The Death of the Book
Niels Olof Bouvin
Umberto Eco has on the subject of computer vs. book remarked that while
reference works (being dictionaries, encyclopaedias etc.) *will* be
transferred to computers (there being obvious advantages by doing so),
literature and poetry will still be printed.
I concur with this, and I think that the core of the problem is not so
much computer vs. book, as reading vs not reading. I find the trend of
increasing illiteracy to be *far* more disturbing. An illiterate
society fed only by mass media would be a fine subject for a dystopian
novel indeed (hmm, Fahrenheit 451...).
ObRCB: Even if book printing *is* ceased, we can still, given the huge
amount of books printed, be collecting for millenia B)
Cheers
Niels Olof
(Please note follow-up)
--
Niels Olof Bouvin http://www.daimi.aau.dk/~bouvin/ Voice: (+45)89423274 \ /
In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro (")
MSc Research Assistant @ Computer Science Depart. Aarhus University Denmark
Robert Birchard
Niels Olof Bouvin wrote in part:
> I find the trend of
> increasing illiteracy to be *far* more disturbing. An illiterate
> society fed only by mass media would be a fine subject for a dystopian
> novel indeed (hmm, Fahrenheit 451...).
politicians make so much over seems to be largely exaggerated. More
novels are now sold (at least in the U. S.) than ever before in history.
Sales of childrens books have increased (again in the U. S.) over 400%
in the past ten years. The phenomenon of the "Super" bookstore has
increased books sales by 60% over the sales in the average Crown
bookstore of ten to fifteen years ago. It seems readers appreciate the
variety and convenience offered in such stores. The Starbuck's coffee
probably doesn't hurt sales either.
With such increasing sales of books are we to believe that folks
are buying books without reading them? Just where is the new illiteracy
we hear so much about?
--
Bob Birchard
bbir...@earthlink.net
http://www.mdle.com/ClassicFilms/Guest/birchard.htm
adam.
i attend a major university--a place that can i believe be safely called
a bastion of knowledge. if i stopped any given undergraduate (or
possibly graduate) and asked them to name any two thomas hardy novels, i
would hypothesize that perhaps 1 of 100 could give me an answer; most of
the remaining 99 would ask "thomas who?" or something as such.
my point: you say that the sale of books has increased in recent years,
and then ask if we are to believe that people are not reading them. i
say that that is exactly what is happening. to respond to your question
socratically--what are they buying, and why? nabakov, pynchon, and
flaubert; or steele, grisham and king? but perhaps i am trying to
put too fine a point on the term "literacy" and "literate". my
connotation of "literate" is no doubt different than yours.
just as a reminder--statistics can say anything, given the proper effort
by one who wishes to make a point. or, "the devil can quote scripture to
his own purposes," if you wish.
adam.
Sam Lanham
On 21 Mar 1997 17:58:24 +0100, Niels Olof Bouvin <bou...@daimi.aau.dk>
wrote:
>
>Umberto Eco has on the subject of computer vs. book remarked that while
>reference works (being dictionaries, encyclopaedias etc.) *will* be
>transferred to computers (there being obvious advantages by doing so),
>literature and poetry will still be printed.
>I concur with this, and I think that the core of the problem is not so
>much computer vs. book, as reading vs not reading. I find the trend of
>increasing illiteracy to be *far* more disturbing. An illiterate
>society fed only by mass media would be a fine subject for a dystopian
>novel indeed (hmm, Fahrenheit 451...).
>
>ObRCB: Even if book printing *is* ceased, we can still, given the huge
> amount of books printed, be collecting for millenia B)
I agree. Besides electronic technology has a way to go before it
produces an artifact as durable (from both the standpoints of
materials and obsolescence) as the book. Fifty years from now in your
grandfather's attic you may pick up a CD-rom and what will you do with
it? Use it for a frisby? But you can pick up the book next to it and
read it. Of course, if the book does go out of production it will do
wonders for the value of my collection.
Sam Lanham (sla...@hctc.net)
Paul Ilechko
adam. wrote:
>
> On Sat, 22 Mar 1997, Robert Birchard wrote:
>
> > Niels Olof Bouvin wrote in part:
> > > increasing illiteracy to be *far* more disturbing. An illiterate
> > > society fed only by mass media would be a fine subject for a dystopian
> > > novel indeed (hmm, Fahrenheit 451...).
recently how many of the large publishing houses are owned by companies
like Time-Warner. What we are seeing is the "hollywood-ization" of
fiction writing. It's all about blockbusters - huge advances for
worthless trash like The Horse Whisperer, massive marketing campaigns,
shelf space, movie tie-ins .. Won't be long before advertisers are doing
product-placement in novels.
Paul.
Ron Hardin
Paul Ilechko wrote:
> Yes, i think there is a lot of truth in this - in fact, i was reading
> recently how many of the large publishing houses are owned by companies
> like Time-Warner. What we are seeing is the "hollywood-ization" of
> fiction writing. It's all about blockbusters - huge advances for
> worthless trash like The Horse Whisperer, massive marketing campaigns,
> shelf space, movie tie-ins .. Won't be long before advertisers are doing
> product-placement in novels.
Don't forget book reviews on Imus; thieving weasels is the characterization
of publishers.
Imus having come on in Columbus Ohio, raising my standard of living.
--
Ron Hardin
r...@research.att.com
On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.
Paris Flammonde
> recently how many of the large publishing houses are owned by companies
> like Time-Warner. What we are seeing is the "hollywood-ization" of
> fiction writing. It's all about blockbusters - huge advances for
> worthless trash like The Horse Whisperer, massive marketing campaigns,
> shelf space, movie tie-ins .. Won't be long before advertisers are doing
> product-placement in novels.
>
Virtually no major literary publishing house still exists; they are all
product-manufacturers of conglomerates. The true editor is extremely
rare and almost all agents are purveyors of merely commercial
merchandise. Almost all contemporary houses instruct would-be writers
to "study the market," "check out our list," "read the best selling
authors;" none suggest reading the great literary figures or attempting
to create an original novel (or, even, non-fiction), and they won't read
or publish such work, fearing its lack of financial attraction.
And all of this is understandable, as exemplified by an
experience I had a few years ago.
Invited to dinner at the home of an academic I found two English
professors, a psychologist, and a political sociologist; two men and two
women. Two M. A.s and two Ph. D.s.
The conversation got around to feminism and literature and one
of the Ph. D.s, a Nowable female, said accusingly, to me:
"All the people you've mentioned are men, don't you even read
women."
"To which I replied: 'But ________, I have mentioned George
Meredith once and George Sand once."
To which she replied: "You misunderstood me; that is what I
said, you only read men, you don't read women writers."
Dead silence ensued: from two who were dumfounded (my companion
and myself); from two who did not know what had happened.
Another member, from the same faculty, asked me a year later
if I had ever heard of Pierre Louys or Alistair Crowley?!
Few teachers speak English correctly, and, therefore, are unable
to teach it. Myriad, tortuous, they, fortuitous, enormity,
disinterested, and countless other words are constantly misused.
Even the Secretary of Education has trouble with grammar and syntax.
flammonde
Jeffrey A. Del Col
I presume you said and meant "George Eliot," not George Meredith.
Otherwise at least one of you had good reason to be puzzled.
To which she replied: "You misunderstood me; that is what I
>su only read men, you don't read women writers."
> Dead silence ensued: from two who were dumfounded (my companion
>and myself); from two who did not know what had happened.
> Another member, from the same faculty, asked me a year later
>if I had ever heard of Pierre Louys or Alistair Crowley?!
> Few teachers speak English correctly, and, therefore, are unable
>to teach it. Myriad, tortuous, they, fortuitous, enormity,
>disinterested, and countless other words are constantly misused.
>Even the Secretary of Education has trouble with grammar and syntax.
>
>flammonde
>
J. Del Col
--
Jeff Del Col * "Sleeplessness is like metaphysics.
A-B College * Be there."
Philippi, WV *
* ----Charles Simic----
Larisa Migachyov
Niels Olof Bouvin (bou...@daimi.aau.dk) wrote:
: Umberto Eco has on the subject of computer vs. book remarked that while
: reference works (being dictionaries, encyclopaedias etc.) *will* be
: transferred to computers (there being obvious advantages by doing so),
: literature and poetry will still be printed.
: I concur with this, and I think that the core of the problem is not so
: much computer vs. book, as reading vs not reading. I find the trend of
: increasing illiteracy to be *far* more disturbing. An illiterate
: society fed only by mass media would be a fine subject for a dystopian
: novel indeed (hmm, Fahrenheit 451...).
I agree with this. It doesn't matter what medium the book is on, as long
as it is still a text object. What does matter is whether or not people
are reading it.
However, I am not sure that illiteracy is increasing. Is it, really?
Given the fact that huge bookstores like Borders or Barnes+Noble can
prosper, I really don't think that illiteracy is that much of a danger.
Larisa
Larisa Migachyov
adam. (acc...@scully.tamu.edu) wrote:
: i attend a major university--a place that can i believe be safely called
: a bastion of knowledge. if i stopped any given undergraduate (or
: possibly graduate) and asked them to name any two thomas hardy novels, i
: would hypothesize that perhaps 1 of 100 could give me an answer; most of
: the remaining 99 would ask "thomas who?" or something as such.
: my point: you say that the sale of books has increased in recent years,
: and then ask if we are to believe that people are not reading them. i
: say that that is exactly what is happening. to respond to your question
: socratically--what are they buying, and why? nabakov, pynchon, and
: flaubert; or steele, grisham and king? but perhaps i am trying to
: put too fine a point on the term "literacy" and "literate". my
: connotation of "literate" is no doubt different than yours.
Well, I think that the popularity of the junk books really shows that
literacy is increasing. 100 years ago, people of low intelligence would
have been illiterate. Now, they are literate, and read junk books. The
fact that everyone, and not just the most educated segment of the
population, can read and enjoy books, is the reason why all the junk
books are so successful.
Larisa
Richard Harter
miga...@maroon.tc.umn.edu (Larisa Migachyov) wrote:
>adam. (acc...@scully.tamu.edu) wrote:
Color me skeptical. I suspect that the literacy rate in the US was
higher 100 years ago than it is today. The dime novel was quite
popular as was pulp fiction in general.
ObBook: Poor Richard's Almanack
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net, The Concord Research Institute
URL = http://www.tiac.net/users/cri, phone = 1-508-369-3911
I'm a primatologist specializing in homo sapiens.
Their lack of true intelligence simplifies my studies.
Ted Samsel
Larisa Migachyov (miga...@maroon.tc.umn.edu) wrote:
:
: Well, I think that the popularity of the junk books really shows that
: have been illiterate. Now, they are literate, and read junk books. The
: fact that everyone, and not just the most educated segment of the
: population, can read and enjoy books, is the reason why all the junk
: books are so successful.
Ah! To be back in the 19th century when we had dime novels & penny-
dreadfuls rather than "junk books".
--
Ted Samsel....tejas@infi.net
"do the boogie woogie in the South American way"
Rhumba Boogie- Hank Snow (1955)
Claudia HCQ Sorsby
adam. <acc...@scully.tamu.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Mar 1997, Robert Birchard wrote:
>
> > Niels Olof Bouvin wrote in part:
> > > I find the trend of
> > > increasing illiteracy to be *far* more disturbing. An illiterate
> > > society fed only by mass media would be a fine subject for a dystopian
> > > novel indeed (hmm, Fahrenheit 451...).
> > > Actually the "trend of increasing illiteracy" you refer to and which
> > politicians make so much over seems to be largely exaggerated. More
> > novels are now sold (at least in the U. S.) than ever before in history.
> > Sales of childrens books have increased (again in the U. S.) over 400%
> > in the past ten years. The phenomenon of the "Super" bookstore has
> > increased books sales by 60% over the sales in the average Crown
> > bookstore of ten to fifteen years ago. It seems readers appreciate the
> > variety and convenience offered in such stores. The Starbuck's coffee
> > probably doesn't hurt sales either.
> >
> > With such increasing sales of books are we to believe that folks
> > are buying books without reading them? Just where is the new illiteracy
> > we hear so much about?
>
> i attend a major university--a place that can i believe be safely called
> a bastion of knowledge. if i stopped any given undergraduate (or
> possibly graduate) and asked them to name any two thomas hardy novels, i
> would hypothesize that perhaps 1 of 100 could give me an answer; most of
> the remaining 99 would ask "thomas who?" or something as such.
I think your test is off the mark. Your school is known more for
engineering and vetinerary medicine than liberal arts; why should a
veterinary student be expected to be familiar with the works of an
overrated 19th-century English novelist? Said student may well be doing
more reading than you'll ever do, but in a different discipline. Why are
you devaluing other kinds of knowledge by emphasizing 19th-century
literature? If I were to extend your logic, it would imply that a
professor of Chaucerian literature, who reads nothing later than that
period, is "illiterate." This is patently silly.
ObBook: C.P. Snow, *The Two Cultures.*
> my point: you say that the sale of books has increased in recent years,
> and then ask if we are to believe that people are not reading them. i
> say that that is exactly what is happening. to respond to your question
> socratically--what are they buying, and why? nabakov, pynchon, and
> flaubert; or steele, grisham and king? but perhaps i am trying to
> put too fine a point on the term "literacy" and "literate". my
> connotation of "literate" is no doubt different than yours. [...]
Frankly, Adam, I'd be a lot likelier to take your opinions on literacy
seriously if you demonstrated some knowledge of capitalization. As it
stands, you're either wildly ignorant or (more likely) another wannabe
individualist, omitting caps in the mistaken belief that it's a sign of
"being unique." It's not; far too many people do it, and all for the
same reason. All it does is make such posts hard to read.
I read something on the whole question of illiteracy recently which I
found interesting. I can't remember the author's name, unfortunately,
but the basic argument was that this is the first time in human history
that universal literacy has been expected (or even allowed). Illiteracy
isn't increasing; compared to previous centuries, the percentage of
people who know how to read is enormously high. (Said author went on to
argue that demanding 100% literacy from the population is not
necessarily a good or even reasonable idea, but that's another issue.)
As for Adam's last point, people who read John Grisham are fully as
"literate" as those who read Nabokov; their tastes may not be as
high-brow, or "literary," but that's worlds away from not being able to
make out what those squiggles on the paper mean. As it happens, I can't
stand Grisham et al. (though King can be fun at times) and I worship
Nabokov (though Pynchon leaves me cold). But that doesn't mean that
people who don't share my tastes should be branded as "illiterate."
Or are you saying that books which are more difficult to read are
somehow better than books which are easier? To quote Nell, cited below:
"If merit is to be judged by difficulty, there is little to prevent the
conclusion that a Chevrolet workshop manual and T.S. Eliot are of equal
worth." (p. 37)
As for the numbers of people who read; it's been true for many years
that something like 80% of the pleasure reading in the US is done by
approximately 10% of the population. And yet, functional literacy in the
US runs around 90%. Face it; most people just don't like reading much.
They may not be very good at it, or they don't think it's fun. They'd
rather be out doing something else. There's nothing wrong with that.
And what about (gasp) non-book reading? You know, newspapers, magazines,
and such? (never mind Usenet posts). One 1979 study showed that, out of
1,450 respondents, 39% read *only* magazines and newspapers. Thus, the
numbers of books sold is a red herring.
Where am I getting my numbers, you ask? From an excellent work entitled
*Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure.* Victor Nell
wrote it, in 1988, and it was published by Yale University Press. It's a
serious psych book, and it sheds a lot of light on many aspects of this
subject.
Nell talks specifically about the false distinction between "serious,"
"good" reading and light "trash," and points out that many skilled,
sophisticated readers like both. Although I shouldn't say "both,"
because it's really impossible to distinguish between them over time.
Dickens wrote pot-boilers in his day, but now his stuff is considered
"classic." Graham Greene wrote everything; spy novels he himself called
"entertainments," serious novels like *The Heart of the Matter,* and
everything in between, including essays, plays, and screenplays. Where
does he fit?
Sorry if I sound crabby, but I get very frustrated when I see people
bandying around this scare stuff about "increasing illiteracy, booga
booga booga." Such arguments are almost invariably ahistorical and
uninformed, and it's all so unnecessary. The information is out there
(often in books, ironically enough), and yet so few people seem to pay
attention to the facts.
Claudia
Paul Ilechko
Larisa Migachyov wrote:
>
> adam. (acc...@scully.tamu.edu) wrote:
>
> : i attend a major university--a place that can i believe be safely called
> : a bastion of knowledge. if i stopped any given undergraduate (or
> : possibly graduate) and asked them to name any two thomas hardy novels, i
> : would hypothesize that perhaps 1 of 100 could give me an answer; most of
> : the remaining 99 would ask "thomas who?" or something as such.
>
> : and then ask if we are to believe that people are not reading them. i
> : say that that is exactly what is happening. to respond to your question
> : socratically--what are they buying, and why? nabakov, pynchon, and
> : flaubert; or steele, grisham and king? but perhaps i am trying to
> : put too fine a point on the term "literacy" and "literate". my
> : connotation of "literate" is no doubt different than yours.
>
> literacy is increasing. 100 years ago, people of low intelligence would
> have been illiterate. Now, they are literate, and read junk books. The
> fact that everyone, and not just the most educated segment of the
> population, can read and enjoy books, is the reason why all the junk
> books are so successful.
>
Seriously though, what is more to the point is that 100 years ago people
of moderate intelligence may also have been illiterate depending on
their class. There wasn't much need for reading for the average farmer,
who worked dawn to dusk. Nowadays those people are middle managers, and
read that deplorable junk. Not that junk is intrinsically bad - it's
just entertainment - the problem is when it squeezes out the good stuff.
See television.
Paul.
Mark Borok
In article <5h7qtl$n...@epx.cis.umn.edu>, miga...@maroon.tc.umn.edu
(Larisa Migachyov) wrote:
> Niels Olof Bouvin (bou...@daimi.aau.dk) wrote:
>
> : Umberto Eco has on the subject of computer vs. book remarked that while
> : reference works (being dictionaries, encyclopaedias etc.) *will* be
> : transferred to computers (there being obvious advantages by doing so),
> : literature and poetry will still be printed.
> : I concur with this, and I think that the core of the problem is not so
> : much computer vs. book, as reading vs not reading. I find the trend of
> : increasing illiteracy to be *far* more disturbing. An illiterate
> : society fed only by mass media would be a fine subject for a dystopian
> : novel indeed (hmm, Fahrenheit 451...).
>
> I agree with this. It doesn't matter what medium the book is on, as long
> as it is still a text object. What does matter is whether or not people
> are reading it.
>
> However, I am not sure that illiteracy is increasing. Is it, really?
> Given the fact that huge bookstores like Borders or Barnes+Noble can
> prosper, I really don't think that illiteracy is that much of a danger.
>
> Larisa
From what I've heard, the publishing industry is doing just fine. In fact,
I think more people are reading than before.
In an old issue of Wired magazine I read that the MIT media lab is
researching the possibility of "electronic paper". Making it possible to
publish electronically in book form. Note how this would combine the best
of both worlds: the portability of a book, the hypertext and multimedia
capabilities of computers and the addition of multimedia elements (don't
forget that "multimedia" includes, by definition, text). If only the cost
can be comparable to that of a book - and I don't see why it shouldn't be,
with time. Also, the paper would be synthetic (less deforestation).
People who insist that written media will be replaced by images, sounds
and virtual reality forget that text is democratic (everyone can write,
not everyone can be a multimedia author), cheap, concise and fast (for
data transfer across networks).
The main problem, as I see it, is not that books will die or people will
stop reading, but that we are turning into a society of consumers who
don't create. It would be well to remind people that the act of creation
can be as rewarding in itself as the act of consuming (books, movies,
etc.) Kill your television!
Mark Borok
http://www.mindspring.com/~mborok
Meg Worley
Claudia writes:
>Frankly, Adam, I'd be a lot likelier to take your opinions on literacy
>seriously if you demonstrated some knowledge of capitalization. As it
>stands, you're either wildly ignorant or (more likely) another wannabe
>individualist, omitting caps in the mistaken belief that it's a sign of
>"being unique." It's not; far too many people do it, and all for the
>same reason. All it does is make such posts hard to read.
Oh, come now. Adam's argument had holes that would allow several
C-130s to fly through in formation, but the connection between
that and his majuscule policy is filmy at best. It's a fine old
computer-geek tradition to lower one's cases, like omitting the
salutation in e-mail (something for which I am occasionally
upbraided by folks who have been sending e-mail for a whole 6 mos.).
Besides, even if Adam does think he's being induhvidual and/or
cute, I see no reason to ostracize and excoriate the young for
being occasionally misguided. Where would we be now if people
hadn't put up with our immature ways way back when?
Rage away,
meg
--
m...@steam.stanford.edu Comparatively Literate
Vance Maverick
In article <33381B...@superlink.net> Paul Ilechko <pa...@superlink.net> writes:
> Seriously though, what is more to the point is that 100 years ago people
> of moderate intelligence may also have been illiterate depending on
> their class. There wasn't much need for reading for the average farmer,
> who worked dawn to dusk. Nowadays those people are middle managers, and
> read that deplorable junk. Not that junk is intrinsically bad - it's
> just entertainment - the problem is when it squeezes out the good stuff.
> See television.
Two points: (1) Everyone is clearly making up facts from whole cloth
-- I haven't seen a single reference cited in this entire thread
(which is supposed to be about literacy! ;-)). (2) Even taking Paul's
"facts" at face value, they don't support his worry. By his claim,
junk isn't replacing the good stuff: it's filling the spare time of
people who had nothing on their minds but farming 100 years ago. I
won't go into the assumption that the middle managers of today are
somehow "the same" as the farmers of yore -- but please, if you're
going to make up facts, at least make them support your argument!
Vance
Maynard Handley
In article <33381B...@superlink.net>, Paul Ilechko
<pa...@superlink.net> wrote:
>Larisa Migachyov wrote:
(actually she didn't, Paul wrote and something somewhere seems confused)
> >
> > adam. (acc...@scully.tamu.edu) wrote:
> >
> > : i attend a major university--a place that can i believe be safely called
> > : a bastion of knowledge. if i stopped any given undergraduate (or
> > : possibly graduate) and asked them to name any two thomas hardy novels, i
> > : would hypothesize that perhaps 1 of 100 could give me an answer; most of
> > : the remaining 99 would ask "thomas who?" or something as such.
> >
> > : my point: you say that the sale of books has increased in recent years,
> > : and then ask if we are to believe that people are not reading them. i
> > : say that that is exactly what is happening. to respond to your question
> > : socratically--what are they buying, and why? nabakov, pynchon, and
> > : flaubert; or steele, grisham and king? but perhaps i am trying to
> > : put too fine a point on the term "literacy" and "literate". my
> > : connotation of "literate" is no doubt different than yours.
> >
> > Well, I think that the popularity of the junk books really shows that
> > literacy is increasing. 100 years ago, people of low intelligence would
> > have been illiterate. Now, they are literate, and read junk books. The
> > fact that everyone, and not just the most educated segment of the
> > population, can read and enjoy books, is the reason why all the junk
> > books are so successful.
> >
> Is this supposed to be a good thing ?
>
Well is reading "literature" such a good thing? I have stated at various
time in the past in rab that I think reading literature is greatly
over-rated and that there is far more interesting stuff available in
non-fiction in all the thousands of subjects out there. Not only more
interesting and more diverse but, IMHO, more likely to teach one about
"the human condition", how we got to the state we are etc.
By this I mean not that I am defending junk fiction (or for that matter
junk pseudo-fiction like _Sun Signs_ or junk non-fiction like the latest
OJ Simpson bio), merely that I find the argument that these people would
be better served by reading Thomas Hardy ridiculous.
Maynard
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
--
My opinion only
adam.
On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Claudia HCQ Sorsby wrote:
> I think your test is off the mark. Your school is known more for
> engineering and vetinerary medicine than liberal arts; why should a
> veterinary student be expected to be familiar with the works of an
> overrated 19th-century English novelist? Said student may well be doing
> more reading than you'll ever do, but in a different discipline. Why are
> you devaluing other kinds of knowledge by emphasizing 19th-century
> literature? If I were to extend your logic, it would imply that a
> professor of Chaucerian literature, who reads nothing later than that
> period, is "illiterate." This is patently silly.
abstract example, my dear. actually, it's a bit of an inside joke/story
that one of my friends and i shared during our freshman year. i'd get
into it, but as all inside jokes, it's likely not to garner much appreciation
except from the ones "in on it." my point, though--"thomas hardy" was only
an abstraction meaning any author generally regarded as literary.
"insert author here," if you will.
am i devaluing other spheres of knowledge? of course i am. i had to
choose a major here at college; that required me to subordinate my love
of subject A to my love of subject B, in order for the university to
allow me to continue my academic education. is it right to devalue
other spheres of knowledge? of course not. learning is learning--even
politics and economics (the two areas of "thought" i hate more than any
other) need to be protected from ever being seriously destroyed. but i
am not a relativist and i do think subjects such as literature, philosophy,
history, sociology, and psychology are "more important" than mathematics,
engineering, or the sciences (biology, chemistry, physics). the former
teach us, after all, about that greatest of mysteries--ourselves.
> Frankly, Adam, I'd be a lot likelier to take your opinions on literacy
> seriously if you demonstrated some knowledge of capitalization. As it
> stands, you're either wildly ignorant or (more likely) another wannabe
> individualist, omitting caps in the mistaken belief that it's a sign of
> "being unique." It's not; far too many people do it, and all for the
> same reason. All it does is make such posts hard to read.
i like to think i'm not ignorant. and when i was a freshman, i started to
write with no caps because (pretentious voice here) "there's nothing in
the world worth capitalizing." however, i've grown up and i realize that
it's far from individualistic; however, you forgot a third, correct
choice--i am unspeakably lazy.
(snip)
> As for Adam's last point, people who read John Grisham are fully as
> "literate" as those who read Nabokov; their tastes may not be as
> high-brow, or "literary," but that's worlds away from not being able to
> make out what those squiggles on the paper mean. As it happens, I can't
> stand Grisham et al. (though King can be fun at times) and I worship
> Nabokov (though Pynchon leaves me cold). But that doesn't mean that
> people who don't share my tastes should be branded as "illiterate."
i agree. "literary literacy" is an entirely different beast from
"literacy." and i thought i had made that distinction when i said that
perhaps i had put too fine a point on "literacy." if that wasn't clear,
i apologize. however, as i earlier said, i am not a relativist and i DO
value nabakov or pynchon far, far above grisham or king (though i will
agree, king is fun).
> Or are you saying that books which are more difficult to read are
> somehow better than books which are easier? To quote Nell, cited below:
> "If merit is to be judged by difficulty, there is little to prevent the
> conclusion that a Chevrolet workshop manual and T.S. Eliot are of equal
> worth." (p. 37)
i most certainly am not.
> As for the numbers of people who read; it's been true for many years
> that something like 80% of the pleasure reading in the US is done by
> approximately 10% of the population. And yet, functional literacy in the
> US runs around 90%. Face it; most people just don't like reading much.
> They may not be very good at it, or they don't think it's fun. They'd
> rather be out doing something else. There's nothing wrong with that.
i vehemently disagree, but that's not really the topic here. perhaps
we can lock horns about this some other time.
> And what about (gasp) non-book reading? You know, newspapers, magazines,
> and such? (never mind Usenet posts). One 1979 study showed that, out of
> 1,450 respondents, 39% read *only* magazines and newspapers. Thus, the
> numbers of books sold is a red herring.
i echo neitzsche's sentiment--"behold the superfluous! they are always
sick; they vomit their gall and call it a newspaper. they devour each
other and cannot even digest themselves." and that also sums up people
who only read only magazines and newspapers.
> Sorry if I sound crabby, but I get very frustrated when I see people
> bandying around this scare stuff about "increasing illiteracy, booga
> booga booga." Such arguments are almost invariably ahistorical and
> uninformed, and it's all so unnecessary. The information is out there
> (often in books, ironically enough), and yet so few people seem to pay
> attention to the facts.
hey, no problem. we all have our days. and you ARE right; literacy is
not on the decline. just remember though--a plateau, though higher than
the plains, is still flat on top.
adam.
Alison Chaiken
hand...@apple.com (Maynard Handley) writes:
>Well is reading "literature" such a good thing? I have stated at various
>time in the past in rab that I think reading literature is greatly
>over-rated and that there is far more interesting stuff available in
>non-fiction in all the thousands of subjects out there.
I agree. Non-fiction seems to be under-rated in serious literary
discussions and perpetually under-discussed on r.a.b. As others have
pointed out, even the name "non-fiction" is something of a slight. A
confidant has revealed that non-fiction is not a possible topic for a
graduate thesis in literature, but that medieval latin works are okay.
This strikes me as downright peculiar. I don't understand why there
is a presumption in literary circles that the best writers will
naturally write fiction rather than non. The synthesis of the facts
and extraction of meaning that writing good non-fiction requires are
no less a creative feat than the production of a novel.
Non-fiction as good as just about any novel:
_Thin Gray Line_ by Rick Atkinson
_My Traitor's Heart_ by Rian Malan
_The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ by Richard Rhodes
_The Gulag Archipelago Volume II_ by Solzhenitsyn
--
Alison Chaiken ali...@wsrcc.com
(510) 422-7129 [daytime] http://www.wsrcc.com/alison/
I will refuse to be reincarnated if I can't come back as Aretha Franklin.
Claudia HCQ Sorsby
Meg Worley <m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
> Claudia writes:
> >Frankly, Adam, I'd be a lot likelier to take your opinions on literacy
> >seriously if you demonstrated some knowledge of capitalization. As it
> >stands, you're either wildly ignorant or (more likely) another wannabe
> >individualist, omitting caps in the mistaken belief that it's a sign of
> >"being unique." It's not; far too many people do it, and all for the
> >same reason. All it does is make such posts hard to read.
>
> Oh, come now. Adam's argument had holes that would allow several
> C-130s to fly through in formation,
Agreed. I sent up a couple myself.
> but the connection between
> that and his majuscule policy is filmy at best. It's a fine old
> computer-geek tradition to lower one's cases, like omitting the
> salutation in e-mail (something for which I am occasionally
> upbraided by folks who have been sending e-mail for a whole 6 mos.).
No, here we differ. Omitting caps is *not* the same as omitting a
salutation. Proper capitalization serves a real purpose in aiding
reading comprehension, as anyone interested in typography or book design
will agree; a salutation is merely a device of etiquette, and its
necessity depends completely on social context. It doesn't make your
message any easier or harder to read, while leaving out all the capital
letters does.
And context is the connection, "filmy" or not. Plenty of folks post here
sans caps, and I usually let it go unremarked (okay, I grind my teeth a
little, but that's not a public reaction). However, Adam posted
specifically on the subject of literacy, complaining that people who had
less high-brow tastes than he did were indeed "illiterate." This
argument, among other problems, shows a fundamental (though common)
misuse of the term literacy, *consistent with his own omission of
capitalization.* He may not like it (nor may you), but someone who reads
John Grisham and capitalizes his writing properly is, strictly speaking,
more "literate" than someone who reads Nabakov [sic] and eschews
capitalization altogether. At least my hypothetical Grisham reader is
demonstrating that he understands the basic rules of English writing,
while Adam is not.
> Besides, even if Adam does think he's being induhvidual and/or
> cute, I see no reason to ostracize and excoriate the young for
> being occasionally misguided. Where would we be now if people
> hadn't put up with our immature ways way back when?
I'm hardly "ostracizing" Adam; I did follow up to him, after all. As for
the crime of "excoriating" him, I am reminded of a great David Brin
quote being used as a .sig in another newsgroup: "Criticism is the only
known antidote to error."
Where will we be if people don't stop putting up with immature -- or in
this case, simply incorrect -- ways and saying, "Gee, that's really
dumb"?
Claudia
Richard Harter
"adam." <acc...@scully.tamu.edu> wrote:
>i attend a major university--a place that can i believe be safely called
>a bastion of knowledge. if i stopped any given undergraduate (or
>possibly graduate) and asked them to name any two thomas hardy novels, i
>would hypothesize that perhaps 1 of 100 could give me an answer; most of
>the remaining 99 would ask "thomas who?" or something as such.
Jude, The Obscure
Jude, The Even More Obscure
Richard Harter
ali...@dailyplanet.wsrcc.com (Alison Chaiken) wrote:
>hand...@apple.com (Maynard Handley) writes:
>>Well is reading "literature" such a good thing? I have stated at various
>>time in the past in rab that I think reading literature is greatly
>>over-rated and that there is far more interesting stuff available in
>>non-fiction in all the thousands of subjects out there.
>I agree. Non-fiction seems to be under-rated in serious literary
>discussions and perpetually under-discussed on r.a.b. As others have
>pointed out, even the name "non-fiction" is something of a slight. A
>confidant has revealed that non-fiction is not a possible topic for a
>graduate thesis in literature, but that medieval latin works are okay.
>This strikes me as downright peculiar. I don't understand why there
>is a presumption in literary circles that the best writers will
>naturally write fiction rather than non. The synthesis of the facts
>and extraction of meaning that writing good non-fiction requires are
>no less a creative feat than the production of a novel.
Interesting, interesting. Me thinks the difficulty is that
non-fiction is topical whereas fiction is generic. A non fiction book
is about something, it has a subject. To discuss it is inevitably to
discuss the subject matter in addition to its literary qualities.
Fiction is (almost) a story about people. We all, or at least most of
us, are people and have a common interest in and understanding of
people.
Perhaps story telling is the irreducible essence of literature. Or
perhaps only fiction is suitable for the needs of the departments of
literature - the universality of topic removes the need for topical
knowledge.
Still, the restriction to fiction removes, I think, much of what it is
to be human. People do not simply think about people; they also think
about things. "How does this work?" is as much a human question as is
"Why did he do that?". Homo sapiens is not alone homo ludens, he is
also homo faber.
A thought on this is that fiction is written for people who are away
from work, either who do not work or are escaping from work. The
great market for fiction, the market for which the novel was
developed, is the leisure class.
A gram of fact yields a kilogram of speculation.
Alison Chaiken
>ali...@dailyplanet.wsrcc.com (Alison Chaiken) wrote:
>>I agree. Non-fiction seems to be under-rated in serious literary
>>discussions and perpetually under-discussed on r.a.b.
c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) writes:
>Interesting, interesting. Me thinks the difficulty is that
>non-fiction is topical whereas fiction is generic. A non fiction book
>is about something, it has a subject. To discuss it is inevitably to
>discuss the subject matter in addition to its literary qualities.
>Fiction is (almost) a story about people.
But non-fiction is not always topical. Some of the most readable
non-fiction is specifically about people. In my response to Maynard's
post, I intentionally listed non-fiction works with great human
interest. In other words, I listed books that tell a moving story. I
don't believe that the significance the story is reduced or the level
of art in the telling is devalued because the story happens to be
true.
Meg Worley
Claudia wrote:
>> >Frankly, Adam, I'd be a lot likelier to take your opinions on literacy
>> >seriously if you demonstrated some knowledge of capitalization.
And then added:
>However, Adam posted
>specifically on the subject of literacy, complaining that people who had
>less high-brow tastes than he did were indeed "illiterate." This
>argument, among other problems, shows a fundamental (though common)
>misuse of the term literacy, *consistent with his own omission of
>capitalization.* He may not like it (nor may you), but someone who reads
>John Grisham and capitalizes his writing properly is, strictly speaking,
>more "literate" than someone who reads Nabakov [sic] and eschews
>capitalization altogether. At least my hypothetical Grisham reader is
>demonstrating that he understands the basic rules of English writing,
>while Adam is not.
I'm stayin' out of the Nabakov [sic] vs. Grisham thang, but
I do insist on maintaining a difference between not-knowing
(what is a proper noun and what isn't) and disregarding the
rules. Certainly, Adam's post leaves us no way to tell which
it is, but we deal with uncertainties like this all the time.
And this, in fact, is probably the main place where Claudia
and I differ (at least on this issue): I am happy to assume
that he knows better but, like Bartleby, Prefers Not To,
whereas Claudia seems willing to take it as a sign of
incipient proctocephalitis. I have no evidence with which
to counter her assumption, but it strikes me as a bit hasty,
especially given the frequency of this habit among computer
geeks.
Mel Wilson
In article <333650...@noln.com>, Paris Flammonde <ta...@noln.com> wrote:
> Few teachers speak English correctly, and, therefore, are unable
>to teach it. Myriad, tortuous, they, fortuitous, enormity,
>disinterested, and countless other words are constantly misused.
Please. "Enormity" is an noun. How can it relate to "they", which
seems to be the subject? "Disinterested" is a surprise after the
building up of such a fine head of contumely; I'm going to have to
think about this. Still, it is a shame what that mob does to words.
>Even the Secretary of Education has trouble with grammar and syntax.
Up here the Minister of Education didn't finish school. Not for
nothing did The Economist call their "revolution" a "whirligig".
Regards. Mel.
Meg Worley
Alison agrees with Maynard that
>Non-fiction seems to be under-rated in serious literary
>pointed out, even the name "non-fiction" is something of a slight. A
>confidant has revealed that non-fiction is not a possible topic for a
>graduate thesis in literature, but that medieval latin works are okay.
This is true of all but a few subgenres. The essay and the
memoir are both well threshed in literature departments of
various languages.
>This strikes me as downright peculiar. I don't understand why there
>is a presumption in literary circles that the best writers will
>naturally write fiction rather than non. The synthesis of the facts
>and extraction of meaning that writing good non-fiction requires are
>no less a creative feat than the production of a novel.
At the heart of things, I don't think literature departments
are about good writing. The grail (or graal, for medievalists)
is metaphor, and it takes a bit more work to harvest a rich
metaphor from a work of nonfiction. Of *course* nonfiction
makes use of metaphor, but many readers -- including some of
the greatest appreciators of nonfiction, in addition to the
academic sniffers -- aren't willing to put in the work to get
at it.
If (as I would argue, but not here) teaching the apprehension
of metaphor is one of the most important contributions that
literature departments make, we certainly need to pay more
attention to nonfiction, since making use of metaphor in
nonspeculative work is a more practical skill than doing so
in the speculative.
Richard Harter
mwi...@interlog.com (Mel Wilson) wrote:
>In article <333650...@noln.com>, Paris Flammonde <ta...@noln.com> wrote:
>> Few teachers speak English correctly, and, therefore, are unable
>>to teach it. Myriad, tortuous, they, fortuitous, enormity,
>>disinterested, and countless other words are constantly misused.
> Please. "Enormity" is an noun. How can it relate to "they", which
>seems to be the subject? "Disinterested" is a surprise after the
>building up of such a fine head of contumely; I'm going to have to
>think about this. Still, it is a shame what that mob does to words.
Is this a spelling flame, a grammar flame, or an honest
misunderstanding. It is clear that all of the words in the sequence
"Myriad...disinterested" are being used as though each were quoted.
Richard Harter
m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) wrote:
>Claudia wrote:
[re adam's decapitated prose]
>And this, in fact, is probably the main place where Claudia
>and I differ (at least on this issue): I am happy to assume
>that he knows better but, like Bartleby, Prefers Not To,
>whereas Claudia seems willing to take it as a sign of
>incipient proctocephalitis. I have no evidence with which
>to counter her assumption, but it strikes me as a bit hasty,
>especially given the frequency of this habit among computer
>geeks.
And cockroaches, past, present, and wannabe. Never forget the
cockroaches.
>Rage away,
May I not, please, gently waft away on spring breezes?
Larisa Migachyov
0521...@accs-as06-dp10.nwrk.grid.net>
<Pine.SOL.3.91.970325...@scully.tamu.edu>:
Distribution:
adam. (acc...@scully.tamu.edu) wrote:
: abstract example, my dear. actually, it's a bit of an inside joke/story
: that one of my friends and i shared during our freshman year. i'd get
: into it, but as all inside jokes, it's likely not to garner much appreciation
: except from the ones "in on it." my point, though--"thomas hardy" was only
: an abstraction meaning any author generally regarded as literary.
: "insert author here," if you will.
And have you read all the authors described as literary? Are you an
illiterate unless you have? There is a lot of them, you know.
: am i devaluing other spheres of knowledge? of course i am. i had to
: choose a major here at college; that required me to subordinate my love
: of subject A to my love of subject B, in order for the university to
: allow me to continue my academic education. is it right to devalue
: other spheres of knowledge? of course not. learning is learning--even
: politics and economics (the two areas of "thought" i hate more than any
: other) need to be protected from ever being seriously destroyed. but i
: am not a relativist and i do think subjects such as literature, philosophy,
: history, sociology, and psychology are "more important" than mathematics,
: engineering, or the sciences (biology, chemistry, physics). the former
: teach us, after all, about that greatest of mysteries--ourselves.
I think biology or biochemistry are much more likely to teach us about
that. :)
I really dislike the pattern of thinking that is illustrated above.
You're using a product invented and created by engineers, programmers,
computer scientists, and you're saying that engineering and math are
unimportant? The lack of respect for engineers in this society is an
appalling thing. Why is a person an 'illiterate' if he doesn't know who
Thomas Hardy was, but a 'learned person' if he doesn't know the first
thing about how an internal combustion engine or a computer works and who
designed and created them? is information about literature so much more
important than information about the items we use every day?
I think that it is a fine thing to read and enjoy good literature. I
wouldn't include Thomas Hardy in the above category, but that's a matter
of opinion. :) However, I think that knowing about literature is not a
"better" thing than knowing about, say, mathematics. Mathematics can
reveal just as much beauty as literature.
Larisa
sayan bhattacharyya
Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote:
>
>Interesting, interesting. Me thinks the difficulty is that
>non-fiction is topical whereas fiction is generic. A non fiction book
>is about something, it has a subject. To discuss it is inevitably to
>discuss the subject matter in addition to its literary qualities.
>us, are people and have a common interest in and understanding of
>people.
I think you over-estimate the generic-ness of fiction. While fiction
is about people, certainly, it is about people in a specific culture,
and someone from a different culture can "lack a common interest in
and understanding of" the specific culture in which a particular book
got written and was meant to be read.
David Christopher Swanson
In article <5hboqj$p...@epx.cis.umn.edu>
miga...@maroon.tc.umn.edu (Larisa Migachyov) writes:
> is information about literature so much more
> important than information about the [techno]items we use every day?
Yes.
DCS
Don Tuite
Alison Chaiken <ali...@dailyplanet.wsrcc.com> wrote in article
<5hagcs$h1e$1...@capsicum.wsrcc.com>...
>. . .Non-fiction seems to be under-rated in serious literary
> discussions and perpetually under-discussed on r.a.b. As others have
> pointed out, even the name "non-fiction" is something of a slight. . .
>
> Non-fiction as good as just about any novel:
>
One of my favorites is _The Voyage of the Beagle_. A rip-roaring
adventure, followed by a classic _New Yorker_ "long piece" about the
formation of coral atolls. (Sort of John McPhee without the interesting
human characters.)
Don
Vance Maverick
In article <handleym-260...@handma.apple.com> hand...@apple.com (Maynard Handley) writes:
> In article <5hbotm$q...@news-central.tiac.net>, c...@tiac.net (Richard
> Harter) wrote:
> > And cockroaches, past, present, and wannabe. Never forget the
> > cockroaches.
> Oh Richard, you are not only dating yourself but placing yourself in a
> very specific group, aren't you?
I wonder. Which dates, and which group are you thinking of?
Vance (b. 1965, member, Lapsed Episcopalians for Free Jazz,
moderate admirer of Archy)
Richard Harter
hand...@apple.com (Maynard Handley) wrote:
>In article <5hbotm$q...@news-central.tiac.net>, c...@tiac.net (Richard
>Harter) wrote:
>> m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) wrote:
>>
>> >Claudia wrote:
>>
>> [re adam's decapitated prose]
>>
>> >And this, in fact, is probably the main place where Claudia
>> >and I differ (at least on this issue): I am happy to assume
>> >that he knows better but, like Bartleby, Prefers Not To,
>> >whereas Claudia seems willing to take it as a sign of
>> >incipient proctocephalitis. I have no evidence with which
>> >to counter her assumption, but it strikes me as a bit hasty,
>> >especially given the frequency of this habit among computer
>> >geeks.
>>
>> And cockroaches, past, present, and wannabe. Never forget the
>> cockroaches.
>>
>Oh Richard, you are not only dating yourself but placing yourself in a
>very specific group, aren't you?
I'll thank you to leave my sex life out of this discussion if you
don't mind. Hmmpphh. Some people.
>My father bought _Archie and Mehitabel_ but I must adnit I'm on the side
>of Claudia on this one. I grew so damn irritated with the "punctuation"
>that after a few pages I gave up and switched to something written in
>standard English.
Oh, you don't want to read A&M, you want to listen to the music.
Better yet, see a production of A&M. The bit where archie saves the
kittens is worth a thousand DCS postings on wealth.
Still, you have an extraordinarilly low tolerance for the eccentric.
I'm not a fan of decapitated prose but it is, IMO, only a minor
annoyance at worst.
>It may be the case that many computer geeks use their own bizarre blend of
>spelling and capitalization. So what? The fact remains that it merely
>makes whatever they are trying to say less comprehensible. They, like
>_Wired_ with its orange letters on yellow background, may like to be cool,
>but they are not doing much of a job of communication. Life is short and
>presents me with a thousand times more reading material than I could ever
>digest. I'm damn well going to ignore anything that's written with scant
>concern for my ease of reading.
Let me pontificate (pontification is the craft of constructing
pontoons.) The reason for using standard fonts, standard styles, and
standard punctuation is to efface the print itself. That is, the
uniformity lessens the attention we pay to the print as artifact,
allowing us to focus on the content of the text (the signifiers,
signifieds, and all that twaddle) and what it communicates. But the
print is, none-the-less, an artifact in its own right. Departing from
standard effacement calls attention to the artifact and thereby makes
statements in its own right, statements implicit in the choice of
variation. (Quite often the statement is that the author has nothing
worth saying.) There is a difficulty however. When cummings
decapitated his prose he had an effect and an implicit message in
mind; when the average lowercase writer does the same he or she does
not.
Maynard Handley
> m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) wrote:
>
> >Claudia wrote:
>
> [re adam's decapitated prose]
>
> >And this, in fact, is probably the main place where Claudia
> >and I differ (at least on this issue): I am happy to assume
> >that he knows better but, like Bartleby, Prefers Not To,
> >whereas Claudia seems willing to take it as a sign of
> >incipient proctocephalitis. I have no evidence with which
> >to counter her assumption, but it strikes me as a bit hasty,
> >especially given the frequency of this habit among computer
> >geeks.
>
> And cockroaches, past, present, and wannabe. Never forget the
> cockroaches.
>
Oh Richard, you are not only dating yourself but placing yourself in a
very specific group, aren't you?
My father bought _Archie and Mehitabel_ but I must adnit I'm on the side
of Claudia on this one. I grew so damn irritated with the "punctuation"
that after a few pages I gave up and switched to something written in
standard English.
It may be the case that many computer geeks use their own bizarre blend of
spelling and capitalization. So what? The fact remains that it merely
makes whatever they are trying to say less comprehensible. They, like
_Wired_ with its orange letters on yellow background, may like to be cool,
but they are not doing much of a job of communication. Life is short and
presents me with a thousand times more reading material than I could ever
digest. I'm damn well going to ignore anything that's written with scant
concern for my ease of reading.
Maynard
--
My opinion only
Colin Rosenthal
On Wed, 26 Mar 1997 19:04:59 GMT, David Christopher Swanson <dc...@faraday.clas.virginia.edu> wrote:
>In article <5hboqj$p...@epx.cis.umn.edu>
>miga...@maroon.tc.umn.edu (Larisa Migachyov) writes:
>
>> is information about literature so much more
>> important than information about the [techno]items we use every day?
>
>Yes.
This is going flamewarards, but before it does I should like to state
my opinion that quantum theory, evolution, thermodynamics, general
relativity and mathematics are among the greatest and most complex
achievements of human society and culture. The idea that one can
understand something called "the human condition" without even
attempting to understand these central parts of who and what we are
is absurd.
I would also add history to the list. Does that make three cultures?
--
Colin Rosenthal
High Altitude Observatory
Boulder, Colorado
rose...@hao.ucar.edu
william r smith
Larisa Migachyov wrote:
Well, I think that the popularity of the junk books really
shows that literacy is increasing. 100 years ago, people of
low intelligence would have been illiterate. Now, they are
literate, and read junk books.
Maynard Handley <hand...@apple.com> wrote:
Well is reading "literature" such a good thing?
By this I mean not that I am defending junk fiction (or for that
matter junk pseudo-fiction like _Sun Signs_ or junk non-fiction
like the latest OJ Simpson bio)...
"Junk" books could be called "illiterature". And we could
define illiterature as any class, group or genre of books that
we don't read. This could include, depending on the reviewer,
all fiction, science fiction, romance, NYTimes best sellers, romance
fiction, pop science, mystery fiction, Danielle Steele, Tom Clancy,
true crime, spy thrillers, biographies of sports people under the
age of 35, new age, alien abduction stories, etc, etc, etc.
William Sburgfort Smith
_______________________________________________________________________________
William Smith will...@mhpcc.edu
Maui High Performance Computing Center WWW: http://www.mhpcc.edu
_______________________________________________________________________________
James Daniel Powers
In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970325...@scully.tamu.edu>,
>except from the ones "in on it." my point, though--"thomas hardy" was only
>an abstraction meaning any author generally regarded as literary.
>"insert author here," if you will.
Insert Hemingway, or Shakespeare, or even Dickens, in that case.
>am i devaluing other spheres of knowledge? of course i am. i had to
>choose a major here at college; that required me to subordinate my love
>of subject A to my love of subject B, in order for the university to
>allow me to continue my academic education. is it right to devalue
>other spheres of knowledge? of course not.
Then why do you insist on doing so? Pursuing is different from judging.
>learning is learning--even
>politics and economics (the two areas of "thought" i hate more than any
>other) need to be protected from ever being seriously destroyed. but i
>am not a relativist and i do think subjects such as literature, philosophy,
>history, sociology, and psychology are "more important" than mathematics,
>engineering, or the sciences (biology, chemistry, physics). the former
>teach us, after all, about that greatest of mysteries--ourselves.
And the latter don't?! Well, that's certainly news to me.
I think you need to take some more math and science classes. And to think
more about the interdependence of the two sets of disciplines you list.
I'm afraid I also don't understand what you mean by "more important". More
important to whom? More important for what?
[much ado about netiquette deleted]
>> As for the numbers of people who read; it's been true for many years
>> that something like 80% of the pleasure reading in the US is done by
>> approximately 10% of the population. And yet, functional literacy in the
>> US runs around 90%. Face it; most people just don't like reading much.
>> They may not be very good at it, or they don't think it's fun.
And this has *always* been true.
>>They'd
>> rather be out doing something else. There's nothing wrong with that.
>i vehemently disagree, but that's not really the topic here. perhaps
>we can lock horns about this some other time.
But what is wrong with it? In what way is pleasure-reading inherently better
than cooking, or doing volunteer work, or going to the symphony?
>i echo neitzsche's sentiment--"behold the superfluous! they are always
>sick; they vomit their gall and call it a newspaper. they devour each
>other and cannot even digest themselves." and that also sums up people
>who only read only magazines and newspapers.
Oh, does it now?
-Jim
--
Jim Powers | "Darling! Do not speak to me of
MSME Department | thermodynamics. Speak to me only
UC Berkeley | of love."
jpo...@sapphirine.berkeley.edu | -The Kids in the Hall
James Daniel Powers
In article <5h87fd$5...@news-central.tiac.net>,
Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote:
>miga...@maroon.tc.umn.edu (Larisa Migachyov) wrote:
>>adam. (acc...@scully.tamu.edu) wrote:
>>Well, I think that the popularity of the junk books really shows that
>>literacy is increasing. 100 years ago, people of low intelligence would
>>have been illiterate.
I'm not sure why you think it likely that rich dumb people would have
been illiterate, while poor smart people would not.
>>Now, they are literate, and read junk books. The
>>fact that everyone, and not just the most educated segment of the
>>population, can read and enjoy books, is the reason why all the junk
>>books are so successful.
>Color me skeptical. I suspect that the literacy rate in the US was
>higher 100 years ago than it is today. The dime novel was quite
>popular as was pulp fiction in general.
I'm certainly willing to be disproven, as I have no data in front of me,
but I find this very difficult to believe. For starters, what was the
literacy rate among African-Americans 100 years ago?
Meg Worley
Maynard writes, re Adam's all-lc style:
>It may be the case that many computer geeks use their own bizarre blend of
>spelling and capitalization. So what? The fact remains that it merely
>makes whatever they are trying to say less comprehensible. They, like
>_Wired_ with its orange letters on yellow background, may like to be cool,
>but they are not doing much of a job of communication. Life is short and
>presents me with a thousand times more reading material than I could ever
>digest. I'm damn well going to ignore anything that's written with scant
>concern for my ease of reading.
Oh, I'm not disputing the difficulties of reading all-lc text.
I'm with you 100% there. I'm just furrowing my little brow
over the hasty assumption that it indicates illiteracy (or
low-literacy). My assumption is participation in a tradition
that is, as Claudia points out, detrimental to quick understanding.
Maynard Handley
In article <5hc94f$d...@news-central.tiac.net>, c...@tiac.net (Richard
Harter) wrote:
> hand...@apple.com (Maynard Handley) wrote:
> >Oh Richard, you are not only dating yourself but placing yourself in a
> >very specific group, aren't you?
>
> I'll thank you to leave my sex life out of this discussion if you
> don't mind. Hmmpphh. Some people.
I meant by this simply that I associate A&M (possibly very incorrectly---I
was a young un at the time, and living in a different country) with a
Manhattanite, reads the _New Yorker_ type of life style. No insult
intended, I promise.
> Let me pontificate (pontification is the craft of constructin
> pontoons.) The reason for using standard fonts, standard styles, and
> standard punctuation is to efface the print itself. That is, the
> uniformity lessens the attention we pay to the print as artifact,
> allowing us to focus on the content of the text (the signifiers,
> signifieds, and all that twaddle) and what it communicates. But the
> print is, none-the-less, an artifact in its own right. Departing from
> standard effacement calls attention to the artifact and thereby makes
> statements in its own right, statements implicit in the choice of
> variation. (Quite often the statement is that the author has nothing
> worth saying.) There is a difficulty however. When cummings
> decapitated his prose he had an effect and an implicit message in
> mind; when the average lowercase writer does the same he or she does
> not.
>
Now I guess, to be fair, when ee cummings does it, usually, at least for
me, it works. So maybe the problem IS more that I'm just not much
interested in what mehitabel (I think that was the cockroach?) or Wired
have to say compared to all the other writers out there.
As another data point, when people try to get arty with their laser
printers and use some non-standard font (eg some Chancery or Gothic type
font) to print out their slide notes or whatever, I'm a whole lot more
likely to ignore them than if they're in something readable like a
Helvetica or Times.
I guess I'm simply not very interested in what someone has to say about
"print as a social construct" or whatever. If that's their point, well
good for them, and I'll get back to reading my _Chomsky Reader_ or
_History of Financial Risk_ or whatever it is I'm reading that involves
subject matter I do care about.
Ted Samsel
Richard Harter (c...@tiac.net) wrote:
: m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) wrote:
:
: >Claudia wrote:
:
: [re adam's decapitated prose]
:
: >And this, in fact, is probably the main place where Claudia
: >and I differ (at least on this issue): I am happy to assume
: >that he knows better but, like Bartleby, Prefers Not To,
: >whereas Claudia seems willing to take it as a sign of
: >incipient proctocephalitis. I have no evidence with which
: >to counter her assumption, but it strikes me as a bit hasty,
: >especially given the frequency of this habit among computer
: >geeks.
:
: And cockroaches, past, present, and wannabe. Never forget the
: cockroaches.
La cucaracha, la cucaracha ya no puede caminar..
: May I not, please, gently waft away on spring breezes?
Volare!~
:
:
: Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net, The Concord Research Institute
: URL = http://www.tiac.net/users/cri, phone = 1-508-369-3911
: I'm a primatologist specializing in homo sapiens.
: Their lack of true intelligence simplifies my studies.
:
--
Ted Samsel....tejas@infi.net
"do the boogie woogie in the South American way"
Rhumba Boogie- Hank Snow (1955)
Stephen Doe
>You're using a product invented and created by engineers, programmers,
>computer scientists, and you're saying that engineering and math are
>unimportant? The lack of respect for engineers in this society is an
>appalling thing. Why is a person an 'illiterate' if he doesn't know who
>Thomas Hardy was, but a 'learned person' if he doesn't know the first
>thing about how an internal combustion engine or a computer works and who
>designed and created them?
I second *that*. My ideal educated person would be knowledgable not
just about literature but also about science, history,
mathematics. . . It does seem easier for "learned people" to slide by
with little knowledge of science.
Stephen
David Christopher Swanson
In article <5hc5jg$o13$1...@ncar.ucar.edu>
rose...@asp.hao.ucar.edu (Colin Rosenthal) writes:
> This is going flamewarards, but before it does I should like to state
> my opinion that quantum theory, evolution, thermodynamics, general
> relativity and mathematics are among the greatest and most complex
> achievements of human society and culture. The idea that one can
> understand something called "the human condition" without even
> attempting to understand these central parts of who and what we are
> is absurd.
>
> I would also add history to the list. Does that make three cultures?
No, history's on our side over here. Always has been.
BTW my Mac is blue-green sicklied o'er with the putrid cast of a screwy
logic board, so my posts may sound a bit nasty for a while.
That's technology for ya.
DCS
Richard Harter
hand...@apple.com (Maynard Handley) wrote:
>In article <5hc94f$d...@news-central.tiac.net>, c...@tiac.net (Richard
>Harter) wrote:
>> hand...@apple.com (Maynard Handley) wrote:
>> >Oh Richard, you are not only dating yourself but placing yourself in a
>> >very specific group, aren't you?
>>
>> I'll thank you to leave my sex life out of this discussion if you
>> don't mind. Hmmpphh. Some people.
>I meant by this simply that I associate A&M (possibly very incorrectly---I
>was a young un at the time, and living in a different country) with a
>Manhattanite, reads the _New Yorker_ type of life style. No insult
>intended, I promise.
Come now. I was quite aware that no insult was intended. I was
responding to an unintended interpretation of the text. I do that all
the time. Confuses the hell out of some people. It's a moral duty.
It builds their character - I'm big on building other people's
character.
But it won't do to assume that A&M is just a Manhattanite, New Yorker,
type. Midwesterners do the culture bit too. It's very different in
mode though - remind me to right an essay about the subject.
More pontification (note that pontoons are used to build bridges.) As
a side note was Caligula's bridge of ships (ob book: I, Claudius) the
longest bridge - would it have been the pontifex maximus? But I
digress.
What we have here is the equivalent of what happened when printing
first became common. If you go back to the handbills of the 1700's
they use wild mixtures of types. What happened was that people had a
new capability and not yet worked out how to use it in a sensible
style. Something like that is happening now. You have all these
people with these magic machines that can do perfect mechanicals
(that's layout artist talk, son) and have zillions of type faces and
fonts. The people using them don't know squat about layout and style
so they play and throw all sorts of junk together.
It's hard to make artistic statements when so many people are making
artistic non-statements.
Be that as it may, I agree with you in a general way - my tolerance
for the experimental is higher, that's all. The whole point about
Times Roman, standard layout, and so forth, is that a lot of thought
and experience has gone into working out how to make books readable
(in the physical sense - can't do much about the authors). This is
not nearly as easy as it looks. So a whole lot of people who do not
know any thing about book design try their hand at it with bad
results.
Richard Harter
jpo...@uclink.berkeley.edu (James Daniel Powers) wrote:
>In article <5h87fd$5...@news-central.tiac.net>,
>Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote:
>>miga...@maroon.tc.umn.edu (Larisa Migachyov) wrote:
>>>adam. (acc...@scully.tamu.edu) wrote:
>>>Well, I think that the popularity of the junk books really shows that
>>>literacy is increasing. 100 years ago, people of low intelligence would
>>>have been illiterate.
>I'm not sure why you think it likely that rich dumb people would have
>been illiterate, while poor smart people would not.
I'm not sure who you think you are addressing or why you think your
remark follows. In any case I did not write the text you are
commenting on.
>>>Now, they are literate, and read junk books. The
>>>fact that everyone, and not just the most educated segment of the
>>>population, can read and enjoy books, is the reason why all the junk
>>>books are so successful.
>>Color me skeptical. I suspect that the literacy rate in the US was
>>higher 100 years ago than it is today. The dime novel was quite
>>popular as was pulp fiction in general.
>I'm certainly willing to be disproven, as I have no data in front of me,
>but I find this very difficult to believe. For starters, what was the
>literacy rate among African-Americans 100 years ago?
Dunno. I almost put in a disclaimer about blacks . I was thinking of
the US outside of the south circa 1890. The South was a special case
for obvious reasons. However in the rest of the country there was
universal education. I grant that the level was not high - many
people did not complete the eighth grade and a high school education
was a distinct achievement. However the basic 3 R's and basic
literacy was the norm - or at least that is my impression.
It is also my impression that the modern phenomenon of schools turning
out illiterate graduates is relatively recent - a post sixties
phenomenon. The one room country school house may have lacked modern
facilities but they were fairly good at getting across the basics.
But that's just my suspicion of how things are and were.
Richard Harter
ali...@dailyplanet.wsrcc.com (Alison Chaiken) wrote:
>>ali...@dailyplanet.wsrcc.com (Alison Chaiken) wrote:
>>>I agree. Non-fiction seems to be under-rated in serious literary
>>>discussions and perpetually under-discussed on r.a.b.
>c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) writes:
>>Interesting, interesting. Me thinks the difficulty is that
>>non-fiction is topical whereas fiction is generic. A non fiction book
>>is about something, it has a subject. To discuss it is inevitably to
>>discuss the subject matter in addition to its literary qualities.
>>Fiction is (almost) a story about people.
>But non-fiction is not always topical. Some of the most readable
>non-fiction is specifically about people. In my response to Maynard's
>post, I intentionally listed non-fiction works with great human
>interest. In other words, I listed books that tell a moving story. I
>don't believe that the significance the story is reduced or the level
>of art in the telling is devalued because the story happens to be
>true.
Oh yes, a non-fiction book can have all of those good qualities that
you cite. But it is intrinsically tainted with topicality. What is
worse, once one admits non-fiction of any sort one is on the brink of
a vast slippery slope. If one admits this work then why not that
work, and so on. Is _The Double Helix_ admissable as a candidate for
literature? It is a very human story - indeed some have said that it
is more fiction than fact. Perhaps we may deny it entrance into the
dusty halls of the canon for technical reasons - it is not stylish
enough, it's tropes are not tropical enough. But is a book which
mentions _Fourier Transforms for Bird Watchers_ even to be allowed in
the anteroom? I think not. Let it find its place in the street where
the rabble who only read books will pick it up or not. It is not safe
to admit non-fiction, even of the finest sort. That is, current
non-fiction. We may safely admit non-fiction which is sufficiently
venerable. Let an essayist be dead two centuries and the gloss of
antiquity will vanquish all topicality.
Of course this may all be hooey, but it makes a fine argument, don't
you think?
Richard Harter
bhat...@skynet.eecs.umich.edu (sayan bhattacharyya) wrote:
>Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote:
>>
>>Interesting, interesting. Me thinks the difficulty is that
>>non-fiction is topical whereas fiction is generic. A non fiction book
>>is about something, it has a subject. To discuss it is inevitably to
>>discuss the subject matter in addition to its literary qualities.
>>Fiction is (almost) a story about people. We all, or at least most of
>>us, are people and have a common interest in and understanding of
>>people.
>I think you over-estimate the generic-ness of fiction. While fiction
>is about people, certainly, it is about people in a specific culture,
>and someone from a different culture can "lack a common interest in
>and understanding of" the specific culture in which a particular book
>got written and was meant to be read.
Point well taken. I was thinking more of the generic character of the
way fiction is put together and the possible themes. However it is
true that the conflicts and issues that people have vary widely from
culture to culture.
Heather Henderson
In article <5hbotm$q...@news-central.tiac.net>, c...@tiac.net (Richard
Harter) wrote:
> m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) wrote:
>
> >Claudia wrote:
>
> [re adam's decapitated prose]
>
> >And this, in fact, is probably the main place where Claudia
> >and I differ (at least on this issue): I am happy to assume
> >that he knows better but, like Bartleby, Prefers Not To,
> >whereas Claudia seems willing to take it as a sign of
> >incipient proctocephalitis. I have no evidence with which
> >to counter her assumption, but it strikes me as a bit hasty,
> >especially given the frequency of this habit among computer
> >geeks.
>
> And cockroaches, past, present, and wannabe. Never forget the
> cockroaches.
Archy had an excuse -- he was a little guy.
Heather
--
Heather Henderson - hea...@scc.net
my home page: http://web.scc.net/~heather
my fiction: http://web.scc.net/~heather/fiction.html
my baseball gallery: http://web.scc.net/~heather/baseball.html
Heather Henderson
In article <5hbkd9$d...@Steam.Stanford.EDU>, m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg
Worley) wrote:
> Alison agrees with Maynard that
> >Non-fiction seems to be under-rated in serious literary
> >discussions and perpetually under-discussed on r.a.b. As others have
"Practical" as in "money-making" is no doubt true. Speaking
of which, I'd like to see less attention paid to the "apprehension of
metaphor" in litrachoor "training" and more attention paid to the
cultivation of the shrewd sentence and the perfect paragraph.
Larisa Migachyov
David Christopher Swanson wrote:
: > is information about literature so much more
: > important than information about the [techno]items we use every day?
: Yes.
Why?
Larisa
Ted Samsel
Richard Harter (c...@tiac.net) wrote:
:
: More pontification (note that pontoons are used to build bridges.) As
: a side note was Caligula's bridge of ships (ob book: I, Claudius) the
: longest bridge - would it have been the pontifex maximus? But I
: digress.
Pontoon is also a card game from the early 19th c. or thereabouts..
:
: What we have here is the equivalent of what happened when printing
: first became common. If you go back to the handbills of the 1700's
: they use wild mixtures of types. What happened was that people had a
: new capability and not yet worked out how to use it in a sensible
: style. Something like that is happening now. You have all these
: people with these magic machines that can do perfect mechanicals
: (that's layout artist talk, son) and have zillions of type faces and
: fonts. The people using them don't know squat about layout and style
: so they play and throw all sorts of junk together.
:
: It's hard to make artistic statements when so many people are making
: artistic non-statements.
:
As I keep tellin' the young engineers, "Just because you have
a 'puter with a graphics package, you aren't a graphic designer."
But they never listen anyway....
Grump grump grump...
Hartletop
Paris Flammonde wrote: "Few teachers speak English correctly, and,
therefore, are unable to teach it." As the sentence stands, "few teachers"
is the subject of the second clause ("are unable to teach it"), which I
imagine is just the opposite of what the author intended. I'm writing this
not to criticize Paris Flammonde, but to point out that almost all of us
can use a little help with our English. In fact, I've been brushing up on
mine with the help of Patricia T. O'Conner's "Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's
Guide to Better English in Plain English."
Doug Turnbull
In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970325...@scully.tamu.edu>,
"adam." <acc...@scully.tamu.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Claudia HCQ Sorsby wrote:
> > Face it; most people just don't like reading much.
> > They may not be very good at it, or they don't think it's fun. They'd
> > rather be out doing something else. There's nothing wrong with that.
>
> i vehemently disagree, but that's not really the topic here. perhaps
> we can lock horns about this some other time.
>
"It is not easy to get a truly and constantly productive spirit to read.
He is to a reader as a locomotive is to a tourist. Besides, one does not
ask a tree how it likes the scenery."
----- Karl Krauss
Doug Turnbull
FIDO
Heather Henderson writes:
Meg Worley writes:
If (as I would argue, but not here) teaching the
apprehension of metaphor is one of the most important
contributions that literature departments make, we
certainly need to pay more attention to nonfiction,
since making use of metaphor in nonspeculative work
is a more practical skill than doing so in the
speculative.
"Practical" as in "money-making" is no doubt true.
Speaking of which, I'd like to see less attention
paid to the "apprehension of metaphor" in litrachoor
"training" and more attention paid to the cultivation
of the shrewd sentence and the perfect paragraph.
Teaching trope-a-dope? Which reminds me, did anyone else
notice how well my hero, George Foreman, looked at the
Oscars?
FIDO
Vance Maverick
In article <1997032703...@accs-as06-dp14.nwrk.grid.net> ch...@macconnect.com (Claudia HCQ Sorsby) writes:
> Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> > -- I haven't seen a single reference cited in this entire thread
> > (which is supposed to be about literacy! ;-)).
> Hey, watch those generalizations. Yesterday I posted a couple of
> specific references to Victor Nell's book on the psychology of pleasure
> reading, and another today.
Quite right, mea culpa. Does Nell go into the question of whether
books have gotten easier? (The recent _Nation_ issue on publishing
included an unbelievably cavalier attempt to demonstrate this.)
> Claudia "get the tar off that brush, darn it"
Vance (hastily getting out the virtual kerosene)
Claudia HCQ Sorsby
Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote:
> miga...@maroon.tc.umn.edu (Larisa Migachyov) wrote:
>
> >Well, I think that the popularity of the junk books really shows that
> >literacy is increasing. 100 years ago, people of low intelligence would
> >have been illiterate. [...]
"For all their shortcomings, contemporary estimates indicate that
literacy is a mass phenomenon, the roots of whch, in England, go back to
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Hoggart, 1959; Leavis, 1932;
and especially Altick, 1957). Neuberg (1971) notes that "by the end of
the 18th century, the ability to read had become widespread among the
English poor...."
--- Victor Nell, *Lost in a Book,* 1988, Yale University Press, p. 15.
>
> Color me skeptical. I suspect that the literacy rate in the US was
> higher 100 years ago than it is today. [...]
"By the end of the [nineteenth] century, literacy rates in Western
Europe and North America had reached virtually their present levels
(Gray, 1971)." ibid, p.16.
Claudia
Richard Harter
miga...@maroon.tc.umn.edu (Larisa Migachyov) wrote:
>David Christopher Swanson wrote:
>: Yes.
>Why?
Your question has two answers, both applicable.
(1) Because
(2) Why not
Claudia HCQ Sorsby
Meg Worley <m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
> Claudia wrote:
> >> >Frankly, Adam, I'd be a lot likelier to take your opinions on literacy
> >> >seriously if you demonstrated some knowledge of capitalization.
>
> And then added:
> >However, Adam posted
> >specifically on the subject of literacy, complaining that people who had
> >less high-brow tastes than he did were indeed "illiterate." This
> >argument, among other problems, shows a fundamental (though common)
> >misuse of the term literacy, *consistent with his own omission of
> >capitalization.* He may not like it (nor may you), but someone who reads
> >John Grisham and capitalizes his writing properly is, strictly speaking,
> >more "literate" than someone who reads Nabakov [sic] and eschews
> >capitalization altogether. At least my hypothetical Grisham reader is
> >demonstrating that he understands the basic rules of English writing,
> >while Adam is not.
>
> I'm stayin' out of the Nabakov [sic] vs. Grisham thang, but
> I do insist on maintaining a difference between not-knowing
> (what is a proper noun and what isn't) and disregarding the
> rules. Certainly, Adam's post leaves us no way to tell which
> it is, but we deal with uncertainties like this all the time.
Granted. But, what do we know? Here's a guy attacking other folks for
"illiteracy," and condemning them for not reading "hard" books -- but at
the same time he can't even spell one of his high-falutin authors right,
even after I gently pointed out his error.
I am a strong believer in the "you are what you post" theory of USENET
identity. So far, on that evidence, Adam comes across as a rather
inconsiderate slob. He seems friendly enough in his followup, though not
particularly bright overall.
> And this, in fact, is probably the main place where Claudia
> and I differ (at least on this issue): I am happy to assume
> that he knows better but, like Bartleby, Prefers Not To,
> whereas Claudia seems willing to take it as a sign of
> incipient proctocephalitis. I have no evidence with which
> to counter her assumption, but it strikes me as a bit hasty,
> especially given the frequency of this habit among computer
> geeks.
First of all, I think the computer-geek idea is a red herring, given
that UNIX, for example, is case-sensitive. Besides, in these days of
student e-mail accounts and aol point-and-drool hell, I see no reason to
assume that net users are necessarily computer literate, never mind
computer geeks.
Perhaps my basic assumption is hasty, but I regard it as the kindest of
possible assumptions. Simple ignorance is not a character flaw; if Adam
doesn't know the basic rules of capitalization, criticisms such as mine
point out his lack, and he can go learn said rules. His writing
improves, and everything's fine.
However, if he's trying oh-so-hard to be an in-duh-vidual, or is so
pretentious he actually believes that tiresome "there's nothing worth
capitalizing" attitude he mentioned in a later post, then he's a jerk.
Or there's the third possibility, which he nows claims as his excuse,
that he's too "unspeakably lazy" to make the effort to hit the shift key
and make his prose more readable (though he is willing to make the
effort to post it, thus effectively demanding our attention -- unlike
Bartleby). This sort of unthinking, self-centered rudeness is also the
hallmark of a jerk.
So, what are the choices? I could assume Adam's a jerk, for one of
several possible reasons, or I could be nice and assume that he just
didn't know any better. Maybe I was being hasty, but at least I gave him
the benefit of the doubt.
Claudia
Claudia HCQ Sorsby
Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Two points: (1) Everyone is clearly making up facts from whole cloth
> -- I haven't seen a single reference cited in this entire thread
> (which is supposed to be about literacy! ;-)).
Hey, watch those generalizations. Yesterday I posted a couple of
specific references to Victor Nell's book on the psychology of pleasure
reading, and another today.
Bob Gore
On Wed, 26 Mar 1997, Richard Harter wrote:
> m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) wrote:
>
> >Claudia wrote:
>
> [re adam's decapitated prose]
>
> >And this, in fact, is probably the main place where Claudia
> >and I differ (at least on this issue): I am happy to assume
> >that he knows better but, like Bartleby, Prefers Not To,
> >whereas Claudia seems willing to take it as a sign of
> >incipient proctocephalitis. I have no evidence with which
> >to counter her assumption, but it strikes me as a bit hasty,
> >especially given the frequency of this habit among computer
> >geeks.
>
> And cockroaches, past, present, and wannabe. Never forget the
> cockroaches.
not likely too boss now am i seeing as how its second nature. and
while i have you on line theres a bone id like to pick. all this
newfangled machinery they like to call it progress but where you stand
depends on where you sit says i. i can just manage to hit the power
button if i get a good running start but theres no place to jump from so i
can hit the keys unless i leap from the top of the monitor which is a long
fall boss i kid you not. mehitabel says she will help me with mouse but
then she always tries to eat it. give me a smith corona any day says i.
your pal
archie
Richard Harter
m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) wrote:
>Silke MW writes:
>>In other words, I can use the techno-items even if I don't
>>understand them; the same can hardly be said about literature.
>What does not understanding literature consist of? How do
>I recognize it in the wild?
See _Stalking the wild metaphor_ and _Bird Watching for English
Majors_, Prof. Nathan Childers, Pretentious Press, 1996 and 1997 where
problems such as recognizing literature in the wild are extensively
treated.
"Literature in the wild is readily recognized by persons who have a
symbiotic relationship with the common wordsucker. Unfortunately the
common wordsucker is habituated to an environmental niche centered
about ivy covered halls and turns gangrenous when exported to
technophilial environments. In such environments literature is
uncultivated; it can only be recognized by recourse to general
taxonomic criteria. In this section we will analyze in detail the
seven stigmata of literature; for a definitive example of identifying
literature within the technophial environment see my essay, _The
Poetry of DOS-_, in appendix B7."
-comparatively illiterate
Vance Maverick
In article <1997032703...@accs-as06-dp14.nwrk.grid.net> ch...@macconnect.com (Claudia HCQ Sorsby) writes:
> Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> > (which is supposed to be about literacy! ;-)).
> Hey, watch those generalizations. Yesterday I posted a couple of
> specific references to Victor Nell's book on the psychology of pleasure
> reading, and another today.
Quite right, mea culpa. Does Nell go into the question of whether
books have gotten easier? (The recent _Nation_ issue on publishing
included an unbelievably sloppy attempt to demonstrate this.)
> Claudia "get the tar off that brush, darn it"
Vance (hastily getting out the virtual kerosene)
Meg Worley
Silke MW writes:
>In other words, I can use the techno-items even if I don't
>understand them; the same can hardly be said about literature.
What does not understanding literature consist of? How do
I recognize it in the wild?
Derek Parker
I suspect that the book is doomed, for all sorts of reasons, not the
last being shortage of paper. But do not despair: a cmputer will
eventually appear whjich is book-sized, which has 'pages' which can
be read in sunlight and turned, with print as legible as a book; it
will have all the qualities of the book, plus the ability to store
several hundred full-length texts. I look foirward to it: a while
library in one's pocket. The only question is... when. Perhaps
some computer buff can tell us!
Derek.
Yury Mukharsky
<am i devaluing other spheres of knowledge? of course i am. i had to
<choose a major here at college; that required me to subordinate my love
<of subject A to my love of subject B, in order for the university to
<allow me to continue my academic education. is it right to devalue
<other spheres of knowledge? of course not. learning is learning--even
<politics and economics (the two areas of "thought" i hate more than any
<other) need to be protected from ever being seriously destroyed. but i
<am not a relativist and i do think subjects such as literature, philosophy,
<history, sociology, and psychology are "more important" than mathematics,
<engineering, or the sciences (biology, chemistry, physics). the former
<teach us, after all, about that greatest of mysteries--ourselves.
I suggest you add Theology and, say, Astrology. As we used to say in school,
all sciences are divided into natural and supernatural. IMHO not knowing, say,
what is the cause is seasons, is nor less shameful, if you will, as being
ignorant in any other part of culture.
<i like to think i'm not ignorant. and when i was a freshman, i started to
<write with no caps because (pretentious voice here) "there's nothing in
<the world worth capitalizing." however, i've grown up and i realize that
<it's far from individualistic; however, you forgot a third, correct
<choice--i am unspeakably lazy.
This is what advantage of literature over movies. A reader is free to imagine
swing of eyelashes, eyes going down and blush. "Ah, don't touch me!".
Yury
sayan bhattacharyya
Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote:
>bhat...@skynet.eecs.umich.edu (sayan bhattacharyya) wrote:
>
>>I think you over-estimate the generic-ness of fiction. While fiction
>>is about people, certainly, it is about people in a specific culture,
>>and someone from a different culture can "lack a common interest in
>>and understanding of" the specific culture in which a particular book
>>got written and was meant to be read.
>
>Point well taken. I was thinking more of the generic character of the
>way fiction is put together and the possible themes. However it is
>true that the conflicts and issues that people have vary widely from
>culture to culture.
On a personal note: when I lived in Calcutta, India (first 23 years
of my life) I used to visit the British Council library and American
Center library quite often and read British and American fiction. I
found that I couldn't relate to most of recent (i.e. "contemporary") British
or American fiction -- the characters and their lives seemed
completely unfamiliar to mine and I couldn't relate to them. However,
old (say pre-1960) British or American fiction I liked much more and
could relate to much more, and curiously, they seemed less remote
than "contemporary" fiction. I don't know quite what to make of this.
Richard Harter
Bob Gore <bg...@vth.colostate.edu> wrote:
> your pal
> archie
dear archie,
the trouble is that you're on the wrong kind of machine. you need to
be on one of those machines with keys that you just walk on that don't
have to be pushed down. also you need a sensitive mouse ball that
spins very freely. don't trust mehitabel though. she is not your true
friend when there is a good looking tom cat around.
your friend,
richard
Rodney Payne
>adam. <acc...@scully.tamu.edu> wrote:
>> i attend a major university--a place that can i believe be safely called
>> a bastion of knowledge. if i stopped any given undergraduate (or
>> possibly graduate) and asked them to name any two thomas hardy novels, i
>> would hypothesize that perhaps 1 of 100 could give me an answer; most of
>> the remaining 99 would ask "thomas who?" or something as such.
Hm. I suspect that if I were to stop any given undergraduate with the
intention of learning whether he or she had questioned anyone else on the
titles of Thomas Hardy's various works, I would find at least 99 out of
100 answering `yes' unbearably pretentious.
--
Rodney Payne | The artist should organise his life. Here
| is a precise record of the time taken by
spur...@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au | my daily chores: I get up at 7.18,
rgp...@cfs01.cc.monash.edu.au | inspiration 10.23 to 11.47.... Erik Satie
Fiona Webster
Richard Harter writes:
>Oh yes, a non-fiction book can have all of those good qualities that
>you cite. But it is intrinsically tainted with topicality. What is
>worse, once one admits non-fiction of any sort one is on the brink of
>to admit non-fiction, even of the finest sort. That is, current
>non-fiction. We may safely admit non-fiction which is sufficiently
>venerable. Let an essayist be dead two centuries and the gloss of
>antiquity will vanquish all topicality.
An interesting argument, but I'm not sure that you've said anything
that specifically applies to nonfiction, as opposed to fiction.
Fiction, too, is topical -- it's often set in the here and now, and thus
dates quickly. Fiction has a slippery slope. Fiction tends to be
venerated after it has stood the test of time. The difference between
Jane Austen and another novelist of the same period is that Austen
succeeds in portraying the world in a way that is not unique to one time
or place. Is good nonfiction any different?
--Fiona
Fiona Webster
Vance writes:
>But that's not the whole problem -- even if we can spot lit, we may
>not know how to spot noncomprehension thereof.
Maybe some day they'll have a brain scan for it -- you know, one that
will detect a specific pattern (or lack of that pattern) of glucose
uptake in the parietal lobes while the subject is reading a book.
But I bet it would be like a lie detector test -- easy to confound.
I often have startled, highly emotional brain reactions on the order
of "I can't *believe* the author wrote that!" which could theoretically
be mistaken for noncomprehension. Similarly, I have brain responses
indicating deep thought and intrigued attention while looking at
gibberish. As does everyone, I'm sure...
--Fiona
Fiona Webster
Ted writes:
>La cucaracha, la cucaracha ya no puede caminar..
Maybe now with that bill they passed in California, some o'
those roaches'll be walkin' 'round after all -- assumin' they
can talk their docs into givin' 'em the scrips. Ah haven't
had a whole lotta success with mah own doc, Ah must admit.
--La Teja~na
Bruce McGuffin
Sayan Bhattacharyya wrote:
On a personal note: when I lived in Calcutta, India (first 23 years
of my life) I used to visit the British Council library and American
Center library quite often and read British and American fiction. I
found that I couldn't relate to most of recent (i.e. "contemporary") British
or American fiction -- the characters and their lives seemed
completely unfamiliar to mine and I couldn't relate to them. However,
old (say pre-1960) British or American fiction I liked much more and
could relate to much more, and curiously, they seemed less remote
than "contemporary" fiction. I don't know quite what to make of this.
Oddly enough, I feel the same way.
Bruce McGuffin
Jens S. Larsen
Yury Mukharsky (m...@physics.berkeley.edu) wrote:
In article <5hedak$d...@netnews.upenn.edu>,
Z. (that's Silke, back in full vigour) wrote:
: <Can't answer that; but, lo and behold, the light switch works, the :
<computer obeys my commands, most of the time at least, I turn the key :
<in the car and it starts, and I'd be hard-pressed to explain any of that
: <in any detail. In other words, I can use the techno-items even if I
don't : <understand them; the same can hardly be said about literature.
Are you absolutely sure about that? I'm not. Don't the parents that
read Andersen's tales aloud make something different out of them than
the children that listen? Can't we enjoy the form of a -- ehrm, would
that be cult-item? -- without previous exposure to the specific
metrics? I think the difference lies elsewhere.
: <Now, certainly it would be preferrable if I knew about both the
: <light switch and the literature,
I'm not so sure about that either (if it's supposed to be preferrable
generally, at least). I think it's nice to have people around to
admire one's capabilities and ask those intelligent and necessary, but
naive questions I'd feel silly to ask myself.
: <but when faced with the choice between a scrumptuous
: <new novel and the scrumptuous non-fiction on light-switches, the novel
: <somehow wins every time.
"Scrumptuous"?! My, the world of words...
: That is because you are more familiar with literature than with light
: switches. To parallel your example: I can open any book and read.
If it's in English, that is. Maybe that's a hint to the
techno/non-techno difference. A Japanese TV set is not technically
different from a B&O one, but Japanese and Danish films are culturally
different.
: Or I can turn on TV, or go to a museum. The degree of enjoiment
: will depend on many factor, level of knowledge of and involment in
: the subject being one of the most important. There is at least
: comparable amount of ingenuity and creative thinking contained in
: your car and in the book you are now reading. By not being able to
: appreciate the former you are robbing yourself. Is not creativity
: the most interesting aspect of culture?
It's also the most scary one, techno or not.
Jens S. Larsen, lingvist (BA in spe)
-------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====-----------------------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet
Jeffrey A. Del Col
In a previous article, don_...@kvo.com (Don Tuite) says:
>
>
>Alison Chaiken <ali...@dailyplanet.wsrcc.com> wrote in article
><5hagcs$h1e$1...@capsicum.wsrcc.com>...
>>. . .Non-fiction seems to be under-rated in serious literary
>> discussions and perpetually under-discussed on r.a.b. As others have
>> pointed out, even the name "non-fiction" is something of a slight. . .
>>
>> Non-fiction as good as just about any novel:
>>
>One of my favorites is _The Voyage of the Beagle_. A rip-roaring
>adventure, followed by a classic _New Yorker_ "long piece" about the
>formation of coral atolls. (Sort of John McPhee without the interesting
>human characters.)
Try Wallace's --The Malay Archipelago--; it does have interesting people.
Wallace was much more observant about the people he worked with and among than
Darwin.
J. Del Col
--
Jeff Del Col * "Sleeplessness is like metaphysics.
A-B College * Be there."
Philippi, WV *
* ----Charles Simic----
Yury Mukharsky
In article <5hedak$d...@netnews.upenn.edu>, Z. wrote:
<Larisa Migachyov (miga...@maroon.tc.umn.edu) wrote:
<: David Christopher Swanson wrote:
<
<: : > is information about literature so much more
<: : > important than information about the [techno]items we use every day?
<
<: : Yes.
<
<: Why?
<
<computer obeys my commands, most of the time at least, I turn the key in
<the car and it starts, and I'd be hard-pressed to explain any of that in
<any detail. In other words, I can use the techno-items even if I don't
<somehow wins every time.
That is because you are more familiar with literature than with light
switches. To parallel your example: I can open any book and read. Or I can
turn on TV, or go to a museum. The degree of enjoiment will depend on many
factor, level of knowledge of and involment in the subject being one of the
most important. There is at least comparable amount of ingenuity and creative
thinking contained in your car and in the book you are now reading. By not
being able to appreciate the former you are robbing yourself. Is not
creativity the most interesting aspect of culture?
Yury
Paul Gilster
My view is that physical books and digital books are two fundamentally
different animals. We need both. The physical book is tangible,
easily browsed for overall topic information (as opposed to the
awkward scrolling of on-line text, which actually harkens back to the
papyrus roll of ancient times), preserves authorial continuity and
argument in a way hypertext cannot, and offers a host of tactile
pleasures; it's also far easier to read.
The digital book is searchable, making it ideal as a reference source;
it can be surrounded by nested hypertext content, allowing authors to
expand their core content with related material, and it is easily
updated on-line. The physical book is a form that has lasted for
millenia, going back ultimately to papyri and other formats; the
on-line book raises questions of data format that must still be
resolved. Will today's CD-ROM be readable by tomorrow's book player?
Are 8-track tapes readable in the standard cassette player?
To me, the key is that hypertext and linear text provide different
ways of examining prose, both with powerful virtues. I see the dual
track of digital books and physical books remaining for a long time,
with publishers learning how to exploit the best of both. Ideally, a
book should be published in both formats. When research beckons, I
would pay extra to be able to search an extensive volume on-line even
if I already owned the printed volume on my shelf. I suspect that
microtransaction technology and intellectual rights software will
solve the copyright dilemma in ways that encourage this outcome.
PG
Ted Samsel
Meg Worley (m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU) wrote:
: Silke MW writes:
: >In other words, I can use the techno-items even if I don't
: What does not understanding literature consist of? How do
: I recognize it in the wild?
Does it grow on the off side of trees?
--
Ted Samsel....tejas@infi.net
"do the boogie woogie in the South American way"
Rhumba Boogie- Hank Snow (1955)
Ted Samsel
Richard Harter (c...@tiac.net) wrote:
: m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) wrote:
:
: >Silke MW writes:
: >>In other words, I can use the techno-items even if I don't
: >>understand them; the same can hardly be said about literature.
:
: >What does not understanding literature consist of? How do
: >I recognize it in the wild?
: See _Stalking the wild metaphor_ and _Bird Watching for English
: Majors_, Prof. Nathan Childers, Pretentious Press, 1996 and 1997 where
: problems such as recognizing literature in the wild are extensively
: treated.
:
: "Literature in the wild is readily recognized by persons who have a
: symbiotic relationship with the common wordsucker. Unfortunately the
: common wordsucker is habituated to an environmental niche centered
: about ivy covered halls and turns gangrenous when exported to
: technophilial environments. In such environments literature is
: uncultivated; it can only be recognized by recourse to general
: taxonomic criteria. In this section we will analyze in detail the
: seven stigmata of literature; for a definitive example of identifying
: literature within the technophial environment see my essay, _The
: Poetry of DOS-_, in appendix B7."
See also *In Search of the Double-Breasted Maitresse Thrasher*
from the French Decadents.
Stephen Doe
In article <199703272...@zetnet.co.uk> Derek Parker <parke...@zetnet.co.uk> writes:
>I suspect that the book is doomed, for all sorts of reasons, not the
>last being shortage of paper. But do not despair: a cmputer will
>eventually appear whjich is book-sized, which has 'pages' which can
>be read in sunlight and turned, with print as legible as a book; it
>will have all the qualities of the book, plus the ability to store
>several hundred full-length texts. I look foirward to it: a while
>library in one's pocket. The only question is... when. Perhaps
>some computer buff can tell us!
I work with computers, a lot, and I for one hope that the infernal
machine fails to drive the book away. Here are some problems I see
with present technology:
--I seem to remember a few years back that use of computers would
result in "the paperless office." This hasn't happened. If anything,
offices use more paper than ever, probably because it is so damn easy
to print stuff out. Everyone still wants hard copy. Quite simply,
book lovers like me will still continue to want actual books, no
matter what Bill Gates dreams up.
--Book-sized, or near book-sized computers already exist. They are
called laptops. Why should I pay $1000+ for a laptop, when I can still
buy a paperback for between $5 and $10? And the screens are still
funky, compared to books.
--Suppose I have the text of a book on CDROM (or even, a floppy disk).
I can still read a one hundred year old book. No tape or floppy disk
will last that long, and I doubt a CDROM would either. Even if they
did, is anyone still using the software and hardware that would still
enable you to read from an ancient CDROM or disk?
--A lot of libraries, I hear, are rushing to catch up with the
Information Age by installing the hardware and software to use CDROMs
and connect to the Internet. That's fine, but consider: money that
could have gone to buy actual books will now go to buying the hardware
and software; to upgrading the hardware and software; to training
library personnel *and* patrons to use the software; and for technical
support. Factor in the fact that when I access the CDROM version of
the encyclopedia, I am tying up that computer *and* the *entire* copy
of the encyclopedia, versus tying up one volume when I take it off the
shelves. Factor in the fact that *nobody* can use the CDROM version
when the system crashes. Factor in the fact that library budgets will
probably *not* increase to support all this new stuff.
--Maybe we are running out of paper (seems various prognosticators
forecast that we are running out of just about anything) but I have
never looked into the numbers, either way. But what if we run out of
whatever these brave new "books" are made of? (For example, if they
are made out of plastic, well--we will run out petroleum someday,
won't we?)
I see some of these problems, at least, as also being problems with
your hypothetical "Book++".
Have you ever read _The_Diamond_Age_? This is a recent science
fiction novel your post reminded of. One of the characters creates
such a book, though to do so he also needs to use nanotechnology, not
just computer technology. It might interest you to check this book
out.
Stephen
Benjamin P. Carter
Derek Parker <parke...@zetnet.co.uk> writes:
>I suspect that the book is doomed, for all sorts of reasons, not the
>last being shortage of paper. But do not despair: a cmputer will
>eventually appear whjich is book-sized, which has 'pages' which can
>be read in sunlight and turned, with print as legible as a book; it
>will have all the qualities of the book, plus the ability to store
>several hundred full-length texts. I look foirward to it: a while
>library in one's pocket. The only question is... when. Perhaps
>some computer buff can tell us!
"Eventually" is a long time. I suggest that the old-fashioned book, the
codex, will be with us as long as is worth arguing about (say 100 more
years). Some existing types of books will become obsolete. Tables of
trigonometric functions and logarithms are already obsolete. But novels
and even software manuals will continue to appear in hard copy for a long
time to come.
Those who predict the disappearance of paper products usually do not
understand their present uses. Consider, for example, the punched card.
Its demise was widely predicted in 1960s. It lasted about 20 years longer
than expected. Someone may still be using an IBM keypunch, for all I
know.
--
Ben Carter (e-mail: b...@netcom.com or b...@gte.net)
William Grosso
On Sat, 29 Mar 1997 08:03:24 GMT, b...@netcom.com (Benjamin P. Carter)
wrote:
>
> Someone may still be using an IBM keypunch, for all I know.
>
Indeed, the more outre among the scarification set use key punches
to produce particularly erotic foreskin piercings. It is a mark of
great distinction to have a complete FORTRAN program permanently
encoded into the prepuce (interestingly enough, these programs are
among the only ones being written today in which using a go to
statement is considered exemplary style).
Cheers,
Andy
Richard Harter
apul...@ix.netcom.com (William Grosso) wrote:
This is a bit misleading. It is the single hole punch that is used.
This being a family group and all that I will not mention what the
chad (that's the little bits of stuff punched out of the, er, card) is
used for. It should be noted that these programs are, of course,
uncommented. It should also be noted that the truly macho use real
FORTRAN; fortran 77 will earn you a sneer at best. However the
sensitive male might consider fortran 90 to show that he really is a
90's kind of guy.
Claudia HCQ Sorsby
Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> > Hey, watch those generalizations. Yesterday I posted a couple of
> > specific references to Victor Nell's book on the psychology of pleasure
> > reading, and another today.
>
> Quite right, mea culpa. Does Nell go into the question of whether
> books have gotten easier? (The recent _Nation_ issue on publishing
> included an unbelievably cavalier attempt to demonstrate this.)
I can't find anything in Nell (he's more interested in the science of
reading comprehension and cognition than the history), but I did happen
to run across something in a lovely little book entitled *In Defense of
Elitism,* by William A. Henry III (1994, Random House). I quote:
"As retired Cornell professor Donald Hayes has demonstrated using a
computer analysis, the language difficulty of textbooks has dropped by
about twenty percent during the past couple of generations. Having
sampled 788 texts used between 1860 and 1992, he says, 'Honors high
school texts are no more difficult than an eighth grade reader was
before World War II.'" (p.42) [NB: All references are to the US.]
I hope this is better/more helpful than whatever _Nation_ offered; it
seems pretty solid -- and scary -- to me.
Claudia
Chester Yeung
> m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg
> Worley) wrote:
> >
> > If (as I would argue, but not here) teaching the apprehension
> > of metaphor is one of the most important contributions that
> > literature departments make, we certainly need to pay more
> > attention to nonfiction, since making use of metaphor in
> > nonspeculative work is a more practical skill than doing so
> > in the speculative.
>
> "Practical" as in "money-making" is no doubt true. Speaking
> of which, I'd like to see less attention paid to the "apprehension of
> metaphor" in litrachoor "training" and more attention paid to the
> cultivation of the shrewd sentence and the perfect paragraph.
>
> Heather
No matter how much one may be attached to non-fiction, it is still a
genre that pales in comparison to fiction.
Metaphor is by no means the sole focus of fiction. And yes, if you
looks really hard, you may be able to extract some sort of metaphor out
of
a work of non-fiction. But any sort of meaning one derives from
non-fiction
would be akin to finding similarities in your personal life and a
horoscope
column(which, I think, we can all agree are pretty shitty). That is,
theoretical meaning in non-fiction is simply a matter of coincidence.
By operating in fiction, a writer is able to manufacture a whole
universe of his own. He doesn't need to rely upon circumstance to
neatly
work in his favor. With fiction, all the elements of the story conspire
along
with the author's intent, working together to fulfill the point of the
work.
Imagine if Faulkner had to stick to "real life." I'm sure there's a
whole bunch of nut-jobs running around Oxford, Miss., but only in
fiction, can
a family so high on the demented barometer as the Bundrens, exist.
Sure, truth is sometimes is stranger than fiction - but only because
one
expects the opposite.
Non-fiction simply lacks the creative capabilities of fiction. What
the
hell would Kafka have done if someone had told him not to include a
giant dung
beetle in his story, and "just stick to the facts."
Besides, non-fiction's kind of boring - might as well read the
newspaper.
Chester
FIDO
Benjamin P. Carter writes:
But novels and even software manuals will continue to
appear in hard copy for a long time to come.
Even software manuals? There is nothing quite so absurd (or
abzurd as some fashionable actors have taken to saying) as,
for example, *THE MACINTOSH BIBLE* on a CD-ROM. it is precisely
at those moments when the computer is down that their manuals
are most useful. For the record, has anyone here ever had a book
"go down"?
FIDO
FIDO
Claudia HCQ Sorsby writes:
...but I did happen to run across something in a lovely
little book entitled *In Defense of Elitism,* by William
A. Henry III (1994, Random House). I quote:
"As retired Cornell professor Donald Hayes has demonstrated
using a computer analysis, the language difficulty of
textbooks has dropped by about twenty percent during the
past couple of generations. Having sampled 788 texts used
between 1860 and 1992, he says, 'Honors high school texts are
no more difficult than an eighth grade reader was before World
War II.'" (p.42) [NB: All references are to the US.]
I hope this is better/more helpful than whatever _Nation_
offered; it seems pretty solid -- and scary -- to me.
Claudia HCQ Sorsby is easily scared. Is it just possible that
text-books are better written and that intelligibility is a
positive virtue? Or that English has modified in style during
the past 100 years? Less convoluted? Or that the Good Professor's
computer-generated measure of language difficulty was based on
one of the standard grammar and style checkers whose use is now
de riguer among text-book writers? Or that the brothers Fowler's
words are finally being listened to?
FIDO
years into
FIDO
William Grosso writes in parenthesis:
interestingly enough, these [FORTRAN] programs are among
the only ones being written today in which using a go to
statement is considered exemplary style.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so nerdishly
sophomoric as knocking FORTRAN. It has been for many years
- and still is - the language of choice for computationally
intensive algorithms and I know of no successfully marketed
large computer that does not rely on a solid and efficient
FORTRAN compiler.
A FORTRAN sub-program written with style is one of the few
that can be read and understood by real people.
FIDO
Fiona Webster
Chester writes:
>No matter how much one may be attached to non-fiction, it is still a
>genre that pales in comparison to fiction.
>By operating in fiction, a writer is able to manufacture a whole
>universe of his own.
>Non-fiction simply lacks the creative capabilities of fiction.
>Besides, non-fiction's kind of boring - might as well read >the
>newspaper.
<sputter> <guffaw> You obviously haven't read much in the way of
creative nonfiction! Can you say Loren Eiseley? Annie Dillard?
William Gass? Edward Hoagland? Barry Lopez? Stanley Elkin? Gerald
Early? Joseph Brodsky? Vicki Hearne? Cynthia Ozick? Stephen Jay
Gould? Normal Mailer? Joan Didion? Jorge Luis Borges? M.F.K. Fisher?
George Orwell? Gore Vidal? Junichiro Tanizaki? Mary McCarthy? Walter
Benjamin? Truman Capote? Julian Barnes? Michel de Montaigne? E. B.
White? Henry David Thoreau? James Baldwin? Wendell Berry? G. K.
Chesterton? Virgina Woolf? William Hazlitt?
Oh come on... if not those, surely you can say Tom Wolfe, or
Hunter S. Thompson. If you find these two authors on the subject of
Las Vegas, for example, to be *boring*... well, I just don't know
what to say.
Chester, I challenge you: Go get a copy of Phillip Lopate's (ed.)
_The Art of the Personal Essay_. Read it from cover to cover.
Then come back and defend your above remarks.
--Fiona Webster
Meg Worley
Me:
>> : What does not understanding literature consist of? How do
>> : I recognize it in the wild?
>> Does it grow on the off side of trees?
Silke:
>It has feet like water-lilies, it has feathers like a bird, it mostly
>comes from famous places of which you and Meg have never heard.
And all this time I thought it crept on little cat-feet and
devoured only those bold enough to look it right in its
thousand argive eyes and proclaim, "I ain't afraid!"
Rage away,
meg
--
m...@steam.stanford.edu Comparatively Literate
Meg Worley
Chester, in perfecting the art of trollsomeness, writes:
>If you looks really hard, you may be able to extract some sort
>meaning one derives from non-fiction would be akin to finding
>similarities in your personal life and a horoscope column (which,
>I think, we can all agree are pretty shitty).
So fiction = "literature" and nonfiction = "junk?" Shane,
what's your take on this? I believe you may have found a
worthy opponent.
Richard Harter
FIDO <fra...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>William Grosso writes in parenthesis:
> interestingly enough, these [FORTRAN] programs are among
> the only ones being written today in which using a go to
> statement is considered exemplary style.
>There is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so nerdishly
>sophomoric as knocking FORTRAN.
Oh, bladderwort. Nerdishly sophomoric indeed. One might well say
that computer humor is intrinsically nerdish and sophomoric - that I
will not argue with. However FORTRAN is aa much a subject for amused
commentary as anything else. Having written some hundreds of
thousands of lines of it over the years I take exception to the notion
that I can't poke fun at it.
>It has been for many years
>- and still is - the language of choice for computationally
>intensive algorithms and I know of no successfully marketed
>large computer that does not rely on a solid and efficient
>FORTRAN compiler.
True enough. Let us leave it at that - rab doesn't strike me as the
appropriate venue for the technicalities of computer languages.
>A FORTRAN sub-program written with style is one of the few
>that can be read and understood by real people.
Real people???!! Oh, Fido, Fido, how the mighty have fallen.
William Grosso
On Sat, 29 Mar 1997 06:55:46 +0000, FIDO <fra...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>There is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so nerdishly
>sophomoric as knocking FORTRAN.
>
Ummm. Okay. I don't remember exactly what I wrote
but I think I chose FORTRAN because we were talking
about key punches.
The comment about gotos was (subliminally): if your
foreskin is large enough to support a program with a
jump statement, then --wow-- that's really something.
A variant on the old tattoed penis joke, as it were
(for more on the tp joke, see the rec.humor.funny
archives).
No insult to FORTRAN, or the people who can read
it without cringing, was intended.
Cheers,
Andy
William Grosso
On Sat, 29 Mar 1997 09:22:43 GMT, c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) wrote:
>
>This is a bit misleading. It is the single hole punch that is used.
>This being a family group and all that I will not mention what the
>chad (that's the little bits of stuff punched out of the, er, card) is
>used for.
>
Oh yes. Let us talk, in detail about machines that could be
used for foreskin piercings but restrain, out of some misguided
sense of delicacy, from talking abot the detritus.
For those who wonder: it is sold to advertising agencies, to be
used as fake dandruff in Head and Shoulders commercials.
Cheers,
Andy
Fiona Webster
FIDO writes:
> There is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so nerdishly
> sophomoric as knocking FORTRAN.
Oh no! The computer language warriors are threatening
to invade our newsgroup! Quick! Pull up the drawbridge!
--Fiona W.
P.S. For what it's worth, I don't think a well-designed
readable computer "book" would be all that bad. (And no,
a current-generation notebook computer does not fit that
description.) It would be nice when you're backpacking,
for example, and you can't carry a whole lot of weight.
And for reading manuscripts: Have you ever had to read a
500-page manuscript? Talk about *unwieldy*...
Richard Harter
apul...@ix.netcom.com (William Grosso) wrote:
Oh good heavens, are there no standards left. Must we really discuss
Head and Shoulders commercials in a *literary* group. Talk about
tacky, Grosso.
Oh well, let it never me said that I didn't do my part when it came to
the lowering of standards. From _Sperm Wars_, page 19:
"We now have all the information necessary to follow the events that
take place from penetration of the vagina by a penis to the production
of the flowback. But to help us along, we require a change of image
from that of the internal medical examination that we have used so
far. What I am about to describe was first filmed by strapping a
fiber-optic endoscope to the underside of a man's penis just before he
and his partner had sex. This gave a penis's -eye view of what
happened. To help me in this description, suppose that you have
volunteered to take part in such an experiment. You are having
intercourse in the missionary position and your erect penis (if you
are male) or ;your partner's (if you are female) has a camera on its
tip. You can see what is being filmed on a big TV screen on the wall
in front of you.
As the penis pushes forward into the vagina for the first time, the
vaginal walls part and, when the penis is fully in, you can see the
blind end of the vagina some distance ahead. Still slightly ahead,
sticking through the vagina's roof, is the cervix. At the moment,
with its central, dimplelike opening, it looks like a pink sea anemone
shorn of its tentacles. But it will change as intercourse proceeds.
If you watch the screen when thrusting begins, you will see that each
time the penis pulls back the vaginal walls close behind it. Each
time the penis pushes forward the walls part. Whenever the penis is
fully inserted, you can see the end wall of the vagina and the
protuding cervix. As thrusting continues, the picture at full
insertion changes. The far end of the vagina becomes more like a
chamber, slowly filling with air and becoming slippery with mucus.
Even more dramatically, the cervix begins to stretch and hang down
more and more. Gradually it looks less and less like a sea anemone
and more and more like a pink, rather broad, elephant's trunk.
Eventually, all you can see in front of the fully inserted penis is
the front wall of the cervical trunk. Its opening points down to the
vaginal floor and cannot really be seen. Toward the climax of
intercourse the cervical opening may rest on the vaginal floor. When
the penis ejaculates, the spurts of semen hit the front wall of the
cervix and run down onto the floor of the vagina, forming a pool at
the bottom of the chamber. Hanging down, dipped into this pool of
semen, for all the world like an elephant's trunk at a watering hole,
is the cervix."
I don't recall seeing that as a PBS science special.
paschal
On Sat, 29 Mar 1997, Richard Harter wrote:
> True enough. Let us leave it at that - rab doesn't strike me as the
> appropriate venue for the technicalities of computer languages.
oh jeez gimme a break....
-Paschal
TODD J PIERCE
But try as you like, it's very difficult to take a computer to bed with
you and read what's on its monitor.
For this reason, and many other, books will live on.
Todd
Larisa Migachyov
: In article <5hedak$d...@netnews.upenn.edu>, Z. wrote:
: <Larisa Migachyov (miga...@maroon.tc.umn.edu) wrote:
: <: David Christopher Swanson wrote:
: <
: <: : > is information about literature so much more
: <: : > important than information about the [techno]items we use every day?
: <
: <: : Yes.
: <
: <: Why?
: <
: <Can't answer that; but, lo and behold, the light switch works, the
: <computer obeys my commands, most of the time at least, I turn the key in
: <the car and it starts, and I'd be hard-pressed to explain any of that in
: <understand them; the same can hardly be said about literature. Now,
: <and the literature, but when faced with the choice between a scrumptuous
: <new novel and the scrumptuous non-fiction on light-switches, the novel
: <somehow wins every time.
Yes, you can *use* the light switch without understanding it; but could
you invent one? Creativity in literature is encouraged; if I were to say
"I'm writing a book", or "I'm composing a symphony", you would say "How
interesting! Do tell me more!" If I were to say "I'm trying to develop a
new light switch", the reaction would be one of boredom. Technical
creativity is just as important as artistic creativity; as much
imagination, thought, and mental effort is involved in inventing a new
artificial heart valve as is in writing a book. However, the new heart
valve might actually save someone's life, while the book might not have
such a direct effect.
I am not disparaging literature, music, or any other art. Though I am an
engineering major, I was a bookworm long before I decided to become an
engineer. All I am saying is that a well-educated person should know and
respect both the artistic and the technical spheres of endeavor. As far
as scrumptious non-fiction about light switches, I agree that not enough
books have been written about engineering for the non-professional.
There are a few writers, but not enough.
Larisa