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 ************
Topic 4         Sat Nov 09, 1991
A.RASMUSSEN1 [Alis]          (Forwarded) 
Sub: Mannerpunk                             

Fantasy of Manners and other forms of cross-dressing.  Is cross-genre writing
the coming trend in genre fiction?  Can genre fiction be cross- marketed?  Is
this making the field stronger?
689 message(s) total.
 ************
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 1         Mon Nov 08, 1993
TAPPAN.KING                  at 09:42 EST
 
ANOTHER TEMPTATION OF CHRIST

THE SUN ALSO SETS

STRANGELOVE II:  LOVE IN THE ASHES

REMEMBRANCE OF MORE THINGS PAST

SLAUGHTERHOUSE TEN

CHILDHOOD'S BEGINNING:  A NEW HOPE

"One More Name of God"

     >T<
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 2         Mon Nov 08, 1993
E.PERRY7 [Betsy Hanes]       at 20:05 EST
 
Austen is peculiarly beset because there isn't enough Austen. (When was the
last time you heard of somebody's setting out to produce ersatz Trollope?) 
However, where the various authoresses inevitably come a cropper is the first
fence: cynicism.  Austen did NOT write romances.

If you really want to shudder, read Jane Aiken Hodge's (or was  it Joan
Aiken's?  I always confuse the two) MANSFIELD REVISITED. I didn't like MP much
in the first place, but even it didn't deserve this sequel.

Ruth Plumly Thompson was better than Baum.  Much better food values, to cite
one obvious case.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 3         Mon Nov 08, 1993
T.WEBER7 [Polgar]            at 20:20 EST
 
I hope it wasn't Joan Aiken, because she is otherwise marvelous.

I'm not in a position to compare Thompson with Baum, as the Thompsons were not
available to me till I was grown.  They read very well, and might have had the
magic of Baum's for me had I read them young enough.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 4         Mon Nov 08, 1993
SFWA-SOUKUP [Martha]         at 20:32 EST
 
They feel different.  They're sweeter, there's less menace far (very far)
away.  But I loved them nearly as much, as a kid.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 5         Mon Nov 08, 1993
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 21:35 EST
 
I picked up the Barrett today at the library, and this book justifies the
pessimism.  JA had a very tight control of her pov, but this  one is quite
unfocused.  
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 6         Tue Nov 09, 1993
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 00:14 EST
 
Delia, I think they do it for =money=.  (I suppose I could be wrong about
that.)

Lois - Ah, thank you.  That helps.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 7         Tue Nov 09, 1993
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 10:56 EST
 
Having read further into the Barrett sequel, I can only say: =Presumption=,
indeed!

There is no characterization here, except what is borrowed from the original. 
There is no point of view or introspection.  The whole thing has a rushed,
condensed feeling to it, quite contrary to the spirit of the genuine thing.

And worst of all, the author has had the presumption to use one of the most
humiliating episodes from the author's private life -- this author who so
valued her privacy as to refuse to allow her name to be used on her works --
for cheap comic effect.

This book is an excellent argument for the principle of Perpetual Copyright .
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 8         Tue Nov 09, 1993
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 18:50 EST
 
FEAR GROUNDS INTO A DOUBLE PLAY.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 9         Tue Nov 09, 1993
L.GROSSMAN [Leigh]           at 23:48 EST
 
Eloise: the Oz books are still in print. I don't know the publisher offhand,
but if you can't find them, email me and I'll check.

Leigh
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 10        Wed Nov 10, 1993
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 21:37 EST
 
Del Rey probably has a bunch of them in print (including Ruth Plumly Thompson
ones)--though maybe not. Dover does have several of the Baums in paper, and
Books of Wonder/Morrow has been doing deluxe hardcovers. (And some trade
papers of other non-Oz Baum books.) (I've been channeling Tom Weber for some
of this message, by the way.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 11        Wed Nov 10, 1993
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 23:08 EST
 
Don - I think you got the speech patterns down pat.

Delia - on further thought: how many Regency novels can get reviewed on the
front page of the LA Times Book Review (Sunday circulation more millions than
I can remember)?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 12        Thu Nov 11, 1993
L.GROSSMAN [Leigh]           at 20:36 EST
 
Morrow has the following OZ books in print: THE ROAD TO OZ DOROTHY AND THE
WIZARD IN OZ OZMA OF OZ THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ THE MARVELOUS LAND OF OZ As
far as I know, these are all facsimiles of the  first editions.

Leigh
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 13        Sat Nov 20, 1993
D.SHERMAN9                   at 22:02 EST
 
You're right.  Fame (of a sort) and fortune are powerful reasons to write
anything.  Is there one of us who would modestly turn away from the kind of
attention that horrid woman got for SCARLETT, even if we'd rather have our
hair done in a nice, blue-rinsed perm than have written the thing? Ah, well. 
We'll never do anything like that, will we?  No, of course not. Delia
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 14        Mon Nov 22, 1993
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 05:50 EST
 
Freud once said that he wrote for largely those reasons, and Ursula Le Guin
spent some time ridiculing him for it.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 15        Tue Nov 23, 1993
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 22:56 EST
 
"Is it universally acknowledged that a book that has made a good fortune must
be in want of a sequel?"

(First line of Judith Martin's review of =both= PRIDE & PREJUDICE sequels in
THE WASHINGTON POST.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 16        Tue Nov 23, 1993
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 23:42 EST
 
I have read PERPETRATION, but have not yet seen the other.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 17        Thu Nov 25, 1993
R.DAVIS68 [Ray]              at 00:07 EST
 
I'm almost finished with a book which I didn't know  existed until last week,
A TROJAN ENDING, a novel by retired poet Laura Riding about the Trojan War. 
Her heroine is Cressida, and her approach to fiction reminds me of Robert
Musil.  (This is a big compliment, for those who are wondering who Robert
Musil is.  A fine hard science fiction writer who David Hartwell might not
include in the canon.)  It's arch and serious, as befits a 20th century novel
about heroic times.

Riding's preface is lovely as well:

  But is Cressida so important?  She is.  There is no story
  so unfinished as hers, and what is unfinished must be finished.
  It is this that makes legends: when stories are left unfinished
  because the life in them was not finished.  The story of the
  Trojan War was never finished.  Something in the world-life
  that the Trojan War represented escaped mortal death; it went
  into suspension as legends....  The strongest associative word
  in my mind for Cressida is 'courage' -- and, as well, for the
  whole time of Troy.  No other age embodied this quality with
  such single intensity -- the more than fatalistic intensity to
  be alive....  Then follows the long spelling out of fear: history
  'proper', in which all the fears of life become articulate. 
  And only then, only now, comes the existence in which so
  much courage survives so much fear.  The early stage of
  any experience is the demonstration that there is courage
  to live it.

Riding published her novel in 1937, one year before she closed her poetic
career.  I wonder how she felt about its lack of success as compared to her
then-lover's I,  CLAUDIUS.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 18        Thu Nov 25, 1993
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 06:30 EST
 
A "retired" poet? How does one retire from poetry?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 19        Thu Nov 25, 1993
PNH [Patrick]                at 08:30 EST
 
You stop writing poetry.  It's been done.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 20        Thu Nov 25, 1993
T.WEBER7 [Recidivist]        at 09:48 EST
 
Is Laura Riding still alive?  I know she lived an awfully long time after
quitting poetry.  I think George Oppen quit for many years too.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 21        Thu Nov 25, 1993
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 11:52 EST
 
Sorry-but the idea of "retiring" from being a poet is one I do n ot accept. I
accept that at some point someone may stop writing poetry, but that is not the
same thing.

Being at Jane's for Thanksgiving, I'd like (as a good guewst should) to second
 her motion.  Delia
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 22        Thu Nov 25, 1993
PNH [Patrick]                at 14:16 EST
 
Jane, um, what's the difference?  Hi, Delia.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 23        Thu Nov 25, 1993
R.DAVIS68 [Ray]              at 14:45 EST
 
You retire from poetry like you retire from anything: Publicly announce that
you aren't doing it anymore, and then don't do it anymore.

Rimbaud and Riding are the two cases of retirement who come to mind.  I mean,
they announced they were done with poetry and never wrote poetry again.  Laura
(Riding) Jackson (she changed her name after her retirement) went so far as to
write several essays explaining why she left poetry and wasn't coming back. 
You can find one, and an excerpt from another, in THE POEMS OF LAURA RIDING. 
Lengthier explanations are in her very odd book of philosophical prose, THE
TELLING.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 24        Thu Nov 25, 1993
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 18:57 EST
 
Laura Riding is still alive.  Helen Vendler recently published an essay on two
studies of her in the NYRB.

R.A. Lafferty no longer writes fiction.  I think it fair to say that he has
"retired."  Conceivably he might resume, but then people do come out of
retirement.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 25        Thu Nov 25, 1993
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 20:02 EST
 
It is a matter of semantics probably, Patrick. But I think being a poet is a
way of thinking, a way of p[erceiving the world. And while you might not be
writing down the poetry, or perhaps not trying to sell the poetry or publish
it somewhere, you would still be seeing the world in that particular way.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 26        Thu Nov 25, 1993
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 20:35 EST
 
Thanks for the recommendation, Ray. Sounds interesting. Amused at your
description of Musil, whom I know about but haven't really read.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 27        Fri Nov 26, 1993
MITCHWAGNER [Frisco Kid]     at 13:42 EST
 
Any particular reason why R.A. Lafferty no longer writes  fiction?

(He must be in his 80s by now.)


 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 28        Fri Nov 26, 1993
PNH [Patrick]                at 17:51 EST
 
Jane, you are a wonderful human being, but I am opposed from the top of my
head right down to the soles of my feet to the idea that poetry, or any art,
is "a way of thinking, a way of perceiving the world," rather than something
we do.

Do artists tend to view the world differently from most people?  Of course
they do.  Is this in itself art?  No.

Moreover, I can't begin to count the number of people I've known who concluded
that Art must be something foreign to them since they'd been given to
understand that being Artistic involved having a Special Way Of Seeing The
World and they didn't feel Special enough.

I believe with all my heart that as soon as you muddle the distinction between
_being_ and _doing_ -- _particularly_ in the arts -- trouble ensues.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 29        Fri Nov 26, 1993
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 18:36 EST
 
"The next voice to speak up was not the Lieutenant's but mine.  I said I
didn't give a good God damn what Mrs. Fedder had to say on the subject of
Seymour.  Or, for that matter, what any professional dilettante or amateur
bitch had to say. . . . not one God-damn person, of all the patronizing,
fourth-rate critics and column writers, had ever seen him for what he really
was.  A poet, for God's sake.  And I mean a =poet.=  If he never wrote a line
of poetry, he could still flash what he had at you with the back of his ear if
he wanted to."

                                            -- J.D. Salinger
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 30        Sat Nov 27, 1993
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 06:16 EST
 
Whosh--I pushed a button,  didn't I. But I still don;t think you can "retire"
from poetry. I can't retire from being a writer. I do it by myself. Without a
deadline. Without being paid for it. Without being published. And I am still a
writer, damn it. Grumble. Grumble.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 31        Sat Nov 27, 1993
PNH [Patrick]                at 07:31 EST
 
Jane, which one of us had a "button pushed" first?  It sounds to me like
you're arguing against the idea that "being a poet" or "being a writer" is
defined by whether you're doing it professionally, for publication, to
deadlines, for money.

I agree one hundred percent.  However, what you _said_ was that "being a poet"
is a state of mind independent of whether one actually writes poetry, and I
can't agree with that.  For if that's so, then all those people who want you
to write up their ideas (they have all these ideas, see, just no time to write
them down) are just as much writers as Jane Yolen.

The fact is, several of the people cited in the preceding discussion really
_did_ "retire from poetry."  Like, they stopped writing it. Period.  Not
stopped writing for publication -- stopped writing. It happens.  Art doesn't
always Win.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 32        Sat Nov 27, 1993
D.SHERMAN9                   at 17:18 EST
 
I probably shouldn't touch this one with an eleven-foot pole, but then I've
always been rash from a pup.  For years, I've been telling my writing students
that a person who writes is a writer, as a person who dances is a dancer. A
person who doesn't write may be a lot of things, but a writer isn't one of
them.  (I hasten to say that the simple act of writing doesn't make you a good
writer or a publishable writer, and someone who keeps yards of journals but
never makes them available to any public probably shouldn't put "writer" on
passport applications.  But that someone is a writer, nevertheless.) Most
writers are like Gene Kelly--they gotta write.  It's not only a way of looking
at the world, it's a way of moving through it and interacting with it.  A
retired dancer may still wear ballet shoes in her soul and walk with her toes
turned out and her back held just so.  But her body just won't let her go _en
pointe_ anymore.  A retired writer, I suspect (whatever its age) may look at
the world the same way, but something physical or mental just won't let the
words go down on paper anymore. Delia
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 33        Sat Nov 27, 1993
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 20:02 EST
 
Gene Kelly had to write?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 34        Sat Nov 27, 1993
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 20:25 EST
 
I expect to be called (or at least call myself) a writer until I die, whether
I am still actively writing. That is one of the ways I define myself. I think
in stories. I am better on paper than in person. I am a writer. I do not think
a writer can "retire" from being a writer. You can only stop writing.

But as two people I much honor--Patrick and Delia--believe differently, I can
only say that this is a personal thing. I believe this. It is not  Canon.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 35        Sat Nov 27, 1993
D.SHERMAN9                   at 22:42 EST
 
Having said all of the above, I realized that I'd still call Beverly Sills an
opera dancer, Dame Margot Fontaine a ballet dancer, Elizabeth Taylor an
actress, and Gene Kelly a hoofer even though they haven't sung, danced (yes, I
know she's dead, but she retired first), acted (well....), o or hoofed for
years.  So I'll be perfectly willing to call Jane a writer if she never writes
another word (which the Dear avert).  My only comfort in all this is that
writers, like gardeners, tend to live long and productive lives.  So, can we
argue the point again when we're 90?

Greg.  "Gotta dance" =  ta write"  Gene Kelley = Budding writer of your
choice.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 36        Sun Nov 28, 1993
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 02:33 EST
 
 Greg:  "Gene Kelly had to write?"  Sure he did.  Don't you remember the
 fantastic writing dream sequence from PROOFREADING IN THE RAIN?

   -- Alan Bostick
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 37        Sun Nov 28, 1993
BETH.MEACHAM                 at 13:46 EST
 
huh.  I don't think Gene Kelly would call himself a dancer anymore. I'm
certain that Dame Margot didn't.  

(Or maybe I'm wrong, and they continued to dance.  And thus were dancers.
Dancer and performer are not the same.  Singer and performer are not the
same.)

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 38        Sun Nov 28, 1993
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 22:12 EST
 
The CHICAGO TRIBUNE had a quite favorable review of PRESUMPTION today, which
was irritating.  Then this afternoon I got PEMBERLY from the library.
 I am now persuaded that PRESUMPTION may have had some virtues, after all.
  It was at least a -lively- book, and the author did get the diction right. 
PEMBERLY gets -nothing- right.  This author does not seem to have the slightly
notion of what made Austen work.  I couldn't get past the first couple of
chapters.  Bad bad bad.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 39        Sun Nov 28, 1993
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 23:33 EST
 
Judith Martin's review of both books in last week's Washington Post Book World
is a hoot.  The review is titled "Fun With Liz and Darcy," and the
illustrations shows the famous etching of Austen, with her eyes altered, Terry
Gilliam style, so that they appear to be rolling.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 40        Sun Dec 05, 1993
B.POLLARD2 [Donovan]         at 15:14 EST
 
        ======= To: D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        =======

  >  Greg:  "Gene Kelly had to write?"  Sure he did.  Don't you remember the
  > fantastic writing dream sequence from PROOFREADING IN THE RAIN?

And Beverly Sills danced opera??  <G>

I shouldn't touch this with an eleven-foot pole either, but here goes.

If I spend most of my life writing poetry (commercially viable or not... it's
inconsequential), then stop writing poetry.  Let's say I announce my
retirement.  From 1994 through 1998 I write no poetry whatsoever -- even for
my own personal enjoyment.  Then, in 1999, I write my best poem ever.

Question:  was I NOT A POET for those four non-productive years?

Sorry, there IS a sound in an empty forest when a tree falls, and I AM a poet
until my dying day.

If, however, I danced my entire life, then fell victim to painful arthritis,
at that point I am no longer a dancer because of its physical impossibility.

An easily argued topic here, so I just HAD to jump in.  Thanks for your
indulgences.   :>

Bruce
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 41        Sun Dec 05, 1993
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 18:01 EST
 
I, of course, agree. 
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 42        Sun Dec 05, 1993
W.BARTON1 [Bill]             at 19:40 EST
 
Let me see. If there's a dancer in the forest singing for her supper when a
tree falls on her, and the beast of poetry past comes bounding out at the non-
sound of her existential scream, will Ayn Rand come back to life.

Hmmm. Probably not.

  <I glyph the glyph of the flu-dazed>
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 43        Tue Dec 07, 1993
J.GARDNER4 [Jim Gardner]     at 22:13 EST
 
It might be useful to distinguish between a quiet retirement and a loud
resignation.  Gene Kelly probably doesn't dance in public now, but he never
made a big fuss about never dancing again.  The same goes for many other
people who aren't currently active in fields where they once excelled.  On the
other hand, there are some people who pointedly turn their backs on their
previous careers and reject any further connection.  In that case, they are
actively suppressing a former part of themselves -- not just the activity
itself, but the drive to engage in the activity.  The evidence suggests that
some people do succeed in amputating this part of their lives; others do not. 
And the writer in me starts to make stories about these people: those who
manage to deaden themselves and those who don't.  (Yes, yes, I know that
"deaden" is a presumptuous word, but if I were writing the story...well, maybe
I'll just start jotting down a few notes...)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 44        Wed Dec 08, 1993
R.DAVIS68 [Ray]              at 23:51 EST
 
I've repressed this a number of times, but I yam what I yam and that's all
what I yam...

Laura Riding was a more accomplished and dedicated poet than any I've ever met
on a net.  (Although I did just find an online zine which published something
of Lyn Hejinian's...)  She was stringently, perhaps insanely, honest.  She
wrote poetry while she hoped by that means to reach closer to the truth, and
stopped writing poetry when she decided it wouldn't reach.  Her decision to
retire shows no signs of being an excuse, or resulting from a moment of pique.
She's held to the decision, and explained it, for fifty years.  I think her
own account of her own decision deserves a little respect.  If her decision
makes one nervous, one might do well to give it a little attention rather than
denying its existence.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 45        Thu Dec 09, 1993
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 00:00 EST
 
Insanely honest or honestly insane?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 46        Thu Dec 09, 1993
R.DAVIS68 [Ray]              at 00:23 EST
 
Well, _I_ would say "insanely honest".  But consider the source. (: >,)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 47        Sun Dec 12, 1993
D.SHERMAN9                   at 17:08 EST
 
May I change the subject for a moment?  I know you've all seen _Age of
Innocence_ and discussed it to your hearts' content, but I just saw it last
night, and haven't had a chance to put my two cents' worth in yet.

From the point of view of this topic, it's a wonderful movie.  It's about
surfaces, the danger and tragedy of manners when their form has taken on a
life of its own apart from its usefulness to society.  It's even (in a
metaphorical sense) a fantasy, a social fairy tale complete with enchanted
princess (we could argue whether she's May or the Countess or both) and fairy
godmother (Mrs. Minott).  It's also quite the most beautiful thing I've ever
seen.  Although I much doubt that anyone in 19th c. New York would consicer
Winona Ryder pretty--she's much too skinny.  She was overwhelmed by the sheer
yardage of her dresses.  And her ears stick out.  And poor Daniel Day Lewis
was much hampered by the flatness of diction British actors affecting American
accents seem to think necessary.  And I still don't think Michelle Pfieffer is
sexy.  Otherwise, it was a perfect movie, mannerwise.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 48        Mon Dec 13, 1993
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 23:03 EST
 
Delia, =I= haven't seen it (but in true superficial fashion, I have read
numerous reviews and am prepared to critique the costumes).
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 49        Wed Dec 15, 1993
W.BARTON1 [Bill]             at 06:19 EST
 
Second the thumbs up on "Age of Innocence." Most of the negative reviews I saw
seemed to focus on the fact that it just didn't make you jump in your seat
every three seconds or so. It was like reading an SF/F novel that isn't funny.
People who don't want to think will be bored. Which is as it should be.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 50        Wed Dec 15, 1993
SFWA-SOUKUP [Martha]         at 13:08 EST
 
 My negative review of "Age of Innocence" stems mostly from that Scorcese
didn't trust his audience not to be stupid, or himself to get an alien culture
across without a very big hammer.  Joanne Woodward is too fine an actress to
deserve my having wanted to strangle her every time her voice came on
soundtrack.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 51        Thu Dec 16, 1993
D.SHERMAN9                   at 17:05 EST
 
But I _liked_ the voiceover.  It was like watching a novel Op.  The only thing
that bugged me was Scorcese's habit of having letters read by the characters
who'd written them looking directly into the camera.  It broke the framework
much more abruptly than the voiceover did.  For me, at least.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 52        Sat Dec 18, 1993
JKS [Jennifer]               at 18:26 EST
 
But was it Visible Heyer?  The trailers gave reason to believe... Eagerly
awaiting my chance to see it.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 53        Sun Dec 19, 1993
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 15:24 EST
 
Jennifer!!
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 54        Mon Dec 20, 1993
D.SHERMAN9                   at 00:40 EST
 
Let's see.  Visible Heyer.  No.  It was Visible Wharton.  I yeild to none in
my devotion to the Incomparable, but she wasn't Edith Wharton.  She always hit
the nail on the head, but the nails she was aiming at just weren't as subtle
as the ones Wharton so definitively countersunk.  For one thing, she believed
in Class and Family and Gentleman (natural and made) in a way that Wharton
clearly does not.  And she had a soft spot for true love.  It might be
interesting to speculate who would have ended up with the boy if Heyer had
written _Age_, and why.  Could I write a sequel, perhaps?  Or an alternate
version?  Do you think I'd get reviewed by the LA Times if I did? Nah. Delia
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 55        Tue Dec 21, 1993
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 02:45 EST
 
 Delia (556):  That is a delicious turn of phrase ("always hit the nail
 on the head . . . so definitively countersunk.")  Did anyone ever tell
 you you should be a writer?

   -- Alan Bostick
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 56        Tue Dec 21, 1993
K.HOUGHTON                   at 08:32 EST
 
Empunks are referred to the front page of the WSJ today, in which a new
postmodern cartoon is featured (as well as the oh-too-easy dream anxiety
note.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 57        Tue Dec 21, 1993
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 13:36 EST
 
Actually referred to as Mpunks?????
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 58        Tue Dec 21, 1993
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 20:03 EST
 
Ken: Don't be so d*mned cryptic. Report, please.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 59        Wed Dec 22, 1993
STEVEN.BRUST                 at 01:52 EST
 
What's a WSJ, for example?

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 60        Wed Dec 22, 1993
L.BAILES1 [LennyB]           at 03:21 EST
 
Steve, I think you won't like it when Ken tells you. 
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 61        Wed Dec 22, 1993
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 06:43 EST
 
We Support Joyce?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 62        Wed Dec 22, 1993
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 08:46 EST
 
WSJ= Wall Street Journal
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 63        Wed Dec 22, 1993
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 20:39 EST
 
Turns out he hadn't even read it. <sigh>
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 64        Thu Dec 23, 1993
K.HOUGHTON                   at 08:02 EST
 
Still haven't, but I trust my source. (Still looking...)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 65        Fri Dec 31, 1993
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 22:52 EST
 
All certified Mannerpunks should note that TNT is doing a 10 hour  marathon of
THE WILD, WILD WEST on Sunday.

For some reason, I seem to be immune to this one, but I am assured it is a
seminal text.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 66        Sat Jan 01, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST                 at 15:45 EST
 
Thanks for the info, Paula Kate.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 67        Fri Jan 07, 1994
K.HOUGHTON                   at 20:55 EST
 
Immune to Ross Martin???  For shame...
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 68        Sat Jan 15, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 01:22 EST
 
Good lord.  Blast from the past.  I can remember watching it religiously in
the MAN FROM UNCLE days, although why it's a seminal (the adj. is remarkably
apt, as I recall) text for FoM will take a little thinking  about.  I don't
remember anyone being particularly witty, although Ross Martin was a snappy
dresser.  I suspect it wouldn't stand the test of time, so I 'll give the
marathon a miss.  Probably already have, come to think on it. Delia
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 69        Wed Jan 19, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 21:41 EST
 
"=Dhalgren='s central character, the Kid, has great charm. Unless one is
prepared, however, to find a meticulous and exhaustive portrait of a somewhat
shy and dubiously honest (if well-intentioned) ex-mental patient charming,
=Dhalgren= cannot be a pleasure to read.

"But one must find doughty old men charming to enjoy =Don Quixote=.

"And one must find high spirited if somewhat naive young women charming to
enjoy =Emma=. Indeed, if one does not find high spirited if somewhat naive
young women charming, all Austen's extensive art, inexhaustible wit, and moral
fervor will seem pretty cold fare."

--"K. Leslie Steiner" [Samuel R. Delany], "Some  Remarks toward a Reading of
=Dhalgren," THE STRAITS OF MESSINA, Serconia Press 1988.

And one must find elves in rock'n'roll bands, tea parties, and walks on the
heath (among other tropes) charming in order to enjoy Emma Bull =et al.=

There are certain writers I find myself completely antipathetic to (Stephen
King is one), and I cannot read their work with any enjoyment at all. And I
regard my opinion on their work as somewhat disqualified because I am entirely
resistant to their surface charm.

And after all, does anyone take Edmund Wilson's "Oo, Those Awful Orcs" as any
kind of informed criticism of Tolkien?

On the other hand, I =do= find fantasy of manners charming. But I don't think
my reaction to it is any =more= emotional than my 180-degrees- opposed
reaction to Stephen King. Nor do I think my emotional attachment to fantasy of
manners makes me =less= "objective" (whatever that means --there are after all
only degrees of subjectivity) than someone who has a completely unsympathetic
attitude to it.

(I was wrong--the Edmund Wilson comment belongs here.)

<Hi, Greg.>
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 70        Thu Jan 20, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 15:52 EST
 
Don - I think that emotional antipathy to a writer or subgenre can cause one
to construct a harsher criticism - that which one finds objectively
ojectionable may, in fact, be one of the "charming tropes" of the subgenre. 
Likewise, that which you or I find charming in Mannerpunk may be objectively
considered adolescent, trite, contrived, or intellectually bankrupt by someone
who is not susceptible to those charms.

<Hi, Greg.>

<back to bagging books>
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 71        Thu Jan 20, 1994
K.HOUGHTON                   at 18:28 EST
 
Indeed. By Donald's above-stated theory, only those naturally sympathetic to a
writer or subgenre are qualified to discuss hisser works.

A few random examples:

No one who isn't Jewish can discuss Malamud. Similarly, a non-Southerner
cannot discuss Williams (Hank =or= Tennessee) or Faulkner. No one who does not
live in New York--indeed, it should probably be required that one was born in
Brooklyn--can comprehend any of the "New York experience" novels. And
certainly no one who is not a Vet can discuss _The Naked and the Dead_ or
_Slaughterhouse-Five_ (or _Mother Night_) or _The Short-Timers_.

No one who idolises Willy S. is capable of discussing Nahum Tate's version of
_King Lear_.

And, certainly, no one who idolises Tolkien for his cross-cultural
assimilations in That "Trilogy" is capable of understanding the glories of
Terry Brooks.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 72        Thu Jan 20, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 18:42 EST
 
Woody Allen films.  You left out Woody Allen films, Ken.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 73        Thu Jan 20, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 18:52 EST
 
Actually, Ken, it is pretty much a commonplace that a southerner's
understanding , say, Tennessee Williams will be =different= than a non-
southerner's (and a New Yorker who has read widely and deeply of southern
writers and southern culture will understand Williams differently than a New
Yorker who hasn't).  It's a question of context more than anything; those in
sympathy will =tend= to have a fuller context (through collateral reading,
travel, research) than those out of sympathy.  Personally, I find both types
of critics useful: those in sympathy have context in their favor; those out of
sympathy have a clear eye on the work =out= of context (or rather, in a wider
context) without the excusing prejudices of the empathetic fan.

It's the modular calculus and the Rules of Chess, again.

Don is better than I at stepping "back" into the wider context, but I'm not
sure any critic can be completely divorced from taste and sympathy -- nor is
it desirable.

<picking glass out of carpet>
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 74        Thu Jan 20, 1994
D.EGAN4 [Doris]              at 19:30 EST
 
C.S. Lewis said something in the same vein.  He disapproved of negative
reviews of works of fantasy by reviewers who hated =all= fantasy.  He said
that he himself had never enjoyed mysteries -- a matter of taste -- and would
not therefore feel qualified to review a book in that genre.

This had nothing to do with where he was born and brought up.  He didn't say
that he felt unqualified to review books that weren't about English dons.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 75        Thu Jan 20, 1994
K.HOUGHTON                   at 20:59 EST
 
Which brings us back, of course, from whence we came, since no one--not even
Donald--would suggest that the two people whose conversation started this riff
(one a Yankee, the other a British Canadian) dislikes =fantasy=.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 76        Thu Jan 20, 1994
D.EGAN4 [Doris]              at 21:52 EST
 
Hmmm.  Didn't Wilson make some snide remark about Peter Wimsey, as well?  I
have a feeling he would not think much of this entire FoM Topic.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 77        Thu Jan 20, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 21:59 EST
 
I could bring up Freudian/Jungian in reply to that last point, but will
temporarily refrain. (And Ken is being cryptic again, for everyone else.
Arguing against context from a knowledge of the context! How insidious.)

Ken's corrective is accepted, though; I'm not talking about absolutes, but
about tendencies. For example, I'd more likely trust Paula's or D.BRATMAN's or
Micole's opinion of a new fantasy than the opinon of Ken or Greg. But there
are other contexts where Ken's or Greg's opinoin would count much more. A
sympathy for the matter =tends= to foster a stronger appreciation for the
manner (in several senses, I guess).

Also, this is a tripartite distinction: sympathy, impartiality, and antipathy.
What I'm wary of is antipathy deprivileging sympathy by posing as
impartiality. (There =is= no objectivity.)

There's a big difference between shrugging and saying some artistic endeavor
doesn't really work for one, but having some reduced appreciation for it
anyway, and declaring that it is actively pernicious, and no proper-minded
consumer should be caught dead in its presence. (I exaggerate for effect, to
be sure.)

Hmm. Probably less coherent than I'd intended. But that's ad hoc posting for
you.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 78        Thu Jan 20, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 22:00 EST
 
Crosspost. I haven't read the Wilson since long before I read Wimsey, so I
don't remember. Seems entirely likely (more genre fiction, y'know).
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 79        Thu Jan 20, 1994
R.DAVIS68 [Ray]              at 22:54 EST
 
Ken, that's a pretty nasty slip from "natural sympathy" to "racial identity"
and "shared residence".  I didn't live in New York when I first discovered
natural sympathy with I'M NEW YORK DAMN YOUR EYES! artists.  On the contrary,
that sympathy is what eventually drew me to New York.

I like the idea that critics are best employed amongst their enthusiasms. 
<Hi, Greg.>  But then I think I write enthusiastic criticism as well or better
than I throw mud.  That's not true of a number of much better critics --
Lester Bangs really got goosed by vitriol -- and some of my favorite pieces of
criticism are real nasty.  Just last summer, I read a lovely, lovely
vivisection of Spengler by Robert Musil.  But self-righteous ignorance doesn't
lead much of anywhere.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 80        Fri Jan 21, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 01:16 EST
 
"Antipathy deprivileging sympathy by posing as impartiality"

Don, that's wonderful.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 81        Fri Jan 21, 1994
K.HOUGHTON                   at 08:16 EST
 
Donald does, as usual, confuse sympathy and advocacy. While I'd be the last to
deny that the hagiographic excesses of the conversation in question were
excessive, one might suggest that the nature of the beast under discussion (if
we accept the beast's independence, which is still dubious) lends itself to
hagiography, with its Tersa Haynel and all that. (May have misspelt that last
name; Brust-san is welcome to correct...)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 82        Fri Jan 21, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 09:57 EST
 
Paula: Modest thanks. I was surprised and pleased when that popped out.

Ken: What in the world (as usual) are you talking about?

There is sympathy. There is advocacy. There is hagiography. Beware slippage. I
have sympathy for the fantasy works under discussion here. I advocate them
critically. Ask the writers concerned if I have ever hesitated to tell them
what I thought was wrong with their books-- literarily speaking. I don't
believe that the term "hagiography" is quite earned in this case.

Antipathy does not change characteristics into flaws, either.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 83        Fri Jan 21, 1994
JKS [Jennifer]               at 22:35 EST
 
Well, Don, per PaulaKate I have to agree that when I read something that is -
almost- what I would have done with the same material but unsatisfactorily not
quite so, and moreover is in print before me and is technically better
executed than I can at present achieve, I get really cranky and jealous.  And
hate myself for it.  (This is -not- why I can't stand MacDonald or Holdstock
or Grant; those are religious differences thank you.)

#

DISCOURSE OF DISCOURSE ALERT.  You're doing it again, boys.  I'll come back
when you stop.

JKS
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 84        Fri Jan 21, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 22:42 EST
 
Jennifer: You must be a postmodernist. We modernists like layers of discourse
(or anything else).

I intellectually understand that jealousy, meaning I have seen it in other
people but don't feel it myself. I'm really =glad= when someone does a good
job doing something I have or could have done myself.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 85        Fri Jan 21, 1994
JKS [Jennifer]               at 22:43 EST
 
<pbpbpbpbpbt!>
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 86        Sat Jan 22, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST                 at 06:01 EST
 
Works for me, Ken.  Carry on.

I know what you mean, Jennifer.  That's how I felt after I read HOTEL
TRANSYLVANIA.  But I felt better after I read the sequels.

Now then.  What, exactly, is hagiography?

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 87        Sat Jan 22, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 07:10 EST
 
Hagiography--lives of the saints, Steve. Used to mean unstinting approval of
someone, believing them incapable of anything bad. Sycophantic behaviour.
Sucking up Big Time.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 88        Sat Jan 22, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:54 EST
 
Sherwood: There's still more work to be done (some =has= been done) on the
relationship between Sayers and Dunnett. As we've said before.

So where 's Greg?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 89        Sat Jan 22, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST                 at 17:51 EST
 
Got it, Jane.  You mean, like, the way everyone acts toward me.  Okay.  Now I
understand.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 90        Sun Jan 23, 1994
JKS [Jennifer]               at 09:48 EST
 
Ooooooooo, Steve, can I kiss your halo?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 91        Sun Jan 23, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 10:39 EST
 
From THE BOOK OF SEQUELS:

PRIDE AND EXTREME PREJUDICE

THe action-packed sequel to =Pride and Prejudice= introduced a new Bennet
sister, "Dirty" Harriet, who won the hearts of Jane Austen fans by
forestalling an insult from Elizabeth Bennet's old nemesis, Laty Catherine de
Bourgh, with a cool "I have no objection, your ladyship, to your proceeding,
since, by so doing, you shall render my afternoon quite agreeable."
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 92        Sun Jan 23, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 11:28 EST
 
Okay, I'm here.   Hi, hi, hi, and hi.

I must say, however, Don, that your tactics -- appealing to sysops to have a
posting of mine in the Greer Gilman topic uprooted and moved here -- is pretty
heavy-handed.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 93        Sun Jan 23, 1994
SF-NIC [Nic Grabien]         at 18:22 EST
 
Greg, I didn't read it as DGK asking us to move the post; rather that he was
asking you if you'd be up for having it moved.  We're easy, either way.

Nic

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 94        Sun Jan 23, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 18:59 EST
 
I was thinking of starting "Anglophilia and Fantasy" as a new topic, but we
could certainly move the discussion here.  I think there's something to Greg's
idea that =some= Anglophilia, especially in children's books pre-WWII, has a
pernicious subtext that's worth examining in a broader context.  I =don't=
think of the Bordertown books as particularly Anglophilic (although I believe
they are specifically directed to a YA audience, even when not marketed that
way).

Greg, =could= we copy your posts here, so we all have the same set of
referents?  
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 95        Sun Jan 23, 1994
BETH.MEACHAM                 at 19:14 EST
 
Donald, that caused a serious snarf.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 96        Sun Jan 23, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST                 at 23:13 EST
 
Gosh, Jennifer.  That's the best offer I've had in weeks.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 97        Mon Jan 24, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 00:21 EST
 
Paula Kate, you can copy the posting anywhere you like.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 98        Mon Jan 24, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 08:29 EST
 
A small moment of explanation. My long post beginning with the Delany quote
must have seemed to come out of the blue, but it was actually an =in medias
res= response to the conversation that Greg reported only much later in
Greer's topic; I had expected him to bring it up here, but he apparently
wasn't reading this topic. As the post he eventually made was directly related
to the discussion I had started here, I made the rather offhand and informal
suggestion that it be moved here where it belonged. It suited my sense of
aesthetics.

So let me make this as polite and formal as possible: if everyone,
particularly Greg, is agreeable, I would like Greg's post from Greer Gilman's
topic (10/44) to be moved here so that the entire discussion can be in one
place.

Sorry to seem like I was causing trouble.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 99        Mon Jan 24, 1994
K.HOUGHTON                   at 18:15 EST
 
To seem =as if= you were causing trouble, please. Bad enough to sanction three
"her"s in a first sentence...<G,d&scamper>
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 100       Mon Jan 24, 1994
R.DAVIS68 [Ray]              at 23:34 EST
 
Don, you really offend me when you act so polite and formal. (Just kidding.)

(BTW, were you or GVG responsible for Miss Mannerist?)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 101       Tue Jan 25, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 05:15 EST
 
"Miss Manners of Fantasy," a sidebar in a recent issue of THE NEW YORK REVIEW
OF SF which some of you have seen, was perpetrated to needle me because (for
good and sufficient reason) I left a work-weekend early. It was staff-written,
and neither I nor (interestingly enough) Gordon participated. I was quite
amused.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 102       Tue Jan 25, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 07:23 EST
 
I thought it was a sketch. Saw it in galleys when in NY.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 103       Tue Jan 25, 1994
TNH [Sophronia]              at 17:29 EST
 
Paula Kate (598), it could be interesting. Well, I'd be interested. I tend to
see it as pretensions to gentility rather than Anglophilia, though the former
often produces the latter. I'm a bit defensive about this because it was years
before I could simply accept the fact that I like Anglo-Saxon and Middle
English literature for their own sake. (I was afraid of turning into one of
the female versions of the Greater Hand-Kissing Nerd.) Now that I've admitted
I am powerless to control my craving for literature with thorns and yoghs in
it, I can happily (but not genteely) go back to reading "The Agenbyte of
Inwit" in the bathtub.

My only objection to Gregory's post being replicated here is that I've already
replied to it =in situ=.

Damn, Donald. Does that mean you've already told Madeleine about =Pride and
Extreme Prejudice=?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 104       Wed Jan 26, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 02:25 EST
 
Sophronia, your objection is noted, but I believe you are overruled (rarely,
rarely, just this once?).  I shall attempt to copy the post; watch this space.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 105       Sat Jan 22, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             (Forwarded) 
 
John Clute, Don Keller, and I discussed American anglophilia and its
sillinesses a few weekends ago.  I opined that a genre exists, going back to
the last century, that subsumes all of these works, even unto the Borderland
stories and LITTLE, BIG.  The progenitors of this genre are THE PRINCE AND THE
PAUPER and LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY, and the genre's essence is the consoling
myth of people of no social distinction being brought into contact with -- and
becoming accepted by -- nobles.

It is notable that both these books are by Americans, and that both are set in
England, and that both were written for children.  It is significant that of
the Scribblies' Borderland books, all are politically inchoate, and that the
one that works best as fiction (Will Shetterly's ELSEWHERE) is a Young Adult
book.

Even the so-called "elfpunk" novels, of which Michael Swanwick's THE IRON
DRAGON'S DAUGHTER is the most ambitious, fall (if perhaps a bit uneasily) into
this genre. Swanwick's book, whatever its imaginative resources, proves
unhappily schematic:  the coke-snorting elves are nobs (U), the taxi-driving
dwarves are the underclass (non-U), various fey are rural peasantry, and a few
others get to be bohemians.  The human in the novel is, of course, a socially
mobile wild card, who ends up gaining entree to elvish society.

The more ambitious, adult novels of this genre usually involve a footloose
individual, of no social distinction, who makes friends early in life (often
college) with a  charismatic, rather irresponsible person who eventually
invites the protagonist to her family's house in the country.  The family is
cultured, propertied, comfortable rather than rich:  the wealth is always
rather "old."  Through association (romantic or otherwise) with these "Silly
Sisters," the protagonist is admitted to the world of Fairie, and eventually
attains a kind of upward mobility with the very strict masters therein.

This template describes a large number of novels, including LITTLE, BIG, 
MOONWISE, and BONE DANCE.  The authors who engage in it tend to take part in a
kind of anglophilia that bothers me.  It is not, let us say, the England of
IRA suspects being summarily executed by British commandos in a parking lot,
the England where there are native-born citizens named Hasan, the England of
cities and brutality and decay.

These books remain, for all their occasional excellence (and I am a great
admirer of LITTLE, BIG), children's books of a sort.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 106       Wed Jan 26, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:59 EST
 
It should be noted that I did not so much =participate= in this discussion as
stand and listen; despite its grain of truth, I little agreed with it, but
could not on the spot find a counter. My long post of a week or so ago above
is my oblique reply.

Teresa: I'm afraid so.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 107       Wed Jan 26, 1994
SOUKUP [Martha]              at 13:45 EST
 
I had a conversation about class-structure differences between England and
America with a Brit last week, as it happens.

What about Brits who write happily about classless America?  Are they being
somehow intellectually childish or dishonest as well, if (say) they aren't
going into dimensions of American racism &c?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 108       Wed Jan 26, 1994
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 13:56 EST
 
What might have been the highlights of this conversation, Martha?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 109       Wed Jan 26, 1994
SOUKUP [Martha]              at 14:35 EST
 
The highlights of this conversation might have been that Americans cannot
deeply understand how rigid class lines are in England; whereas Europeans
cannot understand American racism, because a European is looked at first by
class, and only then by race.  This American may have argued that, though it
be an order of magnitude less rigid, classism does have an impact in America,
wherefore dialect coaches do good business training people out of blue-collar
or Southern dialects into what passes for the educated American standard.

There might have been a premiere episode of George Carlin's new sitcom, in
which, the American may have mentioned to the Brit, Carlin affected a blue-
collar accent different than his usual one, which instantly told an American
audience a lot about his character's background, personality, and limited
chances for social mobility.

This American may have actually had more trouble trying to comprehend the
absence of American-style racism than the presence of British-style classism,
which after all she has read lauded in children's books and seen in British
dramatic presentations since she was very small.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 110       Wed Jan 26, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 17:56 EST
 
Some interesting points -- but BONE DANCE?  I think you're stretching that one
a bit to fit the bed.

And as a writer of books for (among other people) children, I'm perturbed by
the use of the term "children's books" to convey the idea that there is
something lacking in works at least theoretically written for adults.  I think
a refinement of the critical terminology is needed in that area.

Debra

PS:  Speaking as somebody whose political views border close on apathetic,
what exactly is meant in this case by "politically inchoate"?


 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 111       Wed Jan 26, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 18:37 EST
 
Deb, read pp. 131-135, the "high tea" scene.  The authors lets us know that
these  are good guys because they have the right books in their sumptuous
("fronted with leaded glass") bookshelves.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 112       Thu Jan 27, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 00:31 EST
 
I confess to being amused by the reference to "the Scribblies' Borderland
books."

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 113       Thu Jan 27, 1994
TROWBRIDGE [Dave T.]         at 00:44 EST
 
I must second Martha's question (611), Greg. Why does it bother you that these
books don't talk about the dark side of British society? Why should they?

Of course, not being privy to the original discussion, I suppose I may have
missed something, but I really don't understand your objection at all.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 114       Thu Jan 27, 1994
SOUKUP [Martha]              at 01:16 EST
 
Mind you, I tend to prefer books that go all into the dark, cynical undersides
of things, but many sorts of books don't.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 115       Thu Jan 27, 1994
LACE [E.Gilligan]            at 01:37 EST
 
Just shooting from the hip, Dave T., any society where only the highlights are
emphasized tends to sound rather "Utopian" and certainly lacks the teeth of
what a realistic society offers.  People read for pleasure, to escape, to find
some form of relief from the constraints of their daily lives, to be sure; but
glorifying a society without hinting at the underbelly is unfair to the reader
and the society.  A body of work that fails to maintain balance, IMO, suffers
on levels beyond just the literary.

Simplistic, idealistic, etc.  Yes, I know.  The above is my opinion.  I
haven't read the other posts being referred to and I wouldn't presume to try
and state Greg's position, ...

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 116       Thu Jan 27, 1994
M.MCHUGH2 [Maureen]          at 09:46 EST
 
If BONE DANCE is a form of elfpunk, then rather than being the wild card
human, I submit that Sparrow is a changeling child.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 117       Thu Jan 27, 1994
BETH.MEACHAM                 at 09:59 EST
 
I don't think that BONE DANCE is elfpunk at all.  It's slightly mannerist,
yes, but not the rest of it.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 118       Thu Jan 27, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 11:02 EST
 
BONE DANCE elf punk? Not at all. No elves for starters. It is mannerist sf
rather than mannerist fantasy, imho.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 119       Thu Jan 27, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 11:51 EST
 
For Christ's sake, I didn't say that BONE DANCE was elfpunk.  You guys are
repeating each other's misreadings.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 120       Thu Jan 27, 1994
LACE [E.Gilligan]            at 15:28 EST
 
Deep breath.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 121       Thu Jan 27, 1994
JKS [Jennifer]               at 20:41 EST
 
Sophronia!  Well met by phosphor!
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 122       Fri Jan 28, 1994
TROWBRIDGE [Dave T.]         at 00:51 EST
 
Well, I suppose so, Lace. I guess it just doesn't bother me as much as some - -
I long ago noticed that I'm a less critical reader than many I've met on
GEnie.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 123       Fri Jan 28, 1994
LACE [E.Gilligan]            at 02:08 EST
 
I'm guilty of that too, Dave, but this topic branches into philosophical
matters where I become far more thoughtful and critical when I'm reading.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 124       Fri Jan 28, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:37 EST
 
I am led to wonder if Jane Austen wrote children's books of a sort.

Also if we are to expect penetrating analyses of the homeless situation and
the racial tension in Crown Heights when EXIT WITHOUT SAVING finally appears.

And I've always thought that Wilkie Collins' novels worked better as fiction
than Charles Dickens'.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 125       Fri Jan 28, 1994
M.MCHUGH2 [Maureen]          at 08:20 EST
 
Okay, I knew I was misreading on BONE DANCE, I just liked the idea that
Sparrow was a changeling.  In terms of Sparrow's position in society it has a
germ of truth in it.

How is BONE DANCE anglophilic?  Or is it?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 126       Sun Jan 30, 1994
TROWBRIDGE [Dave T.]         at 00:33 EST
 
Lousy jkob of prooofing. Indeed. <g>
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 127       Mon Jan 31, 1994
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 04:15 EST
 
 Greg (615):  Do you mean the bookshelf that is full of writers like Alice
 Walker, Maya Angelou, and Zora Neale Hurston?  It's a good thing that 
 the Garcia Marquez books were kept in another room entirely; otherwise
 the good guys would seem too anglophile for words.

   -- Alan Bostick
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 128       Mon Jan 31, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 05:25 EST
 
"I made a circuit around the couches without exactly seeing them and stood in
front of the right-hand case.  What was probably the complete works of Mark
Twain, in leather.  =The Jungle Book.= =The Encyclopedia of Folklore.=  
=Treasure Island.=  Shakespeare, Yeats, Piercy, Eliot, Woolf.  Haliburton's
=Book of Marvels.=  Grieve's herbal.  Stephen Jay Gould and Martin Gardner. 
And those were the ones I recognized.  Who were Gene Wolfe and Alice Walker
and Kenneth Roberts and Jane Austen?  Maya Angelou and John Crowley and Nora
Zeale Hurson?  And there was another bookcase on the other side.

"'I knew you'd do that,' said Mick's voice, and I jumped.  I really =had=
forgotten there were other people in the room.

"'I'm sorry,' I said, and yanked my eyes from the books and back to the pair
of couches.  'Excuse me.'

"China Black's face was uninformative, but Mr. Lyle was smiling broadly. 
'That's only part of the collection,' he said.  'The rest is in the library. 
I'll take you there when you've finished tea.'

"Chango -- the rest.  'Do you have any' -- I fished in my memory for the name -
- 'Marquez?'

"'All of his, I think,' said Mr. Lyle gravely.  'One of my favorites.  Now sit
down and have some tea.'"
 ------------
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Message 129       Mon Jan 31, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:44 EST
 
Actually, that rather describes some conversations I've actually had.
 ------------
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Message 130       Mon Jan 31, 1994
BETH.MEACHAM                 at 10:27 EST
 
The possession of many books equals classist anglophilia?  Heavens to Betsy,
Greg, you're in big trouble!
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 131       Mon Jan 31, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 16:07 EST
 
I'm still not certain how that sequence translates out into pernicious
Anglophilia (which sounds like something you need to visit the doctor for real
quick).

Of course, if the Inventory of the Bookshelves, considered as a bit of
literary business, strikes some readers as only slightly less of an
interruption to the narrative flow than Homer's Catalog of the Ships . . . I
don't know.  I've always enjoyed bits like that, myself.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 132       Mon Jan 31, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 16:29 EST
 
Yup--my favorite parts of MOBY DICK are the whaling stats. Really. And I love
the book.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 133       Mon Jan 31, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 16:54 EST
 
This is why it's so unrewarding to criticize an everyone's darling -- their
defenders leap to twist the critique into something risible.  Beth, you should
know better.

Here's another attempt to privilege a character through bookshelves, from
Harlan Ellison's "All The Lies That Are My Life":

"The library was floor-to-ceiling with books, almost all hardcovers, arranged
alphabetically by author, from Aeschylus, Aldiss and Algren at the left of the
topmost shelf of the left bookcase to the left side of the entranceway. . .to
Zamyatin, Zelazny and Zola at the bottom of the last bookcase all the way
around the enormous room at the right side of the entrance."

One can see the similarities: the attempt to exalt favored SF writers by
introducing them into a canon on the shelves, the approving description of the
sumptuous editions ("in leather," for Bull; "almost all hardcovers" for
Ellison), the architectural splendor of the room as well as of the bookcases
themselves.  This in addition to the central point, which is that the
protagonists are being portrayed as cultured, civilized people through the
titles on their shelves.

It's a lazy trick, and an unpleasantly cozy one:  the authors' audiences are,
by definition, readers, so there is something complicit in seeking the
reader's approval by citing books that the protagonist likes.  The author ends
up basting himself and the reader both in mutual approval, while pretending to
be presenting an objective catalogue in a descriptive passage.

The anglophilia and attempt to plug into class snobbery in the Bull passage
has to do with other things than the fact that the books are classics.  But
I'll bet you knew that.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 134       Mon Jan 31, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 17:32 EST
 
I see the point you're trying to make, Greg.  I don't _agree_ with it, but I
follow your argument.

There does, though, seem to be some kind of on-off personal-taste setting at
work here, down at the basic level of emotional reaction to a particular
technique, since the Ellison quotation didn't bother me either.  (And I'm
neither a big fan nor a big non-fan of Ellison's writing.)

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 135       Mon Jan 31, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 18:26 EST
 
Maybe the author is simply using a kind of character shorthand. ANd you are
reading "author" where you should read ":character"? Just a thought.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 136       Mon Jan 31, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 20:49 EST
 
I suspect the point Greg is making (and one that, in my opinion, ought not to
be lightly dismissed) is this: Many of the books Emma mentions are a bit on
the difficult side--that is, they are books that one cannot enjoy casually or
easily, but require (and, indeed, reward) intense, *comitted* reading. 
Marquez certainly falls into that category, as does Eliot, and perhaps so do
Wolfe and Crowly.  Most readers do not have the time to commit that much of
their lives to reading; the exceptions tend to be in the upper classes, which
makes worship of especially those authors a bit elitist.  I'm not entirely
certain I agree, but it is certainly something worth considering.

Your other point, Greg, about it being too easy to get the readers' sympathy
by showing a character who loves reading as much as the writer does, is,
perhaps, valid, but I couldn't say because I've always been a sucker for it.
That is, it works too well in my case for me to be able to honestly object to
it.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 137       Mon Jan 31, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 21:47 EST
 
My take on that passage, when I read it, was that these are educated people of
literary taste, =not= merely rich people.  Of course, in California, what
passes for upper class (outside of Pasadena, anyway) most emphatically does
=not= include people who read John Crowley (or much of anybody else).  People
in California who would own that list of books are more likely to be bohemian
than UC.

Perhaps in the East things are different?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 138       Mon Jan 31, 1994
P.GRANZEAU [Pete]            at 21:51 EST
 
A tour of my bookshelf will lead the observer to the conclusion that I am a
totally unread, illiterate clod...er, hm, I wonder if I ought to....
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 139       Tue Feb 01, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 20:10 EST
 
So, Greg, what about the library scene in "The Fifth Head of Cerberus"?
Commits the same sin of conflating sf with "real" literature. What's the
difference, if any?

And what about that Jane Austen, anyway?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 140       Wed Feb 02, 1994
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 02:34 EST
 
 Greg (638):  In wriggling away from the "Anglophilia" canard, you've
 brought up a very interesting point.

 Here's a quote for you:

 "By the head of the bed, on a table near a tensor lamp, books
 were piled irregularly:

 "A bunch on the Hell's Angels: Thompson and Reynolds/McClure; four
 cheaply bound, two-dollar paperbacks: _Angels_on_Wheels_ and
 _Weekend_in_Hell,_a_True_Story_of_the_Angels_as_Told_by_Millicent_
 _Brash_ -- he read the forst paragraph of ill-lined type, shook his
 head, and put it down.  A book called _Bike_Bitch_ was apparently the
 sequel to (same cover/different author) _Bike_Bastard._  Under that was
 _The_Poems_of_Rimbaud,_ with English at the bottom of the pages; then a
 paperback _Selected_Letters_of_Keats;_ next, Dickey's _Deliverance;_ a
 green, hard-cover book of logs and trigonometric functions, place held
 by a white enamel, circular slide rule.  There was sundry science
 fiction by Russ (something called _The_Female_Man_), Zelazny, and Disch.
  The last book he picked up had a purple and gold reproduction of a
 Leonor Fini for cover:  _Evil_Companions._  He opened it in the middle,
 read from the top of the left-hand page to the bottom of the right,
 closed it, frowning, and went to the bamboo, and pushed it aside."

 From DHALGREN by Samuel R. Delany, Bantam Books, New York, 1975, pp 47-48.

 A number of pertinent things are going on here.  First, it is a textbook
 case of the establish-a-character-with-a-shopping-list device.  It is
 clear from this list that Tak Loufer is queer for outlaw bikers.

 Secondly, in opposition to Greg's example's taken from Emma Bull and
 Harlan Ellison, the catalog of books doesn't convey gentility and the
 upper class.  On the contrary, despite the Keats, the math tables
 (damned funny place for them!), and the "sundry science fiction," it
 conveys a lower class atmosphere, filled with a sordid menace.

 Lastly, the science fiction books aren't so much lent distinction by
 their inclusion as lend the other titles in the catalog some of their
 distinction.  Russ, Zelazny, and Disch are (at least at the time
 DHALGREN was written) high-end (upper-class?) SF writers.  These books
 don't really fit in with the others -- if there was one Bantam Book
 edited by Frederik Pohl on Loufer's shelf, given who he his, I would bet
 that it would not be THE FEMALE MAN but DHALGREN itself!  Moreover,
 Loufer stoops low in other genres to find the stuff he's looking for;
 why does he settle only for the best in SF?  

   -- Alan Bostick

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 141       Wed Feb 02, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:55 EST
 
Nice example, Alan.

I was discussing the issues at hand with Madeleine Robins (who hasn't been on
line lately), and she pointed out that another way to read the situation is
that America is still a young culture, and Americans are fascinated with the
more highly-structured, lasted-longer European (and specifically British)
culture. (I'm putting this rather badly...) Americans simultaneously crave
that class structure (the Anglophilia) and rebel against it (the idea that
it's socially malleable and negotiable). It's as much honest interest as
escapist wish fulfillment.

Also a by-blow of the discussion is that Hammett and Chandler are a
specifically American example of getting to know and being accepted by one's
social superiors.

On a totally different subject: the review by Greg Sandow in ENTERTAINMENT
WEEKLY of the new Tori Amos album is a particularly good example of a critic
not allowing his antipathy to dominate his impartiality: he really didn't
=like= the album, but could not fail to be impressed by it.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 142       Thu Feb 03, 1994
L.BAILES1 [LennyB]           at 00:02 EST
 
Maybe because the guy has ambivalent urges?   He's got a fine mind, but yearns
to bypass it and be physical and primal.
 ------------
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Message 143       Fri Feb 04, 1994
SF-NIC [Nic Grabien]         at 16:18 EST
 
500 messages from this topic have been captured for the library.

nic
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 144       Sat Feb 05, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 00:32 EST
 
Alan:  It isn't Anglophilia in Delany's case, but it's still a lazy device.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 145       Sat Feb 05, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 07:03 EST
 
I disagree about its being a lazy device, Greg. If it is the ONLY thing used,
yes. But if it is part of a larger picture, it is simply a device, without the
pejorative added.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 146       Sun Feb 06, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 13:05 EST
 
What Jane Said.

And what about FIFTH HEAD, Greg?

And what about Jane Austen?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 147       Sun Feb 06, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 19:54 EST
 
Don, you young fool, the scene in THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS has nothing to do
with this discussion.  I was criticizing the lazy device of limning a
character's personality by showing the reader his bookshelf -- more
specifically, seeking to make points with the reader by showing what neat
taste the character has -- and the scene in 5H (it's set in a public library)
does not bear on this at all, save that it mentions the titles of a few books.

What does Jane Austen have to do with this?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 148       Mon Feb 07, 1994
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 02:07 EST
 
 Greg (144, 147): "Lazy?"  What's lazy about it?  Compare and contrast
 examining bookshelves as a way of limning character to other methods
 that you may have in mind.

 An exercise for the reader: find some other, less lazy way of expressing
 the nature of the character who has the following books on his or her
 shelf:

 THE TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO
 BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS (Stephen Jay Gould)
 DELTA OF VENUS and LITTLE BIRDS (Anais Nin)
 A LESBIAN LOVE ADVISOR (Celeste West)
 THE MOVIEGOER (Walker Percy)
 YOU NEED NEVER LOSE AT BRIDGE (Victor Mollo)
 STRANGE DEVICES OF THE SUN AND MOON (Lisa Goldstein)
 THE EMPEROR'S NEW MIND (Roger Penrose)
 TAKE THIS BOOK TO THE GYNECOLOGIST WITH YOU (Maleskey and Inlander)
 BRAIDED LIVES, FLY AWAY HOME, VIDA, and SUMMER PEOPLE (Marge Piercy)
 THE WORLD OF PREMCHAND (David Rubin)
 THE FAMILY MOSKAT (Isaac Bashevis Singer)
 THEOPHILUS NORTH (Thornton Wilder)
 THE TRIAL (Franz Kafka)
 ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
 PUSHCARTS AND DREAMERS (Max Rosenfeld)
 ULYSSES (James Joyce)
 THE ABYSS (Marguerite Yourcenar)
 DOUBLE DISCOVERY (Jessamyn West)
 NOT A FREE SHOW (Helen Schulman)
 THE SOPHIE HOROWITZ STORY; GIRLS, VISIONS AND EVERYTHING; AFTER DELORES;
 and PEOPLE IN TROUBLE (Sarah Schulman)

 By the way, it looks to me like you're shifting the ground of the
 debate.  "Lazy" and "Anglophilic" are not synonomous.

   -- Alan Bostick
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 149       Mon Feb 07, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 05:59 EST
 
Jesus Christ.  One apologist fatuously tells me that Anglophilia isn't the
same as laziness, and when I explain that I hadn't been equating the two,
someone else accuses me of trying to "shift the ground of the debate" from one
to another.  I give up.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 150       Tue Feb 08, 1994
S.THOMPSON8 [Sarah]          at 00:45 EST
 
What I find interesting about all this is that the last time the question of
alleged Anglophilia in Mannerpunks came up in this topic-- about a year and a
half ago, I think it was-- everyone denied it vigorously and cited many
examples of non-Anglo influences on American culture (which I thought were
rather beside the point).  Surely you don't deny something so heatedly unless
you agree that it is a bad thing.

Now that the question has come up again, though, people seem generally willing
to admit to Anglophilia but committed to defending it as a good thing, or at
least not necessarily a bad one.  What's going on here?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 151       Tue Feb 08, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 09:16 EST
 
I don't feel particularly inclined to apologize for my Anglophilia.

Greg: Wolfe does, however, put sf books in with "real" books as you accused
some of our other examples of doing.

By the standards you apply in your long post shifted here, it seems to me that
Jane Austen could be argued to be "essentially a juvenile writer." No? 
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 152       Tue Feb 08, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 11:47 EST
 
No.

The fact that Gene Wolfe occasionally has one of his characters come across a
book that actually exists outside Wolfe's imagination has nothing to do with
the ploy of an author making points for his character by having him or her
like books that the reader is apt to admire.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 153       Tue Feb 08, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 12:17 EST
 
Really--what is the difference, then, Greg? It seems to me that the ploy is
the same, just that perhaps you admire Wolfe and therefore it is alright to
use this? I don;t think you can have it both ways. 
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 154       Tue Feb 08, 1994
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 13:38 EST
 
Books and their titles are always pregnant with significance in Wolfe. A book
is probably not simply a book.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 155       Tue Feb 08, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 21:39 EST
 
Aw, c'mon, Lois.  Wolfe just throws stuff in for no reason; you know that.
Next thing you know, you'll claim there are symbolic elements in Wolfe's
stories.  Sheesh.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 156       Tue Feb 08, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 22:01 EST
 
Oh Christ, do I have to explain this again?  I can't believe this.

Jane.  Listen.  The scene that Don alludes to is one in which the protagonist
goes to the public library, and looks through the books, all ordered alpha by
author, near the Ws.  Various real and imaginary titles are mentioned in
passing.  The protagonist is looking for a book by his father; this is one of
the clues that will allow the very attentive reader to figure out the
protagonist's name.

This has =nothing to do= with the practice of making points for one's
protagonist by showing his bookcase to be full of the kind of books the reader
can be expected to admire.  Let's examine why.

1. Wolfe's protagonist isn't looking at his own books.  He's in the
   library.

2. He doesn't necessarily like the books he is looking at.  He mistakes
   a novel for an engineering text; he is not much of a reader.

3. Wolfe is not trying to make us like his character.  Wolfe's character
   is not, in fact, very likeable.

Do. you. understand. this?

I

can't

keep

simplifying

further.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 157       Tue Feb 08, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 22:51 EST
 
We

understand.

We

don't

necessarily

agree.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 158       Tue Feb 08, 1994
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 23:19 EST
 
Steve, I"ve heard the odd rumor to that effect, but naturally I give no credit
to such nonsense.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 159       Wed Feb 09, 1994
G.BLANKENSH2 [Glen B.]       at 00:58 EST
 
I'm still puzzled by the notion that examining a character's bookshelves is
"lazy," and I'm a bit perplexed by the amount of auctorial intent you manage
to read into this particular act, Greg.

I find the contents of peoples' bookshelves a much more reliable guide to
their personality and character than, say, the clothes they wear or the car
they drive.

In the examples you cited, I simply thought the authors were trying to
delineate character - not "score points".

But perhaps this reader doesn't admire all the works the critic expects him
to.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 160       Wed Feb 09, 1994
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 02:21 EST
 
 Greg (152):  Do you really think that Chip Delany expects his readers
 are apt to admire BIKE BASTARD (a sequel to BIKE BITCH)?

 Not only is this bookshelf argument silly, it is tangential.  Greg,
 could you elaborate on your claim that BONE DANCE is anglophilic? 
 Specific examples would be helpful.

   -- Alan Bostick
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 161       Wed Feb 09, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 07:20 EST
 
Doyle has it ght. Don't condscend. You cannot mkae me run, Jane, run.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 162       Wed Feb 09, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:46 EST
 
It still could be argued, Greg (though I'm not; I hope it's clear that I'm one
of the people who completely disagrees with your point ) that Wolfe is cozying
up to his readers by using books (THE MILE- LONG SPACESHIP) that they will
recognize. What would a Proust scholar (who would probably otherwise enjoy the
story) make of that scene?

A message from Micole, who I've been discussing this issue with: "Why does
Greg think BONE DANCE is Anglophilic, when it's obvious that its strongest
influence is Zora Neal Hurston?"

She also wants to know why Greg thinks Will Shetterly's ELSEWEHER "works
better as literature" than the other books we're discussing.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 163       Wed Feb 09, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 08:05 EST
 
It could be argued (not by me, though) that Will's use of song titles, or
lists of stores passed by, or bits of clothing constitute the same kind of
"lazy": characterizing that a list of books in a character's library do.

I think it all goes into basic stew.

(By the by, I think the only truly "lazy:" method is to have the character
look into a mirror and comment on his/her own looks.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 164       Wed Feb 09, 1994
D.DVORKIN1 [Medic]           at 08:40 EST
 
I'm an Anglophile and it's neither good nor bad.  It's just me.

                                                   Daniel the Medic
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 165       Wed Feb 09, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 09:00 EST
 
Anglophiles Anonymous?

I've always found the Inventory of the Bookshelves trope a good way to pick up
ideas for future reading.  I also rather like the this-is-a-book-talking-
about-people-reading-books effect -- there's probably a pomo word for it
somewhere. Readers who don't like that effect probably don't like the trope,
either.

Of course, as a medievalist I was corrupted long since by the medieval
tendency to employ lists of _everything_, so my taste is probably suspect.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 166       Wed Feb 09, 1994
D.DVORKIN1 [Medic]           at 21:09 EST
 
Using book titles to help set a scene, like using music or movies or other
types of art, can add a great deal of richness to the setting.

                                                   Daniel the Medic
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 167       Thu Feb 10, 1994
TROWBRIDGE [Dave T.]         at 00:20 EST
 
What Glen said (159).
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 168       Thu Feb 10, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 00:36 EST
 
Better by far book titles than the brand names of everything in the clothes
closet.  "Joe grabbed a pair of Levi's and his favorite Bugle Boy shirt,
scooped up his Nikes, and ran for the door in his BVDs."

By the eway, I judge real people by their bookshelves.  Always.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 169       Thu Feb 10, 1994
CYN.WARD [ViciousSistr]      at 00:53 EST
 
Lots of people do, Paula Kate:  "You've READ all these BOOKS?"

From Samuel Delany's Introduction to FUNDAMENTAL DISCH:  "I've brought up
(Descending) in dozens of conversations with writers and editors, as one of
the most economical jobs of character sketching I know.  Disch paints his
character largely through the use of lists, in one case a list of items in an
almost empty kitchen cabinet, and a page or so later, a shopping list.  It
struck me then and still does as a marvelously Chekhovian triumph that
certainly singles out the tale for any writer with interest in the technical
side of the craft."

The shopping list includes (as "First, the staples"):  "two Victorian novels
he had never read, VANITY FAIR and MIDDLEMARCH; the Sayers translation of
Dante, and a two-volume anthology of German plays, none of which he had read
and few he had even heard of."

Even after your very. careful. explanation, Greg, I still cannot perceive the
distinction you have made.  It's just a matter of craftsmanship which is
sloppy when used alone.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 170       Thu Feb 10, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 04:32 EST
 
Mumph.  I can almost accept the idea that it's "lazy" to enlist the reader's
sympathy by filling his bookshelves with things the reader will like. Almost. 
But I much prefer this to stories where the writer never manages to enlist my
sympathy for the characters at all.

Moreover, such a device will not work in a story as long as a novel unless the
author has the skill to maintain it throughout the book, and to show us that
the character is consistent with his reading tastes.

Finally, there's a fine line between "lazy" and "efficient."  I can imagine
such a list to be one thing that bothered me if the book, as a whole, failed;
but if the rest of the book worked, I cannot imagine singling that out as a
flaw.

And at the end of the day, we're all Anglophiles.


 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 171       Thu Feb 10, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 07:13 EST
 
The distinction was between the two examples I cited (from Emma Bull and
Harlan Ellison) and the example (Gene Wolfe) which Don puckishly brought up,
which was not relevant.  Don himself acknowledges that; but Jane, who has not
read the Wolfe passage and does not know it, keeps insisting that there is no
difference, save that I like Wolfe and don't (she imagines) like Ellison and
Bull, so want it "both ways."

Everyone is free to agree with her.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 172       Thu Feb 10, 1994
H.HERTZOFF [Hilary]          at 07:29 EST
 
What Dabra said.  Including the part about being a medievalist...
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 173       Thu Feb 10, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 08:02 EST
 
So what about the Disch lists, then, Greg? (Thanks, Cyndy, for quoting that; I
had been planning to bring it up myself.)

Let's get to basics here, Greg: is it aesthetically reprehensible to use =any=
sort of shorthand characterization? Is it aesthetically reprehensible to try
and make one's characters likeable? What about Delany's short essay on "charm"
which I reproduced above? Is this a =fundamental= disagreement, or is it (as
Steve suggests) a matter of craft?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 174       Thu Feb 10, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 09:20 EST
 
Greg--why are you putting words in my mouth?  I am simply saying that you
can't say it works in one instance but you refuse its credibility in another.
Rather say that in the one instance it works because....in the other instance
it doesn't work because....
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 175       Thu Feb 10, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 09:22 EST
 
Of course it's not reprehensible to use "shorthand" in limning character. The
question is what constitutes shorthand and what constitutes short cuts.  Lists
aren't necessarily short cuts, but citing book titles in order to ingratiate
the character to the reader may well be.

The Disch lists are again, not relevant.  Disch is not trying to get his
readers to like his protagonist.  The books in his possession are fine, but
they are merely ordinary college texts; the point is that Disch's feckless
protagonist hasn't read them.  Nothing wrong with saying that.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 176       Thu Feb 10, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 09:31 EST
 
Better. 
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 177       Thu Feb 10, 1994
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 09:56 EST
 
I think the key to Greg's objection, which may be a tad subjective, lies in
the term "ingratiate".  

It's as if the author is saying:  hey, look at these books my guy reads!  Way-
cool titles!  You think they're way-cool, don't you?  We're all way-cool,
right -- you, me, my character.  =We= know what are the right books to read.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 178       Thu Feb 10, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 11:56 EST
 
Jane, I'm not putting words in your mouth.  Go back and look at what you said
in #153.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 179       Thu Feb 10, 1994
G.BLANKENSH2 [Glen B.]       at 12:05 EST
 
But the author =isn't= saying that.  The author is listing books on a
character's bookshelves.  The perception that this is an attempt to
"ingratiate" or "win points" or label the character a "good guy" or a "cool
guy" and so on is a produced by the reader's subjective reaction to those
titles, and the reader's attempt to intuit the motivations of the author.

I don't think the list of titles (or the description of the bookshelves, for
that matter) in the Emma Bull example was meant to impress the reader. 

It was meant to impress =Sparrow=.

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Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 180       Thu Feb 10, 1994
G.BLANKENSH2 [Glen B.]       at 12:07 EST
 
Cross-posted.  That was a reply to Lois's 177.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 181       Thu Feb 10, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 12:38 EST
 
By all means, let us eschew the dragging of red herrings across the trail of
argument.

For that matter, we've just about deconstructed those bookcases into a pile of
boards and glass.  If we're going to talk Things About Mannerpunk that Can
Sometimes be Irritating, how about the tendency of the subgenre to privilege
good-looking, well-spoken sons-of-bitches?

Debra


 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 182       Thu Feb 10, 1994
JOELR                        at 12:48 EST
 
Errps.  But there isn't a Sparrow; Sparrow is a fictional construct.  Any
attempt to "impress" Sparrow is an attempt -- witting or unwitting -- to have
an effect on the reader.  (Not, of course, of necessity the same effect as on
the character.)

Which still doesn't make the technique wrong, or invalid, or anything of the
sort.  The usual test of technique is how well it works on the intended
audience, and few writers write for the critics, and only a few more for an
audience that includes folks as -- technical term coming up here --
sophisticated as Greg Feeley.  (Or, arguably, as oversophisticated.) Having
the character look in the mirror, showing a selection of his or her bookshelf,
sending him off on a gaming session or out to lunch with his friends . . .
none of those work as well when the reader is too heavily clued as to their
function.

Which is one of the reasons that most people, when they become writers, enjoy
reading less.  Too little "Wow."  Too much -- "Oh, that's what he's doing",
and too much substitution of "Oh, I see what he's doing but wow, anyway" for
"wow."




 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 183       Thu Feb 10, 1994
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 12:57 EST
 
Replying to Glen.  That, of course, is why I called the technique subjective. 
Because the author is counting on producing that subjective response in the
reader -- in effect, assuming things about the reader's values.  In one way,
it selects a certain sort of reader;  in another, it attempts to influence the
reader in a certain way.

And if the reader (or the critic) fails to share these values being advanced
by the author, then the reader's subjective response is likely to be an
increased irritation with the technique.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 184       Thu Feb 10, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 13:27 EST
 
I didn;t say, Greg, that I had or had not read the Wolfe. I didn;t say that
you didn;t admire the other folks as well. I just said that you used it to
show what a good writer WOlfe was, having just said
 that the other writers could NOT use it. And I was wondering how that
technique which you had just hated, you could now find acceptable.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 185       Thu Feb 10, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 13:38 EST
 
Different technique, Jane; I keep saying this.  Wolfe isn't showing the
contents of the character's bookshelves in order to give a favorable
impression of the character.  Really.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 186       Thu Feb 10, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 15:00 EST
 
Ah.  I think I see what may be happening.  To someone concerned with how the
book works from out front (dare I say, to a critic), the two instances --
since they seem to have different goals --are two different techniques.  To a
writer, or to someone concerned with process more than effect, they're the
same technique being turned to two different ends.  Or something.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 187       Thu Feb 10, 1994
SOUKUP [Martha]              at 16:09 EST
 
 I wouldn't attempt to ingratiate my characters to a reader with a list of
books, because I wouldn't imagine I knew which books would impress the reader.
I could see listing books because I thought it described the characters.

 Is it really that easy to know what books the bulk of one's readers will not
only like, but find impressive?  I'll have to take people's word for it.

 The question is still on the table whether it is wrong for a writer to
attempt to ingratiate a character to the reader.  (And which readers?)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 188       Thu Feb 10, 1994
SHERWOOD                     at 19:30 EST
 
Debra, anent the well-spoken, good-looking sons-of-bitchs, don't forget well
born.  (Back to Anglophilia...)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 189       Thu Feb 10, 1994
T.EDGERTON [Teresa]          at 20:50 EST
 
The question has been asked (and so far not answered) whether Jane Austen's
books fit into the class of books that Greg is talking about ... presumably
because they don't deal with all the harsh realities of life.

But Austen wasn't selecting what she wrote about in order to create some sort
of idealized view of upper crust society; she was writing only about that
segement of society that she knew best, from personal experience. She wrote
mostly about country gentry, and you see almost as few aristocrats as you see
gutter-snipes.  That's one difference.

And when you do see aristocrats in Austen, they are very different from the
characters in the books under discussion. Where the author has a bad case of
anglophilia, the nobility may be wicked, but they are never vulgar.  Their
vices are usually sufficiently grandiose that they actually, in a perverse
sort of way, add to the impression that they -are- indeed superior people. 
Often, they have a kind of ... well, almost demonic sexual energy, that works
a kind of fascination on the reader.  In other words, you may hate them, but
you'd secretly (or maybe not so secretly) like to meet them.

I don't think that anyone who has read PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and delighted in
the ludicrous vulgarity of Lady Catherine could accuse Jane Austen of
worshipping the aristocracy.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 190       Thu Feb 10, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 21:00 EST
 
It wasn't me who brought up Jane Austen.  I don't think anything I said can be
charged against her works.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 191       Thu Feb 10, 1994
T.EDGERTON [Teresa]          at 22:50 EST
 
I know that it wasn't you, Greg.  I'm under the impression that Austen was
brought up because you rather like her. A sort of attempt to convict -you- of
the very thing you are complaining about--except that, as I said, it doesn't
quite work.


 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 192       Thu Feb 10, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 23:40 EST
 
Yes, I rather like Jane Austen.  She is indisputably the greatest English
novelist prior to the Victorians, and probably the equal of any of them.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 193       Thu Feb 10, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 23:53 EST
 
Martha and Joel are right.  Is there anything wrong using these devices to win
the sympathy of the reader, other than that you, Greg, happen to notice them? 
To me, that's like saying witty dialogue is a cheap way to make the viewer
enjoy a movie.  Well, sure.  That's what I go to movies *for*.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 194       Fri Feb 11, 1994
LACE [E.Gilligan]            at 00:22 EST
 
Debra (says she bound and determined to snag the alternative conversation and
run with it), re: "the tendency of the subgenre to privilege good- looking,
well-spoken sons-of-bitches?" I think you've got something there and my
instinctual reaction is to consider then the other genre where I found that as
a predominate feature ... i.e., we harken back to the dark, dangerous b*stard
so popular in Romance novels.

Manners being what they are, one wouldn't necessarily want one's hero bruting
his way through the problems, one expects finesse and polish ... hopefully,
from the protagonists AND the antagonist.  When I'm reading a non- Mannerist
novel where a character/hero must use physical prowess to succeed (aka, "the
fight scene"), if it's well-written, I enjoy the contest ... the battle and it
certainly gets the adrenaline pumping and drags the reader (in this case, me)
into the mesh of the story.  In a mannerist novel, though, the battles are of
wits and words.  The snide, although well- mannered/polished, snipe found in
the Mannerist work is, then, not so very different from the suckerpunch, or
the surprising show of physical strength, prowess used in other novels.

A good one-liner is good for a rich chuckle at the expense of the villain ...
but is that necessarily a bad thing? If one-liners make up for the substance
of a work, then it is certainly a device and a cheap one at that. I confess
one of the things that draws me to Mannerist fiction is the verbal repartee,
the battle of wits, but there ARE nice people who find themselves in
situations ... they don't always have to be "good-looking, well-spoken sons-of-
bitches," but they frequently are.  Why? Romantic modelling.  Most Mannerist
novels involve some degree of romance, so writers naturally fall back to that
cultural/societal modelling which the Romance genre has thoroughly plumbed ...
in some cases, turning that character modelling into unfortunate stereotypes
which you have identified.

Fore!

Next?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 195       Fri Feb 11, 1994
JOELR                        at 00:40 EST
 
It's a subjective thing, Steve.  Anything that interferes with the reader's
willing suspension of disbelief is a flaw from his point of view.
 (Excepting, of course, the case of those readers who don't suspend disbelief
willingly or otherwise; from my point of view, they're either aliens or
eunuchs, and I don't understand either.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 196       Fri Feb 11, 1994
LACE [E.Gilligan]            at 01:38 EST
 
Oh, hmmm ... I would chose to run with a change in discussion just when the
other starts being a ... well, when the temprature lowers.  Vulgarity in
aristocracy? Hmmm.  Sounds interesting.

Mind you, in my previous post 194, when I say "Most Mannerist novels involve
some degree of romance, so writers naturally fall back to that
cultural/societal modelling which the Romance genre has thoroughly plumbed
..." I do not intend to say that the Romance genre established the romantic
modelling of our society.  The modelling existed before and is, thus, a source
of societal subconscious preferences that the Romance genre has drawn from.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 197       Fri Feb 11, 1994
D.DVORKIN1 [Medic]           at 02:24 EST
 
What ViciousSister said.  Scene after barracks inspection:

Sgt.:  "You really read all these books?"

Me:  "Well, yeah.  And lots more that I don't have out, actually."

Sgt.:  "You scare me."

_In that case,_ I thought but didn't say, _you scare me too._

                                                   Daniel the Medic
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 198       Fri Feb 11, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 03:00 EST
 
What Martha Said: that seems to me, actually, the key question her. (Here.)
Greg?

Joel: Some of these people are, in a sense, writing for a critic, namely me,
since I regard myself as a critic =and= as part of their particular audience.
(Which latter Greg obviously is not.)

I was the one who brought up Jane Austen, and no, it didn't really work.

Or to ask my first question in a different way: Is Frances in BONE DANCE a
likeable character?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 199       Fri Feb 11, 1994
D.DVORKIN1 [Medic]           at 04:21 EST
 
What Sempai said.

                                                   Daniel the Medic
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 200       Fri Feb 11, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 06:10 EST
 
I have said that the device is a lazy one, and it is used in pursuit of a
dubious goal:  agressively recruiting the reader's sympathies.

Can we agree that this goal (never mind my feelings about it for now) can be
pursued in a coarse and manipulative way?

Here's an example with fewer hot buttons.  In John Henry Patrick's film "The
January Man," a screenwriter's film, with an unusually complicated script, the
protagonist (played by Kevin Kline) is a NYC cop who has been hounded off the
force for willful eccentricities and iconoclasm.  Turns out that a serial
killer is plaguing the city so badly that a colleague goes looking for him.

Hounded off the force, the protagonist has taken a job as a fireman.  (This is
condescending toward firemen, but never mind.)  His colleague finds him at the
scene of a fire.  He's inside the burning building, hasn't been seen.  Our
first view of the guy is him bursting through a burning doorway, a small child
in his arms.

I think this coarse and manipulative.   Well hell, one might say, firemen =do=
rescue small kids -- I think it was a girl, and a white one -- from burning
buildings.  And it's important to establish that the protagonist was a good
guy (if he had been located at the firehouse sitting around, he would
obviously have been a schmuck).  And all narrative is manipulative anyway.

Yes, but.  I think some tricks are permissible and some aren't.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 201       Fri Feb 11, 1994
JOELR                        at 09:58 EST
 
Don:  well, sure.


Greg:  while I had other problems with the move, that scene worked for me, but
I go into a movie theater perfectly willing -- eager, in fact -- to have my
feelings manipulated, and in a fundamental way don't understand those who
don't.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 202       Fri Feb 11, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 12:47 EST
 
"Some tricks are permissible and some aren't."

Right.  Try using a word like "permissible" around this crowd and see how far
it gets you.  ("Rules?  In a knife fight?")

Some tricks work and some don't.  Some tricks work for some people and not for
others.  Some tricks only work some of the time.

But _permissible_?

Nonsense.

 Debra

 (To change venue a bit -- about tricks being permissible still -- I turn to
the world of the professional magician, where =tricks= is what it's all about.
Let's look at one technique -- the use of a confederate.  There is
disagreement in the ranks as to whether it's permissible to use confederates.
(A confederate is a person, seemingly a member of the audience, who is
(unbeknownst to the rest of the audience) an assistant to the magician.)  For
example, Paul Fleming says "...it may be remarked that no conjurer worthy of
the name will employ confederates in working his wonders.  To do so is clearly
a confession of an inability to get one's effects by legitimate means which
... do exist and are recognized as such by the leading exponents of the magic
art," while, on the same subject Edwin Sachs says, "Conjuring, it must be
borne in mind, is not like cricket, or rowing, or shooting, or anything else;
there is no _legitimate_ means of arriving at anything through its medium. 
The wished-for result must be produced. . . ."

  -- JDM)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 203       Fri Feb 11, 1994
G.BLANKENSH2 [Glen B.]       at 14:02 EST
 
If the only point of the child-rescue scene in THE JANUARY MAN was to
establish that the protagonist is a "good guy", then, yes, I'd consider it
"coarse and manipulative."

But, just from memory (since I don't have it on tape), I'd say that that
particular scene has at least four different goals, only one of which would be
served by encountering the protagonist lounging about the firehouse.

I repeat that I am amazed at the amount of auctorial intent you manage to read
into various scenes, Greg, and surprised at how easily you manage to be
irritated by the conclusions you jump to.

And... taking a job as a fireman is "condescending" to firemen?  How so?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 204       Fri Feb 11, 1994
M.MCHUGH2 [Maureen]          at 14:12 EST
 
I haven't seen JANUARY MAN but PRETTY WOMAN is another film which is blatently
manipulative.  In this case the manipulation bothered me because it was used
to sell the audience an untruth.  But I am interested in Damon's question,
what's the difference between manipulation and communication.  In an important
sense, I don't think there is one.

But I don't use bookshelves to characterize, I don't have my characters look
in a mirror to describe them (although at the beginning of the next novel I
have a character study his reflection in a window looking out on darkness, I
hope that the point is different.)  I don't do it because I think it's
eventually ineffective.  It's like Danielle Steele telling me that her heroine
is beautiful, smart and full of business savvy.  Why does the heroine always
think the obvious and most banal, and why are her business decisions
simplistic and often wrong?  For my character to be well read, he can't just
have bookshelf full of books, he has to associate his own self-conciousness
about memory with Proust's madelaine.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 205       Fri Feb 11, 1994
SOUKUP [Martha]              at 15:44 EST
 
 Most techniques can be used in a coarse and manipulative way.  Most
techniques can be used in a surprising and subtle way.  <shrug>

 There may be exceptions on either end, licks that are of their nature too
tricky for a bad writer to even begin to approach, and other licks that can
only be used to advance Badness and Yuckiness.  It would seem to me silly to
assume the one under discussion is one of those.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 206       Fri Feb 11, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 16:28 EST
 
Glen, what are the three other goals that are successfully established by the
child-in-the-burning-building scene?  I did not feel that there was ever more
than one track engaged in that film, however pretentious the one.

The scene was condescending for its implication that a cop who washes out can
take up fire fighting, and be a hero.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 207       Fri Feb 11, 1994
LACE [E.Gilligan]            at 18:00 EST
 
Greg, a couple of things here:

1.  Kline (who played the lead in THE JANUARY MAN) had not washed up as a cop.
The other cops didn't like him, they called him a "f*ck up" but he had been a
hero, had been a crime solver, he just broke all the rules and irritated the
heck out of everyone.  If he'd "washed out" as a cop, the other cops wouldn't
have come looking for him to help solve the case.  He had also been set
up/framed as being on the take by his brother (the police commissioner who
came looking for him in that scene).

2.  What were the other points brought out in that scene? Hmmm.  Well, he was
still an independent rule-breaker, that he had picked himself up and moved on,
that he was compelled to take risks and be some sort of a hero ...

Bad example, IMO.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 208       Fri Feb 11, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 19:14 EST
 
Art and manipulation again. Hmm.

=Very= interesting post, Maureen.

I'm going to try an experiment here, which I'm hoping may address some of the
issues here and some of the issues in Greg's topic (there's a lot of leakover.
Next post: an anecdote from life.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 209       Fri Feb 11, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 19:16 EST
 
Veronica said, "I'd like to read =Pandora by Holly Hollander=.

"Oh, don't bother," said Micole. "It's just =Podkayne of Massachusetts=."

After I'd picked myself up off the floor, Micole told Veronica, "I knew that
would get him."

Still laughing, I said, "It's Illinois, though, you know."

"Yeah, but it doesn't sound as good," said Micole.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 210       Fri Feb 11, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 19:18 EST
 
Essay question: if this were a passage from a work of fiction, would it be
considered a legitimate one?

(P.S. I haven't seen any reason to change the names.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 211       Fri Feb 11, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 20:11 EST
 
Greg: Some attempts at manipulation bother me; I can usually tell because I
find myself saying, "I'm being manipulated," rather than just continuing to
read.  But I haven't found any attempts that always send up alarm bells
whenever they're attempted however they're pulled off.  Certainly the example
you give from FINDER didn't bother me.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 212       Fri Feb 11, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 20:57 EST
 
Steve:  I haven't read FINDER.  You mean BONE DANCE.

Lace:  The Kevin Kline character was washed up as a cop because, as you say,
he had been framed.  My point -- that a sufficiently heroic fellow of great
brilliance can go into fire fighting, without the usual years of training, and
be an extravagant hero when next seen is condescending toward real fire
fighters -- remains.

And I don't really think those other themes you feel the scene developed are
any different from the one I adduced.  Only one thing was going on in that
scene, which I felt a manipulative one.

Steve:  Did the example I cited from Harlan Ellison bother you?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 213       Fri Feb 11, 1994
LACE [E.Gilligan]            at 21:40 EST
 
Greg:  I've found myself agreeing with the premise of your other arguments
(i.e., writers manipulating their readers as a short cut to characterization
or other plot engines), but I'm having problems with the broad strokes you use
to illustrate your points.  In theory, I wonder if anyone here disagrees that -
some- writers (maybe even ALL writers) at -some- time use short cuts.

Is manipulation necessarily a bad thing, though? Manipulation INSTEAD of
proper plotting, characterization, etc. is a cheap short cut that, I would
argue, WAS bad, but if the manipulation is subtle, if the plotting and
characterization are up to par, is it a bad thing? Always? (Yes, if the
plotting and characterization are up to par, the writer should NEED to use
manipulation but not needing to doesn't necessarily mean it's bad ... does
it?)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 214       Fri Feb 11, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 22:05 EST
 
What you consider broad strokes actually comprise thousands of tiny dots.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 215       Sat Feb 12, 1994
D.DVORKIN1 [Medic]           at 19:46 EST
 
Greg:

I don't know much about firefighting, but I've seen brand-new medics and very
experienced ones being equally "extravagantly heroic" at various times.
Heroism is a matter of character, IMO.

But this is serious drift, so I'll shut up now.

                                                   Daniel the Medic

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 216       Sat Feb 12, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 20:28 EST
 
In firefighting, heroics -- whatever one's character -- is dependent upon
years of training.  The offhand ease at which the screenwriter made his
protagonist a hero in the field he happened to go into (the one that maximizes
the potential for conspicuous heroism) was a slight to the actual profession.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 217       Sat Feb 12, 1994
SHERWOOD                     at 20:32 EST
 
Either that or just plain ignorance.  Or else the director thought it would be
boring to show him doing the support jobs that rookie firefighters do until
they have enough experience to go into fully involved situations.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 218       Sat Feb 12, 1994
T.EDGERTON [Teresa]          at 22:46 EST
 
Greg, was it clearly stated how long (or how briefly) the character had been a
fireman at that point?  I've only seen the movie once and that not recently,
so I don't remember.

(Lace?  I know you're a Kline fan.  Maybe you can answer this.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 219       Sat Feb 12, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 23:25 EST
 
Greg: I stand corrected, and no, it didn't bother me.


 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 220       Sun Feb 13, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 01:32 EST
 
Steve:  I really felt that Ellison's tactics (smuggling a few genre authors he
considers important into the writer's bookshelf canon:  "Aeschylus, Aldiss and
Algren. . . to Zamyatin, Zelazny and Zola") to have been almost risibly
transparent, as well as finally crude.  Emma Bull's description did the same
thing, and both also privileged the selection of titles (and hence the
characters who owned them) by stressing the sophisticated and expensive design
of the shelves themselves.  Both authors would protest against the suggestion
that they were equating privilege with literary taste and, by extension, moral
stature; but I believe that both come perilously close to just that.

 Teresa:  the Kline character had not been a firefighter for long.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 221       Sun Feb 13, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 03:24 EST
 
I'll grant you transparent, Greg; but I don't think that always equals crude.
The trouble is, I'm afraid privilage (if you're using the word the way I think
you are: economic privilage) is, almost invariably, a precondition for
literary taste.  Literary taste, if defined as enjoyment of writers somewhat
difficult to penetrate, requires a liesure and devotion to literature which
most people cannot afford.  Going on to equate this with moral stature is
trickier; I didn't read either one as doing so, although I can certainly see
the argument.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 222       Sun Feb 13, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 08:23 EST
 
I find the people who use the word "privilege" as a verb almost as annoying as
the people who pretend to be able to find "subtext" in various writings --
both apparently rely on ESP to discover the author's _real_ motives, which
!stupor mundi! are almost invariably discreditable.

          -- JDM
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 223       Sun Feb 13, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 11:51 EST
 
Steve:  Yes, that's how I was using the word "privilege."

I have a longstanding grump against people who inveigh against turning verbs
into nouns (as though it were a recent barbarism), but who never seem to
object to those universally accepted verbs that were converted from nouns in
the last century or the previous one.  If Jim can't "stomach" verbed nouns,
and tends to "eye" them with disdain, and indeed is tempted to "contact"
William Safire and complain, if not actually "host" a colloqium to denounce
them, then I fear my grump switch has been "triggered."

But this is a discussion for Category 30.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 224       Sun Feb 13, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 11:53 EST
 
Erratum:  I meant, of course, "turning nouns into verbs."
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 225       Sun Feb 13, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 15:27 EST
 
I CAN'T BELIEVE I READ THE WHO-O-O-O-OLE THING.

Don:  Loved "Dirty Harriet"!  Hey, man, when are you going to give us the "Are
you a Modernist or a Post-Modernist?" Quiz ("Just answer these few simple
questions.  Circle A or B.") 

On the subject of "Who gets to Critique What":  I'm not a critic, and I very
much dislike having to write reviews.  But I was in a writer's work shop once,
many years ago, in NYC.  I read the story "The Unicorn Masque"  (subsequently
published in Terri's first ELSEWHERE anthology, which tells you _just_ how
long ago it was!).  (If you missed it, it's kind of a "Dorothy Dunnett meets
Joanna Russ in Ellen's brain" story - set in an alternate English
renaissance.)  I looked round the circle, nervously awaiting the dicta.  Lou
Stathis said, "I hate this kind of thing.  So I'm not going to say anything." 
I have always been grateful to him.

(He later asked me to review fantasy for him for "Heavy Metal," and taught me
to stop qualifying my opinions in print--house style--or at least to
 recognize that I was doing it.)

Jennifer:  Thank you for identifying (and sharing) my problem with Rob
Holdstock's writing!  I love him as a person, admire him as a writer, and very
much dislike his vision, while recognizing his virtue - a case, I suppose, of
"One woman's fresh grilled shad roe is another one's Ick, please may I have
the salmon instead?'"  It's a Religious Difference.  Of course.

"All narrative is manipulation anyway."  Yes.  Exactly.  This is what I try to
tell my students, especially those who persist in believing that the way they
perceive reality has anything to do with the way they are able to communicate
it.  (Hmm.  Do I mean that, or do I just like the way it scans?)  Anyway, re.
Grocery Listing (and never mind whether people who read books we ourselves
like are by definition cool):  it's a very 19c novelist's technique, I think. 
When I was younger and even less patient, I found Dickens' scene-setting
intolerable:  he, Edith Wharton, others, all used lengthy descriptions of the
rooms people lived in to establish their characters for contemporary readers
who would understand, say, the significance of Ellen Olenska's books being in
a room usually reserved only for visitors. (Even Shaw, who slipped his
novelizing into the stage directions of his plays-- it wasn't until I met
Terri that I understood why Higgins' mother's furniture being William Morris
told us a lot about her.)  
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 226       Sun Feb 13, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 15:33 EST
 
I guess it's a 19c version of Stephen King's Name Brands.  And very apt to the
topic, since in the societies set up by M'punk, taste defines one.

And, Brava, Ms. Doyle:  a Beacon of Sense on a Sea of Sensibility.

Ellen
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 227       Sun Feb 13, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 17:33 EST
 
Did I mumble, Greg?  Did I speak unclearly?  Or are you once again reading
what you want to read rather than what's on the page (i.e. finding the
"subtext")?

I have no objection whatever to verbing nouns -- it's done all the time in
English, resulting in a rich and sensitive language.

 What I object to are the people who use "to privilege" when talking about
written works.  A reference to an imagined "subtext," or the use of
"privilege" as a verb, generally means that the entire page on which it
appears should be stamped with a large, red stamp reading "BULLSH!T."

 Have I mentioned that I view the concept of "subtext" with total contempt,
with "privileging" running a close second for the title of the Phrenology of
Literary Discourse?

  -- JDM
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 228       Sun Feb 13, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 18:45 EST
 
Well, I have to say that I do think that Ellison was privileging SF by putting
its best authors in with established canon authors (from Aeschylus to Zola) on
the shelves of a world famous, wildly brilliant writer.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 229       Sun Feb 13, 1994
N.BARDSLEY [Nathan]          at 20:24 EST
 
Hmm, yes.  If Don does a "Are you Mo or PoMo?" Quiz, maybe Ms. Willey can be
encouraged to bring about her Mannerpunk quiz.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 230       Sun Feb 13, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 22:38 EST
 
Actually, I think it's pretty simple. Greg and I (and maybe Damon) are
modernists, and the rest of you are postmodernists. See?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 231       Mon Feb 14, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 00:31 EST
 
Jim: Well, I'm not terribly fond of "privilage" as a verb, either.  But you
have an interesting take on "subtext."  It's obvious you feel you know
something about how to read, and that you have opinions on matters of literary
criticism.  And yet, hey! you never said either of those things in so many
words.  Amazing how I could tell that, huh?  I must be a rocket scientist.  Or
maybe I have ESP.

Greg: "Contact" is not a verb under this roof.

Okay, maybe it is.

Ellen: Of course the way one perceives reality has nothing whatsoever to do
with how one communicates it.  And it's real, real easy to keep your political
and social agenda out of your writing, isn't it?


 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 232       Mon Feb 14, 1994
CYN.WARD [punk]              at 01:56 EST
 
Does this mean I have to separate the science fiction from the real literature
on my shelves?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 233       Mon Feb 14, 1994
LACE [E.Gilligan]            at 02:47 EST
 
Responding the Teresa's question about THE JANUARY MAN:  Kline's character had
been off the force something like four years, I believe, and, supposedly, he'd
gone from police to fire.  There are faults, some conspicuous, some subtle, in
THE JANUARY MAN (and most fictional works), but I don't think the nit being
picked right here is as conspicuous /o/b/v/i/o/u/s/ as some would have us
believe.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 234       Mon Feb 14, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 06:57 EST
 
Macdonald--I agree on privilege as a verb. But as you know, I love subtext,
and when I asked for some in KNIGHT'S WYRD you responded admirably. So there!
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 235       Mon Feb 14, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 12:22 EST
 
Jane, when you asked for "subtext" in KNIGHT'S WYRD, I played word games, tap
danced, and shoveled some bull.  "Subtext" doesn't exist.  There isn't
anything in that book that I didn't put there quite deliberately, and there's
no way at all for you or anyone to determine my motives for putting any of it
in there.

 Steven -- for the full "subtext" experience you have to do more.  You have to
tell people that I don't like the term "subtext" because I'm frightened,
baffled, hurt, and unable to understand the deep reasoning of modern critics.

 Actually, at one time I thought that "subtext" might refer to something real.
That was before I was a GEnie sysop during the Hill/Thomas hearings.

 -- JDM
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 236       Mon Feb 14, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 12:30 EST
 
Jim--you are wrong. Your entire take on Xian morality, and honor are in there.
Whether you shoveled them in or layered them in or left them in or let them
in.

Love, Auntie Jane
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 237       Mon Feb 14, 1994
M.MCHUGH2 [Maureen]          at 14:59 EST
 
Don, back after a weekend spent in scenic Toledo, and I read your passage in
Message 209.  You're asking me if that would have been considered a legitamate
passage in a work of fiction?  Do you mean would it have been manipulative? 
Well-written?  I dunno.  (I don't like 'after I picked mayself up off the
floor' <g>)  It told me that the characters were literate, versed in sf, liked
wordplay, but I didn't feel manipulated because I don't get the reference to
=Pandora by Holly Hollander=.  If it's not a real book, then I'd enjoy the
whole thing.  If it is a real book, then I don't know what it's supposed to
tell me.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 238       Mon Feb 14, 1994
M.MCHUGH2 [Maureen]          at 15:03 EST
 
Geoff, stories in A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN originally appeared in
a number of little mags:  THE HUDSON REVIEW, THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY and THE
SEWANEE REVIEW, among others.  Most of them seem to have appeared in '91.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 239       Mon Feb 14, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 17:39 EST
 
Subtext has nothing to do with authorial intent.  (Neither does the
privileging of elements by the text.)  As a reader, I don't care whether the
author intended a specific effect, consciously or unconsciously; if it's
there, there it is.  I wouldn't presume to say that the Honda company intended
their Civics to vibrate when they hit 60 mph, but it's one of the features of
the automobile, just as much as those feature they brag about.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 240       Mon Feb 14, 1994
LACE [E.Gilligan]            at 19:56 EST
 
>>I wouldn't presume to say that the Honda company intended their Civics to
 >>vibrate when they hit 60 mph, but it's one of the features of the
 >>automobile, just as much as those feature(s) they brag about.

That's one of the clearest descriptions of subtext I've ever seen.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 241       Mon Feb 14, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 21:10 EST
 
Of course it's there, Jane.  I put it there, quite deliberately.  It isn't
this mythical "subtext" that keeps being batted about, it's the bleeding
_text_.  -- JDM
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 242       Mon Feb 14, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 21:53 EST
 
"...if it's there, there it is."  Vibration can be measured.  "Subtext" can't
be measured.  If it exists at all, it exists only in the mind of the reader,
and varies from one reader to another.  Therefore it has -- and can have -- no
real existence, no objective existence.  The point is -- it _isn't_ there. 
All that's "there" is the tendency of the human mind to create patterns,
whether any exist in the first place or not.  Greg might say, "The subtext of
X is Y," and all I could reply is, "It is for you, Greg.  This week."

 "Privileging," on the other hand, is bullpucky.  -- JDM
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 243       Mon Feb 14, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 22:01 EST
 
The human mind does tend to create (or better, perceive) patterns, whether
they exist in the first place or not, but subtexts are patterns, or at least
coherent structures.  Whether the structure is sufficiently coherent to be
meaningful, or (like the Face of Mars) is only a mildly striking happenstance,
cannot be quantified, but there is much in literary criticism that cannot be
quantified.

I think Jim is reacting against the suggestions of some critics that they can
perceive in a literary text the expression of subconscious beliefs on the part
of the author.  This is not synonymous with the concept of a subtext.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 244       Mon Feb 14, 1994
SOUKUP [Martha]              at 22:05 EST
 
The _story_ only exists in the mind of the reader.

If people deny there is subtext in my stories--some of which I worked hard to
put there, some of which is an unconscious, natural reflection of the author--
I will call them Deeply Silly.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 245       Mon Feb 14, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 22:16 EST
 
Maureen - "Pandora by Holly Hollander" is a book by Gene Wolfe.  The Podkayne
remark fits it quite well.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 246       Mon Feb 14, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 22:23 EST
 
This is very interesting (certainly to me), but it is not directly relevant to
Mannerpunk lit.  I have opened a topic on "Subtext," in cat 16.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 247       Tue Feb 15, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 02:51 EST
 
No, Jim.  What I spoke of was, in fact, some of the subtext of your message.
Subtext is what the author is saying, but not in so many words.  Obviously,
some people go to preposterous lengths in the name of subtext, while others
use it as a club to beat anyone willing to sit still for it.  But that doesn't
make it any less fun to explore the unstated statements in a piece of writing.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 248       Tue Feb 15, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:19 EST
 
Maureen: What Paula Said, first of all. Second of all, "picking myself up off
the floor" was the one piece of hyperbole/metaphor/non-reportage in the bit,
interesting you should pick on it. I guess the point was that it was the kind
of scene Greg objected to in TAM LIN in his topic, except that it really
happened. (Was it a funny line? Does it still seem funny after the characters
laugh at it? Etc.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 249       Tue Feb 15, 1994
SBAR [Sean Barrett]          at 09:53 EST
 
 >"Subtext" doesn't exist.  There isn't anything in that book that I
 >didn't put there quite deliberately....

You just *think* you haven't subtexted.  <g,d,rvvvf>
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 250       Wed Feb 16, 1994
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 04:48 EST
 
 Jane (163): "(By the by, I think the only truly "lazy:" method is to
 have the character look into a mirror and comment on his/her own
 looks.)" Emma Bull did just that in BONE DANCE, on page 26, but the
 sneak did it in just such a way as to leave some very important questions
 unanswered.  

   -- Alan Bostick
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 251       Wed Feb 16, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 07:12 EST
 
By doing it that way, she took that hoary old banality and made it work FOR
her. When I began reading that I said, "Oh no, Emma!" but when I realized what
she was doing I applauded. S*
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 252       Wed Feb 16, 1994
PETER.HECK                   at 12:50 EST
 
I am constantly amazed at how a good writer can take a device that any
beginner would be ripped to shreds for using, and make it WORK. Sometimes you
don't even notice the author is using a cliche; other times, the writer can
throw it in your face, say "Look, I'm using this disreputable schtick that was
old when Cervantes was a novice," and still knock you off your chair. Emma
tends to be of the latter school; so does Brust. It's one of the things I like
about them.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 253       Wed Feb 16, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 19:40 EST
 
Thanks, Peter.  I remember reacting just the way Jane did when I first read
that passage, and then giggling.  If I didn't know better, I'd say playing
those tricks is a Pomo Thang.  What you say is true, in any case; every time I
hear of one of those things a writer ought not to do, my immediate reaction is
always, "That's true, but I wonder what Ford would do with it?"

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 254       Thu Feb 17, 1994
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 01:41 EST
 
 Sempai (253):  Ford generally has a better idea.  <g>

   -- Alan Bostick
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 255       Thu Feb 17, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 02:32 EST
 
Alan: OOK!

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 256       Wed Mar 02, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 01:53 EST
 
As far as I'm concerned, one of the great guilty joys of writing is getting
away with things you aren't supposed to do.  Like putting the end at the
beginning, or having characters describing themselves, or creating elaborate
in-jokes that also work as fiction to the out-crowd.

Delia
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 257       Sat Apr 16, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 13:56 EDT
 
<cough, cough>

Kinda dank and dusty in here. <striking a light>
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 258       Sun Apr 17, 1994
TROWBRIDGE [Dave T.]         at 00:55 EDT
 
BOOM!

Uh, Paula Kate, I meant to tell you about the gas leak.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 259       Wed May 04, 1994
A.SHECHTER [Andi & Stu]      at 21:45 EDT
 
Dave T - LOL!

 I'm a fan of fantasies of manners - glad to see someone down here.  Do I look
really funny with my eyebrows burned off?
 Andi
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 260       Thu May 05, 1994
TROWBRIDGE [Dave T.]         at 01:45 EDT
 
No, Andi, just sort of surprised.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 261       Thu May 05, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 01:54 EDT
 
Elizabethan.  It's that no-eyebrows, high-hairline look.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 262       Thu May 05, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 05:35 EDT
 
Just described THE GREAT RACE to someone today as a very mannerist movie. No?
Yes?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 263       Thu May 05, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 08:23 EDT
 
A =somewhat= mannerist movie.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 264       Fri May 06, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 00:40 EDT
 
Anything that plays riffs on THE PRISONER OF ZENDA is fairly mannerist in my
book...
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 265       Sat May 07, 1994
A.SHECHTER [Andi & Stu]      at 02:33 EDT
 
I'm mid-way through Patrick O'Brian's POST CAPTAIN, the second Aubrey and
Maturin novel.  Very mannerist, fascinating writing.  If Ellen Kushner was
hipped on Hornblower, this is what she might write.  What do you think, Don? 
With a little skiffy or fantasy added, a la LEMPRIERE'S DICTIONARY, it would
be what I'm referring to as "clockworkpunk".  

 Don, I think of THE GREAT RACE  more as a stylistic homage comedy, but that's
just dithering over terms.

 Stu Shiffman
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 266       Sat May 07, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 15:05 EDT
 
It's certainly very postmodern.

Haven't read O'Brien yet, though I have MASTER AND COMMANDER. What's the
difference between clockworkpunk and steampunk?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 267       Sat May 07, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 16:30 EDT
 
One goes tickticktick and the other goes chuffachuffachuffa?

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 268       Sun May 08, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 09:03 EDT
 
pocketapocketapocketapocketa*QUEEP*pocketapocketapocketa...
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 269       Sun May 08, 1994
A.SHECHTER [Andi & Stu]      at 22:56 EDT
 
Don
 > What's the difference between clockworkpunk and steampunk?
 Steampunk is nineteenth century steam-powered retro-fit technology sf and
fantasy like THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE or such, while to my mind and definition
clockworkpunk is eighteenth century wind-up automaton and water-powered
tiktokish retro sf and fantasy, like LEMPRIERE'S DICTIONARY, Kurzweil's A CASE
OF CURIOSITIES or the recent Colin Greenland (whose title eludes me
temporarily) which a cover blurb something like "the illegimate offspring of
Jane Austen and Doc Smith".  
 ('tho I like Debra's definition, too.)
 Stu Shiffman
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 270       Mon May 09, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:57 EDT
 
Hmm. Haven't read any of these latter. Please describe further (I think I have
the Colin Greenland, though).
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 271       Wed May 11, 1994
A.SHECHTER [Andi & Stu]      at 03:19 EDT
 
Don,

 In re your question, LEMPRIERE'S DICTIONARY by Lawrence Norfolk (Ballantine,
1993) is a amazing first novel, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and a
book of stellar strangeness and charm.  In "short", it involved a young man,
John Lempriere, and his journey from the Channel Islands to London in search
of the answer to his father's bequests and odd death.  Along the way, it
involves Lempriere's projected dictionary of all classical mythological
allusion, an aristocrat who get more sober as he drinks, a Hindu assassin, a
secret route to the Indies, secret caverns below London, the blind justice Sir
John Fielding, social agitation and rebellion, a mysterious automaton,
reprogramming the mind by brazen clockwork, a secret behind the founding of
the East India Company and the destruction of La Rochelle by Cardinal
Richelieu (both involving Lempriere's family), and a collossal insurance
fraud.  Salman Rushdie is quoted on the back blurg, saying "A dazzling
linguistic and formal achievement that also takes on a genuinely rich and
under-explored subject, the East India Company".

 First I saw in on a sales table at Bouchercon, run by S.J. Singh of Toronto's
Sleuth of Baker Street bookshop. He recommended it.  Then I saw the reviews in
the NYTimes.

 I liked it.  A lot.  I think that you will too, Don.

 Allen Kurzweil's A CASE OF CURIOSITIES (Ballantine, 1993) has much the same
feel of eighteenth century complexity and strangeness.  In the years before
the Revolution in France, a young son of a watchmaker is apprenticed to a
defrocked abbe and is educated beyond his expectation.  More amazing
automatons, pornographic watches, and fascinating characters.

 That OK?

 Stu Shiffman 
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 272       Wed May 11, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:08 EDT
 
I suspect Wendy Walker's THE SECRET SERVICE (my copy is lent out, so I can't
name the small press that published it) belongs in this group as well.

But I'm still not =absolutely= clear how this differs from steampunk, how the
Lempriere book differs from, say, THE ANUBIS GATES.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 273       Thu May 12, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 22:56 EDT
 
THE SECRET SERVICE was published by Sun & Moon Press in Los Angeles.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 274       Sat May 14, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 00:11 EDT
 
Andi:  I blush.  I am unworthy.  You are too kind.  (I am thrilled.)

Can we talk about Caroline Stevermer's A COLLEGE OF MAGICS here, or is it
somewhere else???
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 275       Sat May 14, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 00:57 EDT
 
We can talk about it here, I think.  It was mentioned briefly in passing my
topic (along with bthe Graustark discussion), and I think Greg did a critique.

It is certainly Fantasy of Manners, and is thus On Topic.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 276       Sat May 14, 1994
A.SHECHTER [Andi & Stu]      at 03:30 EDT
 
> I suspect Wendy Walker's THE SECRET SERVICE (my copy is lent out, so I can't
 > name the small press that published it) belongs in this group as well.  But
 > I'm still not =absolutely= clear how this differs from steampunk, how the
 > Lempriere book differs from, say, THE ANUBIS GATES.  

 I don't know the THE SECRET SERVICE at all.  Description? 

 Perhaps I've drawn an arbitrary line between steampunk and what I call
clockworkpunk.  Part of it is the difference in philosphies in the 18th and
19th centuries, both Ages of Reason in their ways but different orientations
about how to acheive Utopia, societal perfection, etc.  Anubis Gates is sort
of on the cusp, in the Romantic age of Byron and Shelley separating the
spinning jenny and the steam-powered factory.  High Victorian combines a faith
in Faith and in the power of engineering through steam-power, Saint-Simeonist
projects connecting the land-masses and changing the world.

 Stu
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 277       Sat May 14, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 07:10 EDT
 
Yes, I reviewed A COLLEGE OF MAGICS and discussed it in my topic.  Will resume
discussion here, if anyone is interested.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 278       Sat May 14, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 08:07 EDT
 
My knowledge of history is hazy and I never read all of the book (and I seem
to have lent out my copy), but my suspicion is that THE SECRET SERVICE falls
on the "clockwork" side of the divide. Help?

A COLLEGE OF MAGICS is a fine book, set in High Ruritanian time (turn of the
20th century).

Han Suyin, famous for A MANY-SPLENDORED THING (which I've never read) also
author of THE MOUNTAIN IS YOUNG (a fine small-r romantic novel which I have
read) wrote in 1985 a novel called THE ENCHANTER (which I also haven't read,
but here's my copy) about an 18th-century clockwork maker and his sister who
travel from Switzerland to China. Probably belongs in this box, assuming it
has any non-mimetic elements.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 279       Sat May 14, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 23:56 EDT
 
THE SECRET SERVICE is probably "clockwork"; the "magic" in it is really
peculiar science.

Stu, THE SECRET SERVICE is a trade paperback (and, I believe, hardcover) novel
set in the mid-19th century wherein a method has been discovered by which
people may be temporarily transformed into objects - rose bushes, statuary,
glassware - in which disguise they may spy upon certain vile conspirators. 
Parts of it are quite amazing (especially the opening chapters), but it's
uneven and rather episodic.  It is certainly "fantasy" but it isn't =genre=
fantasy.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 280       Sun May 15, 1994
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 01:43 EDT
 
 [Don Keller] (278):  My feelings about A COLLEGE OF MAGICS are very
 mixed.  The first part of the book, set at Greenlaw, is wonderful; my
 favorite part is the description of Faris's vigil.  (I was a bit
 surprised when it turned out that her vigil was something of a dud by
 Greenlaw standards.  For a college of witches, they seem to understand
 precious little about how magic really works. <g>)  But the second half,
 dealing with the her return to Galazon, was lightweight and trivial, and
 the ending can only be described as a cheat.

 And then there is the astonishing degree to which the book shores up
 Greg Feeley's thesis that fantasy-of-manners is anglophilic.  If you
 believe Stevermer, the British Foreign Office can do no wrong.

   -- Alan Bostick
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 281       Sun May 15, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 14:50 EDT
 
Fantasy of Manners =is= Anglophilic.  Since is primarily generated  by a group
of writers heavily influenced by THE AVENGERS and the Zenda books, Regency
novels and Dorothy Dunnett, not to mention the collected films of Richard
Lester (HELP and A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, and the Musketeer films), that shouldn't
be surprising.

FoM explores systems of behavior and the results of bending/twisting/
intentionally ignoring rules of etiquette and precedence.  The  most
"accessible" model for Correct Behavior is the urbane upper- middle-class-Brit
circa 1800 - 1930.  Whether England is (or ever was) rfeally a conglomeration
of tea shoppes and martinis shaken-not-stirred, raincoats tied-not-buckled is
completely irrelvant to  the power and accessibility of the symbol.

In the case of A COLLEGE OF MAGICS, I didn't particularly pick up on "the
British Foreign Office can do no wrong".  I =did= pick up on the use of
Correct Behavior and the power of embarrassment as weapons; that's what FoM is
all about, that one can =use= (and even pervert) body language, dress cues,
and other class and social-group markers.

As for the "cheat" ending, the cheat ending is endemic.  The entire 3,000
pages of the Lymond chronicle has a cheat ending.  The true question, I think,
is  - did the writer set up the cheat ending so that it is acceptable within
the rules of the story?  I think Stevemer did that, and in fact I =missed= the
"cheat" when it occurred (here I was, reading along, saying to myself "okay,
this novel requires a cheat ending, now how is she going to pull that off?"
and I had already missed it).
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 282       Sun May 15, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 15:12 EDT
 
Good grief, Paula Kate.  Have you ever considered working in Washington as a
lobbyist?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 283       Sun May 15, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 15:15 EDT
 
I do not think I'd like the weather in Washington, Greg.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 284       Sun May 15, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 16:54 EDT
 
Interesting. Perhaps the cheat ending is =endemic=, but is it =intrinsic=?
Does SWORDSPOINT have a cheat ending? What about the tendency to slightlyi
weak endings in Emma Bull's work?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 285       Sun May 15, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 17:00 EDT
 
Of course endemic =/= intrinsic.  Paula Kate's spirited defense of Fantasy of
Manners (shifting the topic while distracting the reader, invoking "Everyone
does it," and a dazzling array of other sophistries) should probably qualify
her as a Political Action Committee.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 286       Sun May 15, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 18:36 EDT
 
I can't imagine why a "cheat" ending would necessarily be either endemic or 
intrinsic to fantasy of manners.  The former might be more likely than the 
latter, given that most-but-not-all of the current creators of FoM are, if not
a "group" or a "school" in the formal sense, certainly mutually influential --
and therefore might well share certain characteristic flaws, in much the same 
way as students in a grade-school classroom share a cold.


But "intrinsic" I can't see, since FoM appears to be largely a matter of style
and attitude, and weak endings are a structural problem.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 287       Sun May 15, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 20:23 EDT
 
I am thinking about the "cheat" ending. I didn;t feel that way, though I must
admit I enjoyed the trip more than the arrival, as it were. 

There are a lot of books whose endings don't entirely satisfy me, but I think
that has more to do with being a writer myself. I want the ending tonbe both
inevitable and surprising. Usually they are one and not the other. (Or
entirely wrong headed, like Alan Garner's OWL SERVICE and Diana Wynne Jones"
FIRE & HEMLOCK.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 288       Sun May 15, 1994
A.SHECHTER [Andi & Stu]      at 22:28 EDT
 
Ellen, dear,
 But it's twoo!  It's twoo!
 Andi
 > > > > > > >
 Hi Ellen!  I guess we can talk about A COLLEGE OF MAGICS, but I still have to
read it.  Give me a few minutes.  I really enjoyed SORCERY & CECILIA.

 Don, I think that I read the Han Suyin and enjoyed it.  Ten years ago
already, since it came out.  How time do fly.
 Stu
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 289       Sun May 15, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 22:30 EDT
 
The "cheat" ending is endemic in fantasy generally, not FoM.  One of One of
the rare fantasies with a specifically =negative= ending that I can think of
is THROUGH A BRAZEN MIRROR, where there was a place that =could= have had a
cheat ending but (thank God) didn't.  I suspect that, in general, readers like
an upbeat ending and don't like a depressing or neutral one.  Therefore, I am
not generally disappointed when a writer goes for a crowd pleaser; I just care
that the crowd pleaser =not= be magus ex machina.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 290       Sun May 15, 1994
BETH.MEACHAM                 at 23:22 EDT
 
An ending doesn't have to be "negative" in order to be a fair one. You can
perfectly well have an upbeat honest end.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 291       Mon May 16, 1994
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 02:30 EDT
 
 [Don Keller] (284):  Would you describe the ending of FINDER as
 "slightly weak"?  (It's interesting that you bring up Emma Bull in this
 context, by the way.)  How about BONE DANCE?  WAR FOR THE OAKS?  (The
 drastic problems with FALCON have less to do with its ending than its
 middle.)  

 Paula Kate (289):  But the ending of COLLEGE _was_ magus ex machina. 
 There is simply no good reason for the person who was supposed dead, on
 the basis of the most compelling evidence, to turn up alive at the end. 
 It was not only a cheat but a gratuitous one, one which served no
 useful purpose.

   -- Alan Bostick
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 292       Mon May 16, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 06:08 EDT
 
The ending of _War for the Oaks_ was rushed -- for a book that long and that 
rich, the climax should have been played out over at least ten or twenty more 
pages, just to keep things in proportion.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 293       Mon May 16, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 08:27 EDT
 
I think Debra has her finger on what often happens in books--rushed endings.
We are like the proverbial horse near the barn. It's in sight--and we gallop
home.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 294       Mon May 16, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 09:13 EDT
 
What Debra and Jane Said about WAR FOR THE OAKS. With both that and BONE
DANCE, I felt the ending was a bit more willed than achieved. Only slightly,
but enough to notice. FALCON had the massive structural problem in the middle,
and the ending was one of those "She isn't =really= going to do that, is she?
Oh, I guess she is..." (Note that I like all three of these books quite a bit
anyway).

FINDER was a different problem; I'd been told by quite a number of people that
it =didn't= have her usual flaws, but I still found it a bit disappointing.
The major downer in the middle was so telegraphed that (well, to me it seemed
inevitable anyway) I really didn't get the full impact, and the rest of the
book didn't work as well on me as it should have.

I didn't find the ending of A COLLEGE OF MAGICS very convincing either. And
(as usual with Caroline's books) I felt that at least several major scenes
(here mostly in the first part of the book) were missing or merely synopsized.
And this despite it being by far her most ample book.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 295       Mon May 16, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 16:03 EDT
 
Don--I specifically did not say that about WAR FOR THE OAKS, but rather was
making a generaliZzed statement about books. I loved WFO, found FALCON needing
a middle, and FINDER (as I told Emma) I wanted to kill her. I kept thinking
there was going to be one helluvah Resurrection Scene. Sheesh.

In general I find a lot of endings rushed. SOmetimes I don't even realize this
on a first read, because I, too, am barreling along. But on sober reflection
afterwards, I go: Whaaaaaaa? Sort of like a drummer in a rock band.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 296       Tue May 17, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 01:42 EDT
 
FALCON needs about 200 pages of "meanwhile, back on Gwynedd" (and I want to
read themn, dammit!).  But I absolutely adore the parts that are there, flaws
and all.

Emma always kills at least one extremely sympathetic character.  Always. While
this supports my theory that overcoming evil should cost, it can become rather
predictable ...

I suppose it's late to bother with a SPOILER WARNING for A COLLEGE OF MAGICS,
but there it is anyway.

I don't object to "cheat" endings on principle, as I said, but I am not sure
about the one in COLLEGE.  The "resurrection" is entirely in keeping with what
Hilarion =would= do (I expected him to do it), but the book might have been
stronger if he hadn't ... (but it probably wouldn't have been Caroline's book,
either).
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 297       Tue May 17, 1994
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 03:49 EDT
 
 Debra (292):  "ten or twenty more pages" for the climax?  Are you crazy?
 As I read the book, the climax is the final concert.  I'd be hard put to
 say just how one could add ten or twenty pages to it without making it
 read like the climax to Norman Spinrad's PASSING THROUGH THE FLAME, or,
 worse, making it just plain boring.

 Jane (295):  I would have thought a Resurrection Scene in FINDER would
 have been at least as much of a cheat as the one in A COLLEGE OF MAGICS
 was.  I thought the developments at the end of FINDER make up the
 cornerstone of what raises it above generic fantasy.

 I tend to find endings of books -- all sorts of books -- rushed as I
 read them, but that's because I as a reader tend to read endings more
 hurriedly than beginnings and middles.  I can't blame the authors for
 that.

   -- Alan Bostick
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 298       Tue May 17, 1994
J.YOLEN [Jane]               at 06:40 EDT
 
Alan--I agree, and Eucatastrophe/Sacrifice are important for fantasy. But I
was SERIOUSLY bummed by it. (Don;t forget, I was the editor for Will's
NEVERNEVER and had a particular investment in the characters.) <Geee this is
difficult to do without giving stuff away, isn't it?>
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 299       Tue May 17, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 07:22 EDT
 
Alan --

Speaking as an author -- yes, you can blame the author for the fact that you 
read endings too rapidly.  It's the author's responsibility to slow you down.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 300       Tue May 17, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:38 EDT
 
Sorry if I've put words in your mouth, Jane, but I found your general governed
my specific. The climax of WftO =is= the concert, and I found, personally,
that it didn't do (for me) what it =said= it did; maybe a few more pages of
detail, atmosphere, whatever, might have fixed it. (If I didn't say so above,
I found it a bit underwritten.)

PASSING THROUGH THE FLAME is a particular favorite of mine; written to
bestseller formula (i.e. if "bestseller" is a genre, this is it), and to
Spinrad's strengths, it's quite successful as a novel, and =should= have been
a bestseller. But wasn't. Haven't read it in way too long and don't remember
it well enough to comment on its climax, though.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 301       Thu May 19, 1994
A.SHECHTER [Andi & Stu]      at 21:36 EDT
 
FINDER is here, and I hope to get it read shortly.  Unfortunately, since Andi
discovered how to dial in to the Seattle Public Library's computer, we've been
drowning in cool books.  I just read TO DIE LIKE A GENTLEMAN by Bernard
Bastable (actually Robert Barnard) which is lovely, set in the 1840's and told
partially in the form of letters and diary entries (some of which are skewed
because the writer knows the entries are being read).

 Stu Shiffman
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 302       Thu May 26, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 20:33 EDT
 
It took me a while to figure out what you meant by "cheat" endings, but I
think I have it now.  Is that where the author wraps things up to suit the
author's own desires instead of the ineluctable logic of the book? If so, I
think the problem with -Bone Dance- (for example) is not cheat so much as it
is that the Utopia they all end up in might not be to  everyone's taste.  It
certainly wasn't to mine.  And I think the problem with -College- isn't so
much the resurrection as it is the way it ends up. (A plague on trying not to
spoil the plot!)  MAJOR SPOILER ALERT.  I don't mind that T. gets resurrected.
I mind very much that he gets resurrected in the King, because it messes up
the rhetoric.  Faris has specifically -not- given up her memories of T. to the
rift.  All the signs say she's going to marry him.  And yet F. finds the King
repellant (and who would blame her?).  And yet T. inhabits him.  Does she
suffer over this?  Does she agonize and wonder, as she has agonized and
wondered over almost  everything else?  No.  She agrees to be friends and work
with him within
 the bare space of a paragraph.  I'm afraid I just don't believe it.
 The rest of the book, however, I love and adore.  I love the running around
Europe, and the mazes, and Faris learning to be a grownup.  Jane aside, I
think this is a very European book rather than just an Anglophilic one.  And
as for FoM being exclusively Anglophilic, what about -Porcelain Dove-? (she
asked slyly).

Delia
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 303       Fri May 27, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 00:03 EDT
 
Who said "exclusively"? he riposted irascibly.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 304       Fri May 27, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 09:23 EDT
 
I've argued Euro-centered, despite the fact that most of it is written by
Americans. (THE THREE MUSKETEERS is French, too, for that matter.)

BONE DANCE's ending is just a hair too easy, as I think I said before.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 305       Thu Jun 02, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:09 EDT
 
"[Jane] Bowles owes something to [Oscar, of course] Wilde--drawing-room comedy
is the queer form from which she makes a psychic guerilla theater." --Stacey
D'Erasmo, "Regarding Jane," =Voice LIterary Supplement=, 6/94
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 306       Fri Jul 29, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 00:46 EDT
 
A hard post to follow, which is perhaps why nobody has followed it for upwards
of two months.  So, what shall we talk about next?  How about Mike Ford's --
Growing Up Weightless--, which is clearly SF of Manners, complete with
references to the starship --Duchess of Malfi-- and the Three Musketeers?  An
odd hybrid, I'm finding it:  Heinlein meets Dumas.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 307       Fri Jul 29, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 00:55 EDT
 
=In=teresting. Haven't read the book yet, haven't heard anyone who has mention
that aspect of it. Tell more?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 308       Fri Jul 29, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 01:10 EDT
 
Is this a hardcover or paperback, and are we all reading galleys or can I buy
a copy yet?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 309       Fri Jul 29, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:33 EDT
 
It's a trade paperback, has been out about a year, I guess (can't find my copy
quickly) from Bantam, just tied for the Philip K. Dick award with Jack
Womack's ELVISSEY (another trade paperback--so much for mass market originals--
from Tor).
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 310       Fri Jul 29, 1994
C.ASH1 [Constance]           at 19:49 EDT
 
The mass market GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS was published a couple of months ago or
thereabouts.

There isn't enough all for one, one for all to really make this Dumas meets
Heinlien.  More like Huck Finn heading out for the territory by the end,
though this protag hasn't got a homicidal dypsomaniac for a pa.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 311       Fri Jul 29, 1994
W.HARRIS4 [William]          at 20:08 EDT
 
GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS is out in paperback.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 312       Sun Jul 31, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 00:57 EDT
 
\Thanks, all.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 313       Mon Aug 01, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 14:27 EDT
 
Delia, I just finished reading -Growing Up Weightless,- and would  dearly love
to know in what way it is FoM?  Even with the Sherwood Forest and Dumas
references (and, just like Mike, references to practically everything else in
the world, and I wish I knew just a -little- more Russian than I do) I can't
make it come out that way.

I'm more than willing to be educated, however.

-Mad
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 314       Mon Aug 01, 1994
ELUKI [Badhb]                at 19:47 EDT
 
I would like to read the version with the even numbered chapters included. 
You know, the ones that carry the plot?  =Was= the deeply-annoying and selfish
young protagonist's father going to sacrifice him a la Abraham and Isaac?  Who
are the evil water- control people?  Is this really =Chinatown= meets =Moon Is
A Harsh Mistress=?  Mannered, yes.  FoM or even SFoM no, unless you stretch it
to include any book written by a SFWAn or former SFWAn living in Minnesota.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 315       Mon Aug 01, 1994
C.ASH1 [Constance]           at 21:30 EDT
 
Madeleine!

(Just in case of confusion the above was a poor effort to express delight at
the presentation of MR's so rarely seen phosphors.)


 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 316       Mon Aug 01, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [    <G>    ]      at 21:32 EDT
 
Numbered chapters?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 317       Mon Aug 01, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 23:11 EDT
 
Bless you, Constance.  I'm trying to, uh, resurge a little.  Also, come see my
questionnaire in Cat. 39, Topic 34.  (Plug--I'm doing research for the
Magazine).

Alis: I did entertain the notion that maybe I got an edition which was missing
a few pages.  Or maybe I'm just dumb, another notion I entertain from time to
time.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 318       Tue Aug 02, 1994
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 04:11 EDT
 
 Madeleine (313):  This is an unusual thing to say about Mike Ford, but: 
 I wish _he_ knew just a little more Russian than he does.  (Some of the
 Russian bits are howlers.)

 Badhb (314):  I'm with you.  I am at a loss to see what Delia meant when
 she brought the book up.

   -- Alan Bostick
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 319       Tue Aug 02, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 08:19 EDT
 
Where's my copy...
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 320       Tue Aug 02, 1994
ELUKI [Badhb]                at 09:04 EDT
 
And mind you, I like his work and love his poetry.  But to say he is cryptic
upon multiple occassion verges on the tactful.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 321       Tue Aug 02, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 09:36 EDT
 
Was a joke, methinks.  (Especially seeing as the book has no chapters.)

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 322       Tue Aug 02, 1994
ELUKI [Badhb]                at 10:48 EDT
 
No; a reference to his work in general, some of which does have chapters (I'd
forgotten that this particular one didn't).  FWIW
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 323       Tue Aug 02, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 12:35 EDT
 
I love Mike, and I love his writing, and I enjoyed reading WEIGHTLESS, but I
kept feeling like I'd missed something, and kept assuming (because I love
Mike, and I love his writing, and I wasn enjoying the reading itself) that I
was dumb (see above). You all comfort me greatly.

Mad
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 324       Tue Aug 02, 1994
C.ASH1 [Constance]           at 21:38 EDT
 
Madeleine -- Would be most difficult for anyone to perceive thee as dum.
  Yr. dum amiga, and so on and so forth ----

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 325       Tue Aug 02, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 22:04 EDT
 
Constance, I bless you and your several works.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 326       Tue Aug 02, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 22:16 EDT
 
Oh, frabjous day!  A discussion.  I like discussions. Of course --Growing Up
Weightless-- is obscure.  Everything Mike Ford writes is obscure.  I think it
comes from his fear that he'll bore his reader by stating the obvious, not
realizing that everyone isn't as familiar with the world and characters he's
creating as he is.  In the hands of someone who doesn't know much about
characterization, this is called bad writing.  In Mike's hands, it leaves
spaces in which we can create our own narratives, if we are so inclined
(sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not).  Or it gives the impression that life
often does, that there's more than one story, more than one way of looking at
the events he's given us.  It's what keeps me reading, anyway, even though I
can't really follow his plots or deduce his intentions.  It feels real, the
way a friend s na>narrative of her life feels real--it's her story, told
tightly from her point of view, with the stuff that she doesn't know or
doesn't understand left (necessarily) out.  And especially in a book like --
Growing Up--, which is about adolescence, this interests me.

This stupid machine keeps hanging up on me, so I'm not going to go on about
the SFoM part.  Besides, I have to think it through first.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 327       Wed Aug 03, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:32 EDT
 
Do. We'll wait. (Where =is= my copy...)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 328       Wed Aug 03, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:21 EDT
 
Delia, I agree wholeheartedly with everything you say.  But there are some
obscure-ish books (including a few of Mike's) which don't leave me feeling
like I've missed five pages somewhere.  WEIGHTLESS does.

Still want to hear about SFoM and this particular work, tho.  I wait with
bated breath.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 329       Wed Aug 03, 1994
ELUKI [Badhb]                at 11:18 EDT
 
I can't agree, Delia.  IMOSHO, it is the job of the writer to make his world
accessible to the reader.  Obscurity through lack of craft, or too much
genius, is not a virtue.  Unless we are all to be let to phone the author at
any hour of the day or night for an explanation, it had =better= be in the
book.  The subplot about murdering the (deeply annoying) kid protagonist so
Luna could get water (=was= that what was going on?) was cryptic.  The entire
section about the theatre troupe, =which he does not even end up joining=,
just sits there like a frog on a birthday cake, unrelated to the narrative. 
Ditto the wandejahr around Luna with the members of his cyber D&D game.  What
is the point of this?  If it is to reveal more of the Evil Earth Plot, could
we please receive the information?  If it is a metaphor for abjuring mystical
thinking in favor of economic-driven rationalism, it would be nice to know
that too.

 While it is occassionnally amusing to be dazzled and baffled in the course of
a text, such dazzled bafflement cannot be confused with craft. IMOSHO
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 330       Wed Aug 03, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [    <G>    ]      at 12:04 EDT
 
The matter of the theatre troupe is scarcely "unrelated to the narrative" of
GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS, since the protagonist is agonizing about whether or not
to join for most of the book.  Most of what eluki calls "obscure" and
"cryptic" is merely difficult -- that is, not offered on a spoon.  How much to
disclose "plainly" and how much to present "artfully" is an esthetic decision,
and virtually all writers plump for easier and less interesting solutions than
Ford does.  He publishes so infrequently, and DAW Books flow so copiously,
that readers who insist on their hands being held should not begrudge this one
lonely redoubt.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 331       Wed Aug 03, 1994
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 12:47 EDT
 
finally identifying title and book
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 332       Wed Aug 03, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 15:01 EDT
 
I tend to agree with Eluki.  Obscurity is not necessarily a virtue.  Nor is 
the lack of it necessarily "handholding" -- though, by God, if I have to hold 
the reader's hand to make certain that he/she gets the point I'm trying to 
make, I'll clasp those fingers in my sticky grip for all they're worth.

Actually, my _real_ cavil with most of Ford's stuff isn't the obscurity, it's 
the way his characters' plots and conspiracies are always so exquisitly 
multilayered, elegant, and brilliantly workable.  The real world isn't like 
that, not even in those circles where conspiracy is a way of life.  Real world
conspiracies are jerrybuilt Rube Goldberg contraptions, always in danger of 
collapsing -- and not because of betrayal or somebody's crisis of conscience, 
but because the Coke machine ran out of Dr. Pepper on the crucial day, so that
people had to go down to the next floor to find a full machine, or because 
somebody's cat threw up on the secret documents.

Come to think of it, that's one of my usual complaints about mannerpunk in 
general ... so maybe _Growing Up Weightless_ really _is_ SF of Manners, after 
all.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 333       Wed Aug 03, 1994
SOUKUP [Martha]              at 15:07 EDT
 
Fiction isn't life, though.  Fiction serves many different purposes: to
present us with something more elegant than life is sometimes one of them.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 334       Wed Aug 03, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 15:49 EDT
 
Everybody chokes on something different, I suppose; it just happens that 
improbable smoothness and complexity on the part of plotters, schemers, 
conspirators, and secret masters of whatevertheheck are something that does it
for me.  I didn't like _Mission Impossible_ when I was an impressionable young
thing, either, for that very same reason . . . which, since I've heard that 
show cited as an Influence, is probably significant somehow or other.  I 
vastly prefer the sort of tale in which the elaborate plot gets knocked into a
cocked hat by random circumstance somewhere around step 2.5 of 15 or so, and 
the characters have to scramble and ad lib madly to salvage things.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 335       Wed Aug 03, 1994
SOUKUP [Martha]              at 16:13 EDT
 
I usually prefer the second sort of tale myself, but I know the first kind of
tale has its place.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 336       Wed Aug 03, 1994
T.WEBER7 [Thersites]         at 18:37 EDT
 
Joel Rosenberg tells of Ford saying he was going to revise "Fugue State" (the
most overlooked sf novella of the eighties, and the most perplexing since
Wolfe's "The Doctor of Death Island") for reprint in the Tor Doubles.  Joel
said, "Ah, so you're going to clear up some of the ambiguities." Mike replied,
"No, add some."
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 337       Wed Aug 03, 1994
JOELR                        at 19:05 EDT
 
Yes, that's what I said, and that's what he did.

Sigh.

I like Mike; I like much of his writing; I see nothing in him or it that would
be ruined by him making things easier -- at times possible -- for the merely
gifted reader.  Having read GUW in the original, and the revised, and having
had the rewrite letters from his editor come across my desk -- she found it
convenient to use my fax board; I've always made it clear that nothing that
comes through my fax board is private from me -- I can say that I think the
places Betsy wanted it made clearer needed to be (with one exception, but this
sentence is already long and convoluted enough, almost) made clearer, and that
Mike's apparent fear of ever repeating a bit of important information is
unwarranted, but . . .

But, hell, it's his call, and that's a wall I've bumped my head against a
couple of times too often.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 338       Wed Aug 03, 1994
DAN.COMFORT                  at 21:16 EDT
 
 
 When I read GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS, I was stunned by the dragon; that
 struck me as one of the most beautiful ideas I'd seen in SF in years.
 I can see merit to the some of the complaints about the book, but
 I'll treasure it for that conceit alone.


                                           Dan


 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 339       Wed Aug 03, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 21:31 EDT
 
Debra, I think you've Explained All when you said that you didn't like
"Misson: Impossible."


 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 340       Wed Aug 03, 1994
ELUKI [Badhb]                at 21:59 EDT
 
Nope, Sempai.  T'won't fadge.  =I= adored Mission Impossible.

 Greg>The rhetorical conceit of comparing one author's output to the output of
one publishing house (and one, actually, that publishes comparatively few
titles) is flawed, and therefore not worthy of the gifted prose stylist we
know you to be.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 341       Wed Aug 03, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [    <G>    ]      at 22:02 EDT
 
eluki:  synecdoche need not be exact.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 342       Wed Aug 03, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 22:06 EDT
 
Yes, of course the elegance of the intrigue is one reason why WEIGHTLESS is
SFoM.  The others are that the stakes are mostly emotional, and are very high,
at least from the characters' points of view.  All the main characters are
elegant, both in their language and in their attitude ( I don't just mean by
that that they dress well.  We can discuss elegance later, if you like.) and
the young protagonists consider themselves marginal to mainstream society,
even though they aren't really, they're just young.  They're also exploring
the idea of morality, testing the limits of their society--thus the journey,
and the games, and a lot of the other tangential plot things.  It's also
interesting that the bad guys (like Horn in SWORDSPOINT and Brust's bay
[that's bad] guys, and Richelieu in MUSKETEERS) work within the existing
social structures to undermine society and enrich or at least advantage
themselves.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 343       Wed Aug 03, 1994
ELUKI [Badhb]                at 22:23 EDT
 
I would like to think there is elegant intrigue in GOW, unfortunately I was
unable to discern it.  Since I figured out the intrigue in Scholars of Night,
however, I don't feel =too= stupid.

 Greg>Thank you for supplying the word.  A syndoche may well be within its
rights to be inexact, but yours was meaningless.  It would be more elegant to
point out that given the vast quantity of highly-accessible material a
publisher such as Tor produces (also, I believe, the publisher for GOW, which
adds a certain gloss of symmetry) the publication of one inaccessible novel
(Mike's) must be allowed.  Considering that he is capable of brilliant
accessible work, and that most people feel it is reasonable to mention a fact
at least three times in the course of a novel (the triad construction being an
hommage to the Breton lyricism of our ancestors), I reiterate my original
position: I should like to see GOW printed with the "even numbered chapters".
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 344       Wed Aug 03, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 23:53 EDT
 
"High-stakes emotional poker" was the way I described another of the classic 
FoM source-writers, Dorothy Dunnett, in an apa review of some years back.

(Why I'll never make it as a Mannerist, reason #2 of many -- my favorite 
character in the whole Lymond series was the hero's long-suffering brother 
Richard, who kept having to clean up the messes, emotional and otherwise, that
his ever-so-elegant younger brother left behind.)

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 345       Thu Aug 04, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 02:52 EDT
 
My, how everyone's own aesthetic agendas are coming out in this discussion.
(And I mean that with no irony whatever: it's really interesting.)

I'm =mostly= with Greg on this (look at the way he writes, and I like that),
though I haven't read the book yet and I'll note that Ford's first two books
(which I proofread for the new Tor editions), THE PRINCES OF THE AIR and WEB
OF (d%mn, forgot the title and can't find the book) were very puzzling indeed.

It's =really= difficult to draw the line between needlessly and acceptably
obscure.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 346       Thu Aug 04, 1994
SOUKUP [Martha]              at 03:27 EDT
 
Harder yet to draw the line between needlessly and interestingly obscure,
which I think is the issue here: that Ford is after aesthetic joys which have
everything to do with the pleasure _of_ figuring things out, instead of being
_obscured_ by the reader having to do the figuring out.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 347       Thu Aug 04, 1994
CYN.WARD [Cindy]             at 04:24 EDT
 
Seems like any such lines would be different for each person

"This is the game that moves as you play"
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 348       Thu Aug 04, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [    <G>    ]      at 07:37 EDT
 
GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS is published by Bantam not Tor, although I don't know
how this would have affected eluki's assertion either way.

John M. Ford's insistence on explaining what needs to be explained only once,
and explaining what could be inferred not at all, represents the endpoint on a
spectrum of exposition in science fiction:  no one, not even Gene Wolfe, is as
rigorous about his prose carrying the tensile strength of catch-it-or-miss-it
structure support.  So when eluki decries the demands this puts on Ford's
readers, she is doing so in a field in which every single other writer is more
to her taste (on this matter) than Ford.

So why can't she leave Ford to his solitary self?  There are, as I said, many
DAW Books published, and all of them are more indulgent of the imperfectly
attentive reader than Ford is.

eluki sounds rather like the conservative mainstream reviewer who bewails the
steep slopes of FINNEGANS WAKE, out of the apparent fear that if it isn't
roundly denounced now, other writers will be tempted to follow its example. 
Ha.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 349       Thu Aug 04, 1994
ELUKI [Badhb]                at 09:02 EDT
 
Oh, but Greg, they =will=.  Because being lucid and apprehensible is so much
work, they will lazily relabel incompetence as genius, citing one John M. Ford
as a prefiguring example of their craft. It's called The Thin End Of The
Wedge, and like many risible constructs, perfectly true.

 I apologize for the confusion between Bantam and Tor; I trust I will be
forgiven for the perfectly reasonable conviction that all books, these days,
are published by Tor.  But I will enquire, with a delicacy immense, why it is
that you have twice singled out DAW as publishing books of a peculiar
accessibility?  Surely, if you wish the reference to be taken as the Lois
Carmen Denominator of the wordbutcher's art, you would choose TSR?  Or
perhaps, if you wish to imply a particular sycophancy to the emotional
interest of fanboys, Baen would be a more intelligent target.  But I am afraid
I have to protest your implied equation of DAW with the lowest form of genre
booklife.  Not the lowest, Caesar.  Not by several.

 And I still say that GOW fails the classical test of the mystery novel: the
clues are =not= all there, no matter how many times you read the text.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 350       Thu Aug 04, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 09:05 EDT
 
I don't think that the ad hominems -- entertaining though they may be -- are 
helping anything here.

Is it fair to say that given a choice between erring on the side of too much 
explanation of the obvious, and erring on the side of too much obscurity, 
every writer gets to choose his/her own characteristic fault?  And the point 
where a pleasantly entertaining excess slides over into culpable error is 
different for every reader, as well?

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 351       Thu Aug 04, 1994
J.BRUNET [JimB]              at 12:32 EDT
 
eluki, I haven't read GOW or any other Ford, more's the pity from this
discussion, but I have read quite a bit of Wolfe and, if Greg's epistemology
is even vaguely correct, I feel moderately certain that brilliance on that
order can't be faked.  That even if complete comprehension eludes the reader,
as it often does me with Wolfe, I _know_ that the shortcoming is mine, for the
 internal integrity and coherency can be felt, if not articulated and
explained, as opposed to reading, say, J. Bumpkus Horsentwaddle's
grandfrooming attempt at High Art which is at root nothing more than pointless
obscurity anchored on a foundation of artistic vanity and dressed-up
pretentiousness.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 352       Thu Aug 04, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 14:44 EDT
 
Jim, I think you're correct.  Your certainty, however, places you  square in
the midst of the people who can tell the difference between a Mike Ford (or a
Gene Wolfe or Umberto Eco or Joyce or...whoever) and J. Bumpkus Horsentwaddle.
Brilliance cannot be faked, no matter what.  But there are people (even
publishers and critics, tho none in this topic) who are quite capable for
mistaking Obscure Twaddle for Obscure Brilliance.

For example, does anyone but me remember a book, I =think= called BLACK BODY,
by H.C. Turk (who once published a book with Tor, which was bad, but not this
bad, called ETHER ORE), published I think by Vintage?  Beautiful cover. 
Handsome book design.  Breathtaking incoherance of plot, theme, and language. 
And it got some really good reviews from major reviewers.

I am in no wise sure at what point, if ever, it becomes the  responsibility of
the author to make sure the reader "gets it." I think that has much to do with
why the writer writes in the first place.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 353       Thu Aug 04, 1994
SOUKUP [Martha]              at 14:46 EDT
 
I missed all those good reviews of the Turk, but the responses to it by the
people who recognized it as crap were a joy to read....
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 354       Thu Aug 04, 1994
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 15:42 EDT
 
I recall reading an exegesis of a Ford story in a Liavek anthology.  The
unravelling of the layers of significance (most of which I had missed -- who
looks for that sort of thing in a shared-world anthology) has made me from
then on give Ford the benefit of the doubt in such matters.]

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 355       Thu Aug 04, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 16:46 EDT
 
Lois, you don;t by chance remember the source of the exegesis of thr Ford
LIAVEK story, do you?  I'd liek to see that.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 356       Thu Aug 04, 1994
T.WEBER7 [Thersites]         at 17:19 EDT
 
BLACK BODY was published by that other publisher that begins with "V". 
Villiard, is that it?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 357       Thu Aug 04, 1994
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 18:03 EDT
 
Argh, fraid not, Paula Kate.  It was several years back, is all I recall.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 358       Thu Aug 04, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 19:14 EDT
 
The Ford exegesis ("Green Is the Color") was by Chris Miller, and was
published in an early issue of NYRSF. I could look it up if pressed.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 359       Thu Aug 04, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 21:44 EDT
 
Tom, all I knew was that it wasn't Vantage.  Someone paid Turk money for the
object.  Go figure.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 360       Thu Aug 04, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 23:35 EDT
 
Don, :)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 361       Thu Aug 04, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 23:58 EDT
 
It occurs to me that part of why we're going around and around in circles here
(yes, we are.  Look upstream and see) is that what we're arguing is as much a
matter of temperament as taste.  Personally, plot doesn't much interest me.  I
hate thrillers because I always get lost, no matter how carefully the author
holds my hand.  What I fall for is character.  If the people are interesting,
I'll wade cheerfully through any number of incompre- hensible plot twists, and
if they aren't, I need at least good window-dressing or interesting historical
facts (belay that.  I hate Michner.) or an interesting and stimulating prose
style to make me finish the book.  This does not make me (IMHO) better or
worse than Mr. Feeley, ms. badbh, Master Keller, or  Mistress Doyle.  Nor do
their differing allegiencies to Style or Narrative or whatever make them
anything but temperamentally different.  I can't stand suspense.  Some people
can't stand spiders.  Go figure.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 362       Fri Aug 05, 1994
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 00:50 EDT
 
 Badhb (349): "And I still say that GOW fails the classical test of the
 mystery novel: the clues are =not= all there, no matter how many times
 you read the text."  So what?  It's not a mystery novel.

 I'm with Greg 100% on the issue of complexity in fiction.  Mike Ford's
 writing feeds a appetite of mine that just doesn't get fed very often. 
 Are you saying that I should go hungry, and live on a subsistence diet
 of Scott Meredith Seven Point Plot Skeletons?

 It's ridiculous to call something a flaw because imitators are likely to
 do it badly.  Think of what would happen if this standard were applied
 consistently:  Lots of people are inept at characterization.  Throw it
 out, too many people do it badly.  World-building?  Don't bother,
 you're not going to get it right.  If I had a nickel for every poor
 prose stylist writing, I'd be rich.  Into the dustbin with style, then. 
 Plot is problematic.  No more plot, don't let any creep into your books.
 Too many people are terrible at description; away with it.  And many on
 the SFRT already agree that because good exposition is difficult it
 should never be tried.  Nosirree, if there is _any_ chance that it can
 be done wrong, it shouldn't be tried.  Better safe than sorry.

 Madeleine (352):  Somebody gave a good review to BLACK BODY?  Aww,
 C'mon!  You're pulling our legs, right?

 Right?

   -- Alan Bostick 
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 363       Fri Aug 05, 1994
SOUKUP [Martha]              at 01:17 EDT
 
Better not publish Tolkein.  Think of the thousand of lame imitations might
happen.  <g>
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 364       Fri Aug 05, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 05:46 EDT
 
Jim (351): That was wonderful.  "...the innterntal integrity and coherency
cann be felt, if not articulated..."  Yeah.  I've been trying to say that for
years.  Thank you.

You're probably right, Delia, but that leaves us little to argue about.  I
propose we assume that Our Way Is The One True Way, just for the sake of
argument.

Contriwise and on the other hand, Greg and Alan, I don't believe Eluki is
claiming such books ought not to exist, but rather pointing out a flaw in the
book.  It is, to be sure, a flaw I don't believe exists, but the practice is
certainly legit.


 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 365       Fri Aug 05, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 06:28 EDT
 
I'm with Delia: I don't like suspense either. Plot-heavy books are not
favorites of mine (though I like the Doyle/Macdonald series, but that's
probably because of characterization, not plot).

I never assume that if I'm not following something by Ford, or Wolfe, or
Feeley, that the author has left something out; I assume that I missed
something (and that's often the case).

Found my copy. (But why are people calling it G=O=W?)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 366       Fri Aug 05, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 07:36 EDT
 
"... why are people calling it G=O=W?"

Because typos breed typos, I suppose.  And the glass slipper is a glass 
slipper now and forevermore.

I find that obscurity and ambiguity get to be too much of a good thing real 
fast.  I'm not sure whether this is in spite of or because of the fact that 
one of the things I have to continually struggle against in my own writing is 
the assumption that connections obvious to me are obvious to everyone else -- 
I feel that if I find myself saying "well, that's because what's _really_ 
going on here is such-and-such," then I've failed the reader at some point.

I'm also not sure that the pleasure derived from wrestling with highly 
ambiguous or obscure literary works is _entirely_ a worthy one.  There's a 
distinct element of self-approval in it sometimes:  "Look how I am not like 
those mindless worshippers of Terry Brooks, for lo! I have understood Gene 
Wolfe!"

Not that any of the distinguished posters in this topic would do that, of
course.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 367       Fri Aug 05, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 07:36 EDT
 
I hope the preceding post didn't come out too snarky . . . the Siamese kitten 
has gone, unexpectedly, into her first heat, and she spent the whole night 
wandering about and inquiring plaintively, in her native tongue, as to the 
whereabouts of Something, She Wasn't Sure What, But She Was Certain We Must Be
Deliberately Hiding It From Her.

Occasionally, just to make certain we weren't unaware of the situation, she 
would come and discourse upon it next to my pillow.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 368       Fri Aug 05, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [    <G>    ]      at 07:59 EDT
 
I don't feel much self-approval while trying to unpack the felicitous inscapes
of Gene Wolfe's novels.  Pleasure, yes, but precious little "How clever I am!"
If anything, rather the opposite.

eluki's assertion that GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS will indeed prove a bad example --
to bad writers defending their ineptitude -- goes so wide of the mark that I
would have to crawl under furniture to go after it.  Let me simply say that no
third-rate writer is going to prevail in refusing to carry out revisions by
citing John M. Ford to his editor.  And truly, precious few bad genre writers
read John M. Ford, or if they do, imagine that their genius takes the same
form as his.

I have never read a TSR book, so can't use them as an example of anything. 
Their covers certainly look frightful, but.  I cited DAW Books because -- to
the degree that one can judge books by their publisher, which is pretty shaky
even in category fiction -- they tend, as a style of novel, to leave little
for the readers to unpack for themselves.  This is fine with me; my point is
simply that with so much self-unpacking fiction on the shelves, why go after
one of the very few writers who leaves his readers puzzles to worry?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 369       Fri Aug 05, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:52 EDT
 
Alan: I'd pull your leg if I could, but my reach isn't that long. I remember
at least one good review for BLACK BODY.  Of course, memory may be corrupted
by the fact that I perused the book first, and any reviews I saw after that
may have failed, in my opinion, to  adequately revile the work and all its
several makers...author,  editor, publisher...

Anent the discussion at hand--I don't know that a book that challenges my mind
and makes me stretch a little does so to the detriment of  plot (maybe that's
not what was being said).  I do think that one of the important things in any
challenging book (whether it's a mystery or something other) is what kind of
markers the author leaves to indicate that a detail of plot or
characterization or setting is crucial and what is not.  A good writer of
mysteries has to leave clues and red herrings all over the place with almost
no markers to indicate which is which--otherwise I untangle the plot 150 pages
 before the Hero, which is tedious.  Writers of non-mysteries tend, often, I
think, to hit the important details a little harder.  Mike Ford, I think,
barely breathes on his, and gives a great lot of them, and in the greater
sense they're all important because they all say something about Luna, Matt,
his father, and so on, whether they speak directly to the plot or no.

On the other hand, there are some books, some of them good,  where the
important details are heavily marked, and the effect of the whole is to make
the reader feel as if she or he has been picked to go along on an inexorable
journey.  Which is a different kind of emotional thrill.

(Excuse please weird grammar--I keep getting distracted by other voices here
and losing my place in my sentances.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 370       Fri Aug 05, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 13:23 EDT
 
Hmmm, I'm over here in the shady corner with Don and Delia ... I -like- plot,
but I get a stomach ache from S*U*S*P*E*N*S*E, and I read for character and
voice and evocation of time/place - and I am almost oblivious to structure. 
What will bring me back to a book over and over is the degree to which the
characters are "real" to me; I am most impressed with writers who can sketch a
character in four sentences of dialog and two lines of description, and then
allow me to recognize that character by a line of dialog later. =That= blows
me away.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 371       Fri Aug 05, 1994
C.ASH1 [Constance]           at 19:20 EDT
 
I need a novel that I can't use up in one reading.  Thus structure, character,
plot and all the devices fictional rhetoric are essential to make the best
books.  Suspense gets used up the quickest.  But a fine plot is the setting
that illuminates all the more clearly the author's lapidary skill with the
other elements upon each re-reading.

Or another metaphor: the plot is the axle upon which the other devices turn
and are transported, and without which, book, author and reader go nowhere.
IMHO.  Yeah.  I like plots.  They take skill and imagination to create too.


 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 372       Fri Aug 05, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 19:46 EDT
 
You ought to read a TSR book, Greg.  Just to get a feel for what the _real_ 
opposite extreme from a Mike Ford novel is like.  Do it during Lent or 
something.

I think the point at which complexity and deft understatement become the 
literary equivalent of one of those "the man in the red house owns the zebra" 
logic puzzles is different for every reader, and probably for every book as 
well.

I admire Ford's gift for complex plots, and I love his richness of invention 
(the man uses as throwaways ideas that most other writers would build into 
entire books) -- but I do think that given the choice between erring on the 
side of being obvious and erring on the side of being obscure, he opts for 
obscurity every time.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 373       Fri Aug 05, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [    <G>    ]      at 20:02 EDT
 
I genuinely don't believe GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS to be an obscure book.  (Nor
even "Fugue State," although the latter novella has made it at least into the
foothills.)  Reading John M. Ford is like doing aerobics for your brain; even
those who like sacking out in front of the tube must enjoy a workout
=sometimes.=


Debra:  I am willing to read a TSR book if they send me a review copy, but
paying $4.99 as well is too much.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 374       Fri Aug 05, 1994
S.THOMPSON8 [Sarah]          at 21:33 EDT
 
OK, Greg, if you genuinely don't believe GUW to be obscure, would you please
explain it to the rest of us (perhaps with a spoiler warning for anyone who
hasn't yet read it and wants to be surprised)?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 375       Fri Aug 05, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 21:40 EDT
 
Greg -- I've got a couple of TSR books around the house, relics of the days in
La Republica de Panama when I was desperate for _anything_ written in English.
 I'll have to mail you one sometime.  It will be a revelation, I promise you.

(When I want mental aerobics, I go read some John Barnes and argue with it as 
I go along.  Different strokes, I suppose.)

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 376       Sat Aug 06, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 02:01 EDT
 
"Thersites"?  Oh, Tom!

Martha--re. your post #363--you are sooooo right!!!

I haven't read GUW, but I have to say that I have often felt that Mike writes
only every other line.  I wouldn't be at all surprised to find he's done it
again.

This is a fascinating discussion of a worthy subject, and I look forward to
its continuance.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 377       Sun Aug 07, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 01:16 EDT
 
I like the phrase, "books that take work to unpack," or whatever it was. Okay,
what pleasures can they bring?

1) Pleasures that do not require unpacking the plot--the interactions of nifty
characters, nice turns of phrase, startling revelations that, for a moment at
least, feel remarkably like Revealed Truth.

2) The pleasure of unpacking the plot, rather like the pleasure of solving a
puzzle.

3) The pleasure of feeling smug about having Figured It Out.

4) The pleasure of showing off for acquaintences about how clever one is for
appreciating such deep and subtle work.

5) The pleasure of re-reading a book for pleasure (1) above, and suddenly
having the plot unpack itself for you all it once.

Now, not everyone who likes these books likes them for the same reasons,
right?  And I hope everyone can understand why someone who reads for, say,
reason (2) would feel a bit miffed if someone accused him of reading for
reason (4).

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 378       Sun Aug 07, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 03:19 EDT
 
I only get miffed when I get twitted for liking books that =lack= things I
don't particularky care about.

I have been unable to find a copy of GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS, so I read THE
PRINCES OF THE AIR instead, which has been languishing unread on my shelves
for almost 3 years.  Fun but only half-deep, I'd say.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 379       Mon Aug 08, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 01:53 EDT
 
But still puzzling.

My response to Gene Wolfe and Mike Ford tends to be not "How clever I am!" but
<smiting forehead> "Of course! How could I be so stupid!"
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 380       Mon Aug 08, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:53 EDT
 
I cannot (dark, horrible secret) read Gene Wolfe, tho' God knoweth I have
tried.  He slides off the surface of my brain, which generally is quite
obliging about grasping slippery objects.  On the other hand, Mike Ford, while
he may elude me (and make me feel dumb) also makes me feel as if my brain has
been doing sit-ups and chin-ups.  Even with GUW, where I kept looking for the
Rosetta page which would enable me to figure it all out, my brain finished the
exercise panting and probably the better for it.  I would not, however, want
everything I read for pleasure to have that effect (I don't run, jog, or ride
an electro-bike, either).
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 381       Tue Aug 09, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 01:14 EDT
 
I notice that everyone has been responding to the hot button of 
comprehensibility as readers.  But I happen to know that most of these posters
are writers. How do you deal with this issue in your own writing? I.e., on
your 3rd or 4th (or whatever) draft, how much do you feel you owe the reader
in terms of clarity?  I know that I, for one, become extremely obssessed with
whether or not I am making myself clear, whether it be in description,
characterization, foreshadowing . . . I almost go to the opposite extreme from
[the way readers perceive] Mike and Gene:  I have a pretty clear sense of what
I want a reader to "get" out of a given scene or sentence, and I'm engaged in
a contest of wills with  what I imagine to be the most opaque reader to SEE
THINGS MY WAY!  (I  refer you once again to the Readercon Motivational
Shrink's test, as  described by Delia Sherman in her topic(?) lately, wherein
we are analyzed for motivations of Achievement, Affinity, or...Power.)  Not
that I every /// ever try to "dumb down" my writing.  But I'm very conscious
of trying to communicate to an existing other person.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 382       Tue Aug 09, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 05:55 EDT
 
Readercon Motivational Test? Did I miss this?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 383       Tue Aug 09, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 09:05 EDT
 
As a writer, I hate the idea of being insultingly obvious.  But bitter 
experience (and not just in the fictional arena, either) has brought it home 
to me that what I see as insultingly obvious -- because all the connections 
are there inside my head -- the reader may not see that way at all, especially
when some of the connections don't make it onto paper.

So then I start obsessing on whether I've left the necessary connections 
unexpressed, thus inadvertently committing obscurity.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 384       Tue Aug 09, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [    <G>    ]      at 09:20 EDT
 
When Jennifer Hershey took over Bantam Spectra, they found a FedEx envelope
that had fallen behind one of the desks.  It proved to contain loose
manuscript pages, which had "FORD / Page 3a" and the like printed in the
corners, and mostly proved to contain nothing else but headings, such as PART
II and Chapter 8: Farside Escapade.  In the middle of one page was this:

           And all night long they sailed away;
              And when the sun went down,
           They whistled and wharbled a moony song
           To the echoing sound of a coppery gong
              In the shade of the mountains brown.

                                  -- Edward Lear

     "The Moon and I could keep this up forever."

                          -- Franklin Pierce Adams

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 385       Tue Aug 09, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:24 EDT
 
As a human being, even more than as  a writer, I sometimes think, I have a
horror of not being understood.  I will talk myself into the ground trying to
make sure that I have not been misinterpreted, to the probable annoyance of
the people around me.

As a writer, I don't explain as much, and I frequently go back and remove bits
of explanation which, in my judgement, interfere with the flow of the story or
writing, or belabor the obvious.  On the other  hand, if I workshop a piece
and a significant number of people don't get the point, I have to at least
entertain the notion that I haven't been sufficiently clear.  And again,
that's a judgement call: I once wrote a story which =most= readers (and those
mostly women) understood at once; two male readers, however, could not make a
certain conceptual leap and found the character's actions unconvincing from
that point. I realized I had made use of a trope of "romance" fiction, looked
at it in the context of the story, and by God kept it.

Readercon Motivational Test?  I clearly have been hanging around in the wrong
places.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 386       Tue Aug 09, 1994
STEVEN.BRUST [Sempai]        at 20:05 EDT
 
Good question, Ellen.  My answer is: I try to write so that if I were the
reader I would be neither confused by something overly mystifying nor insulted
by something overly obvious.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 387       Wed Aug 10, 1994
NEIL.GAIMAN [Neil]           at 03:18 EDT
 
I don't think you can write for everyone, nor should you try. But you should
try and make things work for different types of readers -- put in the stuff
for the people who like to work, as well as for the ones who like all the work
done for them.

I think.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 388       Wed Aug 10, 1994
J.BRUNET [JimB]              at 03:53 EDT
 
I fear I may be a charlatan and cynic of the worst sort.

By way of metaphor:  some writers provide an escalator up a  a mountain that
would not be much of a challenge in any event. Some point you at a sheer
cliff, e.g., the Cliffs of Madness or whatever, drop a pile of rope and pitons
at your feet, and say "Good luck."

When writing non-fluff, my own goals can be described as presenting what looks
to be a climbable but modestly demanding mountain that, 'upon inspection, has
a rather goodly amount of handholds and toeholds all the way up.  It does put
the reader who misses more than one or two in a row in a bit of a spot, but
you can't win 'em all.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 389       Wed Aug 10, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 09:05 EDT
 
What was it John Donne said?

 "...on a huge hill,
 Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
 Reach her, about must and about must go,
 And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so...."

(Quote from memory -- my pb volume of Donne's poetry got lost several 
transcontinental moves ago -- and therefore not guaranteed to be accurate in 
whole or in part.  But the sentiment stuck in my mind.)

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 390       Wed Aug 10, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:32 EDT
 
Anent nothing other than the topic of this Topic, I just finished COLLEGE OF
MAGICS, which is lovely, but which leads me to wonder  why this particular
kind of fantasy so often includes sections wherein the author recapitulates
her/his college experience...
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 391       Wed Aug 10, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 22:15 EDT
 
Doesn't a lot of literature recapitulate its writers' college experience (see
Brett Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, etc.)?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 392       Thu Aug 11, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 00:18 EDT
 
What an interesting question, Madeleine.  What about this?  That college is
the first place where most of us learn to deal with society, ideas, and other
human beings as adults.  It can be a transcendantly awful experience or it can
be a transcendantly wonderful experience, and often it's both, mostly in the
same week.  But it's seldom boring.  I didn't much like my college--it wasn't
enough like TAM LIN or COM (clearly I didn't hang around with the right
people)--but I learned a lot there that I've since written about.  My college
novel remains a fragment, and may always remain so, but I had to start it.    


As for the advisability of holding or not holding the reader's hand, I take
the position of a rather strict Nanny teaching a child the alphabet. After a
certain point, too much help is as confusing as too little.  It's just not
always apparant, especially when there's no physical Reader present to
respond, when that point is reached.  Writing groups are useful, but one tends
to end up writing to them.  It's a fascinating and insoluable problem.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 393       Thu Aug 11, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:24 EDT
 
My "college novel," which I will probably never finish, centers around the
four years =after= I got out of college.  (I just realized this.) I liked my
college and my time there, but always felt like an observer. Perhaps what one
is drawn to recapitulate is the time when one first felt part of a self-
selected community?  (My, doesn't that sound pompous...)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 394       Thu Aug 11, 1994
D.EGAN4 [Doris]              at 12:09 EDT
 
I was thinking of the "self-selected community" angle too.  And also that
college usually brings the first heady sense of freedom -- you're an adult but
not quite, all choices still before you but the confines of your parents'
house behind.

In a way it reminds me of that other short favorite fictional period when all
choices are still before you -- the few years from 18-26 that Jane Austen
liked to write about.  Marriage ended the story there, and with a ritual that,
like graduation, marked the end of dangerous options and the beginning of
predictability.

In both cases the focus goes from wide to narrow.

Besides, college gives you the perfect excuse to do neat things like stay up
all night talking about Emily Dickinson, which, if you were living in another
sort of novel, might get you accused of affectation.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 395       Thu Aug 11, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 13:55 EDT
 
Heaven forfend.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 396       Fri Aug 12, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 19:05 EDT
 
Doris, I think you've got it!  But, Madeleine, I'm wondering what else is in
this large genre of novels you refer to.  I can't think of too many others
besides COM & Tam Lin.  Let me put it to you that colleges also have the
virtues of being enclosed, like a court, like a starship, like a radio station
(to cite some of the most successful TV shows I've seen  based on character
and society).

I'm not through with "who we write for" yet, but I must dash--
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 397       Sat Aug 13, 1994
D.NOTKIN [Deb & Alan]        at 03:05 EDT
 
 Another reason why the college experience may be of interest to mannered
 writers is that college is the area where social status and social power
 becomes strongly influenced by one's wits instead of one's physical
 development.  

 High school boys, for example, can lead violent lives, and a boy's
 ability to take or dish out punishment is a measure of his standing and
 stature.  What is more, on this scale the social world is inherently
 unequal, with older, larger, more developed boys in upper classes having
 the advantage over younger, smaller freshmen and sophmores. 

 In college, however, the playing field is much more level -- the guys
 are all essentially grown up.  And where a boy's smart mouth is an
 invitation for physical retribution, a college youth's wit is his best
 weapon.  Fighting is simply much less socially acceptable in college
 than it is in high school.

 I am emphasizing boys and men here because I've been and am one.  I'd be
 willing to bet there are similar differences between high school and
 college for women. 

   -- Alan Bostick
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 398       Sat Aug 13, 1994
CYN.WARD [Cindy]             at 11:30 EDT
 
It was not my experience that the guys in college are all grown up.  A lot of
freshman behavior is tied directly to being not grown up.  And I hated walking
by Frat Row because of the inevitable immature comments shouted from windows &
roofs.

The percentage of adults, male and female, was higher in general, though.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 399       Sat Aug 13, 1994
W.HARRIS4 [William]          at 11:30 EDT
 
(Re #398, Deb&Alan)

High school was much more exciting than college, for reasons other than D&A's
violent theory.  They had an organized chess club (we went to the state
finals, and once to the national high school championships), and college
didn't.

College, all I did was snatch whatever chess tournaments I could on my own, or
work and go to classes.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 400       Sat Aug 13, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 11:46 EDT
 
The thing about college is that, much of the time, it's a fresh start, a 
chance to construct a new persona for oneself free of the accumulated baggage 
of twelve years, sometimes, trapped in the same role.  Since a lot of the 
Mannered Life is about the construction and deployment of roles and personae 
... I defer the rest.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 401       Sun Aug 14, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 23:15 EDT
 
Debra, I think you've hit something important. In thinking about this a bit
more, I realize that, for me, many of Georgette Heyer's novels scratch the
same itch that books with "collegial" settings do.  And one of the tropes of
the romance is the heroine coming upon the opportunity to remake herself (or
be remade)--as a woman of fashion, as a woman of wit, as a woman of magic
(well, not Heyer, but Stevermer, certainly).
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 402       Tue Aug 23, 1994
MITCHWAGNER [-!!-]           at 12:44 EDT
 
Alan Bostick - I have to disagree with all of your #398. You must've gone to a
tougher high school than me. Your statement that "high school boys ... can
lead violent lives, and a boy's ability to take or dish out punishment is a
measure of his standing and stature"--that's a description of junior high
school for me, and only to some extent. There was a sufficient number of less
athletic kids in my school that we formed our own little social circle.

By high school, violence in my neighborhood was almost as rare as it would be
in adult life.

Physical development =was= important in high school--but it was athletic
ability that was prized, not violence. And this continued to be the case in
college, for that matter, although I agree with you that in college mental
abilities were prized as they never had been before.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 403       Wed Aug 24, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 10:43 EDT
 
Mitch, I always thought that athletic prowess was =controlled= and  channelled
violence?

-Mad
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 404       Thu Aug 25, 1994
MITCHWAGNER [-!!-]           at 13:01 EDT
 
Madeleine - Perhaps so. Me, I figure if you're not intending to hurt anyone,
then it isn't violence.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 405       Wed Sep 07, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 00:33 EDT
 
Let's see.  Violence on the playground ain't going to get us far.  What else
can we talk about?

I guess youall haven't heard my little riff on =The Ballad of Little Jo== yet.
What interested me the most about it (for those of you who know what I'm
talking about--the rest of you go right out and rent it: it's a beautiful
movie) was how Little Jo constructed herself as a man.  First of all, she
scarred her face, and then she didn't ever smile, and then she watched the
other men at the mineing camp eat with their spoons held underhand, and
followed what they did just as I imagine she'd followed her mother's rules for
the proper conduct of young ladies back in Boston.  And she never, never tried
to make anyone like her.  That's what felt the strangest to me. I don't think
I've ever met a woman who genuinely didn't seem to care  whether people liked
her or not.  (It's only fair to say I haven't met that many men who don't
care, either, but it's more of a male trope.)

If that doesn't get you started, I give up.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 406       Wed Sep 07, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 13:46 EDT
 
Oooh, what a lovely discussion.  I just saw "The Ballad of Little Jo" this
weekend, for a fact, although I missed the first half hour or so and need to
watch it again to catch the setup.

The desirability of He (or She) Who Will Not be Won works for both sexes (for
heaven's sake, think of all the people who had crushes on Mr. Spock, the
ultimate unattainable object).  The underlying notion being, I suppose, "but
=I= could make him/her care..."  (I have rather unhappily watched friends of
both sexes go after persons of the  opposite sex who were attracted only to
people of their own sex... with that exact avowed belief.  Tremendous waste of
energy and  anguish.)

Maybe the whole point to not caring if anyone likes you--if you are
impersonating a man, at least--is the presumption of strength, of being so
tough that you don't need anyone's approval.  Boys are strong,  women are
needy, and that nonsense.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 407       Wed Sep 07, 1994
K.DALKEY [Kara]              at 21:00 EDT
 
Another point about the attractiveness of He/She Who Will Not Be Won is that
self-confidence (even to the point of arrogance or recklessness) is considered
very attractive in our culture.  Any anyone who seems not to need or value the
approval of others might be seen as someone very self-confident.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 408       Wed Sep 07, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 23:54 EDT
 
My take on Little Jo is that she didn't =dare= try to get people to like her. 
I also was fascinated by the Bo Hopkins character (sorry, forgot his name). 
It's not often that films quite capture people who are completely despicable
and genuinely likeable at the same time (well, not any that don't fall into
the handsome scoundrel bucket - this was =not= a handsome scoundrel).

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 409       Thu Sep 08, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 00:03 EDT
 
Frank, Paula.  His name was Frank.  And I loathed him and rather liked him all
at the same time.  A classic case of testosterone poisoning, someone who had
swallowed all the myths of his society, his class, and his age without
chewing.

In some ways, =Little Jo= is about nothing so much as it is about manners, the
externals of manhood, womanhood, heroism, desire.  The portrait of her becomes
an emblem of something she might have been, had things been different, but
something that she would have been assuming, pretending to be just as she
assumed the persona of Little Jo.  One of the most poignant moments in the
movie to me was when Tin Man Wong said he didn't like the girl in the picture,
because she'd never be doing =that= with him.  And so she wouldn't have.

I'd be interested to get some male perspective on all this.  Gender theories
work both ways.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 410       Thu Sep 08, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 00:31 EDT
 
Well, I don't know, the girl in the picture did =that= with the
=photographer=.  

Frank.  Right.  It would have been very easy to make a blustery bad guy out of
him; I'm so pleased they didn't.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 411       Thu Sep 08, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:21 EDT
 
Actually, I think Tin Man Wong was my favorite character in the whole  film. 
He makes the transition from role to role (you notice than when anyone other
than Jo is around he does the 'Stepin Fetchit' routine, even after the tenor
of their relationship has changed) with grace and even some humor, and the
shifts and his feelings about them are handled so deftly.

Having, as I said, come in half an hour in, I couldn't tell whether Jo was
behaving as if she didn't care if people liked her, or really didn't care--my
sense was the latter, but I'd be happy to be disabused of that.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 412       Thu Sep 08, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 23:53 EDT
 
If you started half an hour late, you missed the fact that Jo was seduced by a
slender, aesthetic photographer and bore him a son, at which point her father
disowned her and turned her out to starve in the street.  And then she took up
with a traveling peddler who sold her to a pair of passing soldiers ...

I was never really sure whether Jo didn't want to be liked, or didn't =dare=
ackowledge that she wanted to be liked, or wasn't sure, herself.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 413       Fri Sep 09, 1994
E.BRENNER1 [Ellen]           at 01:39 EDT
 
Madeleine: Having seen and loved "The Ballad of Little Jo," I'd say that it's
not so much that Jo doesn't care what others think, but that she can't
*afford* to care what others think.  She has so few options left to her in her
societal situation that allow her any autonomy, let alone physical and/or
emotional safety.  She can only exercise those remaining options if she gets
really tough both physically and emotionally.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 414       Fri Sep 09, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:30 EDT
 
Sigh.  I'm going to have to go out and rent the movie and watch it  again,
guggle to zatch.

The whole setup touches on some themes which have long fascinated me,
particularly in the olden days when I was writing Regencies... Thanks for the
fill-ins, folk.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 415       Fri Sep 09, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 23:20 EDT
 
Yo.  For those just joining us who haven't seen the movie, I did a more
prosaic write-up in my topic (11.25, ca. #345).

I think the issue is a desire to please, and to be acceptable through one' s
's agreeableness to others.  The male myth, particularly in the west, is that
one needs nothing and no one.  This can be very sexy (like Spock, S. Holmes,
et al), or not at all, like Little Jo herself, whose loner-ism, chosen or not,
is a matter of survival.  I can't think of  an archetype for a female self-
sufficient loner who isn't profoundly damaged - and _seen_ as damaged.  

Of course, she says, thinking (this is how I used to write my college papers -
the night before they were due, of course - which is why the opening paragraph
never had much to do with the final conclusion) it is the implicitness of
Damage that makes Spock et al so very appealing to some women:  this person is
not whole/happy.  I can make them whole.

Nancy Springer does wonderful work with the archetype:  I cannot recommend too
highly her THE HEX WITCH OF SELDOM.  (And LARQUE ON THE WING has to be seen to
be believed!!!  Move over, Little Jo .. . this one goes out and buys a penis!)

And Anne Bronte, in THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL (a vastly underrated book, in
my newfound opinion - reads more like Jane Austen than like Emily or
Charlotte) actually presents a mysterious woman who claims not to want/need
anyone - and is thus soundly trashed by the neighborhood -
 who is profoundly attractive to a local bachelor for very similar reasons to
those above (implied damage.  I must have, then save).
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 416       Fri Sep 09, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 23:48 EDT
 
Oops.  I meant, of course, 11.25 #425
 Sorry - ek
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 417       Sat Sep 10, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 00:23 EDT
 
There's also a novel called =The Real Charlotte=, written by the team of Irish
ladies called Somerville and Ross (who did the =Irish RM=, too), about  a
truly repellant woman who knows what she wants and goes for it, no matter who
is standing in the way.  On one level, good feminist that I am, I wanted to
like Charlotte, whose situation is one of those unpleasant "poor relative"
ones, but she was just too hateful.  I'd have to read the book again to find
out whether she was hateful because she knew what she wanted and went for it,
or whether she was hateful for other reasons, and that put the cap on her
general ickyness.  And I don't want to read the book again, particularly.

Ah, well.

To go from the sublime to the slightly ridiculous, I'm rereading (after a
hiatus of many years) Alexi Panshin's =Starwell=.  I think I liked it better
when I was in my twenties.  Villiers is the Manner Hero Complet, but the
narrator's coy asides are beginning to wear upon my nerves.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 418       Sun Sep 11, 1994
R.DAVIS68 [Ray]              at 00:22 EDT
 
Another admiring shake of the locks towards THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL, one
of my favorite examples of authorial crossdressing.  (The first and last
sections of the book, enveloping a woman's diary, are narrated by a man.)  I
think that, like Patricia Highsmith later, Bronte delineates male
characteristics which no male author (to my knowledge) has even noticed. 

 But it wasn't until Ellen's post that I realized that the freshness of
Bronte's male portrait may spring from the same sources as the freshness in
Highsmith's gallery: a clear insight into het male attitudes towards women,
and, perhaps even more interestingly, a willingness to place men who don't
consider themselves abnormally passive or irrational into passive irrational
roles -- roles which we play often in real life but almost never in narrative.

 At first the comparison to Austen seemed odd, since the TENANT's emotional
material is so hot.  But I can sort of see it.  It's as if, instead of using
her realistic insight to punture the Gothic novel's unrealistic surface
narrative, she'd used it to produce the Gothic's emotional effects.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 419       Sun Sep 11, 1994
C.ASH1 [Constance]           at 15:26 EDT
 
In Austen's SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, MANSFIELD PARK and PERSUASION, the central
(female) characters' actions are determined by their inferior economic and
gender positions to other characters superior economic and/or gender status.

The inferior characters are expected to behave and even think in all ways
deemed proper by those who are superior: they must repress all expression of
any resentment of such condition; they must not express their own wishes or
behave as they choose; they must leap instantly to please those who are placed
over them.  Worst of all is the utter power determination of the superior that
the inferior must NEVER express by cut of eyes or tone of voice resentment of
this.  This is very much like the conditions of slavery and later, the
capitalist workplace.

The male narrator of TENANT has this down perfectly, as do all the principal
characters of all the Bronte sisters' novels.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 420       Sun Sep 11, 1994
R.DAVIS68 [Ray]              at 17:48 EDT
 
Superlatively well said, Constance, and I'm saving your post for future
quoting.    As someone who's often disputed the "lightness" of Austen, I
couldn't agree with you more, except for your leaving EMMA off the list. I
wish more academicians felt that way.  (Though if they had, I don't suppose
Austen would have been so often taught.)

 But I do think that Austen, unlike Anne Bronte, was deliberately avoiding the
feeling of tsunami-height gothic doom, rather than deliberately bringing it
on.  Both have an unusually keen need for realism, but otherwise they're very
different writers. 

 Which must connect, I think, in some intriguing way much too complicated for
me to deal with, with the idea of _fantasy_ of manners....  Didn't someone
here once say that FoM brings the mature concerns to the juvenalia's matter?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 421       Sun Sep 11, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 19:30 EDT
 
Yes! Yes!  Austen and Anne Bronte are just the right people to be bringing up
in this context, because they are raising a lot of the same questions FoM
tends to raise.  Dare I bring them up again?  (Of course you do, quit being
coy.)

Even if the main thematic concern of a FoM isn't manners, the way in which the
fantasy's society interacts with itself is usually the medium in which the
author works.  Reading any book of Emma's, E.K.'s, Caroline's, Pat's, Pam's,
Steve's, mine, (there are others, too, and I want to talk about them in
another post), you can usually deduce something about what's going to happen
next by figuring out who in the society can afford to influence people or
events directly, and who has to do it by manipulation, among other things. 
The plot, the characters, the =feel= of any given book can be what Ellen
Kushner calls "wet" (sexy, emo- tional) or "dry" (more Austenesque), but the
emotional stakes are always high.

Anybody out there read =The Oracle Glass=?  It's a 17th century Historical.  I
kept having the eerie feeling that I'd written it in another incarnation--
magic and history and psychology com- bined.





 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 422       Sun Sep 11, 1994
C.ASH1 [Constance]           at 21:54 EDT
 
Ray -- <Blush>  Austen, being pure Manners Fiction, which embodies overturning
the social strictures within their own structure, dramatizes characters who
understand their world so well, that they win within it.

A grand contrast with the Brontes (also see AGNES GREY) who through
intellectual brilliance teamed with passion overturn the condition of their
place ordained by society.  VILLETTE and SHIRLEY work it out in a rather
different way to find their satisfaction.  VILLETTE's Lucy only receives
society's respect and economic independence -- which she never had before. But
she does lose love to death, after overcoming all the obstacles in its way. 
Shirley, being an observer, not a participant in the larger social- economic
design focus of her eponymous novel, achieves her love.  What she overturns is
class by that love from the female side.  Her belove is the region's hated
industrial innovator who brings the machines that cause the labor class of her
region to lose their living.  Moreover, he is indifferent to her.  She
"humanizes" him in the classic ideal manner of the softer sex, and supposedly
raises him to the ideal manners of her class, more observed in the breach than
in reality, toward the less fortunate.

Which is why EMMA isn't included.  She's not oppressed or repressed; she is
part of the power structure.  Her role as principal within the drama of her
eponymous novel is to fit her manners to her postition; i.e. learn who her
proper companions truly are -- Jane Fairfax, not Harriet Somebody Maybe; treat
her inferiors and less fortunate with the gentleness and compassion her state
as a gentlewoman ideally demands -- be kind to Jane's aunt, and don't
patronize Jane as does Mrs. Elton, etc.  This is to fit her for the proper
marriage to continue in the ideal traditions of her class.

Sorry for the length.  It happens with Austen and the Brontes.

Delia -- Speaking of others -- do you recall a certain THE STALKING HORSE?
 :-)

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 423       Mon Sep 12, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:35 EDT
 
And here, for lonely years, I had assumed that I was the only huuman being on
this side of the Atlantic who had read THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL!  I have
obviously found my true cohort.

I think that JANE EYRE fits into the discussion here, though.  One real source
of tension throughout the book is that Jane, emotionally deprived in her
childhood, wants desperately to be liked--to be loved, even--but that she is
unable to compromise or deny her own dignity. Some of the people she
encounters (Blanche Ingraham, for example) see Jane's behavior as merely
gauche.  Others, such as her aunt Reed, Mr. Brocklehurst, and St. John Rivers,
correctly see her as a kind of revolutionary, because she refuses to take
herself at their  estimatation.  In that sense, the only person who
understands and accepts and--miracle of miracles--loves her rebellion is
Rochester: when she finally spits back at him that she, in the sight of God,
is his equal, and cannot be tossed around as he appears to be doing, he
acknowledges it.  (Then, for his own peculiar reasons, goes back to trying to
trick her--precisely because he values her so much he cannot bear to lose
her.)

(Pardon: Tor's edition of JANE EYRE just came out; I did the front- and back-
matter for it, and have been re-reading the book for the zillionth time...)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 424       Mon Sep 12, 1994
D.EGAN4 [Doris]              at 14:57 EDT
 
I'm very fond of THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL.  I was taken by surprise at how
good it was... I tried AGNES GREY afterwards, but to my disappointment I never
could get into it.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 425       Tue Sep 13, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 22:27 EDT
 
What wonderful reading all of the above is!  I just want to say that the
comparison of WILDFELL to Austen sprang to my mind because it is so much more
about a person getting on in a society of strictly defined rules.  There is a
"normative" society in existance, which itself plays a very strong role in the
novel --certainly as manifested in various well-drawn individuals, but Society
itself is the force - both character and background, motivator and subject.

In JANE EYRE and WUTHERING HEIGHTS, certainly social customs and beliefs exist
and are significant, but individuals are more eccentric, characters keep on
the move, the high drama is often played between individuals who are
emotionally as well as physically "alone in a room" . . . .

 The reason "Fantasy of Manners" isn't just cheapjack Jane Austen with  magic,
is because its author must go to the trouble of inventing a  new and credible
society, and in the narrative invest it with all the force and power of, say,
Austen's, or Wodehouse's.  (It's why most fantasy readers also adore Georgette
Heyer -- for all her research, she really did just that.)  It's not enough
merely to posture and pose, and wave lace handkerchiefs, and have the
occasional swordfight. Characters must exist in a social world with
consequences, wherein their ability to navigate its shoals is critical. 

[Please pardon the eccentric punctuation; I _still_ can't upload, and have had
too much coffee.  It would probably help to read it aloud, constantly
interrupting yourself.]
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 426       Tue Sep 13, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 23:17 EDT
 
Well, this has done it.  I re-read JANE EYRE, and now I'm re-reading WILDFELL
HALL.  I hope you're all proud of yourselves.  It's such an indulgence when
there's all that stuff out there I haven't even looked at yet.

Ellen, your statement above is masterful.  I would enlarge it to the extent
that the reason so much historical fiction does not rise above the level of a
ring in the bathtub is because the authors either do not understand, or choose
to ignore, the real historical consequences their characters face.  When I was
reading Regencies, in particular, and  historicals generally, the vast, tawdry
majority were of the "posture, pose, wave a lace handkerchief" ilk, all
populated with characters whose social outlook placed them firmly in 1962. 
(Heyer was, by report, populating her books with people whose outlook was dead
out of 1915, but the value set was closer to 1812, and she well understood
what the social outline of the periods she wrote in was.  She got into trouble
when she tried to write 11th-15th century--periods about which she had
exhaustive information and no appropriate character set.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 427       Tue Sep 13, 1994
E.WILLEY                     at 23:39 EDT
 
It's interesting to me that everyone here keeps recurring to Austen and
Bronte(s) for models, but no one mentions Trollope or Gaskell.


Elizabeth Willey
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 428       Wed Sep 14, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 01:19 EDT
 
Sherwood mentioned Gaskell once or twice, about two years ago, I think.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 429       Wed Sep 14, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 07:01 EDT
 
Some of us are embarrassed to say they've never read Trollope or Gaskell.
(Except a bit of Jane.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 430       Wed Sep 14, 1994
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 08:29 EDT
 
What about Trollope?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 431       Wed Sep 14, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [    <G>    ]      at 09:41 EDT
 
Trollope's fiction, even when he is writing about the Duke's younger brother,
is very perceptibly written from the viewpoint of an astute middle-class
observer.  All of Jane Austen's work is written from the viewpoint of gentry
with private incomes; the very poorest of all Jane Austen's protagonists (Emma
Watson of "The Watsons," who is a lot poorer than her nearest rival) still
belongs to a family with an independent income and servants.  And the Bronte's
work, even Anne's, is written either from the vantage of financial
independence (WUTHERING HEIGHTS, SHIRLEY) or else is charged with the powerful
fairy-tale context of unmerited poverty marrying (or, in VILLETTE, just
failing to marry) affluence.

So neither the Brontes nor Austen ever wrote from within the viewpoint of
settled middle-class stability.  That is the vantage least hospitable, I would
argue, to mannerist sensibilities.

Any overgeneralizations here?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 432       Wed Sep 14, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 12:00 EDT
 
Part of the problem with Heyer's medieval stuff, I think, is that all the
remarkable =fizz= of her Regencies and Georgians was lacking.  It's as if she
assumed that the humor of medieval folk was as heavy as their weaponry.  The
sad thing, of course, was that that was the period she loved best and felt
most serious about; she serious-ed it to death.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 433       Wed Sep 14, 1994
C.ASH1 [Constance]           at 21:01 EDT
 
Gaskell's fiction, as interesting and useful as it is to read, doesn't carry
either the wit of Austen or the gothic drama of the Brontes.

This probably has something to do with why Charlotte wrote SHIRLEY, a novel
that attempted something that her friend Mrs. Gaskell achieved in NORTH AND
SOUTH, and why Mrs. Gaskell wrote Ms. Eyre' biography instead of a novel that
attempted the Bronte matter.

Trollope is -- Trollope.  A man who wrote very many very bad sentences. IMHO,
of course.

You said it very well, Greg.

Madeleine -- Do you really think that anyone here feels you are suffering a
hardship by re-reading Bronte fiction?  :-)

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 434       Wed Sep 14, 1994
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 21:33 EDT
 
I've read a lot of Trollope and enjoyed some of it, but I don't respect it.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 435       Wed Sep 14, 1994
D.EGAN4 [Doris]              at 23:41 EDT
 
Speaking of respect, Lois -- a friend of mine was reading a paperback on the
subway, when the train jerked and a nice looking young man was thrown against
her, sending her book onto the lap of the person beyond.  They retrieved the
book, and he apologized.  "That's all right," she said, "it's just a little
Trollope."


 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 436       Wed Sep 14, 1994
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 23:50 EDT
 
Yes, there is also that.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 437       Thu Sep 15, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:32 EDT
 
Constance: No, not really.

OTBPOTTBRTSSE (off-the-beaten-path-of-this-topic-but-responding-to- something-
said-earlier) I saw THE BALLAD OF LITTLE JO on cable last night, in its
entirety. I think I may have to rent it to make sure  they didn't lop any
crucial scenes out of it, but if the film I saw last night is the film
entire...I think I was happier with it when I hadn't seen the front end. 
Sigh.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 438       Fri Sep 16, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 21:47 EDT
 
Doris - REAlly??? REally and Truly?  I thought that sort of thing ony I mean
only happened in Punch cartoons!

Maddy - Why?

Greg - But the Middle Class had servants, if not independent incomes to pay
them with. I mean, having any money whatsoever from any source was like being
an American, even a poor American, in Brazil or India.  Lots of people, little
work, limited cash flow = lots of Human Resources, i.e. servants.  People
worked for very little to avoid starvation, and hand- power ran a household,
so you needed lots of it.  Also, what about PRIDE AND PREJUDICE?  The Bennetts
don't have much money, and are far from  aristocratic.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 439       Fri Sep 16, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [    <G>    ]      at 22:24 EDT
 
The Bennets, like the Woodhouses, the Watsons, and the Morlands, have an
independent income.  Mr. Bennet is a gentleman, and thus -- as Elizabeth gets
even Darcy's titled aunt to admit -- Darcy's equal.  This is far from middle-
class.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 440       Fri Sep 16, 1994
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 23:11 EDT
 
I doubt that the term "middle class" would have had all the significance to
Austen and her contemporaries that it does for us.  The Bennets, as most of
Austen's characters, belonged to the Gentry.  Some were connected to the
Nobility.  Then there were Tradesmen and Yoemen, etc.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 441       Fri Sep 16, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 23:40 EDT
 
Ellen --

1) Re: THE BALLAD OF LITTLE JO.  I did not feel satisfied that there was a
real sense on Jo's part of the risk--economic and social--she took in being
seduced by the photographer.  Sexual conduct outside of marriage was
incredibly risky for women in that era, The attitude of the film struck me as
disingenuous.  Either Jo throws her hat over the windmill, the world well lost
for love, in which case her abandonment and subsequent disgrace is a
punishment for a very "womanish" behavior in being consumed by a  feeling,
=or= she's having a casual fling, in the same way a man of the time, such as
the photographer, might do.  It's very 20th century and liberated to say, as
the film seems to me to do, that Jo should have been allowed to behave
sexually in the same way that men did at the time--well, of course, being
myself rather 20th century, I believe that.  But I saw =nothing= to convince
me that a well-to-do girl from the middle class with nothing unconventional
about her family, would have brought such an idea to bed with her.  And I if
she does, that rather denies her the right to feel bad when the inevitable
consequences befall her.

My feeling is that putting more a little more weight on what, other than
ruination, drew her into that first relationship, would have helped to further
underscore the transition from female to male behavior.  If she entered the
first relationship on some tide of romantic feeling, in the "womanish" way,
and that relationship ends with discovery and ruin--then  she should enter the
second relationship with more apparent casualness-- in the "male" way.  In
which case it makes sense that =that= is the  relationship in which her secret
is kept and she is happy. 

This is why I need to see the film again, to see if cable lopped out any
scenes which would render the foregoing paragraphs meaningless.  I did like
the film...just liked it better hearing people here explain the front end than
I did watching it myself.

Anent all this: has anyone ever considered that Louisa Alcott's melodramas are
=extremely= manner-ish?  I've been turning all this over in my head with
scenes from WORK, one of Alcott's adult novels, mixed in.

2)  The middle class, per Austen et al, had to work for the money and those
servants.  The issue of where your money came from, and how many generations
you were removed from the source of your income, was very important.  John
Fowles does some marvelous stuff on this in THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN,
with the relationship between Charles and Ernestina.

3)  O, not Maddy, please.  It's lovely for Maddy Prior, but attaches itsel
badly to me (I had a teacher who called me Maddy, and she is not a happy
memory).  If you balk at spelling out Madeleine, and I do myself, freoften,   
Mad will do.  Thanks.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 442       Sat Sep 17, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 03:47 EDT
 
Madeleine, I believe you saw the entirety of LITTLE JO.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 443       Sat Sep 17, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 13:28 EDT
 
Thanks, Paula Kate...I was afraid of that.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 444       Sat Sep 17, 1994
C.ASH1 [Constance]           at 14:53 EDT
 
Mr. Bennet has a private income, attached to their small land, which is
entailed to the closest male heir.  This income, plus the home, will come to
an end for the rest of the family with the death of Mr. Bennet, which fact
contributes no little to the tension of the plot, and the characterization of
the Bennets.  Elizabeth and Jane see this future very clearly, for example.

Mr. Bennet is not engaged in trade.  Trade may make a family wildly wealth --
middle class -- (which signifies something rather different in European
economic history tha in the U.S.) but not part of the gentry.

Madeleine -- I've thought the same about several of L. Alcott's gothic
melodramas.  Speak of the outcast and the despised turning the conventional
social order upside down!  And the the anger!  Like a hurricane, baby.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 445       Sat Sep 17, 1994
L.TILTON [Lois]              at 15:36 EDT
 
The Dashwoods considered themselves similarly impoverished after the death of
their father and husband.  They were reduced to living in a cottage on an
income of L 7K per annum, with only three servants, two maids and a man.  But
the most telling evidence of their lowered state was the fact that Mrs D sold
her carriage.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 446       Sat Sep 17, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 17:50 EDT
 
M - sorry.  I thought I remembered friends calling you "M--y", but my memory
is more than fallible.  Probably thinking of the Prior one. I'm very
interested in your response to the opening of "Little Jo," though mine was
quite different:  I feel we never really did get inside her head throughout
the movie, a fascinating trick for a filmmaker to take with  a viewpoint
character, and possibly one of the reasons I found it "unsenti mental."  We
don't know what she went through before and after the photographer; in fact,
one minute she's undressing, and the next she's giving up her infant child! 
The fact that she appears to have to give up sex for the rest of her life when
she changes to a man is especially poignant later on. (Are the rest of you
bored yet?  rushing off to the video store?)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 447       Sun Sep 18, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 23:43 EDT
 
I'd like to say a small word for Trollope here.  Yes, I think he wrote novels
of manners, and very good ones, too.  They're long, and enormously
complicated, and you have to like his characters a lot to stick with them. But
he did more interesting female characters than most Victorian male novelists
and many Victorian female novelists, too.  I'm thinking mostly of the
Political novels here, because I know those a little better than the
Barchester ones.  I love Alice Vavasour even more than Glencora Palliser,
(=Can You Forgive Her?= the first Palliser novel, is more about Alice than
Glencora, and argues very well against marriages of convenience).  His style,
of course, is a matter of taste.  The word leisurely comes easily to mind. 
But, oh, the characters.  And character, I submit, is a great deal of what FoM
(or anything oM, for that matter) is about.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 448       Mon Sep 19, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:20 EDT
 
Constance: I knew you were a right thinking woman.  I have been a LMA fan for
years now: my feeling is that anyone with Bronson Alcott for a father had a
right to her fury, and then some.  Ever notice how often fathers are =not
there= in her work?  Or are scary Pygmalion figures?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 449       Mon Sep 19, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:23 EDT
 
Ellen:  I agree with everything you said, and yet... it still feels a little
like a political cheat to me.  I'm not exactly sure why it doesn't sit well. 
It just doesn't.  (Although the film is just as choppy about --no, I mean
sketchy--about how Jo and Tin Man Wong go from "You're not =Mr.= Jo" to going
to bed together.  I think I'm generally more inter- ested in how people wind
up in bed together than what they do on  arrival.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 450       Mon Sep 19, 1994
C.ASH1 [Constance]           at 19:56 EDT
 
Madeleine -- Yes, the ineffectual father-figure has most certainly been
noticed, along with the determined effort on the part of the LMA LITTLE WOMEN
et al. author's excuses and attempts to prove that the ineffectual/absent
father really is other than that.

It's just so horrible that this poor woman never got to have any fun at all,
except maybe, I hope, writing those gothic, potboiler, melodramas that she had
to, of course, pretend she did only for money, didn't enjoy and had to abjure
as Bad and Impure.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 451       Mon Sep 19, 1994
E.PERRY7 [Betsy Hanes]       at 20:34 EDT
 
And Trollope _explains_ social customs which other Victorian writers assume
you already know about.  Note, for instance, the very clear explanation in
??THE EUSTACE DIAMONDS?? of why a lady absolutely, positively, never, ever
ever accuses a gentleman of lying. I also have a great weakness for Lizzy
Eustace herself, poor lamb; but then, I like Becky Sharpe, too.

Amen, Constance.  When I get into my time machine, loaded up with antibiotics
for the Brontes, Keats, and Austen (do they help kidney disease?) I'm thinking
of including a little packet of strychnine earmarked for Bronson Alcott.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 452       Mon Sep 19, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 23:11 EDT
 
Bronson Alcott was just a flake.  For a _really_ poisonous Victorian 
paterfamilias, you have to go look at the Brontes' father, or Elizabeth 
Barrett's dad.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 453       Tue Sep 20, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 00:05 EDT
 
Is this where we go into the "suffering artist" riff?  How many great artists
had happy, well-adjusted home lives?  Dickens?  Nah.  George Eliot? Give me a
break!  Shakespeare?  Well, he probably did, but we don't really -know-, do
we?  And besides, you have to have an exception to prove the rule.  Perhaps
what it is is that it's helpful to have been brought up in some way outside
the rules in order to understand them properly.  Most native speakers of
English, for instance, don't know the rules of grammar (Present company always
excepted, of course).  Peope who learn English as a second language are much
more aware of the rules, in all their contradictory splendor, even when they
don't get them right.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 454       Tue Sep 20, 1994
C.ASH1 [Constance]           at 01:07 EDT
 
One way or another, those dads got those girls, to our later benefit, of
course, and at their expense -- the authors' personal emotional expense I
mean.

If it wasn't for Charlotte's dad, she might not have married.  She might have
written some more books.  But Reverend Bronte liked this curate, who did all
his work, and yet gave the old Reverend pride of place.  Charlotte knew
getting married meant getting pregnant, and for her getting pregnant meant
death.  She did it anyway.  Times have changed.  But Reverend Bronte had an
income and status.

Barret's father was rich and totally perverted.

LMA's father's power was given to him by Abba, his wife.  Who had to give him
that in her mind, and that of her daughters, for the sake of her pride. And
thus Lousia had to provide what Bronson could not -- emotional sustenance,
support and loyalty, as well as just plain money.

I think I despise Bronson.  You sure can't read a damned thing he wrote. They
say his charisma overcame that with certain souls in person.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 455       Tue Sep 20, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:10 EDT
 
I was nearly cast out of 11th grade English for voicing my opinion, after a
study segment on the Transcendentalists, that the whole thing looked to me
like an advanced excuse for doing whatever you damned well wanted, and letting
someone else pick up the pieces.  I have since recanted a little on some of
the others, but I hold my ground with regard to Bronson Alcott.  (Betsy, you
bring the strychnine, I'll bring the fire and tongs.)

Among other lovely conceits, the man was convinced that he, eldest  daughter
Anna, and youngest daughter May, were inherantly angelic, because they were
blonde and fair.  Abba, Louisa and (what was the neurasthenic Beth-figure's
name?  Beth?) were demonic.  Talk about damned right out of the pouch.

But you're right, Constance.  If Bronson hadn't had Abba, he'd never have got
away with so much ruinously, poisonously self-serving twaddle.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 456       Tue Sep 20, 1994
E.PERRY7 [Betsy Hanes]       at 19:12 EDT
 
Delia,  I don't think we were saying "all writers are happy", just "some
writers are unusually victimized by their families."  (Dickens was IMHO a
victimizER.)  There's a difference between being an indifferent
wife/mother/father/human being and being crippled by bad parenting.

I should probably kill off Virginia Woolf's older stepbrother while I'm at it.
Anybody got some good recommendations for Toxic Husbands? Carlyle doesn't
count, I think; although I'd love to see some of Jane Walsh's novels from an
alternate universe.  
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 457       Tue Sep 20, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 21:24 EDT
 
Actually, Charlotte Bronte's father was very much against her marrying, and
had a huge fight with the curate because he dared to ask for his daughter's
hand.  Charlotte's marriage with him was more in defiance of her father--she
was his last surviving child, and he knew damn well he'd "_lose_" her to
marriage, one way or antoher.  I've been doing a lot of  research on this,
because I'm writing a story about Charlotte for the Neil Gaiman anthology for
Harper Collins.  The more I hear, the more I'm in  favor of the Rev. Patrick: 
how many other Victorian women of 14, 17, 19, 25 years of age do yu know whose
fathers (and guardian aunts) left them alone for hours at a time to write,
without demanding that they either do something socially useful, or get
married?

Oh, yeah - the other reason I guess I connected Anne Bronte's THE TENANT OF
WILDFELL HALL with Jane Austen is because it's actually set in the 1820s.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 458       Tue Sep 20, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 21:56 EDT
 
See 11.25 #487 for an Alternate History of MannerPunk.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 459       Wed Sep 21, 1994
C.ASH1 [Constance]           at 00:54 EDT
 
Reverend Bronte, however, allowed them to continue under his roof subsequent
to to the marriage.  There were multiple reasons for this.

Father Bronte was so bizarre in habit and outlook that one can conclude all
sorts of things.  For example,  C. took on another Rev. Bronte by marrying the
curate that dad liked and found most convenient.  Many have researched this
for years also and thus drawn their own conclusions from various
correspondences and journals, as of course, will be done matter what one tells
the other is gospel.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 460       Thu Oct 06, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 10:04 EDT
 
Gee, it sure got quiet around here...
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 461       Thu Oct 06, 1994
J.BRUNET [JimB]              at 12:48 EDT
 
Be vewy vewy qwiet, we're all weading Mannerpunk.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 462       Fri Oct 07, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 08:06 EDT
 
Forgot if I've mentioned here that the 9/26 issue of THE NEW YORKER has a
review by music critic Paul Griffiths of a new opera based on =Les Liasons
Dangereuses= (composed by Conrad Susa, whose name is otherwise unknown to me),
which review is in epistolary form as if by the characters of the original
book. More mannerist cannot be imagined. Griffiths continues to be one of my
favorite music writers.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 463       Fri Oct 07, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:26 EDT
 
Don, I don't suppose I could swap you a copy of that review for the loan of my
tape of the Branagh "Lady's Not for Burning," could I?  (Which I cleverly
forgot to bring to the workshop last night, thereby ensuring myself a
bargaining chip I didn't even know I'd need...)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 464       Fri Oct 07, 1994
D.DOYLE1 [Debra]             at 10:36 EDT
 
I read a review in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, of the _Liasons
Dangereuses_ opera -- essentially a rave, with the note that it's apparently 
going to be shown on PBS for the benefit of the most of us who don't live in a
city with a major (or, for that matter, a minor) opera house.

Debra

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 465       Sat Oct 08, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 01:51 EDT
 
"=Branagh= Lady's Not for Burning"???????????????
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 466       Sat Oct 08, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 02:03 EDT
 
That's what =I= said.

Madeleine: But of course. Not even the slightest of problems.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 467       Sat Oct 08, 1994
D.EGAN4 [Doris]              at 11:35 EDT
 
Heh-heh.  I'll bet Madeleine gets channel 31 on her set.

As do I.  I had two VCRs going that night.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 468       Sun Oct 09, 1994
P.MARMOR [Paula Kate]        at 17:35 EDT
 
"Channel 31" does not translate well across cable systems.  What channel is
this please?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 469       Sun Oct 09, 1994
D.EGAN4 [Doris]              at 20:31 EDT
 
My "channel 31" is WNYC, a small UHF PBS station in the New York City area.
It's strictly local.  Last month they had a "festival of Yorkshire Television"
and broadcast a number of interesting programs, one of which was the Branagh
LADY'S NOT FOR BURNING.

At the time I mentioned it on GEnie.  People in California and Texas told me
there was no listing for it where they were, which leads me to think that NY
was just plain lucky.

If you've seen the Chamberlain/Atkins production on A&E, it stacks up
favorably.  The Branagh version had more cuts, often in my favorite speeches.

I've got both on tape, for anyone interested.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 470       Sun Oct 09, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 22:04 EDT
 
You don't happen to have the John Hurt/Sinead Cusack PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN
WORLD, do you?
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 471       Mon Oct 10, 1994
D.EGAN4 [Doris]              at 00:32 EDT
 
Don, I'm sorry to say that I don't.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 472       Mon Oct 10, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 21:24 EDT
 
Don--the tape (and my next three chapters of CITY) are in the mail.

They did cut way to hell and gone out of the Branagh version of LADY (although
at least it was Christopher Fry hisself what did the cutting) but it holds up
tolerable well.  The whole flavor of the thing changes with Branagh's handling
of Thomas Mendip. I love the Chamberlain/Atkins version, but Chamberlain plays
it much -angrier- than Branagh, who mostly seems weary and rather world-sick. 
They're both valid takes on it.  I still favor Eileen Atkins over Cheri Lunghi
for Jennet, but that's just me.

Doris--right you are.  Don't get any of the high-priced entertainment
stations, but Channel 31 comes in loud and clear and frequently British.
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Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 473       Mon Oct 10, 1994
D.EGAN4 [Doris]              at 22:17 EDT
 
I love Eileen Atkins.  But I'm fond of Lunghi, too.  She was in a MUCH ADO
ABOUT NOTHING that ran a few years back, and I preferred her Beatrice to the
recent Emma Thompson one.  (Another Branagh play with lots of cuts... sigh.)


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Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 474       Mon Oct 10, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 23:06 EDT
 
I probably saw that MUCH ADO, come to think of it. It's probably rentable or
borrowable somewhere...
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Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 475       Tue Oct 11, 1994
D.EGAN4 [Doris]              at 01:09 EDT
 
It's certainly borrowable, Don. <g>  Let me know in e-mail.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 476       Tue Oct 11, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 22:56 EDT
 
Oh, DOOOOrisss....Doris, darling best beloved perfect human being, you KNOW
when my birthday is . . . I have to admit/say/claim that TLNFB is one of my
complete and utter seminal influences.  I discovered it in the library of the
arts camp where I was when I was 13, and read it (to myself and aloud with
whoever I could nab) year after year, loving every sentence, without having
the slightest idea of what anyone was saying in the speeches over 3 lines long
(and even some under!)...I was about 21 before I really understood what
Thomas's problem was!  And loved him the better therefore. I have never heard
anyone play it the way I hear it in my head.  I hated the Chamberlain.  In
highschool I found the Gielgud recording (with  Richard Burton as Richard!); I
think that was OK.  I have (as a teenager) rudely walked out on _2_ gatherings
of amateur playreadings of it because I couldn't bear to hear the lines coming
out all funny.... I'll let Kenny B., auteur of my beloved "Hank Cinque", give
it a whirl.  And thank you.
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Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 477       Tue Oct 11, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 23:30 EDT
 
I hadn't thought about it specifically, but it's clear that TLFNB is a crucial
ur-Mannerist text.
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Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 478       Wed Oct 12, 1994
D.EGAN4 [Doris]              at 00:02 EDT
 
Ellen, cherie, your whim is my command.  Indeed, as long you continually
praise my person, my writing, and my fashion sense, as well as my promiscuous
use of commas, my tape collection and bank account are open to you.

(And have you noticed how eluki slyly dropped a couple of LADY references into
her latest?)

I know what you mean, btw, about hearing it perfectly in your head.  A few
months ago I bought an audio tape of Richard Burton doing John Donne.  I love
Donne, love Burton, figured it would be a wondrous match.  Of course it
wasn't.  And I felt so ungracious in my disappointment, too -- like those
people pointing at the screen during the Lord of the Rings movie, saying
"THAT'S not what Frodo looks like!"

I think I need your address.

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Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 479       Wed Oct 12, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 10:58 EDT
 
Well of course TLNFB is quintessential mannerist. Gee whiz.
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Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 480       Thu Oct 13, 1994
A.SHECHTER [Andi & Stu]      at 00:11 EDT
 
 Just back from working on a convention so I'm a few days late.  Branagh did
Lady's Not for Burning?  Pant, pant, slobber, drool (you think that's bad -
you should hear me over on the Branagh topic!) Anyone willing to make a copy
and send it to a Seattlite who doesn't have cable or anything?  Will
pay...will send chocolate, coffee, flowers, etc.
 Slobber,
 Andi
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Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 481       Thu Oct 13, 1994
BROOK.WEST                   at 02:51 EDT
 
Ahem...GEnie policy is that illegal acts, like copying videotapes of
copyrighted material, should not be encouraged in the public BBS. Please
refrain from doing so.

Of course GEnie has no control over what may be discussed in email.

Brook West, Cats 3-5 TL
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 482       Thu Oct 13, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [    <G>    ]      at 07:44 EDT
 
I will confess (in a small voice) to having disliked "The Lady's Not For
Burning" since encountering it in college, where it seemed -- along with all
other modern blank verse dramas -- a piece of pseudo-Elizabethiana.  Possibly
I am missing something.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 483       Thu Oct 13, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 19:35 EDT
 
Well, yes it is, to a certain extent.  But nonetheless brilliant for that. It
seems to me that backward-looking works of art (like POSSESSION, like THE SOT-
WEED FACTOR) redefine the genres they look back to, filtering     pre-modern
artistic technique and language through modern sensibilities. Is POSSESSION a
piece of pseudo-Victoriana?  Yes and no.  Is Peter Ackroyd's book about
Hawkweed and 17th Century England a piece of pseudo-Pepysiana? Yes and no.  
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 484       Thu Oct 13, 1994
E.LANG1 [Ellie]              at 23:08 EDT
 
Hawksmoor
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Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 485       Fri Oct 14, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [    <G>    ]      at 08:51 EDT
 
I tend to distinguish modern plays set in, say, the Elizabethan era (such as
Edward Bond's "Bingo") with those that moreover ape (perhaps "imitate" is a
less charged word) the literary style of that era.  "The Lady's Not for
Burning," by this light, belongs not so much with POSSESSION as those
overheated Victorian pastiches by Joyce Carol Oates, A BLOODSMOORE ROMANCE and
THE MYSTERIES OF WINTERTHORN.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 486       Fri Oct 14, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 22:16 EDT
 
So where do the Elizabethan (approximately) sections of AEGYPT or LOVE AND
SLEEP fit into this schema? Or "Aweary of the Sun," for that matter.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 487       Fri Oct 14, 1994
C.ASH1 [Constance]           at 23:53 EDT
 
CYRANO DE BERGERAC is late 19th Century French Romanticism, not 17th Century
France, for example, despite it's marvelous ornamentation.  It's also
sentimental.

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Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 488       Tue Oct 18, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 22:54 EDT
 
There's an A.S. Byatt novel called THE VIRGIN IN THE GARDEN that addresses
this issue.  It's about a man who writes an Elizabethan play and puts it on in
a relative's (I think--it's been years since I read it) garden.  The relative
is a Lord, and the garden Elizabethan, enormous, knotted, mazed, and pleached
to a fare-thee-well.  Frankly, I find such endeavors entirely enchanting, as I
believe I indicated.  Mileage, of course, may vary.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 489       Wed Oct 19, 1994
D.FRIEDMAN11 [Dawn]          at 04:56 EDT
 
  I want to hear more about the Oates novels, please.  I worked my way through
them several times and still don't know what she meant to accomplish.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 490       Wed Oct 19, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 06:21 EDT
 
Delia, that's the kind of novel I like especially, the one set in contemporary
times that generates tension between the present and the imagined past of a
literary pastiche.  It's when someone simlply writes the pastiche (as Fry did)
then I sometimes get impatient.

Dawn, what is there -- ever -- not to understand about what Joyce Carol Oates
is getting at?  She was evoking, in her usual crushing manner, her usual
themes of the irrationality of human passions, the absurdity of thinking
Progress will change them, the weight of the past, etc.  Don't forget the
destructive power of sexuality.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 491       Wed Oct 19, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 06:56 EDT
 
So, Greg, what =is= the difference between "The Lady's Not For Burning" and
"Aweary of the Sun"? I confess that I fear I like them both for the same
reasons.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 492       Wed Oct 19, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 07:01 EDT
 
Donald, you silly goober, "Aweary of the Sun" is not written as though it were
composed at the turn of the seventeenth century, like (say) the Robert Greene
short story that became the basis of "The Winter's Tale."  It is set in 1613,
and tries to get the language right, but doesn't pretend to date from then.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 493       Wed Oct 19, 1994
M.ROBINS [Madeleine]         at 09:47 EDT
 
I'm afraid my love of  T"The Lady's Not for Burning" is largely irrational--it
scratches an itch I have in a most pleasurable way, even when I know right
well it is a pastiche.  Tho I never thought Fry was pretending that "Lady"
dated from the Elizabethan.  (I have a similar fondness for some of the works
of Sinclair Lewis, whom I know I ought to hate, but can't, despite his
shrillness.  I believe the term "guilty pleasure" was invented for just such
instances.)
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 494       Wed Oct 19, 1994
D.EGAN4 [Doris]              at 10:52 EDT
 
I don't know that Fry meant TLNFB to seriously sound as though it were
composed in Elizabethan times.  It was clearly a modern hybrid with
Elizabethan flavoring -- half a pastiche.  It reminds me of discussions we've
had in other topics around here as to just how much "flavoring" a story needs
when you set it in the past -- have the characters speak contemporary English,
have them speak from their time, or mix the two and hope it works.  Fry was
going for a mix.  Although I'm not sure of his use of the word "certifiable."
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 495       Thu Oct 20, 1994
D.FRIEDMAN11 [Dawn]          at 05:01 EDT
 
  Oh, she meant all that, did she, then?   "Crushing" is certainly the word. 
Trust me to look for double meanings when I'm hit over the head.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 496       Thu Oct 20, 1994
DGK [[Don Keller]]           at 06:34 EDT
 
I think I need to reread the play.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 497       Thu Oct 20, 1994
G.FEELEY1 [Greg]             at 09:03 EDT
 
When Oates rumbles up in a pile driver, don't look for embroidery.
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 498       Thu Oct 20, 1994
C.ASH1 [Constance]           at 21:12 EDT
 
Delia -- Read THE VIRGIN IN THE GARDEN also.  It was just a local lord, no
family connection between him and the author of masque-drama-pageant.

It was a delightful book, as everything written by A.S. Byatt is.

 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 499       Sun Oct 23, 1994
E.KUSHNER [Ellen]            at 18:02 EDT
 
Doris - of course I worship you, your hats, every comma you ever refused to
delete...and, of course, your law-abiding ways.

TLNFB doesn't strike me as at all Elizabethan, except in Frye's love of
figurative language.  Stage directions say the time is "1400 either  more or
less or exactly."

Nor is it a pastiche, in my eyes:  it's inspired by the last words of a
convict who, in 1947, confessed falsely to a murder, saying "It was worth
while being hung to be a hero, seeing that life was not really worth living" .
Written directly after WWII, at the same time as all those delicious French
Romantic pieces by Giradoux and Anouilh, by people trying to  distinguish
innocence from ignorance; people, in fact, reclaiming  fantasy as an artistic
means of coping with the issues of present reality --which, in Frye's case,
include the relative values of Realism and Panache (and a neat little gender-
bender he does, too, by making the "Science is Everything, the Concrete is all
that exists" mouthpiece be a woman!). s
 ------------
Category 4,  Topic 4
Message 500       Wed Dec 07, 1994
D.SHERMAN9 [Delia]           at 18:59 EST
 
Hello?  Hello?  Anyone out there?  Did EK scare you off?  Are you bored by
TL'sNFB?  Are you bored by Mannerpunk?  Finally?  Can we talk about something
else?  Any suggestions?  Don?  Patrick?  Someone?  
 ------------

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