The Snootiness of Gene Wolfe's fans

Nancy Lebovitz · 01 Mar 2004, 00:11 · from rec.arts.sf.written.2004.mbox

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: nancy at unix5.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz)
Subject: Re: The Snootiness of Gene Wolfe's fans
Date: Mon, 01 Mar 2004 00:11:32 GMT
Message-ID: <Ucv0c.189$T51.113433 at newshog.newsread.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <Xns949D9FE6F929Difyouwanttoemailvisi at 199.45.49.11> <lawrence-43D2DE.01241529022004 at news-central.ash.giganews.com> <Xns949E112EE9E9Aifyouwanttoemailvisi at 199.45.49.11>

In article <Xns949E112EE9E9Aifyouwanttoemailvisi at 199.45.49.11>,
Josh  <if.you.want.to.email at visit.joshbrain.tripod.org> wrote:
>
>Thats the thing that perhaps wasn't clear enough in my first post: I 
>really *liked* Wolfe because of his opacity. I *liked* the fact that his 
>stories weren't blatantly obvious and the payoff not immediate. I *liked* 
>the fact that I knew that the majority of readers wouldn't get half the 
>stuff. I *liked* the feeling of self-importance when someone saw me 
>reading Wolfe.

It's plausible that part of Wolfe's appeal is that he engages the feeling
of being intelligent, and even that he engages the feeling that one is
more intelligent than other people.

It's rather harder to prove that Wolfe doesn't offer anything else, though.

I'm not a tremendous Wolfe fan, but I think there's something fine and
pulpy about duelling with poisonous hypnotic flowers, or beaches so old
that their sand is all specs of broken glass, or (a bit more subtly) 
people living out their lives in a palace waiting room.`
-- 
   Nancy Lebovitz    nancy at netaxs.com  www.nancybuttons.com  
                       Now, with bumper stickers

Using your turn signal is not "giving information to the enemy"

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