the classic strawmanning. Granted, it may be out of sheer stupidity, not willful malice, but, in the end, in a material sense, does it really matter? He’s wrong; whether it is out of misguided and malicious pride or just plain old stolidity matters not. So, I was correct in my initial essay, my debunking of VP’s counterclaims were correct, and VP’s attempts to debunk those secondary claims of mine, I have definitively shown to be incorrect, using the very definitions he claims debunks me. He is, in essence and reality, reading black where white is stated, and stated clearly enough for even a child to recognize. Words mean specific things, and definitions are dependent upon knowing the meanings of the words used to define other words. Were this a formal debate, VP would not only have lost in a shutout, but he would be laughed at when he stepped up to the podium.

The oldest and most important device of Verse form, meter selects one phonological feature of lang. (stress, pitch, length) and reduces it several levels or degrees in ordinary speech (3 or 4 levels of stress; high, mid, and low pitch; various durations) to a simple binary opposition (‘stress’ vs. ‘unstress’; ‘level’ vs. ‘inflected’ pitch; ‘long’ vs. ‘short’) which may be generalized as ‘marked’ vs. ‘unmarked’.

This is from the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Dan rightly mentions that Princeton’s overview covers several pages. However, he glosses over the implications of this concession by writing:

This is very important to note, because from the start of my essay through its end, I am the person arguing that meter is a reductio ad absurdum, it is not real, and it reduces human speech to a false binary opposition. Princeton proves I’m right on that score, and says so in black and white.

(Never mind that Dan’s own example from Webster’s contradicts his claim that meter is “a reductio ad absurdum” – which is to say, it doesn’t exist.) Well, OK Dan, but, as you intimated, Princeton says a lot more in black and white. It also writes:

The traditional view had always been that m. is an arbitrary pattern imposed on words — that, as Gurney put it, “metrical rhythm is imposed upon, not latent in, sppech” (1880). It seems indubitable that meter is in some sense a filter or grid superimposed on langauge. But 20th century linguistics has shown convincingly that many aspects of poetic form are merely extensions of natural processes already at work in language itself.

One page later, and after much exegesis to support this contention, Princeton closes the section by writing: But modern metrics also holds that strong syllables outside ictus are “demoted” and weaker syllables under ictus “promoted” under the influence of the meter. Promotion of weak syllables under non-ictus weights and slows the line, adding power. Demotion of stresses under ictus gives a quicker and lighter line. This is not a purely metrical mechanism, it shadows normal phonological process by which alternation of weak and stress, and strong and stronger, is effected atomically in polysyllables.

Apparently Dan either couldn’t be bothered to read this far or conveniently chose to ignore this portion. Princeton, in fact, not only disagrees with Dan but recognizes the binary stress pattern of the English language as a “normal phonological process”. And, by the way, did I mention it does so in black and white? Not only that, but Princeton rightly points out, as I have, that 20th Century linguistics has shown convincingly that many aspects of poetry are “extensions of natural processes already at work in language itself.” The next time Dan claims to be a man of science, take it with a grain of salt.

First, I did indeed quote the opening salvo of the definition, and for a reason; all encyclopediae (save for the crap from a Wikipedia) follow formats for their entries. They open with a summary, then extrapolate, usually in descending order of importance, upon the varied lesser aspects of the entry. In short, the opening is a concise summary of all that is to come. My quoting of the opening does, indeed, summarize the entry, and it states: The oldest and most important device of Verseform, m. selects one phonological feature of lang. (stress, pitch, length) and reduces it several levels or degrees in ordinary speech (3 or 4 levels of stress; high, mid, and low pitch; various durations) to a simple binary opposition (‘stress’ vs. ‘unstress’; ‘level’ vs. ‘inflected’ pitch; ‘long’ vs. ‘short’) which may be generalized as ‘marked’ vs. ‘unmarked’. Note how VP never addresses that it, even in its summary, debunks in even more unequivocal terms, VP’s claims that no one ever claimed two discrete stress levels. Instead, amazingly glossing over that reality, he then digs far into the entry to uphold two claims about meter, that supposedly bolster his cause. First, what it states is that meter is, indeed (as I claimed) a reductio ad absurdum, because it tacitly admits there are multiple stress levels. So, again VP asserts a proof that proves he is wrong! Then, he does it a second time, by claiming that when the entry states: But 20th century linguistics has shown convincingly that many aspects of poetic form are merely extensions of natural processes already at work in language itself. Now, note, VP is accepting a claim made by an encyclopedia on poetry and poetics as an authority on something outside of its purview. While its opening salvo, indeed, does support a rather manifest claim, the encyclopedia is in no way an authority on phonology, and like most areas of human existence, there are indeed many differing opinions. Imagine citing a textbook on crustaceans as authoritative on the insect life of North America, as if the fact that both groups of animals descended from a common ancestor meant that an expert on one group automatically became on over the other. In short, not in this world. Thus, VP’s digression is utterly pointless.

Having yet to even get any wood on the ball, VP, I guess, to his credit, keeps flailing away:

Dan then goes on, at some length, railing at my characterizations of his argument. None of which, curiously, supports his claim that meter doesn’t exist. He repeatedly refers back to Websters and Princeton, neither of which support his argument.

But, as I’ve repeatedly shown, both Webster’s and Princeton both unequivocally show I am correct. But, let’s not let facts deter a good psychotic episode.

This is really amazing. First, VP spends the bulk of his essay claiming that my claim that meter is a fallacy is wrong, then he cites a study (naturally, the links do not work)…

So, is VP stupid or disingenuous? Or, does it even matter at this point? Most people, when they get a link that brings up a message that states that the request could not be processed, define that link as not working. Of course, given VP’s utter inability to be able to comprehend dictionary definitions, perhaps he simply has no idea that this represents a non-functioning link.

Without, apparently, reading them, he both dismisses and reinterprets the science (which, did I mention, he didn’t read).

More importantly, Dan never counters the example of an artist like Eminem. As I wrote above, Rap is “thumping example” of accentual and accentual syllabic verse.

Dan quotes Princeton out of context, ignores science, and glosses over 8 Mile.

First, as shown, there was no ‘science’ to peruse, and given VP’s utter inability to read well and misattributing authority to texts that have no authority over a claimed subject, what’s the point? Similarly, since Eminem is not a poet, there is as much reason for me to comment on its pointlessness as there is to discourse on crustaceans. And, I quoted Princeton in context, it was VP that took a claim out of context; and offered no science link to peruse. Of course, the study of poetry simply does not fall under the purview of science, but often poor thinkers try to lump certain things

As I implied in the piece VP quotes, I was a mediocre formalist. Note the past tense. I am a great poet, formally and in free verse. There are poems of mine that scan perfectly, according to metric nonsense, but not because I was following metric dictates, but because any well musicked poem will, given the reductive aims of meter, scan well. It’s what is in them that matters.

So, according to Dan, meter doesn’t exist but, by gosh(!), when he wants to, he writes meter with genius!

Well, no. But, apparently VP was not able to mentally digest what he just quoted previously: There are poems of mine that scan perfectly, according to metric nonsense, but not because I was following metric dictates, but because any well musicked poem will, given the reductive aims of meter, scan well. Again, he cannot be this dense, can he? I give the reason why the fallacy of meter will seemingly manifest, despite one’s not abiding by its dictates. One might not believe in evolution, and in God, but two differing animals, competing for an ecological niche, will develop similar traits during their competition, regardless. Over and over this occurs, but it does not mean God exists. Similarly, a well musicked poem will give a simplistic veneer of what is classically called meter, but one merely needs to listen well to see its fallacy, as I’ve shown and, as VP unwittingly concurs to, for metrics is a fallacy, a reductio ad absurdum.

Not that all meter isn’t “nonsense” (but his poem scans perfectly). He’s not following metrical dictates (it’s just that a “well musicked poem” does the same thing), and not that it’s not nonsense (but it scans well). Never in the annals of “seminal” essays has a more self-contradictory paragraph been written.

Again, the only contradictions are in VP’s claims because he is either a) deceitful, b) dumb, or c) both.

I guess that’s what happens when you try to have your cake and eat it too. At the very least, readers shouldn’t be taking advice from a man who claims meter doesn’t exist, then hurriedly, as an afterthought, asserts that he nevertheless writes meter with genius. Makes you wonder who the idiot really is, doesn’t it?

No, because it’s clearly VP, for even as he writes, ‘readers shouldn’t be taking advice from a man who claims meter doesn’t exist, then hurriedly, as an afterthought, asserts that he nevertheless writes meter with genius,’ it’s clear that I never stated that; I stated: ‘There are poems of mine that scan perfectly, according to metric nonsense, but not because I was following metric dictates, but because any well musicked poem will, given the reductive aims of meter, scan well.’ Now, reread what VP wrote, then what I wrote, and it’s clear that he is lying and strawmanning. So, I guess c is the answer to whether or not VP is deceitful or dumb. After all, if one cannot even understand simple dictionary definitions, what hope is there for contemporary published literature, and why it sucks?

Well, great VP. If one cannot grasp the outside world well, at least a knowledge of oneself means all isn’t lost. But knowing thyself has nothing to do with the metric fallacy; which was what all this was about in the first place; and which, as demonstrated, exists, and not just because I say so; but because the whole weight of human poetic history and logic back me up.

Now, on to another loser for whom the question of malice or stupidity has never been in question, for he excels in both- fudgepacking boy wonder from the UK, Steven Edmondson. In detailing his stupidity above, I knew exactly what he would do. He would contact me, still desperate for my approbation, then leave a cybertrail of his pathetic juvenile idiocy across blogs and Wikipedia. And, true to form, a week after the piece went online, and just after it hit Google, Little Steven got his knickers in a twist, and, in true Pavlovian asslicking pooch fashion, shot off an enraged email, disguised as smugness, even though he was fuming as he read the essay. How do I know? The same way I knew he would send just such an email, and then try to stir up trouble on other blogs and Wikipedia- because he’s a predictable drone with not a dram of creativity:

From: Joey Pottr <joeypottr@hotmail.co.uk>
Date: Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 2:30 PM
Subject: RE: Cyberstalking

Sir,
I was amused to find your incredible rant on the denizens of the Empireonline forum on your website, and inbetween laughing at its petty bitterness and an almost autistic obsession for arguing with "people with no life", I thought I should clear up the myriad of inaccuracies your post contained.
Firstly, if you call cyberstalking 'finding your essays and posting comments on them for shits and giggles' then you probably have some cyberstalkers. Including us. I say us because despite your knowing claims about IP addresses, there were 3 people involved and none of them were weepingsam.

This is what is known as ‘inflation of the self.’ The fact is that all blogs can track incoming and outgoing visitors and their destinations. My wife does it, and so do the owners of the assorted websites mentioned in the piece. Little Steven’s and Weepy’s are distinct, and from different parts of the world, with different ISPs. Some have even been tracked down to libraries and pubs. And this includes Wikipedia, wherein some of my biggest fans exist; due to the idiocies of folks like Steven.

One of the ironies of this whole Wikipedia thing is how I’m so often accused of being online 24/7, and in multiple locations around the world, when I sit back and laugh at the whole thing. I get many emails from Wiki editors- some with tens of thousands of edits, and who use their own sockpuppets to combat folk like this in their vandalism. Some, however, are in inner circles of Wikipedia, and give me the IPs of folk like Little Steven, which match up with those tracked by the website owners where I post. Think of this: Cosmoetica has gotten over 150 million hits on its main page and well over 6 billion total hits, on its thousands of pages, in less than a decade. Does anyone with a brain not think that doesn’t mean there are many fans on and off Wikipedia? That many of them would be longtime users? Total strangers? Do the math, and divide 6 billion by 1/10,000^th, or a hundredth of a percent (a very conservative estimate of my readership at Cosmoetica). That’s still about 600k people out in the Internet as potential fans online. I read, recently, that Wikipedia gets about a tenth of a percent of daily online traffic, or one in a thousand visitors online visit it. 600k divided by a 1000 means that hundreds of fans of my site will be online at Wikipedia during any 24 hour period (again, a very conservative estimate, and not accounting for the fact that I think Wikipedia’s traffic rate is likely higher than the estimate, especially if its #5 in traffic, all around). Yet, it is all me, despite Wikipedia’s own internal tracking of IPs confirming the very fact that 100s of folks from all over the world have been fans of my website and edited at Wikipedia. In short, a nice try to obfuscate, but Little Stevie was nailed.

I first came across your site on Wikipedia during a period when most films had a link to your ridiculous essays, almost totally because of self-advertising. You may recall two posters called StevenEdmondson and twmns tried to clear it up. You'll remember because you posted there pretending to be someone else and accusing everyone of being sockpuppets out to get you. Not at all the behaviour of an obsessive man. So anyway, after clearing most of it up (but unable to delete your page because of the amount of obfusaction you had made up about sockpuppets, and because you inexplicably have a fan who happens to be a wikipedia mod) we decided to keep an eye for any more vandalism. And yes, it is vandalism because you are posting them yourself, and you've pretty much admitted it - so don't try to get out of that one.

In his mind, I’ve admitted such, but not in reality. In fact, one of the funniest posts on Wikipedia that I was directed to was after one of the attempts to delete my Wiki page, one of the obsessives actually claimed, in all seriousness, that he could not understand how I was evading his IP blocks- well, because it was not me, but many people. Even funnier was one claim that some admin had supposedly honed in on me moving around in a hotel chain across America, to avoid their blocks. This sort of thing is known as the projection of self. Folks that are obsessed over things simply cannot imagine that other folks do not operate the way they do. Everyone, me included, has to be similarly obsessed as they are; as if working a 40+ hour fulltime job, lesser part-time stuff, household chores, a popular website, my own creative writing, watching films, reading books, and writing essays, not to mention researching and conducting interviews, spending time with my wife, and sleeping, eating, defecating, and urinating, leaves me much time at all. No, I have to be as obsessed as they are; even though time and agin they have seen that dozens, if not hundreds, of separate entities, have tried to combat the vandalism that Little Steven and his kind do. But note, how easily and Pavlovianly he gives up the incriminating info on himself; clueless that I knew this all along.

Soon enough you realised you couldn't link to your site anymore and you started being clever and linking to altfg, noripcord and blogcritics, sites that weren't specifically associated with you. Well, you obviously wanted a fight so we decided to give it you in the form of challenging you where you couldn't claim it wasn't you, on your articles. It soon became clear that you didn't actually care if you were vandalising wikipedia so we just started posting negative reviews to see if you wouldn't get riled into revealing yourself, and also because you're really funny when you're angry.

Notice, how ‘I’ was a vandal; even though I did not post any links, and the links posted by others always conformed with Wikipedia policy; unlike the vandalisms shown in the essay- where, as example, Ronz clearly violated Wiki policy, as shown by an admin there. It was Little Steven and his cohorts vandalizing. And, one need merely look at the timelines of my posts on multiple other websites, and they clearly predate even my Wikipedia page, much less any other links. But, to the obsessive mind, I had to be as focused on Wikipedia as they are. On the best day, I got about 120 visits from Wikipedia. This was some years ago. It was the best day by far, and the only time I ever got close to or more than 100 hits. I get over 1000 a day from IMDB, Amazon, and other related related sites, each and alone. I average 80-100k hits a day, so do the math. It was not worth nearly as much as these obsessives think; but it cores right into their delusions about the import of Wikipedia (in short, despite its traffic, no one goes to Wikipedia for ‘real’ info on the arts- they go to vandalize and promote minor celebrities or obsessions over UFOs, religion, or politics- the vast majority of edits there add zero in terms of knowledge- contrasted to what the links to my reviews did), even as it has been source-banned from almost every school and college across the Western World. Again, though, look how Pavlovianly he has fallen into the trap and hung himself.

Well that was ages ago, and in the meantime a friend of mine, who also uses Empireonline posted a topic about you that you couldn't possibly object to, because you love being criticised and you crave the oxygen of publicity you so rarely get. Knowing all this you should really apologise to weepingsam because he had nothing to do with it. It seems that since you kept accusing anyone who criticised you of being him he found out and, admittedly stupidly, posted on noripcord to say it wasn't him, so compounding his guilt in your eyes. You also owe an apology to TheManWithNoShame who has no relation to weepingsam, and you also owe an apology to StevenEdmondson who isn't the Will who posted his remarks on the other site. No, that one was actually Will. You also owe an apology to Mr Edmondson for insinuating his poetry was in anyway serious (it was actually Times headlines stitched together) - that was merely a ruse to see if you'd post any old shite someone sent in if they were fawning enough. But to your credit you stayed cool and didn't rise to the bait. No, obviously you were so unphased by it all you didn't end your rant by wishing suicide on a teenage boy. Oh wait a minute...

Again, a nice try at covering his ass, but even the folks at Empire can see the IP numbers of those who post. Whoops….

Anyway, I had forgotten all about this, and forgotten about you until I decided to google my name, and lo and behold, up comes the rant on your site admitting that after all you were concerned with all the negative reviews you were getting from people on film forums expressing their views on a film critic (OMG HOW AWFUL OF THEM!), and concerned with people clearing up the reviews someone inserted on wikipedia and that you inexplicably know and care about. I especially like the line about how anyone who posts on a forum can't have a life or a job, yet an unpublished poet and writer who doesn't have a job (professional twat is not an occupation, you know) and spends his time arguing with anonymous nobodies is somehow superior.

An anonymous online troll Googles his own name regularly, and claims I am obsessed with him? Actually, he read the essay just as I knew he would. Again, the drool on Little Steven’s chin gives him away.

How long have you been unemployed Mr. Schneider, waiting for that sweet publishing deal to come for that book you wrote that repeatedly praises you from the perpective of some guy you met in high school, while sponging off your slightly more successful wife? It must feel fantastic I'm sure.

Another clue to Little Steven’s obsession. He read a couple of old pieces where I was unemployed after a move to another state, and has not been able to move on. Imagine, among the 100s of essays posted, and he has read them all. I’ve long stated thast obsessives like him are partly to thank for Cosmoetica’s popularity. I cannot recall how many similar obsessives will find a claim, word, or thought from a minor essay (or several of them) and cobble together a wild view of me (as Satanist, liberal demagogue, gun-toting Nazi, etc.) only their crazed minds can comprehend. Note the utter conflation of ‘success’ with money. Yet, if I am so unsuccessful, why do folk like Little Steven and Weepy simply not click to another website? Because they know what I am saying is correct, and wish like hell that they had said it. This envy/rage at being ‘bested,’ in their minds, is what fuels them.

Anyway, I just wanted to clear a few errors up and tell you you have made my day. Infact you've made all of our days over at Empire - we think it's the best thing anyone's written ever.

Well Epiphany Demon says so and he has 4232 posts. I only wish Rosenbaum and Thomson would take time out of their busy schedules to call us 'fudge packers' and would think it's worth responding to criticism like

"If you squint and read that it looks like he says that it's okay to gorge between fannies. Sexist."

But no, they actually have a semblence of dignity and sanity. Thanks for all the laughs and ad hominems, but our work here is done. I will keep an eye out for you in those literary and poetry journals, but I wont be holding my breath.
I remain yours,
Steve..
I mean, Joey Pottr.

It really is quite easy to win arguments with idiots like this. You just give them the rope and they find the nearest tree limb. Now, get back to packin’ some fudge, Joe- er, Little Stevie. BTW- here is where Little Stevie and pals continue their circle jerk. Note, how Little Steven and company are the folks seeking out my attention, yet I’m somehow the one seeking publicity. How, exactly? By running a non-Lowest Common Denominator arts website that is non-commercial? By contrast, note how Little Steven not only obsessed over this essay (above), but then immediately posted on Wikipedia, about it, to the vandal called Ronz and an admin who is one of the saner denizens of that loony bin. Not surprisingly, neither commented, for Little Steven is known as a vandal at Wikipedia, even by other vandals, such as Ronz.

Over the years, I’ve gotten email requests from cyberstalkers who’ve asked me to take down emails they regretted sending, because those emails were found by HR people who Googled names during job interview processes. This has occurred a few dozen times. It’ll be funny to read Little Steven’s supplication, in a few years, when he’s out of school, and the majority of online information about him is that he is a cyberstalker. Sari Sotamaa’s ghost is smiling as Pavlovianly as Little Steven.

Postscript: Dan Schneider's website Cosmoetica appears to be having technical problems. The email contact link is not operable. Therefore, I'd like to address two errors in Mr. Schneider's rebuttal of my critique above. 1) I have never submitted work to Mr. Schneider's online journal Cosmoetica. Mr. Schneider's assertion therefore is at best a lie, and, at worst, a delusion. 2) I did not mispeak when I asserted that William F. Buckley threatened to punch Noam Chomsky in an interview on Mr. Buckley's show Firing Line back in 1969. Here's the url for that particular event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEIrZO069Kg. Though this proof was just a couple of clicks away, Mr. Schneider chose to erroneously attribute this event to a Mailer/Buckley confrontation. Otherwise, Mr. Schneider, by the nature and substance of his rebuttal, eloquently substantiates any and all of my original claims concerning himself and Cosmoetica.

Like most online nuts, Parcelli engages in fabrications and outright lies. First, Cosmoetica has never had extended technical problems wherein the email link would not be operable. I stated: 'And, fourth, Parcelli leaves out one crucial fact in his piece like, The Weekly Johnson piece, apparently written in 2006: that is that in late 2005 or early 2006, Parcelli submitted poems to me for posting on Cosmoetica. Because they were near-doggerel I, naturally, declined, and offered my criticisms. Unfortunately, the submission being four years, two computers, and several email services, ago, I do not have the poems and submission any longer. But, when one reads the piece, one can easily discern the puerile ‘revenge’ meme present, especially in his ascription of his own motives to me, as well his envy.' This is all true. But while I have not been able to save all the countless emails I have received over the years, I have always maintained a list of emails that I have put on spam lists because the senders demonstrated, in the past, a desire to annoy or flood me with replies. Hence, Parcelli's claim that the link was not operable is false. It's just his email address was BLOCKED! Why? Given his claims and online temperament (see distortions, lies, and deliteracy below), and lack of skill poetically, and given my temperament and writing and critical abilities, does it not seem almost fated that Parcelli's reactions to my criticism would generate a necessity on my part to cease contact with him? As for Buckley threatening to punch Chomsky in the face, I typed, 'And, as for threatening to punch Chomsky, no. Go Google the supposed threat- it was a comic play off of the real threat that Buckley made to writer Gore Vidal when Vidal kept calling Buckley a fascist. So, Parcelli is still oh-fer in his essay.' That does not deny the video Parcelli links to, only the claim that Buckley was threatening Chomsky. Play the video: at about 20 seconds in to it, Buckley makes the comment, but it is not a THREAT, as Parcelli claims, but, as I claim, 'a comic play off of the real threat that Buckley made to writer Gore Vidal when Vidal kept calling Buckley a fascist.' If Parcelli calls that a threat he is psychotic, for even Chomsky is laughing WITH Buckley. And then Parcelli claims I attributed the punching threat of Buckley to Norman Mailer when, in black and white, I state it was Gore Vidal, as shown here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8. Indeed, it is Parcelli, who cannot even read, much less look up easy to find video links! Incredible! Hence, Parcelli is caught not only lying but actively distorting his lie. It's right there in black and white. He is either a) lying, b) displaying poor reading comprehension, or c) both. Also, note how Parcelli's rebuttal says nothing in defense of his doggerel vs. my great poetry. Why? He cannot. And one does not forget someone who sends dozens of pages of doggerel to you, and then tries to argue for it in an increasingly shrill and delusional manner (sort of like this 'rebuttal'). So, to recount, and as proven in his own claims' being shown to be false, it is Parcelli who has been shown to be a liar and active distorter, as well as not too bright in figuring out why his email was blocked.

Carlo Parcelli: liar, distorter, deliterate. In other words a typical generic online idiot!