Pinko Wallace Stevens

used to love Proust but living la vie Belacqua/helped me understand I'm probably more of a Kafka

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@JosephZander @cheer_wine The only reason the USSR didn't do crewed missions to the moon is because when the US did it they shifted focus to other things which no one had done yet. They certainly had the capacity.

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@JosephZander @cheer_wine (deleted because I was wrong; we did make it to venus non-accidentally)

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@cheer_wine it would be like if the hare sprinted to the halfway point, dawdled for a while until briefly overtaken by the tortoise, and then sprinted to the end of the course, at which point the judges declared that the "official" finish line was actually halfway plus one step

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@cheer_wine generally a finish line is something determined beforehand by general agreement; in this case the race was "won" on the basis of arbitrarily picking a mile marker in the middle of the course because it was the only one your preferred winner happened to pass first.

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@buildhomez @LinkofSunshine The way you can *make* this true is if you make everyone the same height and then also make everyone start from the same baseline of training/experience, at which point yeah sure you probably end up with a very different group of elite players

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@buildhomez @LinkofSunshine I think this depends quite a bit on playstyle actually. Players who are comparatively skilled for someone so tall are also going to be skilled relative to the general population, purely because as professionals they've had so much more practice playing basketball.

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@Jeffreyhbaird @JoyceCarolOates Musical key is about the relative frequency of different notes across the duration of a piece, so you literally cannot write a piece that changes key every note, in the same way you couldn't write a book that changes sentence length every word.

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@buildhomez @LinkofSunshine I also think basketball players would probably be moderately better than average at any task that involves throwing a round object at a precise target (though nowhere near as much better than average as they are at basketball) because that's something they practice a lot.

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@buildhomez @LinkofSunshine Well that's obviously not true; if it were than every basketball player of a given height would be no better or worse at basketball than any other player of the same height.

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@buildhomez @LinkofSunshine The thing is they are, in fact, 6'9, and as it turns out being skilled for a 6'9 guy (or a 6'4 guy, for that matter) is a much bigger advantage than being skilled for a 5'10 guy. This is one of those "basic physical requirements" for elite play which every sport has.

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@buildhomez @LinkofSunshine Sure, and cut off their arms or blind them or give them all osteoporosis and none of them are. Sports played at the highest level have basic physical requirements that can't be overcome with skill alone; but that doesn't make the players who meet those requirements unskilled.

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@buildhomez @LinkofSunshine there are like 50 guys taller than him right now

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@michal_patryk @raghavv_01 TIL losing the first set and being on serve in the second counts as "winning"

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@RobertHarrisonv @coltraneist @newphilologyX Yes in that they both studied him as literature; no in that Aristotle used an Aristotelian lens while Bloom used a Romantic-Gnostic-Kabbalistic-Freudian lens. The overall study of literature is broad enough to include both of these approaches, neither of which exhausts it.

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@RobertHarrisonv @coltraneist @newphilologyX I think literature studies implies the study of literature, such that any instance of people studying literature is prima facie an instance of literature studies.

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@stogachess @lionel_trolling The thing is "being a Republican in the MAGA era" is as big a character defect as any he's shown.

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@RobertHarrisonv @coltraneist @newphilologyX That's not the question at hand though: what is your definition of literature such that, say, Sophocles definitively doesn't count as literature?

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@RobertHarrisonv @coltraneist @newphilologyX To do that, it's not enough to just say things were different. You need to specify the particular differences that you think are fundamentally incompatible with our concept of literature.

[Pinko Wallace Stevens @PinkoStevens]

@RobertHarrisonv @coltraneist @newphilologyX You want to make a stronger claim, under which Homer and the Attic dramatists definitively did not and could not function as literature for the Greeks in any capacity, such that Greek writing about them could not ever be literary criticism.