----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 02, 2009 10:45 AM
Subject: Re: Johnson/Goldsmith debate
Hey, grant him all that he says here, & for a reader, the thing 'made'
is still boring as all get out, except perhaps AS A CONCEPT!
BTW, one might call Bök's work somewhat derivative, but it's certainly
not boring the way KG's deliberate copies are; Eunoia is a
stimulating, brilliant, & engaging work, because the riffs played on
Oulipo therein are so delightful....
Doug
Doug, Eunoia IS NOT stimulating, brilliant etc. BECAUSE of the riffs it
plays on Oulipo. Literary allusions, showing or implicitly critiquing
influences within a text, may delight the scholar, but they are not
important or delightful in themselves to the reader. Unless we assume that
the only important reader is the scholar, and that "intertextuality" is the
major component of a work's appeal. Except for bits of Raymond Queneau,
Oulipo creations strike me as typical pointless lifeless French filigree.
Eunoia (which I've looked at because of all the praise it gets from langpos
and other cyborgs) likewise.
--- I've been deleting email after email on the current thread; you all seem
(forgive me if I'm wrong) to be talking about someone who copied someone
else's stuff and signed his name to it. Whatever paradoxical charge that
might have is for me entirely contained in, and exhausted by, Borges's
Pierre Menard. But then, it is well-known that I'm a hopelessly purblind
reactionary. Bye-bye again.
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