From: jessec@yang.earlham.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Re: What it is to be alive?
Date: 21 Nov 92 07:40:17 GMT
Organization: Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana

In article <1992Nov20.155233.12184@bsu-ucs>, 00vmszopa@leo.bsuvc.bsu.edu 
writes: 
> In article <1992Nov19.233408.20565@yang.earlham.edu>, 
>jessec@yang.earlham.edu writes: 
>> In article <1992Nov19.171801.8269@pbhyc.PacBell.COM>, 
>> djdaneh@pbhyc.PacBell.COM (Dan'l DanehyOakes) writes: 
>>> 
>>> 	way.  Each of us can understand _people_, and that is
>>> 	probably about as close as you can some.
>>> 			--Douglas R. Hofstadter
>>> 			  GODEL, ESCHER, BACH
>>> 
>>> Nuff said.
> 
> Don't know about THAT..
>>
>>[my "wow" comments deleted] 
>> 
>>    Anyway, I don't think that Hofstadter (from what he says here, anyway) 
>> is slamming the lid on the question for the writers of literature.  
>> Dennett, who also tears apart our concepts of consciousness, finding only 
>> "multiple drafts" beneath the illusory Jamesian "stream of consciousness", 
>> nevertheless is an admirer of writers like Joyce and Faulkner who 
>> attempted to plumb human phenomenology with more veracity.  As Hofstadter 
>> says, "it all depends on what you mean by 'understand.'" If you mean, can 
>> an author describe, without omission or simplification or just plain 
>> making mistakes, what it is to be conscious for even one minute? The 
>> answer (at least with the limitations of text) is no.  But authors can 
>> come asymptotically closer and closer to describing that experience 
>> *convincingly*, so that the reader stares, shakes her head, looks again, 
>> and says "yeah... it *is* like that!"
> 
> I really like what you're saying here.

   Why thank you. :-)

> In some cases it's: "My god it really is that WEIRD!"

   Absolutely!  Cf. Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, many 
others...

> William Gibson and some of the other authors mentioned around these 
> parts shift us into overdrive on fumes of chaos, style, and irony. I 
> think that there's a huge group of people (all ages) struggling with our 
> culture and what it means to be alive in the midst of latter-day 
> technological sprawl, and it's being read about and discussed in a very 
> mainstream genre. Usually beneath the surface.

   Hmm.  I'm slightly confused... what "very mainstream genre" are you 
talking about? You don't mean c'punk, do you?

> There's much more to be said than 'nuff said. (Though it's tempting, 
> cool and easy to sum things up like this -- some of my favorite sci-fi
> characters talk that way :) )

   With you there...

> Philip K. Dick is my big read right now, and I'm sure that you have
> read some of his stuff. (?)

   Yes.  Everything in *I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon*, *VALIS*, and *Radio 
Free Albemuth*.  Still have to check out some of his other novels, 
especially the one that Ursula K. LeGuin gave so much praise to, in her 
essay on "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown" (A really nifty 
essay, by the way.  It's included in two anthologies of essays: *The 
Language of the Night* and *Science Fiction at Large*) back in '78... *The 
Man in the High Castle*, I believe? --Oh, yes, and I read *A Scanner 
Darkly*, probably one of the scariest addiction stories ever.  In general, 
I like Dick (heheh:-), although the way that his protagonists slide into 
paranoia and try to pull me with them gives me fits... but that's the point.

> The new biography of him, _Divine Invasions,_ is engrossing to say the 
> least. His wacked-out life reflects 
> the intensity of his work -- he apparently COMPOSED at eighty to 100 
> words a minute.  

   People like that truly scare me... Damn, I don't even *think* that fast.

> I've been dwelling on his questions of consciousness lately, even though
> I should probably choose a major instead.

   Interesting interpretation... How would you phrase these questions of 
his? As for your major, go for English.  English majors simply rule the 
universe.  Philosophy majors can, like, serve us nectar and ambrosia etc.  
Everything else is *pfui* I say. :-)


   --Jesse.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But like the best fictional characters, he [Florentino] insists on his 
autonomy, refusing to be anything less ambiguous than human.  We must take 
him as he is, pursuing his tomcat destiny out among the streets and 
lovers' refuges of this city in which he lives on terms of such easy 
intimacy, carrying with him a potential for disasters from which he 
remains safe, immunized by a comical but dangerous indifference to 
consequences that often borders on criminal neglect.

			--Thomas Pynchon on Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
			  *Love in the Time of Cholera*
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