I would like to state, for the record, that I know hundreds of published poets and most of them don’t know two flips about scansion. That particular argument from authority is insane.
So, you’re saying we shouldn’t be too hard on prr because he may have a tapeworm.
Or worse, be an editor. 
PS - prr, a little word of advice. When your thread makes two pages and no one agrees with you, you might want to at least consider the possibility that you are wrong. Just consider it, hmmm?
And when lissener needs to give you advice on the appropriate level of snark for CS…
(For the record, this is meant as a lighthearted jest; actually, his post in this thread was excellent advice, IMHO)
They refused to correspond to each other or even speak to each other in public. it was quite the scandal of the time.
I appreciate your clarification. I’m sorry this thread got so protracted, because I wasn’t ever (I don’t think) denying getting snarky with Biffy, and by the somewhat-too-stringent-for-my-taste standards of CS, I no doubt deserved Dex’s intervention. I started this Pit thread with the intention that of pointing out that I (and maybe Biffy) would have responded well to a simple “Guys, your tone is getting too personal to conform with CS standards. If you want to insult each other, please take it to the Pit.” Instead, you came down with Official Mod warnings, legal language, and in my case specific remarks as to who seemed mainly at fault. I felt your tone was needlessly harsh, to my taste, and a more neutral, official tone (in an Official Mod warning) would have gotten better, faster, clearer results. Your “Are we clear?” and your countdown seemed condescending and overtly rude. If that’s your chosen tone for slapping people down, giving snarkmeisters a taste of their own medicine, with a little Mod-muscle flexing thrown in, so be it. In my case, it just fanned what was a fairly low flame, and seemed a little too much ammo for so small a target.
The other issue I’d like to raise here is the misconception that all CS topics concern the arts and are therefore matters of taste, with no possible correct answers. If that were so then obviously no corrections of any kind could ever be offered. But of course certain things (dates, actor’s names, etc) are both artistic and factual. If we were discussing, let’s say, shade trees, and I were to opine that my two favorite shade trees are the tulip and the rose, I’d expect that an expert in botany might come along and tell me that
-
tulips and roses are not trees
-
not do they provide much shade
and
- I have a lot of botanic learning to do.
Now, number 3) might seem (does seem) excessively personal and insulting to some (not to me). To me, it is a substitute for not providing a lot of detail in items 1) and 2)–the expert botanist might be reluctant to provide a course, in the process of that hijack, in elementary botany, for my benefit, since I had impudently and ignorantly provided misinformation in the guise of discoursing on types of shade trees.
I strongly suspect that most people on the Straight Dope, and virtually all posters in this thread, think my analogy is faulty because Botany is a scientific field, in which facts abound, while Metrics is just b.s.ing, in which one point of view is precisely as valid as another. I will ask you to take my word that metrics, while far short of a science, is an extremely subtle yet precise art that requires serious intent study to become competent at and a lot of hard work to master.
I really don’t care to get into why I consider myself to be competent at the very least–it’s very easy to deride serious study and to claim falsely that one has or has not studied something seriously, since I can’t really provide evidence of my expertise and remain anonymous here. So I’m asking just to be indulged this far: there is expertise in metrics, and it is not just the ignorant spouting of random bullshit.
When I studied metrics, however, with a world-class acknowledged expert in poetics on the doctoral level, I did have the experience of making a load of ignorant mistakes at first. At the time, I had two master’s degrees in Creative Writing (from institutions considered to be the very best in the U.S.) and had been scanning poems, in my fashion, for years–and I was routinely messing up the scansion of poems for the first few weeks of this doctoral-level course. It took me well over a month of serious effort to apply the complex and sometimes confusing (but ultimately rational) standards of scansion. By the end of the course, I got the highest grade this professor had ever given in “Metrics and Scansion.”
I say this not to brag, but just to argue that it is a genuine field of study, of considerable difficulty, that seems to be regarded very lightly around here, for reasons that I understand but don’t endorse. And, because of this perception, I think Biffy’s colossal ignorance is underestimated. I suspect many of the Dopers above read his post, in which he displayed an astonishing lack of fundamental understanding, not only of metrics but the entire function of rhythm in verse, and thought “Makes sense to me.” So when I got snippy with him (which, as I say, may well have deserved some form of Mod intervention) I think many posters in this thread then thought “Whoa, dude, that’s totally out of line–you have your opinion, he has his, live and let live.” But if you apply my tulips-and-roses analogy above, you may not have had that reaction at all.
One of the things I like best about the SD is the standard of, at the least, identifying ignorance as ignorance. Some areas of inquiry may be so small, like metrics, so that there is not even, on the Dope, the perception that the field is even a legitimate one in which standards and methodologies apply. So the overwhelming support Dex and most of you have lent to Biffy’s position is understandable, but ultimately is enabling of ignorance, and that’s disappointing to me. If I catch a little heat because of my indelicacy in broaching this subject, and upholding a higher standard of learning that you do, that’s a price I’m willing to pay. I wish I knew a way to be more conciliatory and still make this point, because I don’t wish to further irritate folks around here, but ultimately truth is truth, and not subject finally to a majority vote, even of Straight Dopers and Straight Dope Mods.
Etc. It wasn’t an Official Mod Warning, it was a ‘knock it off’. And no matter how well you can defend yourself, if twenty people think you were being an asshole, you were probably being an asshole.
Seems to me that what people are saying is that 1 and 2 are appropriate responses (with some elaboration), but 3 is not, even from a botanist.
PRR. Bubby. Didn’t your own irony meters respond to this sentence, even a little, while you were writing it? I mean, it broke mine. So surely, unless yours are already broken, you got some little bit of reading here, right? I mean, can you seriously tell me that you wrote that sentence without some little flicker of realization of why “condescending and overtly rude” is not considered conducive to universal understanding and productive communication in Cafe Society?
This is a nearly monstrous strawman that is unworthy of you. Do you really think it will be productive to this discussion to derail it into a totally unnecessary tangent pointing out that no one has suggested that such things as dates and botany are not the subject of CS’s subjectivity rules? You absolutely know, beyond any question in my mind, that no one thinks that such factual issues are not open to polite discussion and correction. And then you go so far as to try to sneak onto your list of obvious undeniables, like an Alaskan senator with a bridge to sell, your item number three. Let’s see: your item number one is an emotionally neutral objective fact; item two is an emotionally neutral objective fact; item three is a patronizing, dismissive, self-aggrandizing, discussion-stopping bit of presumption that, in real life (try it!), would probably get you smacked. Items one and two address the subject of the discussion; item three addresses the person discussing it.
This is called ad hominem, and it’s considered by many to betray a weakness of position in the person who employs it in discussion. You should know this stuff, PRR. Aren’t you some kind of teacher or something? Maybe it was daycare worker. You have a lot to learn about mature discourse.
Dude, it just doesn’t work like that around here. It doesn’t work like that anywhere, but especially around here. First of all, if you’re going to argue from authority–which, of course, is another way to admit the weakness of your position–you don’t get to do so without evidence of that authority. You don’t get to just go, “Trust me, I’m an expert.” Around here that’s called the “My cite is my post” fallacy, and is rightly derided as a kind of self-godwinization.
Any position you take around here, unless it’s purely subjective, is subject to evidentiary support. You just want the lazy way out. You don’t want to lay out that part of your education that makes you an “expert”–and I’m not talking about identity-compromising credentials [ :rolleyes: ], I’m talking about the content of that education: the relevant facts on the subject under discussion–you just want to *say *you’re an expert and leave it at that. That makes you look like a pompous blowhard who can’t back up his assertions. Cuz if you’re NOT backing up your assertions, what makes you think that claiming you don’t have to because you’re an expert in the field is gonna cut it around here? You get to go “because I said so” to your students. We are NOT your students. You have no special standing around here, without earning it HERE, as say for example Colibri has when discussing ornithology. Colibri never blustered into a GQ discussion about birds trying to trump other positions by saying “trust me, I’m an expert.” He simply earned the nearly universal respect of other Dopers by always *politely *and informatively sharing his knowledge about birds.
This place is not set up for you to apply for Special Expert Status so you can laze your way through a discussion without having to explain and defend your position, or educate another person–rather than just tell them that they need education–about a specific point on which you might have expertise. You have to earn that kind of respect around here. And you know how you don’t earn it? By being pompous and condescending. Trust me on this. There are a few subjects that I’m extremely expert on, and in real life I’m accustomed to being deferred to when these subjects arise. Unfortunately, with my occasional inability to refrain from exhibiting my frustration in this venue, I have largely sabotaged any respect I might have earned as someone who is knowledgeable in these areas.
As you are doing, PRR. Do you really think that continuing to argue for your experthood is the way to go about earning our respect? Have you really sat back and thought about this situation?
Dude, are you retarded? or just overwhelmed by this martyr complex you’ve sprouted? No one has lent any support to Biffy’s position! You took yourself out of the conversation by claiming unsupported “expert” status and trying to enforce that by belittling Biffy! *YOU *made this a discussion of tone and personalities, and derailed it from a discussion about “positions.” We have lent support to Biffy AS A HUMAN BEING worthy of respect in this discussion. You have been smacked down not for being WRONG, but for being a jerk! *YOU *are the one who continues to insist that focusing on personalities should be a perfectly acceptable approach in CS discussions, but now *YOU *are the one who is strapping yourself to a cross when it backfires in your face! *SURELY *you can see, now, why diverting the discussion from the subject at hand to the personalities involved is universally considered a debate no-no? Surely you can see where such diversions lead?
You need to ponder on the humility of anonymity, PRR. If you come to this discussion stripped of your identity, you come as an equal to all participants. We interact in a medium of pure voice.
It’s a challenge, but as writer you should also see it as an opportunity. If you write for an audience, this place gives you the opportunity to discover, with frightening immediacy, how your voice is received by your audience. By blindering yourself to all but what you can TEACH, you close yourself off to all that you can LEARN.
One of the reasons may be that, despite intense cavilling about your mistreatment, you’ve still not fought any ignorance on the subject. If you devoted a tenth of your posting time to a lucid and civil explanation of the issues at hand, you’d do far more to increase the respect folks have for you than all the time you spent feeling bad about your harsh treatment by the mods.
Why not explain the issues instead of shitting on people?
Daniel
Because to do so in that thread would have been to hijack the thread.
I offered to discuss it in another thread (and have done so, quite without condescension, in the past, if you’ll care to to do a quick search) but I felt (perfectly accurately) that Biffy was not interested in furthering his understanding. I felt this way because he had been, IMO, extremely obnoxious in asserting his totally screwed up notions about metrics in his little hijack, and I had experience enough in the aforementioned threads to know what a frustrating dead-end it was to move people off their junior-high school misunderstandings on that subject. So I risked a Mod smackdown, and got one.
And lissener I was and am completely aware of the ironies of noting Dex’s rudeness in chastising my rude post. If I was rude to Biffy, as it seems pretty universally agreed I was, do you really think (as I asked Dex) that rudeness is the most effective tool in addressing rudeness? All I’ve been asking for is for Mods to display more exemplary tones than the ones they are chastising, or at the very least to try that approach the first time they raise the subject. As a writer of kindly and helpful posts, as well as snide and snippy ones, I assure you that people will respond better to the former than the latter. The fact that I wasn’t interested in eliciting **Biffy’**s good will doesn’t mean that I think being nice to everyone on the Straight Dope is a waste of time, and I maintain that a more affable tone on **Dex’**s part probably would have discouraged this whole thread in the first place. But the irony of a rude poster complaining about the rudeness of his smackdown is not, I asure you, lost on me.
I’m not particularly interested in being perceived as an expert of metrics–I probably know more about metrics than other Dopers, but I hardly expect you to accept that just because I say so. My point in discussing the level of training I’ve had was to say that I was a doofus with several advanced degrees before beginning my serious metrical analysis, and I understand intimately how people’s perceptions of their expertise can be way out of proportion to their knowledge because mine certainly was. It can be very humbling to accept that you know very little about a subject, and it took some difficulty for me to get around the idea that I had some serious work to do if I wanted to get good at this stuff. That’s all. If you want to discuss it, I’ll be glad to explain what I know, and to admit what I don’t know. But if you want to to tell me that a tulip is a kind of tree, I think I’ll just snark at you a bit. If you object to that, or if a Mod decides to give me a double-dose of snarkiness as some kind of perverse lesson in why I shouldn’t be snarky, well, in the words of the great metricist Richard Pryor, that’s an ass-whupping I’m just going to have to take.
Also, if I would have thought about it a little further–and this may be the thrust of many of the comments addressed to me above–I probably just should have pitted Biffy in the first place and not violated Cafe Society standards.
This is a crack in the foundation of your overall wrongness, so it’s encouraging. The continuing denseness of your previous post throws it into perspective, so it’s not THAT encouraging. Let’s hope this post is your Helen Keller “Water!” moment, and not a dead-end anomaly.
As opposed to what you actually did, which was to “merely” shit in it. :rolleyes:
prr, I read Greek and Latin poetry, and thus fully appreciate the importance of metrics and scansion. You were still a dick. I suspect it wouldn’t have been against the rules to pit him, but it would still be idiotic.
The proper response to well-meant ignorance is information, not attitude. I see no evidence whatsoever that Biffy was originally being superior, or defensive, or snotty; it’s a sad fact that not everyone knows everything. Chill out.
I totally misread your helpful tone, Giraffe. And as loath as I am by now to proclaim my expertise in anything around here, I’m a pretty experienced reader of subtle texts, so if I was confusing Dex’s “official Mod order to cease and desist” with an “official Mod warning,” then it’s probably a fairly minute distinction. But thanks for performing that check for my benefit. One of the more troubling parts of this Pit thread, for me, is the high regard I hold for you and for Dexas genuinely goodhearted and concerned Mods whom I hate to be exchanging sharp words with.
Helen’s Eidolon–Could you do me a favor? Could you go back and read **Biffy’**s post that I was responding to, and tell me if you honestly don’t think he was asserting a misplaced confidence in how to scan that line of Keats? It’s not a matter of “knowing everything.” It’s just highly offensive (to me) to pretend to have a much greater knowledge than you actually have, and that’s what I was responding to there. I read his tone as confident and assertive, his tone implying “THIS is of course the way the line is scanned.” I doubt that you would presume that far, expert in scansion though you may well be, in asserting your reading, and I have rarely found a poem without some point at which I would gladly concede that my own reading is questionable or worthy of discussing. I was just trying to say, “Hold on, junior–have a little humility in guessing at things requiring some training and understanding, would you please?” and probably that, too, would have been read asunacceptabley condescending.
I’m no expert. In fact, I know just enough to know how much I don’t know. And yes, Biffy was overly confident, despite being wrong. And this just shows how much he didn’t know. It didn’t show, IMHO, anything that would justify being rude to him. Being firm in your interpretation, sure. But not rude or condescending.
After all this time you still miss the point. The point was that if you disagreed with how Biffy read the line it was incumbant upon you to say what your reading is. Not just saying “junior” was wrong. Maybe a different thread to discuss the reason’s why you disagreed. But just saying someone is wrong is not good enough, especially with extra snark.
Well, as I just said, it probably would have been smarter to reserve my snarkiness for a Pit thread in the first place.
I think the main point you and I still disagree about is whether Biffy’s post was “well-meant ignorance.” I read it as aggressive, obnoxious, self-centered naked wallowing in arrogant ignorance, not well intended at all, but rather trying to impose on you and me and the several thousands of other Dopers who know far more about metrics than Biffy does (and seemingly ever will). If you read him as “well-meant,” then I was way out of line.
THAT DOESN’T EVEN FRICKIN MATTER! PRR, Newt, hon, would you please whack yourself upside the head? I can’t reach. Why will you refuse to understand that YOU diverted the thread from being about *POETRY *to being about BIFFY.
END OF FRICKIN STORY. Rationalize to yourself all you want about how he “made” you do it, how he annoyed you beyond your ability to control yourself, but nobody’s buyin it! You’re a grownup! You made a choice! You chose wrong!
GET THE FUCK! OVER! IT! It was “offensive” to YOU that someone spoke with “misplaced confidence”? And that gives you carte blanche to smack them down, because of YOUR low threshold for being offended? You need to admit to yourself that you weren’t “correcting” him, you were PUNISHING him for daring to make you feel offended. You made it about you and him, as personalities. You hijacked the thread from being about metrics, to being about your ludicrous sensitivities to “misplaced confidence.”
Grow the fuck up!
Ya THINK?
You call people you discuss poetry with in real life “junior”? Man, I hope some day you do. Report back when you’re eating solid foods again.