HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Date: 13 Aug 92 17:44:16 GMT
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

In article <9208121749.AA04844@cfdev1.shearson.com> mtaranto@shearson.com (Mark Taranto) writes:
>
>jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>
>> jmann@vineland.pubs.stratus.com writes:
>
>>> Finally, a good English department provides a forum for discussion.
>
>> What does this have to do with the canon?
>
>Jeff must have missed the start of this discussion.  The original
>question dealt not with the literary canon, but with academic acceptance
>of books.  The comment about the English department was not off the point.

I understood that English depts were relevant.  But they would
provide a forum for discussion regardless of what the canon was.

Still, perhaps I was just confused.
From: proberts@informix.com (Paul Roberts)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Ayn Rand
Date: 13 Aug 92 22:46:11 GMT
Article-I.D.: informix.1992Aug13.224611.5204
Distribution: na
Organization: Informix Software, Inc.

In article <1992Aug10.184333.16927@Cadence.COM> vince@cadence.com (Vince Gibboni) writes:
>(Ron Nadel (x2025)) writes:
>> (Paul Roberts) writes...
>>>  (Keith Robert Gretzky) writes:
>>>>                     Does anyone out there
>>>>                     have an opinion on 
>>>>                     Ayn Rand?
>>> 
>>>       Yes. She's a lousy writer and a worse philosopher.
>>> 
>>>>                         --Gretzky--
>>
>> I am in complete agreement with Gretzky.
>>
>> Her novels remind me of the point Woody Allen makes 
>> with a great punch 
>> line from Annie Hall where he describes two older ladies eating at a 
>> restaurant; one says, "Gee, the food here is lousy!" and the other 
>> says "Yeah, and the portions are so small."  If you imagine their 
>> conversation ending with the punchline "Yeah, and the portions are 
>> too big" you have Ayn Rand in a nutshell (for once).
>>
>
>    Two points:
>
>        1) Ayn Rand was a very nice person who wrote very good books,
>           was very kind to cats, and once - I have it on good authority -
>           actually rescued piglet from a Very Bad Storm.
>
>        2) You are, in fact, _not_ in agreement with Gretzky; you are in
>           agreement with someone else entirely.
>
>
>
>--
>                                                         vince@gda.cadence.com
> The one indispensable answer to an environment bristling people and things
> one thought were bad was to go on finding out new ways in which one could
> think they were bad.  - Kingsley Amis

Now how do you know that Gretzky and I are not one and the same person?

Paul
From: irwinke@CS.ORST.EDU (Keith Irwin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Asimov and the decay of SF
Date: 13 Aug 92 05:01:07 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Oregon State University, Computer Science Dept
Originator: irwinke@storm.CS.ORST.EDU

jmann@vineland.pubs.stratus.com (Jim Mann) writes:

> But much of the best SF does do well with characters.  Silverberg,
> Le Guin, Bishop, Kim Stanley Robinson, Dick, and so forth
> all have produced novels with very strong characters.  In some cases,
> SF novels are focused almost entirely on character: 
> Silverberg's Dying Inside and Le Guin's The Dispossessed come to
> mind.

If we take SF as a genre in which excellence is measured by how well an
external (ie, non-psychological) alternate reality is presented, do you
think a case could be made that a character based novel will do this better
than a flat character novel?  Would it be useful to say that only through a
presentation of a character's internal reality can the external one really
take on life, at least for us readers?

--Keith
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: tmaddox@netcom.com (Tom Maddox)
Subject: Re: Liberals, Little Girls, and Boolean Logic
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 92 06:42:40 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 

In article <1992Aug16.135756.14792@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@husc9.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:
>>>Whether he chooses pen or pistol, keyboard or cutlass, Mr Cramer has
>>>all the chances of a fart against a hurricane.

>TM:
>>	A very bad smell against a bunch of hot air blowing very strongly--
>>what does it matter who triumphs?

>How characteristic of Mr Maddox' bloated, dyspeptic, cheesy public
>persona to conflate a malodorous byproduct of bodily decomposition
>with an irresistible force of nature!

	There was no conflation--as the word "against" would show a competent
reader in the language.  As to "an irresistible force of nature"--Zeleny's
megalomania puffs and struts again but is still simply hot air, not a tropical
storm.
-- 
				Tom Maddox
		    	    tmaddox@netcom.com
		   "I swear I never heard the first shot"
                Wm. Gibson, "Agrippa:  a book of the dead"
From: Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca (Crawford Kilian)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: The Literary Canon
Date: 14 Aug 92 04:37:28 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada

I've been reading Terrance's comments with a mixture of fascination, enjoyment
and despair. Like him, I grew up in a minority within a minority--the American
Communist families who moved to Mexico in the early 50s to evade blacklisting
(not very successfully, I might add)--and one result of that experience was
what I eventually came to call "disculturation": a sense of not belonging to
any particular culture, least of all the one that was paying FBI agents to
harass my dad and granddad and make sure they didn't work anywhere for very
long.

I enjoy reading and re-reading the books by people in that exile culture:
Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr., Albert Maltz--because I remember them from my
youth. I know their children, and we shared an experience that changed us all.
But we shared it in sharply different ways, so different that we can now
scarcely agree on any aspect of it except perhaps a few dates.

So I wonder how black readers and writers can be so uniform in *their*
experience and attitude that only other black writers can mean much to them. I
think of a black colleague at my college who grew up in a small Nova Scotia
town; a fifth-generation black British Columbian forestry instructor; a Haitian
cab driver in Montreal; an Ethiopian cab driver in Winnipeg; a host of others
who all happen to be genetically coded for melanin production, but who have
very little else in common.

And I wonder what kind of vicarious pride a black reader is supposed to get
from reading a black writer. Granted, personally knowing a writer when you're a
kid (as I knew many) creates a strong likelihood of pursuing writing as a
career. But--as a Canadian writer observed recently--the normal experience of a
young white male to reading Shakespeare is not to feel pride as a white male,
but utter despair at the very thought of trying to emulate such a talent.

I also worry about any attitude that says your race and sex are the most
important aspects of your personality--the very things you can't control--and
that your personal achievements are important only insofar as they make your
racial or sexual colleagues Look Good. Shelby Steele, in the July Harper's,
makes a very strong case against this kind of "New Sovereignty." It seems to me
to entrench the very racism and sexism it purports to oppose.

If I am mistaken, I'm sure someone will come to my rescue.
Xref: sparky rec.arts.books:14661 rec.humor:26130 alt.folklore.urban:21454 rec.arts.sf.misc:2588
From: tsuanian@cc.curtin.edu.au
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,rec.humor,alt.folklore.urban,rec.arts.sf.misc
Subject: Re: Agnostics and Athiests
Date: 13 Aug 92 06:40:35 GMT
Organization: Curtin University of Technology

In article <1992Aug11.093645.1663@news.columbia.edu>, lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner) writes:
> In article <1992Aug10.133736.1851@cas.org> sdr57@cas.org () writes:
> 
>>to remain hidden - I've argued this on another thread. However,
>>the faith required need not be blind - the continued existence
>>of major religions in nations with good educational systems
>>demonstrates that it is possible to reconcile the existence
>>of a deity with modern scientific knowledge.
> 
> Do you seriously believe that the rank and file of major religions are both
> truly religious and also qualified to get enough of this sort of philosophical
> argument you are carrying on that causes them to deal with modern scientific
> knowledge?  Most people don't know how to screw in a light bulb; science
> influences them nada.  Organized religion is predicated on that status quo
> to a large extent.
> 
> cjl
Let's get back to basics here.  Why.  Why did this omnipotent
being create humans (be it in his own image or in his own image
thru a slightly defective mirror 8-)).  I mean whats His purpose?
Why would any being create something or someone so that He can
judge them.  Would you go out and but components, build 400
thingwatsists and say lets test them and the ones that do good
I'll put them into this box I call Heaven and the ones that
dont I'll stick into this box I call Hell.  Now remember
you are omnipotent you have no use for these things you build.

So why??????????

Ian
-- 
 Internet: TSUANIAN@cc.curtin.edu.au
 Bitnet: TSUANIAN%cc.curtin.edu.au@cunyvm.bitnet
 UUCP  : uunet!munnari.oz!cc.curtin.edu.au!TSUANIAN
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: tmaddox@netcom.com (Tom Maddox)
Subject: Re: Life's too short. Was: 1930s Science Fiction
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 92 06:49:47 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 

In article <1992Aug16.171250.26404@ms.uky.edu> fehr@ms.uky.edu (Jeff Davis) writes:
>In article <0-3myxd.tmaddox@netcom.com> tmaddox@netcom.com (Tom Maddox) writes:
>>>Tom Maddox writes:
>>>
>>>		I don't have the foggiest notion of Pournelle 
>>>		and Niven's ideology, but found the one book 
>>>		of theirs which I read impossibly boring, and 
>>>		it soured me on all of sci-fi. 
>>>
>>	I'm stunned by this. I ate a bad vegetable once so ate no more. I 
>>	stubbed my toe on a street in San Francisco so will never return. 
>>	Etc. To convict all of sf of Niven and Pournelle's lapses in 
>>	_Footfall_ is remarkably whimsical.  

>My rocket-booster quick judgment of sci-fi was precipitated by the Pournelle-
>Niven book but that elephantine goop was not the sole cause: 

	I see.  I mistakenly assumed that you meant what you said.

>It has always
>seemed to me that sci-fi is a genre with a single book: _Frankenstein_.
>My other laser probes into the genre, prompted by friend's goading of
>"You gotta read this..." has usually come to the Dreaded End. The Cyberiad
>is the exception here . . .

	So now you are saying that you have read a *few* sf books, on the urging
of a single friend, and have concluded that _Frankenstein_ is the single sf 
book.  Somehow, this strikes me as intellectually even more bogus than the
first remark (which had the virtue of being unmistakably inane) as 
it adds a level of critical pretension that is utterly unjustified.

	Substitute "films" for "sci-fi books" and see how sound your position 
is.
-- 
				Tom Maddox
		    	    tmaddox@netcom.com
		   "I swear I never heard the first shot"
                Wm. Gibson, "Agrippa:  a book of the dead"
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: wismith@amelia.nas.nasa.gov (William R. Smith)
Subject: History of the O'Toole's
Organization: NAS, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 92 15:32:46 GMT


While reading "Flashman", the first in the Flashman series by George
MacDonald Fraser, last night I came across a reference that historians
of the O'Toole's may be interested in.

Harry Flashman is a officer in Queen Victoria's British Army.  He is
a self confessed liar, cheat, rake, drunkard, womanizer, bully and 
coward.  In this first part of his memoirs he is mistaken for a hero
in the War in Afganistan in 1841 and is being carried wounded back to
India for a hero's welcome.  In Flashy own words:

	From there it was the same all the way - at every town and
	camp there were garlands and congratulations and smiling 
	faces and cheering, until I could almost believe I _was_
	a hero.  The men gripped my hand, full of emotion, and the
	women kissed me and sniffled; colonels had my health drunk
	in their messes, Company men slapped me on the shoulder,
	an Irish subaltern and his young wife got me to stand godfather
	to their new son, who was launched into life with the appalling
	name of Flashman O'Toole ...




William Sburgfort Smith
Intel, SSD
From: kamorgan@athena.mit.edu (Keith Morgan)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Date: 16 Aug 92 22:15:48 GMT
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Food for thought:

The great sin ... is to assume that something that 
has been read once has been read forever. As a 
very simple example I mention Thackeray's _Vanity
Fair_. People are expected to read it during their
university years. But you are mistaken if you think
you read Thackeray's book then; you read a lesser
book of your own. It should be read again when you
are 36, which is the age of Thackeray when he 
wrote it. It should be read for a third time when
you are 56, 66, 76 in order to see how Thackeray's
irony stands up to your own experience of life. 
Perhaps you will not read every page in those later
years, but you really should take another look at a
great book, in order to find out how great it is, 
or how great it has remained, to you. You see,
Thackeray was an artist, and artists deserve this
kind of careful observation. We must not gobble
their work, like chocolates, or olives, or
anchovies, and think we know it forever. NOBODY
EVER READS THE SAME BOOK TWICE.

Robertson Davies, in _The Tanner Lectures on Human Values:
Volume 13, 1992, ed Grethe B. Peterson (University of Utah)


--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Keith Morgan		      | Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
kamorgan@athena.mit.edu       |                          H.L. Mencken
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: jzimm@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Joann Zimmerman)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Canon in an Altered Key
Date: 19 Aug 92 21:29:08 GMT
Article-I.D.: ut-emx.78032
Reply-To: jzimm@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Joann Zimmerman)
Organization: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin TX
Originator: jzimm@daisy.cc.utexas.edu

On the theory that anybody's canon is going to be at least as much
descriptive as prescriptive (whether or not that was the intent),
perhaps we ought to look at lists which *start out to be* descriptive.
One such is _The Harvard Guide to Influential Books_, in which 113
Harvard professors list books which have had some sort of major
influence on their thought or field of study.

In other words, here we have a list of books that come with the label
"useful to somebody" already attached. There is a fair diversity, both
in choice of faculty member (although I recall an emphasis on the
liberal arts) and in individual selections. Amazing how little overlap
there is; the Bible gets about 10 mentions, and no other book gets
that many. 

Much more interesting than the usual "canon" lists, and contains some
real fortune cookies. Some suggestions from there which I've picked up
on and either enjoyed or made use of include Barthes, Paul Ricoeur's
_Time and Narrative_, and Elizabeth Bowen's _The House in Paris_. 

I go digging through this gold mine about once a year; probably time
for another plunge beneath the surface.


-- 
"[Fiction's] function is not to detail the actual world, but to create
a parallel one. Image by image, phrase by phrase, through artifice and
evocation it must then make that world at once credible and meaningful."
-- Robert Stone               ...!cs.utexas.edu!ccwf.cc.utexas.edu!jzimm   
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: mtaranto@shearson.com (Mark Taranto)
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Organization: Yale CS Mail/News Gateway
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 17:49:12 GMT


jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

> jmann@vineland.pubs.stratus.com writes:

>> Finally, a good English department provides a forum for discussion.

> What does this have to do with the canon?

Jeff must have missed the start of this discussion.  The original
question dealt not with the literary canon, but with academic acceptance
of books.  The comment about the English department was not off the point.

Mark

Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon & Women
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 15:34:33 GMT

                              Thursday, the 20th of August, 1992

Francis Muir writes:
 The Frogs were a special case -- to some extent still are. Remember the
 revolutionary cry:

I think England was the special case.

            Mike Morris
          (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)


Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: francis@oas.stanford.edu (Francis Muir)
Subject: Re: MFK Fisher (Re: Bang, BANG, B-A-N-G!)
Organization: Stanford Exploration Project
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 00:55:32 GMT

Stephen P. Guthrie writes:

	Francis Muir writes:

		Forster's novels can be lined up by weight, with *The 
		Longest Journey* at one end -- the heavyweight -- and 
		*A Room With A View* at the other. TLJ is recognized 
		in England as the Masterpiece (but really quite dreadfully 
		boring), but ARWAV is the Jewel. HE falls flat somewhere 
		in between. 

	Where do you rate 'Passage to India'?

Ah. I feared someone would ask that. You know, I have not read *A Passage
To India* for many, many years, and I doubt that I ever shall again. I
found it profoundly uncomfortable reading. Perhaps it was because it was 
written not out of experience. So, where do you think it lies?

							Fido


Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: evanh@sco.COM (Evan Hunt)
Subject: Re: The Books I Just Bought [and checked out]
Organization: The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 21:21:35 GMT


sheila@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (sheila) writes:
 
>Another time I was at the Fine Arts library I checked out
>an album, AT THE DROP OF A HAT, Michael Flanders, Donald Swann.
>Unfortunately, I do not think this is available in any store, nor
>has it been re-released. I also listened, once, to FACADE by

Getting off the topic, but word is that the F&S albums are now
available on CD in England and there's also a video of them
performing.
 
>I did notice from the card catelogue that Michael Flanders
>has another album, AT THE DROP OF ANOTHER HAT, but it was in
>another library. I did not have a chance to go.

There is also "The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann", a collection of
their animal songs. Very charming for children, and some witty satire
for adults.

-- 
"I had generously shown on the stage my interior life as a raging beast, but
 my exterior life as a mediocre human being and dilettante of of normal int-
 elligence remained unchronicled...I *knew* that beneath my work's primeval,
 hysterical facade there was a calm little writer in an armchair just waiting
 to burst forth." -- Wally Shawn, on the writing of "My Dinner With Andre'"
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,rec.humor,talk.religion.misc,sci.skeptic
From: sbuckley@fraser.sfu.ca (Stephen Buckley)
Subject: Re: Agnostics and Athiests
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 18:25:44 GMT

Lawrence C. Foard writes:

>Stephen Buckley writes:

>>someone wrote:

>>>Oh really?  So creating something automatically gives one the right to
>>>do anything at all with the created!  Really, if we managed to generate
>>>life in the lab, would you then conclude we could do anything we wanrted
>>>with it?  Or would you say that we should treat it like any other living
>>>thing?
>>
>>  no that's not what i said.  god is justified in doing whatever he wants
>>with his creation.  if i write a poem, i can burn it, but if i could create
>>life, i could do whatever i want with it.  

>If you created an intellegent life form why do you think it has any
>fewer rights than other intellegent life? It won't be that long until
>we can create intellegence, that doesn't mean we have the right to
>enslave it.

>>but 2 things.  one is i don't
>>believe humans create life.  i believe god does.  human beings can have
>>sex but god creates the life.  :)  two is if you can prove to me that i
>>can create life, which entails proving god is not creating life [but
>>both of those are empirically unverifiable], then i would discuss your
>>hypothetical as reality--until then tho, it's just hypothetical. 

>Give it another 20 years or so.

  from my watching of the evolution of science, i think we are doing things
even now that sort of look like creating new life [in engineering new
stuff never before seen], and i expect that sort of thing will continue
for more than the next 20 years.  but i don't think in the next 20 years
we can prove god isn't the creator of life, and we are only participating
in a larger event of life occuring.  if it can be shown that no god exists
and we are the sole components involved in the generation of life, then
this hypothetical would be reasonable and worthy of realistic debate
with authentic, actual implications on life.

---                          
     Stephen Buckley        /    the meaning of life is the answer
     sbuckley@sfu.ca       /      to God's question in the Bible:
   TrueNorthStrong&Free   /        
      1-800-REALITY      /    "What are you going to do with my Son?"
From: heath@athena.cs.uga.edu (Terrance Heath)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Date: 12 Aug 92 17:16:26 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

In article <65746@hydra.gatech.EDU> barclay@RAIL9000.gatech.edu (Barclay Blanchard) writes:

>
>But there is a context for African American writers that goes back at least as
>far as 1899 (we studied Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces in a lit class last
>spring, about the blacks' struggle to become part of American society's power
>structure after the Civil War, written in the then accepted form of a 
>sentimental novel, and our teacher said that there are several other such works
>published and others still being found).

There is a context that goes even further back than that. Back to
1853, I believe, with the publication of William Wells Brown's
_Clotel_.  There is also _Our Nig_ which was published around the same
time, written by a free black woman (whose name escapes me at the
moment. I'll check my copy of the book).

-- 
"Black men loving black men is THE revolutionary act!"
			-Joseph Beam_
Terrance Heath 
heath@athena.cs.uga.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: mnemonic@eff.org (Mike Godwin)
Subject: Re: Whom Do the Intellectuals Serve?
Originator: mnemonic@eff.org
Organization: Electronic Frontier Foundation
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 12:23:08 GMT

In article <1992Aug10.002240.7261@u.washington.edu> twain@milton.u.washington.edu (Barbara Hlavin) writes:

>--Barbara (Babs/Baba/"Linda")  (This is how a really amazing number 
>of people remember my name, thinking of the actor Linda Lavin, and now 
>you know how to pronouce Hlavin) 

Damn! I was using "Rowan and Martin's Hlavin"!


--Mike



-- 
Mike Godwin,     |  "No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye."
mnemonic@eff.org | 
(617) 864-0665   |                --Elizabeth Bowen
EFF, Cambridge   |
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,soc.history