Dumb-Ass on another thread.

[HawaiianBeachBoy_1959]

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18960893&postcount=20

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18961558&postcount=24

So, as clearly demonstrated here, Exapno-Mapcase is effectively a pseudo-intellectual college know-it-all who thinks he knows more than everyone else. This Darwinian nightmare thinks that the Lost Generation of Paris in the 20s were “struggling.” Yeah, right! Any half-wit with even half of an IQ point would know that those guys would NEVER have gotten to Paris if they were “struggling.” (See top link)

For those of you who don’t understand, airline travel then was either A) nonexistent or B) unreliable. So that meant that middle-class people (who, in the 20s, most of them were and remained that way for the rest of their careers) had to travel by boat. And, as anyone who traveled anywhere by boat before the Jet Age will tell you, boat tickets were not cheap. So, how the hell does a “struggling” artist get the money to buy a ticket (any class of boat ticket) to France?

What a total fucking idiot. He also apparently didn’t know that those “struggling artists” actually had very well paying day jobs, or, in F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway’s cases, were already making money from their writings. Pablo Picasso had a very fine career painting.

The asshat thinks that just because he’s been on this site for as long as it’s been around, he thinks he can strut around like he’s the Big Man on Campus who knows everything. The worst part is that when I called his dumb ass on it, he said that my claims were “historically inaccurate” and “a distortion of reality.” (See bottom link)

It is rather fitting that this site’s slogan is “Fighting Ignorance since 1973. It’s Taking Longer Than We Thought.”

What a Moron. Seriously, a quick Google search on any reliable site would debunk his claims. I don’t know who or what this fucking idiot was talking about, but as far as I could tell, whatever he was describing was certainly NOT the Lost Generation.

[Trinopus]

Exapno Mapcase is one of the more sensible souls on these boards. You would appear to be a bit of a loon.

[Morgenstern]

@HawaiianBeachBoy_1959

…

For those of you who don’t understand, airline travel then was either A) nonexistent or B) unreliable. So that meant that middle-class people (who, in the 20s, most of them were and remained that way for the rest of their careers) had to travel by boat. And, as anyone who traveled anywhere by boat before the Jet Age will tell you, boat tickets were not cheap. So, how the hell does a “struggling” artist get the money to buy a ticket (any class of boat ticket) to France?

…

He wins it in a poker game.

I second the loon diagnosis.

[Larry_Borgia]

Switch to Decaf.

[Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew]

@HawaiianBeachBoy_1959

So, how the hell does a “struggling” artist get the money to buy a ticket (any class of boat ticket) to France?

If you’re James Joyce, “desperately short of money and unable even to afford new clothes” (per biographer Gordon Bowker) you get your way paid by Ezra Pound, who recommends the relocation to France specifically because it’s “the cheapest place he knows of” (ibid).

Ya loon.

[Fear_Itself]

@HawaiianBeachBoy_1959

For those of you who don’t understand, airline travel then was either A) nonexistent or B) unreliable. So that meant that middle-class people (who, in the 20s, most of them were and remained that way for the rest of their careers) had to travel by boat.

Or Zeppelin. If I was an artiste travelling to Paris, I would go by Zeppelin.

[Princhester]

@HawaiianBeachBoy_1959

And, as anyone who traveled anywhere by boat before the Jet Age will tell you, boat tickets were not cheap.

Are you sure? According to figure 5 from this paper in around 1920 you could travel 3rd class across the Atlantic for about $30 or about $60 2nd class.

According to this inflation calculator $30 in 1920 would be about $356 in today’s terms.

$350 isn’t nothing but it’s not exactly a huge amount to scrape together for a poor person who has heard they will be able to live very cheaply once they get where they want to go.

I’m not willing to write Exapno off just yet.

[TriPolar]

I don’t know shit about Lost Generation artists but it didn’t take long to find out you don’t either.
wiki

Although Fitzgerald’s passion lay in writing novels, only his first novel sold well enough to support the opulent lifestyle that he and Zelda adopted as New York celebrities. (The Great Gatsby, now considered to be his masterpiece, did not become popular until after Fitzgerald’s death.) Because of this lifestyle, as well as the bills from Zelda’s medical care when they came, Fitzgerald was constantly in financial trouble and often required loans from his literary agent, Harold Ober, and his editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins. When Ober decided not to continue advancing money to Fitzgerald, the author severed ties with his longtime friend and agent. (Fitzgerald offered a good-hearted and apologetic tribute to this support in the late short story “Financing Finnegan.”)

wiki

Joyce concocted a number of money-making schemes during this period, including an attempt to become a cinema magnate in Dublin. He also frequently discussed but ultimately abandoned a plan to import Irish tweed to Trieste. Correspondence relating to that venture with the Irish Woollen Mills were for a long time displayed in the windows of their premises in Dublin. Joyce’s skill at borrowing money saved him from indigence. What income he had came partially from his position at the Berlitz school and partially from teaching private students.

[HawaiianBeachBoy_1959]

Fitzgerald: financial collapse happened after he left Paris and came back to the US. So…a little further in the future than Lost Generation. (He died in 1940.)

Joyce: Ok, I lose that one.

Picasso: he had a career since the beginning of the century until his death in 1973.

Hemingway: Reporter for Toronto Star, and making a steady paycheck at doing that even before he reached Paris.

Dos Passos: Two commercially successful novels before he arrived in Paris.

My point is, that Exapno thought the rest of the above were “struggling” artists. (Again, Joyce, I will concede, was a Grade-A nutcase.)

PS: for inflation calculations, Forbes says not to calculate inflation using Consumer Price Index. Government changes it so many times it’s ridiculous.

If You Want To Know The Real Rate Of Inflation, Don't Bother With The CPI

[Bryan_Ekers]

I only opened the thread to see if the topic was me.

It’s not, apparently.

[HawaiianBeachBoy_1959]

Mr. Ekers,

I am not the kind of man who just randomly throws people in the Pit. You have to offend against me to earn such a fate. The idiot I was criticizing tried to start shit by rambling like he knew everything on my other thread. Fortunately, the moderator put a stop to that nonsense. I have nothing against you for I do not know you. Don’t worry. I’ll see to it that should you end up here, I will defend you.

[HawaiianBeachBoy_1959]

[quote=“TriPolar, post:8, topic:741241”]

I don’t know shit about Lost Generation artists but it didn’t take long to find out you don’t either.
wiki
Fitzgerald’s money actually came from the sales of his short stories and his first two novels. (He produced over 170 short stories if I recall correctly.) i’d also like to point out again that Fitzgerald in the 20s was actually quite the celebrity. it’s almost like there’s two Fitzgeralds: The handsome young Irish boy from Minnesota, King of the Jazz Age. It wasn’t until a decade later, we have the second Fitzgerald: a lonely, destitute, alcoholic shell of a man, “a pale, ghost of a man” as Sheila Graham described him.

(Typical of what I’ve come to expect from the Internet, though. Not even bothering to check which part of FSF’s life that information came from…)

Now, before the Internet high-and-mightiness comes out, I will point out that I do not know everything, and frankly, I could be a lot smarter period. But when it comes to literary history, come prepared if you’re looking to start an argument.

[Frank]

@HawaiianBeachBoy_1959

The idiot I was criticizing tried to start shit by rambling like he knew everything on my other thread. Fortunately, the moderator put a stop to that nonsense.

The only person addressed by a moderator in that thread was you.

[HawaiianBeachBoy_1959]

Precisely. He stopped ME. I was the one who went too far, and I was reminded that I should know better. Won’t make that mistake again.

[Nava]

@HawaiianBeachBoy_1959

Picasso: he had a career since the beginning of the century until his death in 1973.

And there was more than one period in which he was peniless or nearly so. The money he paid to avoid his military service (fine in stead of service) was from his uncle, for example, not from his earnings.

Being “known in some circles” and “making money” aren’t necessarily linked.

[Starving_Artist]

Exapno is a pretty smart guy with an impressive range of knowledge over a literally (heh) huge range of subjects. IMO, he’s one of the more interesting of the board’s posters and I usually enjoy reading whatever he has to say.

He’s not infallible though and is occasionally given to posting as fact things he’s read elsewhere and accepted at face value. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this and most of us do the same on occasion. My only real gripe with him is that (IIRC) when corrected he rarely if ever acknowledges the correction and generally just disappears from the thread.

As far as to whether some of these now famous artists and writers truly “struggled” I think we’d first have to define what struggling means. Personally I would regard someone such as Hemingway, who could earn at least a bill paying income as a reporter, as having “struggled” to become successful as a writer and novelist, and also to earn the kind of income that usually accrues to having achieved success in a particular field.

In other words, I don’t necessarily think that being able to pay the bills means that one isn’t struggling. It’s pretty common for people who’ve reached middle age and a certain level of financial success to look back on their early adult years as being a time of struggle.

[Wakinyan]

The Americans who lived in Paris at the time, like Hemingway, generally led a pretty good life on the money they received from the USA (by writing or otherwise), because of the rate of the dollar in relation to the franc. But of course, what’s “struggling” for one bloke may be high life for another.

[Penfeather]

@HawaiianBeachBoy_1959

Precisely. He stopped ME. I was the one who went too far, and I was reminded that I should know better. Won’t make that mistake again.

You are way too invested in this.

[Monty]

Wrong person in that scrap is pitting the other party.

[VinylTurnip]

@HawaiianBeachBoy_1959

Mr. Ekers,

I am not the kind of man who just randomly throws people in the Pit.

You have to admit, Bryan, that this statement is supported by his long and illustrious history as a guest member of this forum.