Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Sun, 6 Sep 1992 04:59:42 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      Initiation hazing?

What's this, Agnes Kruchio <kruchio@EPAS.UTORONTO.CA> indulging in idle
speculation about what's well known, affeecting mere guesswork, you understand,
hanging out by the water cooler with Lenny and the new guy, Renato Barahona?

>I think DAF has written a couple of books - in dribs and drabs -

[Might have got something published, even, if someone as was true in the Good
old days could look at the stuff and smell Career Development. Trouble with
that today, any gainfully employed sociologist doesn't need me and giving me
any help means hours of talking to what amounts to a beggar for conversation.
Just making the best of a Bad Situation, nothing in life but Drugs and Televis-
ion, this is the Television. You don't want me scaring women, Agnes.]

>on this list even since I have been here and I am relative
>newcomer. The longer messages were 100s of lines long, provocative,

Come off it, Agnes, between 115 and 160 is a long one. You are talking about
the Old Days, one was over 500 lines, but that was before you were born. The
more "provocative" stuff is long gone, no dirty politics, no kinky fantasies,
almost respectable. Stuff as many jokes into it I can, sure, got to keep myself
awake. Three of the four, maybe all four, known readers are Gone. Haines Brown,
now there was a writer of LONG postings, I always wondered *how* he did it, do
not have strength in my body to write LONG ones like that, that LONG they were/

>all of them; in fact someone at one point )who knows how
>seriously) even proposed a list of DAF's writings. There
>was some bemused or serious? interest, but there was mo followup as

[Agnes, your nose is growing very long about here. Somebody, whose name you
know very well, who told me you said, well, whom do the call letters which
were part of where the fake announcement came from, AECOM.YU.EDU, remind you
of, then there's the superannuated adolescentoid humor which I am relieved to
say he's finally outgrowing but elsewhere doing some very serious philosophical
writing I am far too stupid and illiterate and ill-educated to understand. And
we have the posting from Jay Cocks at ULKYVM telling anybody who could not look
it up in the usual file, BITNET LINKS X, that "SUNYSB is not a valid BITNET
node." For this school the only valid BITNET nodes are SBCCVM, SBBIOVM, and
SBCCMAIL. This place is the first. More practically, not even an old junkie,
which is what everyone knows is what I am, can get a doctor to write a "script"
for that much Drugs. Not to mention moving my body I need it for. For that kind
of work I would only take Money!]

>I think he has a lot to offer, and I am glad he is
>cutting down on the length - a) he might get more readers this way and
>b) and we can finally figure out what it is!

[Agnes, this will not wash, you know I did a lot of public relations work on
you trying to get you to communicate about what I was writing which you could
offer advice about. But I found out what it was was, you were <eek> shocked
<eek>, a morally depraved menace, which is a defensible posiiton, so I am not
about to complain. For your benefit, even, I left announcements I would answer
questions from any source, one satisfied customer in the free marketplace of
ideas, where ideas gotta be sold to become ideas at all, better than
uncomprehending multitudes who got me on the kill file. But I do not care, Dope
and television, what else is there.]

**** Now, members of the toiling masses in television land, I ask you, did
anybody, anytime, ever complain of how long Haines Brown's postings were? No.
That was the trouble, people were apparently *not* getting to the end with the
possible exception of me, understand it or not, and Don Mabry. Who would jump
up down in Mississippi and say, "We thank Haines Brown for his thoughtful...."

**** So what I was trying to invent was Contextualized Pornography. Get it
Meaningfully Different, no matter how, for whom, whichever way, from the
RANGE OF VARIABILITY within which text was required to meaningfully different
from other NORMAL text, then people would read it like it was a dirty book
straight through to the end, and feel ashamed of themselves! Yes, they did.
Got chills and goosebumps and maybe even guilt, and exploded with righteous
wrath they needed PROTECTION from this kinda smut. Without dirty words it was,
even. Oh, well, the human mind is a screwball thing. A terrible thing to
waste. But messy for everyone if it does get used, so we take 90% of everybody
and say, We don't pay you to think, and they know thay cannot do it.]

Sincerely,
Daniel A. Foss
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