Doctor Scratch wrote:Daniel Peterson wrote:A few years ago, he was even lamenting my conventional, conformist, unadventurous, hyper-orthodox, middle-brow, vanilla sensibilities in literature, art, music, and film -- despite the fact that he actually knows little or nothing about what those tastes are.
Oh, I think I know a *little* about them, especially thanks to a pleasant PM that I just got from an "informant." It really seems that you're trying to branch out, Dr. Peterson. Good for you.
LOL. Yup. When I was sixteen, I was introduced to Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Edvard Munch, and Oskar Kokoschka, which certainly represented a "branching out" from my tastes as a fifteen-year-old, but I didn't yet know Diego Rivera. I only became a Rivera fan when I was seventeen. And I don't think that I really got into Gustav Klimt until my early twenties. And so on and so forth.
This is such nonsense, Scratch.
I suppose it might be amusing for me to learn from your "informant" what my tastes in literature, theater, music, and art are, but . . . really, Scratch. Are you so silly, so gullible, so hungry for gossip about me that you can't see that you're almost certainly being played for a fool?
Of
course "the information [you] got was stuff that Dr. P. himself advised [you] to look over at one point." It was publicly
available. Here, on this message board. Your "informant," who knows how voraciously hungry you are for material about me, and how uncritically you'll accept anything that you can use to demean me, saw this latest iteration of your genuinely ridiculous line of aesthetic criticism against me, and, knowing that you would be exceptionally receptive at the moment, used that publicly available material in order to formulate a plausible PM that you would swallow hook, line, and sinker. I'm confident that, having baited the hook so effectively, he then went on to give you other morsels that you gulped right down.
The fact is that, unless your "informant" is my wife or one of my sons (which I rather doubt), he is extremely unlikely to actually know much of anything about my tastes in literature, art, music, and drama. I listen to music at home. My wife and I haunt art galleries and museums, particularly when traveling -- but almost always by ourselves. We attend plays frequently, sometimes with others but oftentimes by ourselves. We read privately; there is no electronic news ticker at the front of my house announcing that "Peterson is currently reading Wilkie Collins/Heinrich Böll/Nikos Kazantzakis/Tayeb Salih/Shusako Endo."
It's easily noticed from things that I've published that I'm exceptionally fond of such writers as Shakespeare, Eliot, Dante, and Goethe, but there's no way on earth that you can deduce, on that basis alone, what the outer limits of my reading are.
Nor do you have any grounds for determining my favorite composers, operas, pieces of music, sixties bands, and the like.
You really are a piece of work.