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Posted: 19-06-2006 19:19 Post subject: "New Lands"

I'm writing a book on Fort's philosophy, and would be interested in knowing what Forteans think about New Lands. It's often cited as the least successful and least popular of all his books; but I'd be interested to know what people think about it, and why...

Replies either to here or to i.j.kidd@durham.ac.uk.

Cheers

Fortist

Posted: 08-07-2006 00:36 Post subject:

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Posted: 08-07-2006 01:28 Post subject: Re: "New Lands"

Posted: 08-07-2006 14:56 Post subject:

You can read "New Land" in new lands; very apt!! There's some beautiful writing in "Lands", I think moreso than any of the other books.

Ian

Posted: 08-07-2006 22:11 Post subject:

Posted: 09-07-2006 08:49 Post subject:

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Posted: 09-07-2006 09:57 Post subject:

The general style of that book reminds me unpleasantly of the lengthy rambling diatribes that now infest the paranormal regions of the internet. If Fort were around today, I expect he'd have a website on Geocities with green text and lots of animated gifs.

Posted: 09-07-2006 17:10 Post subject:

Posted: 09-07-2006 17:35 Post subject:

NO. nO. IMO, Fort would have been very pedantic in his choice of exactly the right typeface.

Basically, his problem was that as an angry and holistic, Romantic, who perceived a World that was being an-atomized and reduced to discreet elements that could be further pulverized into easily explained 'Facts', he was trying to find the correct vocabulary to explain the trichotomy between, 'as is' Reality, Human Perception and the poverty of Human Communication of Ideas/Models/explanations.

He was one of the pioneers, like Jarry and Saussure (only working in the relative vacuum of a burgeoningly Empiricist USA), waiting for the likes of Wittgenstein, Popper, Barthes and Eco, to come along with the right technical lingo, that could reduce it all to something like a science.

The apparent incoherence of his prose style is only Poe-like and jazzy syncopation, waiting for the new lexiconographers to sketch out the maps of the New Lands that he helped discover.

Posted: 09-07-2006 17:57 Post subject:

Did I mention Fort's biting, ironic and absurdist sense of humour?

Posted: 09-07-2006 21:07 Post subject:

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Posted: 09-07-2006 21:44 Post subject:

I think we're overestimating Fort by classifying him as a philosopher. New Lands is simply a scattershot compendium of anomalous events interspersed with bizarre half-theories and rants about how the fact that scientists sometimes get things wrong or sometimes disagree with each other proves that scientific methodology is somehow intrinsically flawed.

As far as the "apparent incoherence" of Fort's writing style goes, I suppose it's marginally more readable than Beckjord, but only just.

Posted: 09-07-2006 21:53 Post subject:

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Posted: 09-07-2006 23:24 Post subject:

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Posted: 10-07-2006 01:29 Post subject:

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