/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>19456176
>>19456333
Wrong!! Lambdadelta belongs to neither of you, but if you work hard and intelligently and acknowledge the whole of your actions—their ripples and your responsibility—without appeasing the collective thought, you might one day belong to her.

>>19453789
You're correct regarding utility. Languages should be made, structurally, easier than harder. This is why I dislike languages like French that are gorged on conjugation and fickle rules. Learning those rules is not a matter of mastery or ability, but rote memorization, in the same way you would praise a game that requires creative problem solving versus encyclopedic knowledge. There's nothing impressive about it.

And no, verbose prose can very well be ostentatious. Nabokov did this often, but it's not a vice. Those with mastery ought to express confidence. It's much more charismatic. I'd want a drawing genius to extemporize or show off. Here's how it is: if you have confidence in your ability and it's not justified, you'll be laughed at in your arrogance, and if you have confidence in your ability and it's justified, you'll be venerated and inspirational. What Nabokov does is inspirational, showing us the secret creative reaches of our language as a calculated spectacle. Every unit, in the prose's melody (along the syntactic, poetic, and thematic planes) and harmony (unit to phrase to whole) at every scale is deliberate and interweaved seamlessly, so that their connections have no singular vector to them. It's truly miraculous and I'm smitten by it.

It's not anti-intellectual if you recognize the merit of great prose like you would Bach's compositions. They're the same thing.