The Locking of the Avril Thread

You've just re-stated the rockist position on authenticity, J0hn. You're saying 'You can do both,' but then you immediately declare a preference for 'roots' over 'becoming': in your model, presumably, one can stay in touch with one's roots without even thinking of 'becoming', but 'becoming' in its own is 'just slumming or playing let's pretend'.

I don't disagree with your definition of 'becoming' -- though the word is not well-picked, since it has traces of Heidegger's concept of authenticity, which leads us back to rockism and Platonism; I can only 'become' by stressing that I'm heading towards 'the real me'. What I disagree with is the word 'just', and the implication that 'just pretend' is not the whole core and essence of that part of the binary. There is nothing wrong with pretending to be someone you're not, and becoming that person! We all do it. Wire had 'Forty versions all dying to get the part'. This is what I mean when I talk about 'divergers'. Moving towards fiction and away from 'the authentic'. Perhaps we need a word which, unlike 'becoming', connotes pluralism, divergence, and the joys of the fictive. A word which had more Donald Barthelme than Tolstoy in it (he adds, just to keep The Music Mole happy).

'From the work of Freud, Heidegger and Lacan we can put together a definition of the Uncanny as that state of mind which we experience when the unbroken and coherent appearance of the so-called 'common-sense' world is broken or disrupted by evidence of its 'made' quality, as a constructed world. This gives rise to feelings of being disturbed, disgusted or horrified, or to great levels of anxiety or vertigo as certainties are threatened and the very structure of everyday and normal life seems to give way. A classic instance of this would be the mingled fascination and disgust many people feel when confronted with a transsexual; that is someone whose sense of themselves is at odds in a very deep way with their apparent [to others] gender identity... Of course, the threat of anyone who transgresses the boundaries which we regard as fundamental to the nature of the world and of the 'Real' is that by transgressing them they bring to our attention the possibility that these bounds may be arbitrary, or that we too may exist in some deep way on both sides of any given divide.'

This matches what I said upthread about 'natural law' and also about not believing that binaries contain inherent truths.

But I must now impose the following stricture: henceforth, all discussion must be in rhyming couplets.

These couplets don't rhyme, or scan
yet do I feel comfortable

that my man Momus
will be happy in their blankness.

Again, no preference! I say only
that your love of the binary opposition

puts to lie
your opposition thereto.

which I don't -
that wouldn't do or undo anything about

the problem of your establishing
this false binary.

"Roots" is your meme, not mine!
I think often when people complain about

"roots"-oriented things,
it's them that have

the roots sunk deep, and branches pointing
like fingers at others.)

I always call you
"conservative," and find it odd

that you position yourself
as champion of new things!

Your refusal to accept
that "I contain multitudes"

(as good old Uncle Walt
once put it)

is such quaint old-country hogwash
that it'd be charming

if you didn't slander Heidegger
in the bargain.

Nobody hatin'!
it's just ol' Momus, prevaricatin'.

That song by Wire is the same shit, man
As 'I contain multitudes' by Walt Whitman.

I'll never understand, as long as I live
Why you call anti-rockism 'conservative'.

and remarkably
American

if you don't mind
my saying so

and even
if you do.

someone must have fed young c-man a lot of toast
xpost

You say you weren't privileging 'roots' above 'becoming'
Then why did you say 'roots' without 'becoming' was 'just' something?

You wanted to have your cake and eat it too;
Eating without having wasn't good enough for you?

Then why did you say 'becoming' without 'roots' was 'just' something?

Did you steal that from KRS-ONE or something?

And as for NY, consider 3rd Bass
You know, the ones who wrote 'Gas Face'

the original thread's been lost long ago
and now we're comparing the relative slow -

ness of calum and some other young dudes
and doubting legality regardin' the nudes

I can't ascertain if devolving
is the name of the game or evolving

would indict more the truth
regarding digression into trolls' youth.

momus's a good sport, with patience to spare
too bad his opinions are founded on air.

'The Locking of the Avril Thread'...
One it it will be put to bed.