quote:Originally posted by Launchywiggin: Pel's probably the most knowledgeable and well-spoken high school student I've ever seen
I would just like to point out that using large words and dramatic gestures doesn't make you knowledgeable or well-spoken-- just as playing really fast in odd time signatures or scale modes doesn't make you a great musician
Communicating with and touching the hearts of your audience is the essence of musicianship, and of being well-spoken.
Failure to understand the distinction is Pel's entire problem. He is to clear discourse as Yngwie Malmsteen is to music: busy, pompous, and trying too hard to show everyone how "good" he is. This has been already been said to him many times over... so I guess I'm not sure why I'm saying it again, except that I thought it needed to be said again.
Posts: 3846 | Registered: Apr 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
Pel, have you ever seen Good Will Hunting? Do you remember the scene where Robin Williams is sitting in the park talking to Matt Damon when he says the following?
quote:So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that.
If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.
You're a tough kid. And I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, "once more unto the breach dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help.
I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms "visiting hours" don't apply to you. You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. And look at you... I don't see an intelligent, confident man... I see a cocky, scared...kid. But you're a genius Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine.
That's how I see you, Pel. You're smart, very smart, but you haven't a clue about life. Of course, that's not really your fault, you just haven't experienced it yet. The problem, however, is that you know how intelligent you are, you just can't see beyond that, and you end up missing out on all the experience, knowledge, and wisdom that others can offer to you. You think you've got everyone and everything figured out becuase you've read a book or two, but you have yet to truly understand people, especially the ones that you socialize and converse with. You have so much that you can offer to the Hatrack community if only you would spend less time trying to sound as smart as possible and more time trying to actually interact, listen, and understand people.
Posts: 1256 | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Launchywiggin: Pel's probably the most knowledgeable and well-spoken high school student I've ever seen
I would just like to point out that using large words and dramatic gestures doesn't make you knowledgeable or well-spoken-- just as playing really fast in odd time signatures or scale modes doesn't make you a great musician
Communicating with and touching the hearts of your audience is the essence of musicianship, and of being well-spoken.
Failure to understand the distinction is Pel's entire problem. He is to clear discourse as Yngwie Malmsteen is to music: busy, pompous, and trying too hard to show everyone how "good" he is. This has been already been said to him many times over... so I guess I'm not sure why I'm saying it again, except that I thought it needed to be said again.
Really enjoyed that offering Jim-Me. Its been a guiding principle in my music writing. I try hard to be real in my writing, but I would never pretend to be complex so that people would be impressed.
Its the same way I feel about art, I felt upset that I could not spend an hour in the Vatican Museum looking at Rafael's paintings. There was just so much realism and honesty to take in. I glance at much of what is considered art and I am bored within seconds.
John Schmidt is nice but kinda boring, I just rediscovered Rachmaniniov, what a great composer.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Launchywiggin: Pel's probably the most knowledgeable and well-spoken high school student I've ever seen
I would just like to point out that using large words and dramatic gestures doesn't make you knowledgeable or well-spoken
In my first attempt to argue back with someone...
Pel never JUST uses big words--he almost always appeals to authoritative/academic sources. The fact that he knows Shakespeare, Socrates, and Latin etc. means that he is knowledgeable in a lot of subjects. The fact that he can articulate his thoughts better than most of my fellow college graduates makes him well-spoken in my mind.
Posts: 1314 | Registered: Jan 2006
| IP: Logged |
quote: Pel never JUST uses big words--he almost always appeals to authoritative/academic sources. The fact that he knows Shakespeare, Socrates, and Latin etc. means that he is knowledgeable in a lot of subjects. The fact that he can articulate his thoughts better than most of my fellow college graduates makes him well-spoken in my mind.
Using Kant's model of intellectual analyzation as forwarded in his seminal work, A critique of Pure Reason, I will have to disagree. Like Kafka expresses through the schziophrenic fixation of Gregor on his lateness for work, I feel like this approach neglects a rounded, balanced appropriation of the facts for a more rounded and -- dare I say? -- plomp address.
Similar to Liebtniz's brilliant theory of Calculus that is nonetheless flawed for its use of infinitesimals, this theory is flawed. But concomittant to this flaw is a grain of beautiful exegesis that can be expounded and expanded to encompass the weltanschauung at hand. יִרְאַת , רֵאשִׁית דָּעַת; חָכְמָה וּמוּסָר, אֱוִילִים בָּזוּ.
Finally, let me add that as the 20s star Clara Bow states (famously) Being a sex symbol is hard to do when you are tired and depressed. Let me add that James Montgomery Flagg would not agree with the Platonic modeling, and that the Rambam, an 11th century philosopher, might have to chip in with a guide for the perplexed, such as one who has read thus far.
Furtheremore: We have to accept that this synectic approach is acceptable. I disagree with this. In the famous analyization of Clara Bow, the biographer David Stenn discusses his neurotic background. Applying the same supercillious standards of his to combat prolixity, we must accept that Rembrandnts famous painting of the naked Bath Sheba is, in fact, a sexual degeneration of the form to a primogenial form, embraccing sid pro quo forms.
Vah! Denuone Latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur.
Let me finish by saying that I am an ***** and that we'll miss you, Pelegius. May your heart be sheilded in peace.
I think the difference is Pel is trying to put down a thing. It's hard business and most people balk at the task and talk about satsumas instead.
I think he is off, and that it would be a good idea for him to read more carefully, listen more and write less, but he is swinging for the fences. I appreciate the effort because it's possible that through his diligence, if he goes about it carefully, he will hit upon an idea that travels, and we'll live in a better world for it.
A few years ago, I put my money on Kasie H as a plucky young high school jr. whom I'd gladly end up working for in twenty years. Now she seems like a safe bet.
Now I'm throwing my weight behind Pel. In twenty years, as long as he keeps reading and doesn't start drinking, I'll be glad to know him. So Pel, when you are a big deal whatever, remember to invite me to the after-party.
posted
For those agreeing that Pel is well-spoken...well, he can use words with many syllables. That isn't really the same as being well-spoken. Most of his sentences are clunky, and as others have mentioned, he doesn't have a good concept of how to appeal to his audience.
posted
I lurk at ornery on occasion, so I bring you Pelegius's farewell post from that forum.
quote:[partial quote, last paragraph only] It is with a great sense of failure that I write these words, being unable to hold an unpopular position is a sign of weakness, is it not? But I am weak and weary beyond my sixteen years, knowing that my giants, who were not windmills, still stand because I could amass no force against them. And all my speeches were but whispers to the wind. I have not the strength to speak of semantics, feeling much as Tennyson's Ulysses although I cannot say that I leave any Telemachus behind with my scepter and my isle, nor that my strength at any time was great enough to move Earth and Heaven.
Apparently, solipsistic bombast just won't fly there either.
Good luck to you Pelegius, whether you come back to Hatrack or not. Remember what Anatole France said: "I didn't begin to learn anything until after I had finished my studies." Robert Browning, who died on this day, said much the same:“Live and learn, Not first learn and then live.” There's more to life than books and academics, and internet fora. Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
This thread is giving me an Old Person Moment. I remember back when I was growing up, we had to talk to real people, face to face. We had to get out of the house and do things. We couldn't spend all our time on this Internet thing. I think we were better people for it, low these 30ish years ago. Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Pelegius: for I am not the stuff martyrs are made of.
You are not the stuff of which martyrs are made. You seem to have dangled your participle. Or preposition. Or whatever. This is the sort of thing up with which we Hatrackers should not put (to paraphrase Churchill. Or Churchhill. Or whatever).
Posts: 2926 | Registered: Sep 2005
| IP: Logged |
Martyrs are made by necessity - no one knows until they are in that situation if they are willing to die/live for their religion/cause/family. When there is no one holding a gun to your head, so to speak, trying to be a martyr is pretentious and self-aggrandizing.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote:Pel never JUST uses big words--he almost always appeals to authoritative/academic sources. The fact that he knows Shakespeare, Socrates, and Latin etc. means that he is knowledgeable in a lot of subjects. The fact that he can articulate his thoughts better than most of my fellow college graduates makes him well-spoken in my mind.
He's read Shakespeare, as well as many of the other classical thinkers. That is not the same as understanding them. He has habitually showed such poor comprehension of what the people he quotes and paraphrases were actually saying that I can't imagine anyone thinking he's at all knowledgable about them.
As for well-spoken, given that's he almost never typed a sentence whose meaning was clear on the first pass, I'd have to respectfully disagree with you there, as well.
The fact that he seems to have fooled several people into thinking that, though, should be immensely satisfying to him.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Pel references other people's thought, often incorrectly or in inappropriate contexts, but I don't know that I've ever seen him articulate his own thoughts other that acting as if the things he says are obviously, unimpeachably true. It's one of the things I've been pushing him to do since he started posting here and something that I think would help him out immensely.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
While Phanto makes the point well, but indirectly, let me make it explicitly by a passage from Orthodoxy which, not by coincidence, was a part of my first post ever to Pelegius:
quote:It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard.
posted
I think it's awesome that Pel keeps on trying to say something. Yes, he's young, but that will change. I think if he keeps on writing, keeps on engaging with people, he'll be a much better person for it. Certainly much better than most of his peers who don't even try.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
CT, yeah, I just can't resist bringing him into things... a failing of mine
Storm, I am not sure that I consider what I have seen Pelegius do to be "trying" (well, it's trying all right, but not in the sense we meant it ). I freely admit that I haven't even read all his posts, much less know anything about the real person, but from what I have seen, he has no interest in improving. He was greeted with much good advice and many good faith attempts to help him communicate and he pointedly ignored them. I specifically remember one thread where he clearly and obviously ignored everyone who was trying to reach out an olive branch and instead focused on the very few, but nonetheless present, hecklers. That is not effort, in my book, and I have made it a personal mission to not feel obliged to those who will not lift a finger to help themselves.
Edit to add: It speaks volumes that his stated goal is to be a martyr. As Katharina accurately pointed out, that is bad. A martyr is trying to accomplish something else and dies in the process. If your goal is the martyrdom itself, then you are not a martyr but, in fact, the very opposite-- a suicide.
Posts: 3846 | Registered: Apr 2004
| IP: Logged |
We have several more knowledgeable and better-spoken high school students on Hatrack, completely ignoring those you may know IRL.
They're just not as in-your-face about it. And many you might not even know are high school students.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Kasie and Hobbes blew Pel out of the water. It wasn't obvious because they were confident enough to converse with adults on an adult level instead of jumping up and down like a toddler saying "Mommy, watch!"
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
I was just tired of some people ganging up on him. Maybe he isn't the "most" knowledgeable or well-spoken hs student, but when I was in high school, I wouldn't have been able to even have a conversation about half of the things Pel can talk about--and he's what, 16?
Sure--he's mellodramatic and he hasn't grasped the importance of clarity in his writing, but how is that different from most high school students? We're all expecting him to be a mature adult before it's physically or mentally possible. It's like our strategy has been to SMASH HIM DOWN AND TEACH HIM A LESSON.
I see a frustrated kid that's going through a VERY tough time dealing with reality--and instead of support, he's getting opposition from a community he DOES care about.
Posts: 1314 | Registered: Jan 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
You know, I see Launchy's point. Pelegius might have benefited more from being ignored than from being flamed.
Yes, he was invasive in his comments, and insulting, but we could have modeled for him a better kind of discourse.
Posts: 1877 | Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Launchy, his writing style, while problematic, isn't the main problem, in my opinion. I think people might be more inclined to cut Pel some slack about his style of discourse if he didn't have a history of being very rude and dismissive of other people's opinions. I don't think he SHOULD get support when he's that rude; I don't think kids should get a bye (by?) on politeness just because they're young, or having a tough time dealing with reality.
I don't it's so much that people's strategy has been "smash him down and teach him a lesson," as it is that people don't respond well to be treated rudely, regardless of the age of the person doing the treating.
Posts: 4077 | Registered: Jun 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote:I see a frustrated kid that's going through a VERY tough time dealing with reality--and instead of support, he's getting opposition from a community he DOES care about.
I've seen no indication that he cares in the slightest about this community. In fact, I've repeatedly seen evidence that he views us as a large sociology experiment, or a captive audience for his soliloquies, or a mirror.
Every other tactic described has been tried, a lot, by a lot of people. And yes, they all would have been a lot better than this. Too bad they didn't penetrate the fog surrounding the poor boy's head even a micrometer.
I think it's far more damaging to him as a person to feed his ego even more by telling him how well-spoken he is, and how mean everyone here has been to him than to tell him the truth.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged |
We have several more knowledgeable and better-spoken high school students on Hatrack, completely ignoring those you may know IRL.
I'm talking about high school students in general. I think the majority of high school hatrackers are WAY above the norm, and I still stand by my assertion that Pel is intelligent, knowledgeable, and more well-spoken than the majority of high school students.
I would still prefer his convoluted writing to the grade-school level papers I've peer-reviewed in my English classes in college (they're really that awful).
I do think Pel needed some kind of negative reaction to many of the things he's said. I know that a lot of people have been nothing but respectful and positive in their criticism.
I guess it's just common that people usually RESPOND to posts because they disagree with one part of a post, and it's like all the rest of it just gets ignored in the discussion. I feel like that happened a whole lot with Pel.
Posts: 1314 | Registered: Jan 2006
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by katharina: Kasie and Hobbes blew Pel out of the water. It wasn't obvious because they were confident enough to converse with adults on an adult level instead of jumping up and down like a toddler saying "Mommy, watch!"
Wasn't Teshi still in high school when she first started?
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
it may be nit-picky, but it also bugs me that he continued to lie/mislead about the details of his age throughout his stay here...
Back when I first saw Pel posting he was claiming to be 17, which then got backed off to "17 in a month or two" which now apparently is backed off to a straight 16.
I know it's a small detail, and he never hid the fact that he was in highschool, but when you flat-out lie about something like that it just adds to the frustration, along with everything else that has been mentioned.
Posts: 1038 | Registered: Feb 2006
| IP: Logged |
quote: Storm, I am not sure that I consider what I have seen Pelegius do to be "trying" (well, it's trying all right, but not in the sense we meant it [Wink] ). I freely admit that I haven't even read all his posts, much less know anything about the real person, but from what I have seen, he has no interest in improving. He was greeted with much good advice and many good faith attempts to help him communicate and he pointedly ignored them. I specifically remember one thread where he clearly and obviously ignored everyone who was trying to reach out an olive branch and instead focused on the very few, but nonetheless present, hecklers. That is not effort, in my book, and I have made it a personal mission to not feel obliged to those who will not lift a finger to help themselves.
I think Pel was unreasonably treated badly by the vast majority of the people here.
I think few of Pel's posts were rude or deserved the treatment that he got.
I think that's all I'm going to say on the subject. Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
Noemon, a lot of people were in high school when they started here. Myself included! (And right now I'm applying to graduate school. How time flies!) Mr. Funny is still in high school, last I checked.
Pelegius, I wish you luck. When I was younger, I thought I'd possibly be a martyr of sorts someday. I figured I'd burn myself out finding a cure for all the diseases out there. Then I realized that I didn't want to neglect other aspects of being human, like friendship and family. Service to humankind was and is a nice ideal, but I don't wish to neglect my own humanity in the process. Maybe you're destined to be a martyr. But maybe your calling is to be an ordinary human being. And that requires strength, too, to give up the idea of being a sacrificial god and realize that you're just like everyone else.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Launchywiggin: I still stand by my assertion that Pel is intelligent, knowledgeable, and more well-spoken than the majority of high school students.
And if you had said that, I might have agreed. But that's not what you said.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Shigosei: Noemon, a lot of people were in high school when they started here. Myself included!
You know, I should have known that but I didn't. You've just had such an adult voice here from day one that I never stopped to think about it.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
). I freely admit that I haven't even read all his posts, much less know anything about the real person, but from what I have seen, he has no interest in improving. He was greeted with much good advice and many good faith attempts to help him communicate and he pointedly ignored them. I specifically remember one thread where he clearly and obviously ignored everyone who was trying to reach out an olive branch and instead focused on the very few, but nonetheless present, hecklers. That is not effort, in my book, and I have made it a personal mission to not feel obliged to those who will not lift a finger to help themselves.
