the superb level of discourse here

Patri10629 · 02 Nov 1999, 09:32 · from urth-v0028.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: Patri10629 at aol.com
Subject: (urth) Re: the superb level of discourse here
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 04:32:47 EST
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0337 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0337.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

In a message dated 11/2/99 12:43:53 AM, Mitchell Bailey writes:

<< As you probably can tell, I'm not a literature scholar. I'll have to
paraphrase Sev's line on this subject: if I sometimes manage to seem a
peer of the esteemed contributors to this list, or at least one whose
company does not shame them (perplexes? annoys?) it is to a significant
extent due to that erudition to which I've been exposed here.  >>

No, I couldn't tell, and, yes, I know *exactly* what you mean. If ever ther=
e=20
was a forum which enhanced and increased my pleasure with Wolfe's work, why=20
humbling me, this is it. What a privilege it is to eavesdrop. Hats off to=20
you, mates.

Love Mr Ansley's Oz reference.

A sidenote: Responding to my constant complaint that parades are not=20
organized in response to, and full-page New York Times reviews are not=20
devoted to each new Wolfe book, (and a national holiday not declared=20
specifically for a masterwork like ON BLUE'S WATERS), a friend replied: "Wi=
th=20
those godawful covers they slap on his books they're scaring off anybody wi=
th=20
half a brain who doesn't already know he's great." Comments?

Actually the cover of OBW is sort of Wolfe in a nutshell--the siren's one=20
grotesque feature is hidden from view, the animal's leg's too. What? What's=
 a=20
few limbs between friends?

I must say again: We are not all lit crit/ sci fi (uh-oh I said the naughty=20
word)/intellectual giants (I mean besides Mantis and Alga), nerds and=20
nerdettes obsessed with minutia  (I'll forgive the geographers for the=20
moment). "Minutia." Hey! Maybe That could be my name! (sorry)  Is Wolfe so=20
wrenchingly good? So demanding?  Am I naive  and alone in thinking that his=20
art is ultimately accessible?

best,

Patrick O'Leary

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

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