[lit-ideas] Re: Ishiguro's Implicature
- From: david ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2017 18:28:38 -0700
On Oct 6, 2017, at 5:29 PM, (Redacted sender "jlsperanza" for DMARC)
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Nobel Ishiguro got a BA from Kent in philosophy. Research to be done: who
taught him what!
I’m wondering if the weather taught him that putting a campus on a bare hilltop
is a bad idea. Romans put forts on hilltops for very good reasons. But we are
not Romans, historically speaking. We have nor tortoises nor hippocausts, nor
centipedes, nor bundles. We do not remember the Roman law, “he who baths first
baths fast.” I, however, remember visiting the University of Kent on a day the
Scots would call dreich and thinking I really didn’t want to spend three years
or the duration in that location. Maybe when the sun came out students
frolicked and learned stuff. It’s been known.
There is something Griceian about Ishiguro: especially when the NYT reports
him as having developed from a song-writer into a ‘fiction-writer’. The
reason Ishiguro gives is Griceian in nature:
He never succeeded in the music business, but writing songs helped shape the
idiosyncratic, elliptical prose style that made him one of the most acclaimed
and influential British writers of his generation. “That was all very good
preparation for the kind of fiction I went on to write,” Mr. Ishiguro said in
a 2015 interview with The New York Times. “You have to leave a lot of meaning
underneath the surface.”
M.U.T.S. is a school of writing invented by a South African general, Jan
Christiaan Smuts OM, CH, ED, PC, KC, FRS, who noticed after writing the famous
Smuts Report that his name and the aspirations of the school he had in mind had
a good deal in common, monetarily speaking, so somewhat anachronistically and
in the nineteenth century manner, he named it after himself. There was
nervousness after the war, what with flappers flapping and so on, that "meaning
under the surface" might be taken to imply eroticism, so they dropped the “S."
Ishiguro (that’s Hidé) is a Japanese Oxonian analytic philosopher and
professor at Keio <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keio_University>, Tokyo.
I bet he knows nothing of Botulism, but if he did he could be the first
philosopher from Japan to win this prize:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Botul ;
<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Botul>
I’m tempted to include a reference to Botulism in my coming oeuvre, “Metaphor
and Elephants; Foregrounding Theoretical Bigness.”
TGIF.
David Ritchie,
opening a second beer in
Portland, Oregon
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