Digest urth.v021.n005

Kevin J. Maroney · 03 Nov 1998, 10:49 · from urth-v0021.mbox · original

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: "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaroney at crossover.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v021.n005
Date: Tue, 03 Nov 1998 10:49:55
Message-ID: <urth-v0021-0037 at digest.urth.net>
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At 08:45 AM 11/3/98 -0500, alga wrote:
>Oh, I agree, and could easily find other examples, even from Gilgamesh. (W=
hy
>are you reading Butler, btw, did you download it? There are some splendid
>more modern translations. Did you know that Butler, and Graves after him,
>was convinced that The Odyssey was written by a woman?) =20

The Butler was available online. I actually can't remember what translation
I was reading when I first encountered this scene; I read it in WH Auden's
_The Greek Classics_ (Viking Portable Library).=20

>But there is a
>certain very general argument that could be sustained or at least argued
>over in the Jaynes premise.=20

I certainly understand; but Jaynes was making an absolute categorical
statement, and like any absolute categorical statement, a single
counterexample damages it. (Harold Bloom seems to make a similarly broad
and indefensible statement in his newest book on Shakespeare.)

>I'll say again that I believe that Wolfe is at
>his best when dealing with rather flat "archaic" figures, that in my own
>opinion he is less successful at the nuanced 3-dimensional "modern" figure.

Interesting observation, and one that I simultaneously find quite correct
and want to argue with. Alden Weir is a brilliant 3-dimensional figure, but
other than that, the characters in his best stories do tend to be viewed at
a remove.=20

Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at crossover.com
Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction
http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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