Digest urth.v028.n112

Peter Stephenson · 14 Dec 1999, 23:44 · 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: Peter Stephenson <pws at pwstephenson.fsnet.co.uk>
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v028.n112
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 23:44:30 +0000
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0626 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0626.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

urth-errors at lists.best.com wrote:
> >Is it the duty of the FAQ to initiate one into the "mysteries" of TBOTNS?
> >Or to initiate one into the method of reading Gene Wolfe?
>=20
> Neither. A FAQ is a list of frequently asked questions and their answers.
> It is a device invented to prevent people from posting the same question
> over and over in a newsgroup (at which task is has generally been a notab=
le
> failure) and to relieve other people from having to reply with the same
> answer over and over or ignore the question (at which task it is a fair
> success; of course the response, "read the FAQ" must be posted over and
> over, but this is a lot less effort).

Hmmm.  I don't think this is entirely appropriate with Wolfe.  If you look
back in the archive I think you'll find we have had the same question over
and over, and each time with different answers embedded in a completely
different discussion.  I certainly wouldn't want to think the questions
shouldn't be asked again, nor that `read the FAQ' would ever be an adequate
response to anything more than the simplest question.  And from the other
discussions recently, that doesn't even seem to include `who is the
author'.

(A propos of which, I can't resist the following, but please feel free to
stop reading now.)

> From: "Jonathan Laidlow" <LAIDLOJM at hhs.bham.ac.uk>
> (and by the by, Barthes wrote 'Death of the Author')

But how do we know that Barthes `wrote' it?  And what do we mean by `write'
anyway?  etc.

corncrake

*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