Severiano

Alice Turner · 25 Apr 2000, 10:57 · 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: "Alice Turner" <akt at attglobal.net>
Subject: (urth) Severiano
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 10:57:32
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0928 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0928.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Here's a mystery for the list, at least it's a mystery to me. The learned c=
ritic, Frank Kermode, contributed an essay to the NY Times Book Review on t=
he subject of several books about heaven (a subject in which I take a profe=
ssional interest). Let me quote a paragraph:

"The British novelist Julian Barnes allows an old-style heaven, the one tha=
t lingers on in the popular imagination, with harps, crowns and nightshirts=
 for those who want it, but declares that it is going out of fashion. The n=
ew heaven is a more democratic, laid-back affair, a sort of limited monarch=
y where the titular head of state does not attempt to interfere and there i=
s "pleasure every way." One can have the perfect breakfast three times a da=
y, with as much sex and golf as desired. (His hero has a caddie called Seve=
riano, a little joke for the cognoscenti.)...."

Do we have any of the cognoscenti here? I am completely at a loss. Is it a =
golf joke? An opera joke (Severiano sounds like an opera name)? A literary =
joke?=20

-alga

*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