I think the OP should stick War and Peace up his ass.
All this hostility towards the OP is frankly puzzling. I must say, it’s nice to see people who have never had even a single moment of pretentiousness in their entire lives; no, not even while a teenager.
The description of the show reminds me of all my nitpicks of The X-Files; the show that led to my becoming a member of The Nit-Pickers Guild.
Originally posted by Rilchiam
Damn, that was funny!
The Republic! Read The Republic! Its always worth a read and then you can stare at walls and think really hard. Its fun! And never boring! (Try Allen Bloom’s translation)
much better than crappy tv.
This is another one for the list of Rhum Runner’s least favorite arguments. The old, “if you aren’t perfect, you can’t criticize” line. Often seen in the slightly less ridiculous, but no more compelling, guise of, “You can’t criticize this behavior if you have ever done this behavior before.” Of course we were all pretentious teenagers who thought we were smarter than everyone else. You know what? the older people called us on it when we did it, and now it is our job to call the OP on it when he does it.
The OP had something to say about the TV show, fine and dandy. Then he goes and ruins a perfectly decent rant by throwing in all these references to War and Peace, and how he likes to show off at school by carrying a big book around. We have all read big books before, and frankly it isn’t that impressive. If he had said he was reading On Liberty or The Republic as was mentioned, I would have been far more impressed. But that is all an aside, the point is, pretentious references to ‘big’ novel equals good rant that gets turned to sludge.
On second thought, if we are going for the heavy and mystifying genre, let me suggest Perry’s Handbook for Chemical Engineering.
Of course, the kids who read that doorstop for fun get me to recoil in horror and then hand them a copy of The Republic.
But another good one, that I found much more fun than War and Peace was At Dawn We Slept, which is a big tome of Pearl Harbor. I hate history and I liked this thing.
Hmm…nice IMHO thread when I wake up, What are your favorite Big Pretentious Heavy Books to Carry Around?
As for the OP, crappy tv is eternal, read the good stuff. But, if you are not one of the unfortunate academics who refuses to mature at all, you will find more enjoyment from reading for yourself than reading to impress others. Some of the Big Impressive Classics[sup]TM[/sup] are total crap. Some are truly great works. And there are many, many great works that are not impressive at all. (One of my favorite stories to think about is quite obscure and I have to beat people into reading it so I can talk with them about it. [sub]Kipling’s “Without Benefit of Clergy”. My e-mail is in my profile.[/sub])
What you learn is that until you are into thinking/studying/philosophy for its own sake, you’re really going to miss the point of a lot of the good stuff you can get your hands on now.
This carries the caveat that all you are online is what you can present in text, and the OPer has presented himself as a sanctimonious prick. He may or may not actually have a deep understanding and love of fine literature, he just didn’t show himself to have one at all.
And beyond all of that, this is excusable with a warning if the OPer is 13 or so. If he’s 21, its less excusable because he’s one of those pests in my philosophy classes who can’t put together an original thought, but can use every word in the thesaurus. If he’s older than about 28-30, I’d call it a lost cause and mourn the loss of a reasonably good mind to the rot of hubris.
Hmmm… lemme try this.
OP, how dare you read War and Peace! You should be watching Jackass with the rest of us while drinking whisky like Belushi in Animal House! How dare you get a kick out of someone’s reaction to your relative open-mindedness! Non-conformist dirty hippie jerk!
[/heavy sarcasm]
Let him read the book and be proud for Cecil’s sake!
I think you’ve missed the point. As Medea’s Child says, we only know about the OP through his text. If he throws in several irrelevant references about a particular book (which especially renowned for being difficult) with the express intention of looking down his nose at other students, that comes across as pretentiousness. Add to that the apparent attitude proclaiming ‘I only watched this because I was bored - honest - and I’m above it all really’ and it’s not difficult to see why we have the impression we have!