catamites and narrators

Jerry Friedman · 17 Sep 2002, 15:36 · from urth-v0209.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: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) catamites and narrators
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 08:36:25 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <urth-v0209-1747 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0209/1747.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


--- James Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net> wrote:
> At 08:01 PM 9/16/2002, Borski wrote:
>=20
> >Among my many works-in-progress (most of which will probably never see
> light
> >of day), but promised to another venue, is an essay entitled "The
> Stained
> >Altar Boy: The Pederast as Villain in the Works of Gene Wolfe."
>=20
> Good points, and there are other examples also. But I question your
> title,=20
> since Wolfe grew up outside the Roman Catholic church. I doubt he had
> much=20
> if any knowledge of this problem growing up -- though I cannot recall if
>=20
> Louisiana was where he spent time as a youth, so he might have
> encountered=20
> it by hearsay. At any rate, I would question whether he had altar boy=20
> molestation in mind as he wrote these works -- as your title would imply
> to=20
> most readers of your essay.

I think this problem has featured in stereotypes of the Catholic
church for centuries (see _Candide_), probably for over a millennium,
believed by many among both the knowledgeable and the ignorant.  Want
to read a joke?  I didn't think so.

--=20
Jerry Friedman

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! News - Today's headlines
http://news.yahoo.com

--=20

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