The Distant Suns of Gene Wolfe

Daniel D Jones · 04 Jun 2007, 23:00 · from 2007-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: ddjones at riddlemaster.org (Daniel D Jones)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2007 19:00:34 -0400
Subject: (urth) The Distant Suns of Gene Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <d716a1c40706041103q765d10bas19ac5947d6dbbc1d at mail.gmail.com>
References: <BAY119-F35F3B5ADBB895FE4875A0DF230 at phx.gbl>
	<d716a1c40706041103q765d10bas19ac5947d6dbbc1d at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <200706041900.34628.ddjones at riddlemaster.org>

On Monday 04 June 2007 14:03, Michael Straight wrote:
> Sheesh.  Do we really have to pretend that liking Wolfe proves that
> we're super-smart and that people who don't are just lazy, not willing
> to do the "hard work" that we're willing to do?

Interesting take on what's been said.  I'm not sure why you interpret it that 
way, as I don't recall anyone saying that those who don't find Wolfe 
appealing were lazy or unwilling to work.  Perhaps it was hidden in the text, 
a careful blend of hints and clues that requires multiple readings to ferret 
out the hidden slur.  I would have thought that reading Wolfe might have 
sensitized me to such subtleties, but apparently I wasn't sufficiently 
perceptive to notice this subtext.

> Reading Wolfe requires a different kind of attention than reading some
> other books, but I wouldn't call it work.  I enjoy that kind of
> reading.  If I didn't, I wouldn't do it.  It doesn't make me morally
> superior to someone who doesn't enjoy that kind of reading.

Of course it's work.  Thinking requires effort and expends energy.  That's the 
very definition of work.

Despite our society's Puritanical heritage that might argue otherwise, work 
and enjoyment are not mutually exclusive.  Far from it.  A significant part 
of what I enjoy is work of some kind or another.  Whether it's crafting wood 
projects in my workshop or writing extensions for Firefox or rebuilding 
my '78 shovelhead or creating a new recipe, most of the activities which 
engage my time are work.  I find them quite enjoyable.

Essentially everyone here could make the same claim.  The particular types of 
work they might mention as examples would undoubtedly be quite different from 
my list.  That doesn't at all make me superior to them, nor them to me.  It 
simply makes us different.  Wonderful world, isn't it, that can encompass so 
much variety with scarcely any effort at all?

> I don't enjoy skateboarding or skeet shooting, but it's not because
> I'm too lazy to do the "work" (practice) it would take for me to do
> those things well.  I'm just not interested

Fortunately, I"m not aware of any attempt to enforce either practice upon you.  
Absent such concerns as paying bills and putting food on the table and 
whatever other personal concerns drive your behavior, you're free to engage 
in whatever pursuits you find enjoyable.  One of them appears to be reading 
Wolfe.  That doesn't make you special in any significant sense, but it does 
put you in a rather small minority.  Book sales provide conclusive proof of 
that.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net