"been teaching literature for over 35 years"

Marc Aramini · 09 Sep 2013, 13:42 · from 2013-September.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: marcaramini at yahoo.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 06:42:13 -0700
Subject: (urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"
In-Reply-To: <522DCADA.4080402 at clueland.com>
References: <52290769.660c320a.7def.fffff916 at mx.google.com>
	<1378442246.57552.YahooMailNeo at web124504.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
	<1378489682.63899.YahooMailNeo at web124506.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
	<522A4070.4070407 at irit.fr>
	<5B8EEAEF-B206-4F5D-A277-349B6C60AD19 at gmail.com>
	<1378614309.6288.YahooMailNeo at web124502.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
	<522C7085.3060202 at verizon.net>
	<D75A571ED1584BAF8820AA540F92E8CF@Rover>
	<522CA3B6.70903 at verizon.net>
	<0398640b3bd4fdc0229df649e074727b.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>
	<1378703957.73667.YahooMailNeo at web124505.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
	<BDD66FCCDD7B4949ADF7A85B5195143A@Rover>
	<522DB883.6040101 at clueland.com>
	<D263433829BF4B73BC8A9442F1D5BCCF@Rover>
	<522DCADA.4080402 at clueland.com>
Message-ID: <108AEAAC-0151-4DEA-8F83-657408EFEDA7 at yahoo.com>

I've made a ton of science - biological claims about Wolfe ... But his interest as a symbolist always seems to me to keep the science at that level - it's representation rather than the hard application, like the giant nucleic acid building in House of Ancestors having some atavistic sympathetic vibration with the real person's genetic material it "matches".  Accretion disks and schwarzschild radii seem ever so slightly "harder" than Wolfe's usual symbolic , tropish employment of science. 

When he obsesses about something, it is usually closer to industrial engineering and the kinds of materials used - if I had to guess I would say theoretical physics are treated a little differently than the "let's build this based on these building properties" descriptions that crop up (like talus manufacturing - this is where science becomes less metaphorical for Wolfe)

We really should keep mid 70s or even earlier understandings in mind, unless we are just talking about probabilities here that are not lit crit in nature.  

Are we talking about the text or the possibility of the text here?  Because Borges or st augustine will probably influence his treatment of a scientific mystery as much as his physics background ... 

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 9, 2013, at 6:19 AM, Jeffery Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com> wrote:

> On 9/9/2013 7:42 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>> It doesn't matter (in engineering terms) whether stuff that reaches the
>> event horizon goes somewhere else or not (that's kind of the definition
>> of an event horizon).  But an accretion disk outside the Schwarzschild
>> radius is just standard dynamics for any super-condensed object.
> 
> What force acts on the matter to prevent it from following the usual swarm of elliptical orbits instead of the disk?
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

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