HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: kate@cactus.org (Katherine M. Catmull)
Subject: Re: Books in the time of love
Organization: Capital Area Central Texas UNIX Society, Austin, Tx
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1992 17:52:58 GMT


Mark Taranto writes:

	Perhaps Kate Catmull's literary/love connections are more 
	related to the stage.  She could tell us a story about how she 
	will always think about that leading man who fell for her when 
	she was in Streetcar, or Cat on A Hot Tin Roof, or one of those 
	other plays where the leading man always falls for the leading 
	woman.


That always happens in all plays, unless sexual prefrences don't
match up or one of the two players is unusually vile
and disgusting.

The only time I acted (haha) upon such an infatuation was when
I played the Princess in _Love's Labours Lost_ a few years ago.
You might say it was the play's fault, or the directors for giving
us the less interesting roles; because while Rosaline (?) and
Berowne are wrapping up their story downstage, I am being
comforted over the death of my father, privately, just the two
of us, during a couple of longish speeches . . . 

Anyway it was a dreadful mistake but didn't last long, thank goodness.
I did fall in love with my husband when he _directed_ me in Sexual
Perversity in Chicago--I don't know what that means and I don't
_want_ to know.

Oh, and when I played Annabella in 'Tis Pity She's A Whore,I 
afterwards dated the young man who played Giovanni, the brother
with whom she has an incestuous relationship. But--no kidding--
everywhere we went, waiters and theater ushers and other
strangers kept asking if we were brother and sister ("Well
you sure _look_ like brother and sister!"). It gave us the creeps,
and we drifted apart.

As for books: I have an old habit of asking people "What's the book
that got you through high school?"--you know, the book that
kept you going, made you strong; that you re-read when in need of bucking up,
perhaps even returned to in college like a teddy bear once in a
while, maybe even occasionally now . . .

The point is, I should have paid more attention to my beloveds' answers. One
guy urged me fervently to read Gravity's Rainbow; as that summer
and that relationship grew more bizarre and surreal, so did
the book, and after awhile I superstitiously put it away.

I lived with a guy for five years who told me fair & square
early on that his High School Book had been Been Down So Long
It Looks Like Up To Me. And I _read_ it, too, and liked it, not
realizing. . . .

My husband in our early days answered my question promptly
with "Soul on Ice," which alarmed me when I got to the bits about women.

But so far, so good. Our first anniversary's on Monday . . .

And I don't plan to be reading anything.

Kate


-- 
- - - - - - - -
kate@cactus.org
Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: reiher@pram.cs.ucla.edu (Peter Reiher)
Subject: An interesting passage from Trollope
Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 92 20:57:11 GMT


Here's a passage I came across recently in Anthony Trollope's "The
Warden".  It struck a certain familiar feel.  After brief reflection,
it reminded me quite a lot of the general fate of those who post
opinions to the net.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
[Mr. Harding, a clergyman, asks advise after being attacked in the Jupiter, 
Trollope's thin disguise for the London Times.]

"Write to the Jupiter", suggested the bishop.

"Yes," said the archdeacon, more wordly wise than his father, "yes, and
be smothered with ridicule; tossed over and over again with scorn; shaken
this way and that, as a rat in the mouth of a practised terrier.  You
will leave out some word or letter in your answer, and the ignorance of
the cathedral clergy will be harped upon; you will make some small
mistake, which will be a falsehood, or some admission, which will be
self-condemnation; you will find yourself to have been vulgar, ill-tempered,
irreverend, and illiterate, and the chances are ten to one, but that being
a clergyman, you will have been guilty of blasphemy!  A man may have the
best of causes, the best of talents, and the best of tempers; he may
write as well as Addison, or as strongly as Junius; but even with all this
he cannot successfully answer, when attacked by the Jupiter.  In such
matters, it is omnipotent."

				Anthony Trollope, "The Warden"
--
		Peter Reiher
		reiher@wells.cs.ucla.edu
From: cb@tamarack13.timbuk (Chris Brewster)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Edward Hamilton Bookseller
Date: 29 Sep 92 16:03:51 GMT
Distribution: rec.arts.books
Organization: pubs
In-reply-to: jciliber@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu's message of 29 Sep 92 12:22:11 GMT


My only reservation about Edward Hamilton Bookseller is that the catalog
takes *forever* to get through, since it has very little organization.
I was wading through one last night.  The first page listed hundreds of
books under the heading $1 BOOKS.  Later, a two-page spread lists even
more books (twice as many, actually :-) under the heading NEW ARRIVALS.
These are mighty long lists to have to look through with no categories.
Other pages do use categories, but I wish they were more fine-grained.
And why does the same category show up in four different places?  I
wonder if Hamilton could improve this aspect of the catalog.

Chris Brewster
cb@cray.com
From: matt@physics.berkeley.edu (Matt Austern)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Kafka's "Metamorphasis"
Date: 4 Oct 92 23:29:52
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (Theoretical Physics Group)
	<3OCT199215425081@portal.lasc.lockheed.com>
Reply-To: matt@physics.berkeley.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: physics.berkeley.edu
In-reply-to: le01167@portal.lasc.lockheed.com's message of Sat, 3 Oct 92 22:33:38 GMT

In article <3OCT199215425081@portal.lasc.lockheed.com> le01167@portal.lasc.lockheed.com (Ron Nadel) writes:

> In any case, what did you expect from a course on "psychology and
> literature"?  when you toss out the basis of the course
> (psychological analysis) in favor of the superficial part of the
> work, it should come as no surprise that you would run into
> problems!  Sounds like the professor did not give enough background
> and preparation that would aid in discovering the imago hinted at in
> the larva as it were.

Actually, if you ask me, the interpretation that was suggested in this
course was pretty superficial too.  Saying that _Metamorphasis_ is
just an entertaining story about a man turning into a bug misses the
point of the book, but then, saying that it is about a man who goes
mad and thinks he turns into a bug also misses the point.  (If you say
it's a story about alienation, I think you're getting closer.)

Whether or not the transformation is "real" is, in my opinion, not the
most important question in interpreting this story.

--
Matthew Austern                   Just keep yelling until you attract a
(510) 644-2618                    crowd, then a constituency, a movement, a
austern@lbl.bitnet                faction, an army!  If you don't have any
matt@physics.berkeley.edu         solutions, become a part of the problem!
From: adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Enforced Shakespeare?
Date: 6 Oct 1992 11:15:55 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: mizar.usc.edu

In article <BvpLGy.BEs@fulcrum.bt.co.uk> 
igb@fulcrum.bt.co.uk (Ian G Batten) writes:

| By contrast, consider Marlowe.  Much of his work dropped out of the
| repertoire in the eighteenth century and has only recently --- and
| rarely --- been performed.  There's no cult of personality, 

No Marlowe personality cult?  What planet do you live on?

| so the plays
| are revived essentially by quality.  I'll bid you two Edwards II for one
| Tamburlaine, etc. 

I haven't any idea what that second sentence means.  In any
case, you don't seem to be taking into account how few plays 
Marlowe managed to write before his encounter with Mr. Frasier.
Not that there isn't a Shakespeare industry, but I think you'd
be foolish to claim that Marlowe and Jonson are ignored.

| Ditto Jonson.  Shadwell, even.

Volpone isn't done often?  

Arne

Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy)
Subject: Re: She's baaaaack.....Camille Paglia
Reply-To: jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
	<1992Oct2.221548.5855@speedy.aero.org> <BvIpDt.992@news.cso.uiuc.edu>
	<1992Oct3.001516.8173@eff.org>
Date: 3 Oct 92 00:34:17

Speaking of attractiveness getting one jobs, someone remarked shortly
before most of the American railroads went bankrupt that almost all
railroad company presidents were over six feet tall.
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
From: kat@starbird.WPI.EDU (Flame's Passion)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: A query...
Date: 6 Oct 1992 19:14:00 GMT
Organization: Worcester Polytechnic Institute
NNTP-Posting-Host: starbird.wpi.edu


I'm looking for GOOD bookstores in several areas around my house...

Pittsburgh, PA (I missed the posting with the list...)
Cleveland, OH
Akron, OH

Anyone know of any in these areas?  I've heard of the the Bookworm in
Pittsburgh, but other than it being in Squirrel Hill, I don't know much
about it or how to get there.  Please E-mail me your suggestions.  I'm looking
for used, antique, or large selection (stuff you don't find eveywhere) kind of
bookstores.

Thanks in advance for the suggestions...

kat
 ***************************************************************************
      Christina Freeman                                 kat@wpi.wpi.edu
		"Was there not, from the first, more poison in
 			  your nature than in mine?" 
                           - _Rappaccini's Daughter_ 
			      Nathaniel Hawthorne
                  ********************************************
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: francis@oas.stanford.edu (Francis Muir)
Subject: The unpronounceable Paglio
Organization: Stanford Exploration Project
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 14:47:54 GMT

Is there any agreement on the "proper" pronunciation of Miss Paglio's
name? I suspect there are many who only see the name without any sound
atteched -- and perhaps that is how it should be. I know how the Brits
will say it. For them it must be

		PAG-lee-oh

In much the same, forceful way they pronouncd "macho" as

		MACK-ko

shark-like. But I fancy that New York has assimilated enough Italian
that, for example, Mark would pronounce Ms P:

		PAR-lee-er

with the same sound as found in 

	sir-AR-lee-oh and in-TAR-lee-oh.

For my self I'd like to take my cue from our now, helas, departed
Annette Bergmann, who had this wonderful imitation of Helena Bonham 
Carter playing Our Heroine in *A Room with a View* and pronouncing
the river that flows through Florence:

	the AAAAAAAAAAAAH-no

so 
for me
Ms P
is

	PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH-lia

								Fido
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: levine@symcom.math.uiuc.edu (Lenore Levine)
Subject: Re: She's baaaaack.....Camille Paglia
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1992 13:45:01 GMT

hhenderson@vax.clarku.edu writes:


>>Yes, she's back.  Camille Paglia, "the intellectual pin-up of the
>>'90, ... an academic rottweiler" or so says the back cover of _Sex,
>>Art, and American Culture_ (Vintage, 1992, 337 pages, $13.00).

>I love and adore Camille.  I disagree with most of what she says,
>including her excoriations of "feminists" (she *is* one, and should
>admit it) but I admire her intelligence and bravery, and the fact that
>she takes no crap from anyone.  Viva Paglia!

>>If you liked _Sexual Personae_ or just love wrestling with an intellectual
>>vampire bitch, do read this book.

>"Intellectual vampire bitch" is a rather sexist characterization.
>I mean, Norman Mailer is a pompous, dick-waving fathead, but I haven't
>heard anyone come right out and say it in those words.  Let's try not
>to slip into sexism, conscious or unconscious.  See Michiko Kakutani's
>review of Paglia's new book for some slyly offensive remarks -- the
>stress placed on Paglia's "arrogance" and "conceit", words describing
>the same qualities that, in a male author, would probably be called
>confidence and authority.

>Heather
>HHENDERSON@vax.clarku.edu

But if she's not a very nice lady, and Norman Mailer's not a very
nice man, wouldn't the endearments you describe be appropriate to
both?

There is a difference between a curmudgeon and a creep. And I
think Ms. Paglia crossed the line with some of her statements on
date rape. In particular, she was saying something to the effect that 
rape is not a big tragedy that will ruin a woman's life. 

May have been true, in many cases. But now there's the risk of AIDS...

On behalf of all us intellectual vampire bitches, I'd like to
complain about Ms. Paglia. She's ruining our good name. 
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: mtaranto@shearson.com (Mark Taranto)
Subject: Re: Literature students
Organization: Yale CS Mail/News Gateway
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 15:21:18 GMT


wwhitman@nevada.edu (MICHAEL WISE) writes:
 
> I did not like A Good Soldier, and have, perhaps wrongly, based my
> assessment of him on that. Any recommendations, Mark?
 
Reread it -- and this time take great pleasure in the slow way that
the truth comes out.  Perhaps my view is colored by the fact that I
was given the book by a woman who revealed her true nature as slowly
as Ford reveals the truth in the book.  Imagine yourself falling in
love with a woman-child who changes before your eyes from worldly
temptress to innocent and proper.  Imagine discovering that she
knows things you could not have imagined, and is blissfully ignorant
of things which you take as second nature.  Like Ford, she never lied,
but the Truth was revealed so slowly, and in such a manner that my
perceptions of her were constantly changing.  I learned that there
can be great pleasure in spending time with an unreliable narrator.
 
[More stuff about Hemingway deleted where we learn that he was a shit,
but has an easy style to dissect, so is a good person to teach to
students in a composition class.]
 
> I have the opposite sense of the students that the original poster has.
> To me, they come in with nothing: no formula, no original thoughts. I
> would be pleasantly surprised to see either a genuine reaction to a
> work, or even a standard interpretation.
 
As has come out -- Barclay's reaction is, in part, due to the fact that
it is a senior level class.  I suspect she would agree with you about
Freshman Composition.
 
> Welcome back, Mark.
 
Our connection to the net was down for a week.

> Have a nice weekend?
 
No.  But thanks for asking.
 
Mark
 
 
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: wismith@amelia.nas.nasa.gov (William R. Smith)
Subject: Re: WWII Novels?
Organization: NAS, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 92 17:52:45 GMT

John Robinson Dooley writes:
	
	Of course, Wouk also wrote "The Caine Mutiny", a WWII novel published 
	in the early '50's too.

Jan Yarnot writes:
	>
	If ever there was an author my mother (a Navy brat born, bred,
	married, and buried) would have enjoyed eviscerating and inventing
	whole new tortures for, it was Wouk, for this book.  "There NEVER
	was a mutiny on an American ship!" and don't you forget it.  



I have heard this statement before and don't believe it true.  But my
faulty memory could be playing tricks.  I believe the USS Constellation,
sister ship to the USS Constitution (Old Ironsides) was mutinied during
the War of 1812 off the coast of Chile.  The ship put into an off shore
island for repairs.  The crew was made very welcome by the native population
and when the officers ordered everyone back on board following the repairs
a group mutinied and refused to leave.

I think the officers and a partial crew sailed to a South American port
for further repairs.  I don't remember what happened to the mutineers.


Corrections will be, no doubt, forthcoming from our nautical and historical
experts.



William Sburgfort Smith
Intel, SSD
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Howards End
From: mnor1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Mark Hiro           Norman         )
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 22:01:30 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept. University of Auckland

In <1992Oct04.152647.42043@bas-a.bcc.ac.uk> zcakilh@ucl.ac.uk (Miss Chee Mei Yeoh) writes:

>mtaranto@shearson.com (Mark Taranto) writes :

>> It has been at least a week since I've raved about what a wonderful
>> book [Howards End] is.
> 
>Have you seen the Merchant-Ivory film adaptation? It's quite good.

Quite good??? It's incredible. I can't believe it didn't win at Cannes.

I just noticed in the Times that the 70mm print is screening in the Curzon
Mayfair... probably in full stereo as well. Too bad I'm thousands of miles
away, we only got to see it in glorious MonosounD here :-(


-- 
Mark Norman           | My university doesn't let me send email.
mnor1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz | "We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful..."
From: fuller@athena.cs.uga.edu (James P. H. Fuller)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: argument from buoyancy (was ...from gravity)
Date: 30 Sep 92 20:33:07 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

francis@oas.stanford.edu (Francis Muir) writes:

>The October '92 issue of *PUBLISH* magazine contains an interesting article 
>on the Voyager Company, publishers of the dozen or so Expanded Books for
>Apple's PowerBook portable computers. Briefly, they make several arguments
>of which the first is from gravity. It is a lot lighter to carry around than
>a dozen hard-copies. For me there would be more interest in their various
>search capabilities, but they have an automatic bookmark among other goodies.
>For example, you can elect to underline or make bold any text. The first
>book was *The Annotated Alice*, but I think they have some Joyce. 

     My copy of _TAA_ had an adventure, which consisted of being dropped in
the bathtub (yes, I was reading it there.)  It survived pretty well being
dried out in the sun and reflattened by several volumes of an encyclopedia
(those useful encyclopedias again....)  I wonder how a PowerBook would have
fared after a similar bath.

     I'm going to shout some now.  I LOVE computers!  I ADORE the litle
beasties.  I've been a computer hobbyist for fifteen years.  My present home
computer has sixteen megabytes of memory and a six hundred megabyte hard
disk.  It runs Unix.  Other computer jocks will please bear these credentials
in mind when I bellow

                 COMPUTERS ARE NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR BOOKS!

Computers are wonderful for storing and retrieving and searching text.  But
for READING text they stink.

                                                      -- jf
From: francis@oas.stanford.edu (Francis Muir)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Books in the time of Love
Date: 6 Oct 92 13:18:50 GMT
Article-I.D.: morrow.1992Oct6.131850.27669
Organization: Stanford Exploration Project

MICHAEL WISE writes:

	Why do rapid feminists who hate Hemingway and everything he 
	stands for take a graduate course devoted to him? Just want 
	to know.

The only rapid feminist I can recall was that Fury, the Red Queen,
who knew Freud well enough ("Off with their heads!" is an obvious
reference to mass Glans Penile amputation) but Hemingway? Perhaps 
Michael's patronymic has persuaded him of the truth of that final
couplet to the Gravian Hymn to Adversity:

	...where ignorance is bliss,...

and, there again, perhaps not.

						Fido
From: fuller@athena.cs.uga.edu (James P. H. Fuller)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: The Talk Of The Town
Date: 2 Oct 92 14:14:54 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

vks0@bunny.gte.com (Vijay Samalam) writes:

  [very clever Talk Of The Town parody, all too true...]


     Dwight Macdonald made the best case for The New Yorker many years
ago, but it wasn't quite good enough.  I read TNY when I was a (young)
teenager but, great Ghu, the ads, the vulgar, tacky ads.  In the end I
could no longer stand the feeling that I was keeping company with the
sort of people I would walk blocks out of my way to avoid in real life.
Now I wait for the cleverer cartoonists and John McPhee to publish
their stuff in book form.

     I know that magazines and newspapers pretend there is an unbridge-
able gulf between Upstairs and Downstairs (the editorial and the adver-
tising sides of the publication) but it's a self-delusion.  If you're
constantly surrounded by pretentious vulgarity you are yourself going to
become pretentious and vulgar at some point, and that's that.  Objection-
able changes have appeared in great numbers in TNY lately, or so I'm told,
but the seeds of its destruction were already sprouting happily during
William Shawn's tenure and were in fact planted by Ross.  There's a reason
why saints go to deserts, of one kind or another: no one has *ever*
found a way to be slick and fat and remain honest.

                                                   -- jf
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: mnemonic@eff.org (Mike Godwin)
Subject: Re: Enforced Shakespeare?
Originator: mnemonic@eff.org
Organization: Electronic Frontier Foundation
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 18:16:43 GMT

In article <BvpLGy.BEs@fulcrum.bt.co.uk> igb@fulcrum.bt.co.uk (Ian G Batten) writes:

>The example I was thinking
>of was ``Two Gentlemen of Verona''.  It's a weak play: I doubt anyone
>would seriously argue with that.

Well, it's weak Shakespeare, for sure. Whether it's a weak play is another
question. I think "Two Gentlemen" stands up rather well when compared to
other plays of the period from playwrights like Dekker and Beaumont and
Fletcher.

>Why is it now performed?  If it were
>not by Shakespeare, would anyone bother?

I think so. I've acted in two different productions of this play, about
eight years apart, and audiences generally loved it. The verse is not
grade-A Shakespeare, but it's clearly Shakespeare; it has his rhythms and
idiosyncratic but effective usage. The story is no sillier than that of "A
Comedy of Errors," which has always been a favorite.

>It wasn't performed in full
>much between the time of the author and about 1930.

"Not performed much," I hasten to point out, is not the same as "not
performed."



--Mike



-- 
Mike Godwin,    |"Liberty resides in the rights of that person
mnemonic@eff.org| whose views you find most odious."
(617) 864-0665  | 
EFF, Cambridge  |                           --John Stuart Mill
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: mnemonic@eff.org (Mike Godwin)
Subject: Re: Books in the time of school
Originator: mnemonic@eff.org
Organization: Electronic Frontier Foundation
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 20:42:23 GMT

In article <1992Oct6.183716.11937@cactus.org> kate@cactus.org (Katherine M. Catmull) writes:

>I feel that to complete the circle I must fess up and say
>that the book that got me through high school (and bits
>of college, and occasional tenuous moments e'en now) is
>Franny and Zooey, by the infamous JDS.

I've been trying to figure out which of the many books I read and reread
in high school gave me the kind of soul-sustaining lift that Kate talks
about here. The one that comes to mind is MORE THAN HUMAN, by Theodore
Sturgeon, although Ursula LeGuin's THE DISPOSSESSED is probably a
runner-up.


--Mike



-- 
Mike Godwin,    |"Liberty resides in the rights of that person
mnemonic@eff.org| whose views you find most odious."
(617) 864-0665  | 
EFF, Cambridge  |                           --John Stuart Mill