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Date:         Sun, 23 Aug 1992 08:51:55 EDT
From:         jcs <GE777009@BROWNVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: my syllabus

>Posted on 23 Aug 1992 at 00:43:43 by S1MBM@ISUVAX.BITNET
>
>my syllabus
>
>The Tempest
>Moll Flanders
>Gulliver's Travels
>Frankenstein
>Bleak House
>Heart of Darkness
>Mrs Dalloway
>The French Lieutenant's Woman
>
>(The works appear in the order in which they will be taught.)
>
>I welcome your comments and suggestions.  However, please don't tell me not
>to use any of these works; they've all been ordered.
>
>I was assigned this course a few days ago, and the semester starts Monday, so
>I'll be handing out xeroxes of Blake and *Paradise Lost* for the first week's
>reading.
>
>McBruce (a silly name, but i hope it will distinguish me from the distinguished
>         MBM)

I took a british literature class when in college, and it included
Women in Love, and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.

I found that, after reading these two, i would seek out DH Lawrence,
and James Joyce, because i felt they embodied that whole british
thang, (ei., the family structure, how women fit into society,
class systems).  While Women in Love isn't nearly as comical or
adventurous as say, Gullivers Travels, it is a very compelling and
impressive work.

I am also a fan of Lawrence's short works as well, especially
The Horse Dealer's Daughter.

"... don't be silly, don't be silly," he said, trying to comfort her, kissing
her , holding her in his arms.  "I want you, I want to marry you,
we're going to be married, quickly, quickly--tomorrow if i can"

But she only sobbed terribly, and cried:
"I feel awful. I feel awful.  I feel i'm horrible to you"

"no, i want you, I want you,"  was all he answered, blindly,
with that terrible intonation which frightened her almost more
than her horror lest he should _not_ want her.
                 _______________


jenna
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Date:         Tue, 25 Aug 1992 13:38:33 CDT
From:         Diane Fisher <diane@PRC.UTEXAS.EDU>
Subject:      subscription
Comments: To: literary%ucf1vm.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu

How can I get mail from "Discussions about literature"? My address is
 diane@prc.utexas.edu
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Date:         Wed, 26 Aug 1992 15:16:44 EDT
From:         Evelyn Duncan <R3EJD@AKRONVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Changes, Rooshians
              26 Aug 1992 14:55:46 EDT from <skovitz@MAGNUS.ACS.OHIO-STATE.EDU>

I agree with Sonia; congratulating the New Yorker for putting a woman
at the helm (any woman) is tokenism.  When will people be judged for
what they do, instead of what group (men, women, whites, blacks,
Indians,...) they belong to?

It's this particular woman and her management style I worry about:
will she turn the grand and glorious New Yorker into a copy of
Vanity Fair?  I sincerely hope not.

Evelyn Duncan
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From:         Melanie Willis <GS0383%SPRINGB.bitnet@SIUCVMB.SIU.EDU>
Subject:      Graham Greene

Millie brought up Graham Greene. Has anybody ever read "After the Affair?"
Also he wrote this long short story, kind of a novelette, I guess, a fantasy
fairy tale type thing, about this boy who discovered an old man living inside
a great big hollow tree. The old man had a wife there too, she was an old hag
who could barely talk, but, anyway, the old man kept the little boy down there
for a while and they talked about life, etc. It was very bizarre, funny, and
thought-provoking. Has anybody else ever read this story? Melanie
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Date:         Thu, 27 Aug 1992 07:24:37 PDT
From:         LITERARY <LITERARY@CLOVIS.FELTON.CA.US>
Subject:      Re: Changes at the New Yorker

Reply-to: Tim.Bowden@p0.f509.n216.z1.fidonet.org (Tim Bowden)
Fido-To: fscll@alaska.bitnet

I'll tell you what a traditionalist I am.  Those of you who
were raised with the New Yorker know this sense.  You will
pick it up at the newstand, flick open one page, and read
the contents in your left hand.  It is, if there are other
browsers present, a signal of breeding to know where the
contents of the New Yorker are listed.  No one should ever
pick up a copy of New Yorker for the first time.


I have been disappointed on rare occasions to see some
nincompoop had moved the table of contents.  I saw the
decline of the magazine then.


The value of the New Yorker is in nonfiction, in my opinion.
Short fiction you can find elsewhere, but to know about how
it is in the world for a variety of gifted observers; that's
the reason I pick up the magazine.

Have to agree with the pauper, though;  recently I have most
often placed it back on the rack after glancing at that
page of titles...
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Name: Christopher Mark Conn
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Date:         Mon, 31 Aug 1992 11:11:24 CDT
From:         Christopher Mark Conn <sascmc@UNX.SAS.COM>
Subject:      Re: Zen
Comments: To: literary <literary%ucf1vm.bitnet@unx.sas.com>
              92 11:48 am

>
>         re: Hofstdter:  I read his Godel, Escher, Bach . . . and loved it -
> before that I knew little or nothing about Zen, and that got me interested.
> Since then I have read a few books (including some of Alan Watts') on Zen.
> For a different viewpoint, you might read two books by Jan-Willem van de
> Wettering, . . . the titles of which I can't recall, I'm afraid.  J-WvdW
> is a westerner who actually joined a traditional Zen monastary, stayed there
> for a couple years (without "solving" his koan, by the way, until much
> later); he spends a lot of time talking about some rather peripheral issues
> (it hurts to sit in the half-lotus position for hours, no ,ater how long
> he tried) and, somehow, makes it seem more interesting and "real" than
> some of the more intellectual approaches to Zen (such as Watts.)
>         I also read Metamagical Themas, by Hofstadter; nothing sticks out
> in my memory from that, except an impression that he overindulged the
> whimsical spect a bit in those essays.
>         Ian
>

The best book I've ever read on Zen is _Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind_ by
Shunryu Suzuki. Suzuki was a Soto Zen master who founded one
of the major Zen centers in the U.S., located in Northern California.
I believed he died in the early 70's.

I liked Suzuki's book because it got the message across clearly and
without a lot of theorizing and unnecessary history. His message is
that the essence of Zen is practise and it should be a part of your
everyday routine, not "something special". He had a very low key approach
to Zen which I think is typical of the Soto school. Most of the books
that we see in the west are written by people from the Rinzai school,
which is much more formal and rigorous.

I liked Alan Watt's books too because they gave me an "outsider's view"
of eastern philosophy... there are obvious differences between east
and west and I think he did a good job of translating them (as well as
the language itself). He is not well thought of in some circles, perhaps
because he tended to see things his own way (he was accused of being a
drunk and a womanizer, so what), but I think his independent approach
makes his work all the more interesting!



I'm a peripheral visionary...
I can see into the future but just way off to the side.        - Stephen Wright
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Date:         Fri, 28 Aug 1992 11:16:06 PDT
From:         Tim Bowden <tcbowden@CLOVIS.FELTON.CA.US>
Subject:      How reading is read

*** This message originally written to: Eildons@unc.Bitnet
                             from area: LITERARY

I recognize how too close a scrutiny of the individual
links will lose sight of the chain;  that's why my
calendar is fouled into next week and why I always
lose at chess.

There was a story about someone, perhaps Mabel Dodge,
who had agreed to type _the Making of Americans_ for
Gertrude Stein.  (Admiring moans.)  Gertrude came in
to find her very cautiously typing one distinct letter
at a time.  Why?  Because she was a Lady, was Mabel,
and had not yet received permission to *read* the
manuscript.

I love to watch the way the white sandbars on the Red
are built and dissolve, but I have no idea which way
the River runs.  Probably my own learning disability...
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Date:         Sun, 23 Aug 1992 09:19:20 EDT
From:         Tim Johnson <PH408014@BROWNVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: The French Lieutenant's Woman

>I think that we can look again at the sentence
>you quote, the sentence which seems to have curled the beard on your goat.
>Yes, from a certain perspective the sentence over-displays a certain kind of
>learning and mastery, but this is precisely where Fowles displays his genius
>in writing a book about Victoriana *for contemporary readers*:
>most of us *would not* have a clue about the
>allusion had he not told us that Gk. traveler
>were expected to deliver Periclean orations along with the news, whereas a
>learned Victorian audience just might not need to be reminded of this.
>....  See you no humor in that infamous sentence?
>McBruce

  I guess I see some humor in it, but let me offer an
analogy.  There is a famous (or infamous) joke about
theoretical physicists.  In abbreviated form, it reads
something like this:

  These dairy farmers decided that they wanted to
  improve the output from their cows.  So they hire
  a theoretical physicist from the local university
  to do some consulting, pay him a mint, and wait
  patiently for the results.  Finally, the physicist
  comes up with the goods.  "I can improve production
  by almost 150%," he says to the eager farmers.
  "First, imagine a spherical cow...."

  Now, physicists and theorists might well find this funny,
but probably no one else.  You have to recognize that theorists
tend to take their complicated real world problems and reduce
them to very simple models to "solve" them.  And so, many
physics problems get reduced to spherical cases.

  If I had been writing _TFLW_ and had written

    He was very interested in Darwin's theories of evolution,
  who, if he did not exactly envision a history populated by
  a chain of the physicist's spherical creatures - physicists,
  in attempting to create mathematical models of real world
  systems often over simplify those systems, resulting in what
  can only be thought of as very unreal, usually spherical,
  special cases - did reveal some sense of order in the
  diversity of life and the fossil record.

you the reader would doubtless be laughing *at* me, not with me.

  That is how I read his sentence, and in reading his many footnotes,
and elaborate descriptions of unessential items (clothing, for example)
I was left thinking "what a pompous old pedant."

  However - I didn't object to the author's intrusion in his work
in general.  I thought his first ending to the novel....

  ************  SPOILER  ************

where our hero stays on the train, passes by the town where the
woman of his obsession is staying, goes to his fiancee, marries her,
and lives adequately ever after, *was* handled quite well.
And I feel the same way about the later two endings as well, though,
as I say, I would have had the ending different.  "What, are you
nuts?  It's been years.  I've forgotten you.  Love is an ephemeral
thing.  So, buzz off."


                                 -Tim
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Date:         Wed, 26 Aug 1992 08:23:44 EDT
From:         Ken Koester <MAINT2@ERS.BITNET>
Subject:      RE: Trollope

On Wed, 26 Aug 1992 06:47:00 EST MARGARET WRIGHT said:
>. . . .  However I do think that Dickens and the early
>Victorians believed that their type of novel was new (and novel).  The sudden
>explosion of the middle class with a new leisure and desire for reading created
>a reading public avid for their works

A slight quibble:  seems like every century I study since the 13th features the
rise (or in this case, explosion) of the middle class.  That's an awful long
time for it to be rising, even if it explodes at the end.  More to the point:
I recall my 18th century professor making exactly the same point about the
18th century, leisure, and desire for reading.

>        What the 20th century has produced is experiments in style.  I find
>that after reading Hemingway I think in Hemingway sentences and after reding
>Faulkner in parenthetical phrases.  But I'm not sure that if the novel as we
>know it ceases to exist that later centuries may not see the 20th century
>novel as we do later Greek and Roman drama - advance in style but not in
>substance.  Of course there are 19th century type novels still being produced -
>*Doctor Zhivago* and *The first circle* come to mind although it can be argued
>that Boris Pastrnak and Solzhenitsyn had their roots in the 19th century.  And

Yes, and you could well add Hesse, Mann, Proust et al. to your list.  I think
that the 20th century novel in general is more than an experiment in style; if
nothing else, it is an enormous expansion in range, subject matter, and, for
lack of a better phrase, artist's role.  "Substance" strikes me as a pretty
slippery rascal to pin down. . . but I don't find anything unsubstantial about
Faulkner, as compared to his 19th century predecessors.
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Date:         Wed, 26 Aug 1992 08:24:21 -0500
From:         "MRGATE::\"A1::LEISUR42\""@MMC.BITNET
Subject:      Re: Science Fiction

From:   NAME: Carole Leisure
        FUNC: Marketing and Development
        TEL: (615) 327-5940                   <LEISUR42@A1@MMC>
To:     NAME: VMSMail User IN%"LITERARY <IN%"LITERARY@UCF1VM.BITNET"@MRGATE>


Once again, we are back to how do we measure the worth of literature and
what is its purpose.  Science fiction has introduced ideas into the minds
of men--AND WOMEN--which, when brought to fruition, have advanced our
civilization.  Although this may be a mixed blessing, with technology vs
the environment, it beats the heck out of not dreaming at all.  Clarke's
'Childhood's End' is, in my mind, the ultimate philosophical approach to
the human condition.

Carole
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From: millie@shire.math.columbia.edu (Millie Niss)
Subject: Graham Greene, modern poetry 
Organization: Mathematics Department, Columbia University
Followup-To: millie@math.columbia.edu
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 11:34:41 GMT
X-Posted-From: shire.math.columbia.edu
X-Posted-Through: sol.ctr.columbia.edu

I haven't read the story about the boy and the old man.  What is it
called?  I didn't save the original post.

Has anyone read _A Burnt Out Case_ ?  (It's about a famous architect
who has lost his drive to work and eventually ends up living
anonymously in a leper colony.)  I haven't read that much GG but that
one surprised me since it wasn't a political mystery like the other GG
novels I know.  Are there others more like _A Burnt Out Case_ ?  

What do people think of _Monsignor Quxote_ ?  I've heard it is
considered to be one of GG's worst books, but I found it interesting
(although it wasn't a pasge-turner).  I read it right after reading
(parts of) Cervantes, so I was in a position to see the refernces.  I
thought GG did a good job of raising the issues of madness and
personal identity which are so important in _Don Quixote_.

Millie.

P.S.  I read a few lines of David Shapiro poems in a bookstore
yesterday.  I think I may take the book out of the library.  The ideas
seemed interesting and the poems were not too obscure.  It _is_ a
bit modern for my tastes.  Maybe I have the old-fashioned prejudice
that lines of poetry should have stranger syntax than prose.  I
suppose the weirdnesses of traditional poetry (permuted word order,
odd contractions, unusual choice of words) is partly a "Bad Thing"
which bad poets did to make their ideas fit into fixed meters, but
I've gotten used to verse like that.

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Posted-Date: Sun, 23 Aug 92 16:19:39 EDT
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Date:         Sun, 23 Aug 1992 16:19:39 EDT
From:         MM <mbm@PACSCL.UARC.UPENN.EDU>
Subject:      speed
Comments: To: literary@ucf1vm.cc.ucf.edu

	They sure lied to me when they said I was fast. These are fine-tuned
eyes I'm hearing about. And brains that take in whole pages. What I am going
to do about this?  Michael McColl]
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Date:         Fri, 28 Aug 1992 07:27:38 PDT
From:         Tim Bowden <tcbowden@CLOVIS.FELTON.CA.US>
Subject:      The sensualy sensory (was Trollope[?])

ET>   She shows how erotic restraint can be.  The scene with
ET> our two modern lovers-to-be sitting side by side on the
ET> lower bunk of the train compartment, NOT touching, is much
ET> more delectable than many other scenes in other books
ET> involving bodily contact.


I'm not sure why that is, but it is.  I can recall a photo
series in one of those style magazines with the women
cavorting in the surf, and the angles and positions
and the almost-but-not-quite touching carried a sexual
tension beyond the scope of any of the meat mags.

_Possession_ goes to the top of my must-read list due to
this post...
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Date:         Wed, 26 Aug 1992 14:55:46 EDT
From:         Sonia Kovitz <skovitz@MAGNUS.ACS.OHIO-STATE.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Changes, Rooshians
Comments: To: LITERARY@ucf1vm.cc.ucf.edu
              Bowden" at Aug 26, 92 10:39 am

>
> But more than the tradition, the eminence, the noble
> mission which was the New Yorker, there is a woman
> who is at the helm.  Can we not celebrate that at
> this late date?  And, is it just barely possible,
> that fact is at the core of more than a few of the
> reservations we see around us?

HORRORS, Sonia shreiked as the body lay decomposing on the deconstructionist
see-saw in Timmie's House of Mirrors,

when we celebrate "a woman at the helm" as opposed to WHO SHE IS and WHAT SHE
HAS TO OFFER..... something's rotten at the New Yorker
  Tokenism makes me wish I were back at the monastery tripping over Karamazov
legs and howling "all is permitted" ....
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Date:         Wed, 26 Aug 1992 13:46:04 EST
Comments:     Resent-From: Pierre Blackburn <LDAA@VM1.SI.USHERB.CA>
Comments:     Originally-From: Pierre Blackburn <LDAA@VM1.SI.USHERB.CA>
From:         Pierre Blackburn <LDAA@VM1.SI.USHERB.CA>
Subject:      The poet and the devil

I read in polish philosopher J.M  Bochenski's book on authority : "The poet
makes the devil say "Keep to the words! Thus you will enter in the temple
of certainty".

I would like to know to what this alludes to. Any idea? Something from
Shakespeare maybe?


thanks

Please reply to my personal address, I am not a member of this list.

Pierre Blackburn
departement de philosophie
College/Universite de Sherbrooke
Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada
Ldaa@vm1.si.usherb.ca (internet)   Ldaa@udesvm.ca (Bitnet)
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Date:         Sat, 22 Aug 1992 19:04:00 EDT
From:         IAN YORK <YORK@MCMASTER.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: reading

        I definitely do register sentence structure and rhythms, but I'm not
entirely sure how.  As I try to analyze it now, it seems to me that there is
sometimes almost an echo effect; a few moments after I pick up the sense of a
phrase, it will be replayed mentally if it *sounds*  noteworthy.  But I'm
not sure what happens in between, or if it really happens at all.
        As to re-reading, I usually have to do that when I'm studying some-
thing in any formal kind of way.  When I read a scientific article and all
I care about is the overall result, I can read it once; but if I want to know
the methods and the details of the reults, I usually have to read it 2-4
times.  I suspect it would be the same with fiction if I were to approach it
as a study, rather than strictly as pleasure. . . The luxuries of dabbling
outside your field.
        Ian
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Posted-Date: Thu, 27 Aug 92 16:40:44 EDT
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Date:         Thu, 27 Aug 1992 16:40:44 EDT
From:         MM <mbm@PACSCL.UARC.UPENN.EDU>
Subject:      science
Comments: To: literary@ucf1vm.cc.ucf.edu

Entropy has a lot to do with Pynchon's _The Crying of Lot 49_, I think, and
though I haven't read _Gravity's Rainbow_, I think there was a conscious
effort to make use of lots of theories and sciences. Theory may provide
new models of perception, which alter what data is perceived, which alters
what ends up in books. But that's a theory. mbmnotnotmccoll
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