Urth Net

← back to the conversation

An Evil Guest - An Object Lesson (was Palgrave History of Science Fiction)

Norwood, Frederick Hudson · 20 Mar 2018, 19:57 · from 2018-March.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: NORWOODR at mail.etsu.edu (Norwood, Frederick Hudson)
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2018 19:57:39 -0000
Subject: (urth) An Evil Guest - An Object Lesson (was Palgrave History
 of Science Fiction)
In-Reply-To: <BN7PR07MB4546457C84716725C4A75C1382AB0 at BN7PR07MB4546.namprd07.prod.outlook.com>
References: <mailman.1.1521561991.31534.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
 <CY1PR14MB062928924223533C82A37C90DFAB0 at CY1PR14MB0629.namprd14.prod.outlook.com>
 <CAF1072zOAM3BazHX+X-YMEvEDwYHakm3ydvzYnY-5_Q4cMkksQ at mail.gmail.com>
 <BN7PR07MB4546457C84716725C4A75C1382AB0 at BN7PR07MB4546.namprd07.prod.outlook.com>
Message-ID: <BN7PR07MB4546DC60F81008E56567ACEB82AB0 at BN7PR07MB4546.namprd07.prod.outlook.com>

Watch out for this Marc Aramini.  Next thing you know he?s going to ruin the movie Titanic for everybody.

Footnote: this actually happened.  I went to see a movie of Romeo and Juliet and, near the end, one of the two teens in the seat in front of me leaned over to his girlfriend and loudly whispered, ?Don?t worry, it will come out all right in the end.?

Rick Norwood

From: Urth [mailto:urth-bounces at lists.urth.net] On Behalf Of Norwood, Frederick Hudson
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2018 3:55 PM
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) An Evil Guest - An Object Lesson (was Palgrave History of Science Fiction)

What do you mean Hamlet dies!  And no spoiler warning.  You?ve spoiled the surprise ending.

Rick Norwood

From: Urth [mailto:urth-bounces at lists.urth.net] On Behalf Of Marc Aramini
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2018 1:51 PM
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net<mailto:urth at lists.urth.net>>
Subject: Re: (urth) An Evil Guest - An Object Lesson (was Palgrave History of Science Fiction)

Cognitive dissonance incoming from the fasciest of textual fascists (me): ideally people should be able to engage the text on the level they feel comfortable with (even if they are in some ways ?wrong? about plot matters. I had a recent interaction with the philistines on reddit wherein a banal and uninteresting reading of the disturbance at the gate was being pushed as the ?correct, all there is to it? reading. And the speaker had the audacity to suggest to ME what the proper reading was. They know not what they do.)

And while I believe in the discoverability of intent and the immutability of plot elements implied or explicit (Hamlet dies, urth literally becomes Green), sometimes it is necessary to let people read as they want to - for some, Wolfe really is just a fun read.

Better to let people read as they want than risk the unenlightened fascism (as opposed to my enlightened, transcendent variety) of pushing definitive readings that are deaf to subtext (and I?m not talking about your readings at all here, Robert). I agree that we should be speculating on Cassie?s condition ... but if that isn?t important or central to the goal of other readers I think it is okay. We all read for different things(but that doesn?t mean our plot exegeses are wrong, of course)




On Tuesday, March 20, 2018, Robert Pirkola <rpirkola at hotmail.com<mailto:rpirkola at hotmail.com>> wrote: I find it most peculiar to take political and cultural stances towards information conveyed about a character in a book.  It is not I who am measuring CC.  Margaret measures her and we are informed of it *in the book*.  And not for the purpose of objectifying her, but for the purpose of making costumes for a play!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20180320/29ed5b61/attachment-0001.html>

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