From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #174 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Tuesday, August 8 2000 Volume 02 : Number 174 Today's Subjects: ----------------- re: o/storr/jung [Kathleen Woodbury ] dharma-essay ["David S. Bratman" ] Re: comments8/2 ["David S. Bratman" ] Re: b/jungdream1 ["David S. Bratman" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2000 21:48:34 -0600 From: Kathleen Woodbury Subject: re: o/storr/jung On Sun, 6 Aug 2000 "Donald G. Keller" wrote: >I now have a copy of Jung's =Psychological Types=, one of his best-known >books (Vol. 6 of the =Collected Works=), where he explains his division of >human psychology, not only into introvert and extravert (terms he didn't >invent but popularized), but into thinking/feeling/sensation/intuition >subtypes. (He got to musing about this after his break with Freud, and how >the fact that Freud was an extravert and he was an introvert had a great >deal to do with their differences--in every sense of the latter word.) Is this where the Briggs-Myers (or Myers-Briggs?) stuff comes from? Not only do they do extrovert and introvert, but don't they also do thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition in their dividing people up into different groups? (The only part missing is new and status quo--however you want to put that.) Phaedre/Kathleen workshop@burgoyne.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 03:23:48 -0400 (EDT) From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: dharma-essay Don - I guess I had better say _something_ about the dharma essay now (I haven't read the other one yet), because pretty soon I'll be in Hawaii and not able to say anything for over a week. My first reaction was, "way too condensed." I missed the eager way in which you spin out elaborate chains of parallels, often on the same subjects, when posting here. Maybe this was editorially dictated, but it's still a problem. This is because I'm not sure your readers will follow you as you leap and bound your way to conclusions. I think you're usually right: but you haven't shown yourself to be right. I suggest that you go through the essay looking for every place where you use the words "clearly" or "certainly" and look to see if you can fill in a chain of reasoning somehow. For instance: > Certainly this is how Principal Snyder sees Buffy and her gang But the "this" to which you're referring is Puhvel's description of the defender/menace ambiguousness of the warrior. Snyder doesn't see Buffy as ambiguous, at least not in the episodes I've seen: he sees her as a menace alone. My guess it that by "this" you mean "this other side of Slayerness, the menace side", but if so that's not what you say. Nor do you quote anything demonstrating Snyder's attitude, which I expect you'd do if you were writing about this online. > Clearly Buffy is a kshatriya If she is any of the three functions, yes. But you've leapt over an intermediate step, which is to show that the three functions are an applicable analysis at all. If you wish not to try to demonstrate that here, but let the weight of the subsequent analysis carry this point, then I suggest a rewording. "If this analysis is applicable" or "If Buffy is any of these, then she's ..." or something. I'm afraid I do not follow all of the three functions discussion. Not to say you aren't right, but it's not clear. First, the striking thing of the Indra/Namuci legend as you describe it (we're at the end of Part 2 now) is how Indra evaded his pact: if there's any parallel to that in Buffy's killing of Angel, you don't discuss it. If the parallel is, as I suspect it is, that Indra, like Buffy, killed a friend, you need to rephrase the discussion of Indra to emphasize that. (Although Indra's "friendship" with Namuci, being a watchful peace, is totally unlike Buffy's with Angel, which is romantic love.) Going on to part 3, Buffy's first list of sins: > The 2nd sin in this case is the sexual one This gets confusing and unclear, since sex, like money, is a third function matter. The Buffy/Faith/Angel list of sins: > She betrays her former fellow warrior Buffy by switching bodies But again, this is much a third function sin as 2nd, because what she does with it, as you say, is seduce Riley. (You compare it to Indra's adultery: that was the 3rd function example in the very first list, the one of Indra's sins.) The point isn't that these 2nd function things are really 3rd, but that it's muddled and not clear. If they are really 2nd, you have to bring that out and banish the underbrush. One other tiny query: > Beowulf's second great deed was killing a dragon "Last" for "second", surely? 1. Grendel. 2. Mom. 3. Dragon. What works, then? Specific places where your capacity for penetrating insights shines out clear. The last paragraph of part 1. The parallel of Vritra and the Judge near the start of part 2. The list of Jenny, Kendra, and Teresa as 1st/2nd/3rd function victims of Angel in part 3, the one three-functions list that really comes through and convinces. If you write at all like I do, I'd suggest going through relevant things you've written here and on Genie and finding appropriate passages, cleaning up any tentative points and formalizing the phrasing slightly, and incorporate those into the essay. David ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 03:47:14 -0400 (EDT) From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: comments8/2 On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Donald G. Keller wrote: > David: I have to agree with Gayle that it's nearly impossible to get the > full emotional impact of "Becoming" if you haven't seen > "Surprise"/"Innocence." In fact, I'd argue that you can't really get the > full impact without the earlier Buffy/Angel scenes in the 2nd season > (scattered over of the first half of the season, in several cases the > only really good scenes in weak episodes); and in fact, it sure helps to > know the buildup from the first season (and not just the episode > "Angel") as well. Buffy & Angel is a full-blown romance with many emotioal > nuances that took them 34 episodes to tell, ending with "Becoming." (3rd > season is really all aftermath.) > > Which is like saying you can't get the full effect of "The Scouring of the > Shire" if you've only read =The Return of the King=. Of course you can't get the full emotional impact without knowing the whole thing! I would be sorry if I'd given the impression that I thought you could. But that wasn't the issue here: the issue was whether I could grasp enough of the salient points to be able to make a cogent criticism of aspects of "Becoming." In fact I revised and withdrew from some of my first-reaction criticisms after reading Gayle's comments on on watching "Becoming II" again more closely. But my remaining criticisms, like the silent vortex, do not appear - from anything anyone has said - to be defendable on the grounds of what happened in episodes I haven't seen. The equivalent of all this in Tolkien is whether a reader would be able to grasp the nature of and reason for Saruman's villainy in "Scouring," and the reasons the heroes distrust him immediately there, without having read the Council of Elrond and the end of Book 3 of LOTR. I think there's enough in "Scouring" to put this across. > I can understand that it's frustrating if you only have access to a few > pre-3rd season episodes, but =Buffy= really is (as I said differently in > one of my essays) more like an epic poem published in fascicles than like > a "tinkertoy" TV series. And I can't see that as a flaw. It's a flaw in three ways. 1) If taken as a whole, you have a 34-hour movie. The fact that (a few experimental works by the filmmaker equivalents of LaMonte Young aside) there are no actual 34-hour movies should give one pause before considering the show that way. 2) Although it's at a minimum on _Buffy_, there is still enough of the tinkertoy aspects of a series show - episode beginnings and endings, mostly - to cause cracks in the smooth flowing of the story. 3) _You_ may have all the episodes on tape, but until the complete VCR or DVD edition is released, what are the rest of us to do? If the makers intend the work to be seen as a whole, it's something close to criminal not to make the whole available to new viewers; only mildly excusable because it's still in progress. But in the meantime, the situation being as it is, I think it's incumbent to treat partial viewers with patience and fortitude, and not to look down on them as an inferior life form. Here's a thought. Once the show is completed and issued commercially, all 60 or 80 hours or whatever it turns out to be, how would you recommend that a new viewer watch it? All at once is physically impossible. Would you say one episode at a time, with gaps in between? That was how you originally saw it: it conveys suspense, and allows one to digest each episode before going on to the next? Or the way you'd read a novel? That is, as much as you want at one sitting and finishing it up in the course of a week or a month? Would watching, say, 3 episodes at once - remember, this is someone seeing them for the first time - give one surfeit? ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 03:48:28 -0400 (EDT) From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: b/jungdream1 I thought of the desert scene in "Restless" first, but that's been on my mind. Everything you say is certainly good and relevant, as usual. ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #174 *****************************