From dtart at bigpond.net.au  Thu Mar  6 21:37:33 2008
From: dtart at bigpond.net.au (Denise Tart & David Green)
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 16:37:33 +1100
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
Message-ID: <006a01c88015$5859ae40$0201a8c0@MumandDad>

Sometime back we were discussing how 'true' some of Durrell's book were.

Both Baudelaire and Wilde were influences on LD. Here is Wilde, paraphased

The Ancient Historians used to give us delightful fiction in the form of fact, but the modern novelist is presenting us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. Promising young writers with a natural gift for exaggeration are developing a morbid and unhealthy habit of truth - telling and are ending up writing novels that are so lifelike that no one could possibly believe in them.. I make a plea for a return to the art of telling beautiful and untrue things, that noble and lost art of lying.

For me, the strange, magical, timeless quality of much of Durrell's work stems from some application of this approach

David

Denise Tart & David Green
16 William Street, Marrickville NSW 2204

+61 2 9564 6165
0412 707 625
dtart at bigpond.net.au
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From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net  Fri Mar  7 09:47:24 2008
From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine)
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 09:47:24 -0800 (GMT-08:00)
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
Message-ID: <8299352.1204912045332.JavaMail.root@elwamui-darkeyed.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Wilde is playing off the first sense of lying, namely, misrepresentation of fact and applying that to fiction.  But there is another sense, known to all, of deliberate deception, for which we have such things as copyright laws.  Durrell uses the first sense admirably but misuses the second.


Bruce


-----Original Message-----
>From: Denise Tart & David Green <dtart at bigpond.net.au>
>Sent: Mar 6, 2008 9:37 PM
>To: Durrel <ilds at lists.uvic.ca>
>Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
>
>Sometime back we were discussing how 'true' some of Durrell's book were.
>
>Both Baudelaire and Wilde were influences on LD. Here is Wilde, paraphased
>
>The Ancient Historians used to give us delightful fiction in the form of fact, but the modern novelist is presenting us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. Promising young writers with a natural gift for exaggeration are developing a morbid and unhealthy habit of truth - telling and are ending up writing novels that are so lifelike that no one could possibly believe in them.. I make a plea for a return to the art of telling beautiful and untrue things, that noble and lost art of lying.
>
>For me, the strange, magical, timeless quality of much of Durrell's work stems from some application of this approach
>
>David
>
>Denise Tart & David Green
>16 William Street, Marrickville NSW 2204



From odos.fanourios at gmail.com  Fri Mar  7 10:01:02 2008
From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:01:02 -0700
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
In-Reply-To: <8299352.1204912045332.JavaMail.root@elwamui-darkeyed.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
References: <8299352.1204912045332.JavaMail.root@elwamui-darkeyed.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <47D182DE.3000801@gmail.com>

Hey Bruce,

I'd say Durrell and Wilde are actually remarkably akin here -- Wilde's 
use of pastiche and reworking of other texts is on display /in spades/ 
in his "The Decay of Lying."  It's nearly impossible to miss it.  The 
point, in part, for Wilde is that his "misrepresented" stolen bits taken 
on a new shape when they are recreated in his work.  And Wilde certainly 
did much more of this "misrepresentation" than Durrell ever did (any 
good critical edition will identify these extensive borrowings and 
reconstructions).

You might disagree with Durrell using the second sense of lying, which 
you tie to copyright laws, and I can appreciate why you'd dislike it or 
not value it as a reader, but he came to it through a very clear 
aesthetic tradition to which he constantly alludes, and in which it has 
a specific function.

I see very little difference between Durrell and Wilde in either of the 
two senses of lying here, but I doubt either was limited to just two 
senses...

   "Appropriate what is yours, for to publish
    anything is to make it public property"
         -- Wilde

Best,
James

Bruce Redwine wrote:
> Wilde is playing off the first sense of lying, namely,
 > misrepresentation of fact and applying that to fiction.
 > But there is another sense, known to all, of deliberate
 > deception, for which we have such things as copyright
 > laws.  Durrell uses the first sense admirably but
 > misuses the second.
> 
> 
> Bruce

From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net  Fri Mar  7 10:58:21 2008
From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine)
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 10:58:21 -0800 (GMT-08:00)
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
Message-ID: <7831820.1204916302165.JavaMail.root@elwamui-darkeyed.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

I will not let Durrell off the hook by an appeal to an "aesthetic tradition."  Nor do I think he was not responsible at the end of his life for his MS of Caesar's Vast Ghost.  The examples I have in mind are not playful "borrowings," they are not allusions, but they are quite clearly gross examples of plagiarism.  This has been discussed before and need not be rehashed.  Compare those known passages in Prospero's Cell, the Quartet, and Caesar's Vast Ghost with their sources in Durrell's contemporaries.  He could have been sued and would have probably lost.  Given the extent of Durrell's "borrowings," I don't think any court would accept a defense based on the free circulation of other writers' prose and ideas.  Deception is relevant when a writer passes off other people's words as his own, without any accreditation or even remotely suggested accreditation, and that was what Durrell was doing on numerous occasions.


Bruce


-----Original Message-----
>From: James Gifford <odos.fanourios at gmail.com>
>Sent: Mar 7, 2008 10:01 AM
>To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>Subject: Re: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
>
>Hey Bruce,
>
>I'd say Durrell and Wilde are actually remarkably akin here -- Wilde's 
>use of pastiche and reworking of other texts is on display /in spades/ 
>in his "The Decay of Lying."  It's nearly impossible to miss it.  The 
>point, in part, for Wilde is that his "misrepresented" stolen bits taken 
>on a new shape when they are recreated in his work.  And Wilde certainly 
>did much more of this "misrepresentation" than Durrell ever did (any 
>good critical edition will identify these extensive borrowings and 
>reconstructions).
>
>You might disagree with Durrell using the second sense of lying, which 
>you tie to copyright laws, and I can appreciate why you'd dislike it or 
>not value it as a reader, but he came to it through a very clear 
>aesthetic tradition to which he constantly alludes, and in which it has 
>a specific function.
>
>I see very little difference between Durrell and Wilde in either of the 
>two senses of lying here, but I doubt either was limited to just two 
>senses...
>
>   "Appropriate what is yours, for to publish
>    anything is to make it public property"
>         -- Wilde
>
>Best,
>James
>
>Bruce Redwine wrote:
>> Wilde is playing off the first sense of lying, namely,
> > misrepresentation of fact and applying that to fiction.
> > But there is another sense, known to all, of deliberate
> > deception, for which we have such things as copyright
> > laws.  Durrell uses the first sense admirably but
> > misuses the second.
>> 
>> 
>> Bruce
>_______________________________________________
>ILDS mailing list
>ILDS at lists.uvic.ca
>https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds


From odos.fanourios at gmail.com  Fri Mar  7 12:40:38 2008
From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 13:40:38 -0700
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
In-Reply-To: <7831820.1204916302165.JavaMail.root@elwamui-darkeyed.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
References: <7831820.1204916302165.JavaMail.root@elwamui-darkeyed.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <47D1A846.1010804@gmail.com>

Yes, Bruce, it has been discussed, but you keep skipping that discussion 
and pretending you needn't address it.  Please, more substance and less 
vitriol...  Perhaps you could go back to the examples and discuss them 
in detail.  I'd like to see your close analysis.

But, for the sake of making some real progress, let's get back to that 
sticky situation you dodged.  What about Wilde?  If you're keen on Wilde 
(as I certainly am), how do you distinguish his work and Durrell's, or 
should we toss Wilde, Joyce, Miller, Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Eliot out 
without any further consideration?  If that's not an "aesthetic 
tradition," then what would count as one?

Moreover, Durrell seems to have been pretty thorough in giving credit 
where credit was due in his critical works -- so why not the novels?  In 
conjunction, he alludes very, very heavily to a series of writers who 
did precisely the same when reusing past creative works.  For instance, 
both Eliot and Wilde borrow far more heavily than Durrell, yet they 
don't offend you -- wherein lies the distinction, and can you *detail* 
it?  How would you respond to the likes of Kathy Acker or Burroughs?

Or, we could ponder the examples in paragraph 3 of William Posner's 
essay here (all familiar names in our past discussions -- Shax's theft 
of phrases from a contemporary translation of Plutarch is the most 
notable, as well as Eliot's later theft of Shax's theft):

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200204/posner

How, Bruce, can you tame plagiarism as the master-mistress of those 
desires?  And, what exactly do they seem to desire, 'cause it don't seem 
like a shortcut, and it's not some fire in rose-red youth...  Or, 
instead, is there a very clear tradition to which Durrell has aligned 
himself?  After all, why even have a tradition if you can't take it up, 
chop it up, and reuse it in new ways that serve your own purposes?  And 
why would he allude to a tradition of authors who say exactly that if he 
didn't see any reason for it?  It seems like far more work than a 
plagiarist would go to!

I've formally charged people with plagiarism, most often with quite 
significant consequences.  It's a charge I take very serious, as do most 
academics.  However, I remain largely untroubled by Durrell.  Does that 
strike you as simply bizarre, or does it seem more rational that there 
are compelling reasons?  If you're here for a dialogue, wouldn't it be 
worthwhile to discuss those reasons in conjunction with your own?  As 
Wilde already said, the truth is rarely simple and never pure.

But, there's no sense in writing much on this topic -- I doubt there 
will be more response than repetition of what's already been said.  I'd 
welcome thoughts from others or anyone who sees more instances of 
borrowings in LD's texts.  We know that he shamelessly stole plots from 
psychoanalytic case studies, and that strikes me as a very engaging 
place to discuss how these borrowings enrich a text when we recognize 
them.  What about Groddeck's noses, Hutin's Gnostics, and Torhild 
Leira's tears?

And what of Wilde?  I've asked some direct questions here, and I'm 
interested in responses -- dodging direct question (albeit more loudly 
each time) doesn't interest me at all...  Borrow some of Wilde's art, 
and I'll go along for the ride.

Best,
James

ps: where's the hook and who was fishing?

pps: Biographically, how do you respond to my previous (and detailed) 
discussion of Caesar's Vast Ghost?  MacNiven is pretty clear on the 
point on p. 683, noting that Mary Byrne typed up Durrell's mess of notes 
and notebooks (all of which always contain transcripts & clippings from 
things he found interesting, being both notebooks and commonplace 
books).  Isabelle Keller can likely contribute more about the ms., 
perhaps in discussion in Paris this summer, but the "notes-to ts." 
transformation suggests he didn't compile it himself, and the biography 
asserts this too, as well as the point about Haag's writing that you 
keep going back to.  Just watch "Une Amitie Parisienne" and tell me how 
carefully you think Old D. went through Byrne's transcriptions of his 
scribblings?

Bruce Redwine wrote:
> I will not let Durrell off the hook by an appeal to an
 > "aesthetic tradition."  Nor do I think he was not
 > responsible at the end of his life for his MS of
 > Caesar's Vast Ghost.  The examples I have in mind are
 > not playful "borrowings," they are not allusions, but
 > they are quite clearly gross examples of plagiarism.
 > This has been discussed before and need not be rehashed.
 > Compare those known passages in Prospero's Cell, the
 > Quartet, and Caesar's Vast Ghost with their sources in
 > Durrell's contemporaries.  He could have been sued and
 > would have probably lost.  Given the extent of Durrell's
 > "borrowings," I don't think any court would accept a
 > defense based on the free circulation of other writers'
 > prose and ideas.  Deception is relevant when a writer
 > passes off other people's words as his own, without any
 > accreditation or even remotely suggested accreditation,
 > and that was what Durrell was doing on numerous occasions.
> 
> 
> Bruce
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: James Gifford <odos.fanourios at gmail.com>
>> Sent: Mar 7, 2008 10:01 AM
>> To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>> Subject: Re: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
>>
>> Hey Bruce,
>>
>> I'd say Durrell and Wilde are actually remarkably akin here -- Wilde's 
>> use of pastiche and reworking of other texts is on display /in spades/ 
>> in his "The Decay of Lying."  It's nearly impossible to miss it.  The 
>> point, in part, for Wilde is that his "misrepresented" stolen bits taken 
>> on a new shape when they are recreated in his work.  And Wilde certainly 
>> did much more of this "misrepresentation" than Durrell ever did (any 
>> good critical edition will identify these extensive borrowings and 
>> reconstructions).
>>
>> You might disagree with Durrell using the second sense of lying, which 
>> you tie to copyright laws, and I can appreciate why you'd dislike it or 
>> not value it as a reader, but he came to it through a very clear 
>> aesthetic tradition to which he constantly alludes, and in which it has 
>> a specific function.
>>
>> I see very little difference between Durrell and Wilde in either of the 
>> two senses of lying here, but I doubt either was limited to just two 
>> senses...
>>
>>   "Appropriate what is yours, for to publish
>>    anything is to make it public property"
>>         -- Wilde
>>
>> Best,
>> James
>>
>> Bruce Redwine wrote:
>>> Wilde is playing off the first sense of lying, namely,
>>> misrepresentation of fact and applying that to fiction.
>>> But there is another sense, known to all, of deliberate
>>> deception, for which we have such things as copyright
>>> laws.  Durrell uses the first sense admirably but
>>> misuses the second.
>>>
>>>
>>> Bruce
>> _______________________________________________
>> ILDS mailing list
>> ILDS at lists.uvic.ca
>> https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds
> 
> _______________________________________________
> ILDS mailing list
> ILDS at lists.uvic.ca
> https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds
> 

From godshawl at email.uc.edu  Fri Mar  7 13:34:41 2008
From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:34:41 -0500
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
In-Reply-To: <7831820.1204916302165.JavaMail.root@elwamui-darkeyed.atl.s
	a.earthlink.net>
References: <7831820.1204916302165.JavaMail.root@elwamui-darkeyed.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <E3.F1.08390.DE4B1D74@gwout1>

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From godshawl at email.uc.edu  Fri Mar  7 13:39:14 2008
From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:39:14 -0500
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
In-Reply-To: <47D1A846.1010804@gmail.com>
References: <7831820.1204916302165.JavaMail.root@elwamui-darkeyed.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
	<47D1A846.1010804@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <95.74.05263.EF5B1D74@gwout2>

The doctrine of "fair use" permits brief passages 
from a book to be quoted in a book review or a 
critical essay; and the parodist of a copyrighted 
work is permitted to copy as much of that work as 
is necessary to enable readers to recognize the 
new work as a parody. A writer may, for that 
matter, quote a passage from another writer just 
to liven up the narrative; but to do so without 
quotation marks?to pass off another writer's 
writing as one's own?is more like fraud than like fair use.

That's all I have to say about this matter, children.
***************************************
W. L. Godshalk		*
Department of English         *
University of Cincinnati            Stellar disorder  *
Cincinnati OH 45221-0069      *
513-281-5927
***************************************




From odos.fanourios at gmail.com  Fri Mar  7 13:49:23 2008
From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:49:23 -0700
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
In-Reply-To: <E3.F1.08390.DE4B1D74@gwout1>
References: <7831820.1204916302165.JavaMail.root@elwamui-darkeyed.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
	<E3.F1.08390.DE4B1D74@gwout1>
Message-ID: <47D1B863.1060308@gmail.com>

> Also did he ask permission to use some material?
 > "Warner old boy, you wouldn't mind, would you, if
 > I used that scene in my novel?" "Go ahead old
 > fruit, the damn book isn't selling very well."

Bill, why can't we have such nicknames on the list!  Bruce, as a measure 
of good will, I'll entrust you with creating mine.

For what it's worth, we do know that Durrell did engage in that kind of 
"old boy - old fruit" banter and did ask at least some folks about using 
their stuff.  We needn't look any further than /Sebastian/.

As for /Prospero's Cell/, he even wrote up a list of what he needed to 
'prune' from other works in order to complete the book, then sent the 
list to the Gennadius Library where it has remained ever since.  He 
certainly doesn't seem to have been hiding his tracks in any way, either 
in the world or in the books...

Best,
Jamie

From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net  Fri Mar  7 15:40:50 2008
From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine)
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 18:40:50 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
Message-ID: <832962.1204933250724.JavaMail.root@elwamui-muscovy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

James:

I think you are throwing up literary smokescreens and dodging my concrete examples of plagiarism in Durrell's work.  First, examine how Durrell took Sophie Atkinson's An Artist in Corfu (1911; pp. 69, 72-74, 86-87, 129-33, 137) and reworked her prose into Prospero's Cell (1970; 94-97, 114, 123, 126-28).  Then compare the example of Alexandria as inverted mirage in Balthazar (AQ 1962/1968; p. 211) with its source in R. Talbot Kelly's Egypt Painted and Described (1902/1903; p. 5).  Full credit goes to Bill Godshalk for uncovering this "borrowing" back in 1967.  Finally, consider how Durrell lifted Michael Haag's very long footnote in his edition of Forster's Alexandria:  A History and a Guide (1986) and incorporated the passage into his text of CVG.  This has been discussed before, so I won't give the page references.  Here, I do not follow MacNiven's assessment of that MS.  There are other evaluations.  These examples are not exhaustive but the result of a little research, and I suspect they are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

What is important is that none of these examples give credit to their true sources, and the reader is being deceived into thinking this is Durrell's own work.  (And I'm beginning to think, if my memory is correct, that Durrell himself believed that what he'd stolen was his own, as evidenced by the BBC film about his return to Alexandria, where he allows the inverted mirage passage to pass as his own prose.)

I see no evidence that these liftings are either allusive, satirical, or in anyway "literary."  They are there, as I see it, to expand or embellish his text, without attribution.  That is egregious.  More seriously, it is actionable as a copyright violation in a court of law.  That is the issue, and not whether other writers did the same thing.  If they did, on the same scale that Durrell did and with the same intent, namely, to deceive, then they too are subject to censure.

I don't believe in confusing this basic issue by bringing in extraneous examples of how other arts -- e.g., music or painting -- borrow or build upon themes within their own ranks.  For me, the key idea when dealing with borrowing in literature is one of deception, what is the intent of the person who borrows?  Why is he or she doing it?  Is there a legitimate literary purpose, which in some way acknowledges one's contemporaries or predecessors?  Or is it simply theft?  That is, taking without acknowledgment what belongs to someone else.  Intent is hard to determine, but not in the cited examples.  T. S. Eliot gave license to this practice when he said in his essay on Massinger, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."  True.  I don't think, however, that argument would hold up in a court of law, given the way Durrell stole material in some of his works.

Had Durrell's "borrowings" in Propero's Cell come to the attention of Faber, after publication, I think the book would have been recalled and his career ended with that publisher. 


Bruce


-----Original Message-----
>From: James Gifford <odos.fanourios at gmail.com>
>Sent: Mar 7, 2008 12:40 PM
>To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>Subject: Re: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
>
>Yes, Bruce, it has been discussed, but you keep skipping that discussion 
>and pretending you needn't address it.  Please, more substance and less 
>vitriol...  Perhaps you could go back to the examples and discuss them 
>in detail.  I'd like to see your close analysis.
>
>But, for the sake of making some real progress, let's get back to that 
>sticky situation you dodged.  What about Wilde?  If you're keen on Wilde 
>(as I certainly am), how do you distinguish his work and Durrell's, or 
>should we toss Wilde, Joyce, Miller, Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Eliot out 
>without any further consideration?  If that's not an "aesthetic 
>tradition," then what would count as one?
>
>Moreover, Durrell seems to have been pretty thorough in giving credit 
>where credit was due in his critical works -- so why not the novels?  In 
>conjunction, he alludes very, very heavily to a series of writers who 
>did precisely the same when reusing past creative works.  For instance, 
>both Eliot and Wilde borrow far more heavily than Durrell, yet they 
>don't offend you -- wherein lies the distinction, and can you *detail* 
>it?  How would you respond to the likes of Kathy Acker or Burroughs?
>
>Or, we could ponder the examples in paragraph 3 of William Posner's 
>essay here (all familiar names in our past discussions -- Shax's theft 
>of phrases from a contemporary translation of Plutarch is the most 
>notable, as well as Eliot's later theft of Shax's theft):
>
>http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200204/posner
>
>How, Bruce, can you tame plagiarism as the master-mistress of those 
>desires?  And, what exactly do they seem to desire, 'cause it don't seem 
>like a shortcut, and it's not some fire in rose-red youth...  Or, 
>instead, is there a very clear tradition to which Durrell has aligned 
>himself?  After all, why even have a tradition if you can't take it up, 
>chop it up, and reuse it in new ways that serve your own purposes?  And 
>why would he allude to a tradition of authors who say exactly that if he 
>didn't see any reason for it?  It seems like far more work than a 
>plagiarist would go to!
>
>I've formally charged people with plagiarism, most often with quite 
>significant consequences.  It's a charge I take very serious, as do most 
>academics.  However, I remain largely untroubled by Durrell.  Does that 
>strike you as simply bizarre, or does it seem more rational that there 
>are compelling reasons?  If you're here for a dialogue, wouldn't it be 
>worthwhile to discuss those reasons in conjunction with your own?  As 
>Wilde already said, the truth is rarely simple and never pure.
>
>But, there's no sense in writing much on this topic -- I doubt there 
>will be more response than repetition of what's already been said.  I'd 
>welcome thoughts from others or anyone who sees more instances of 
>borrowings in LD's texts.  We know that he shamelessly stole plots from 
>psychoanalytic case studies, and that strikes me as a very engaging 
>place to discuss how these borrowings enrich a text when we recognize 
>them.  What about Groddeck's noses, Hutin's Gnostics, and Torhild 
>Leira's tears?
>
>And what of Wilde?  I've asked some direct questions here, and I'm 
>interested in responses -- dodging direct question (albeit more loudly 
>each time) doesn't interest me at all...  Borrow some of Wilde's art, 
>and I'll go along for the ride.
>
>Best,
>James
>
>ps: where's the hook and who was fishing?
>
>pps: Biographically, how do you respond to my previous (and detailed) 
>discussion of Caesar's Vast Ghost?  MacNiven is pretty clear on the 
>point on p. 683, noting that Mary Byrne typed up Durrell's mess of notes 
>and notebooks (all of which always contain transcripts & clippings from 
>things he found interesting, being both notebooks and commonplace 
>books).  Isabelle Keller can likely contribute more about the ms., 
>perhaps in discussion in Paris this summer, but the "notes-to ts." 
>transformation suggests he didn't compile it himself, and the biography 
>asserts this too, as well as the point about Haag's writing that you 
>keep going back to.  Just watch "Une Amitie Parisienne" and tell me how 
>carefully you think Old D. went through Byrne's transcriptions of his 
>scribblings?



From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net  Fri Mar  7 16:10:27 2008
From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine)
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 19:10:27 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [ilds] 57
Message-ID: <10799773.1204935027702.JavaMail.root@elwamui-muscovy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

The answer is 57.  As Angela Landsbury, the Red Queen, says, more or less, to John McGiver, playing the role of a U.S. Senator in the Manchurian Candidate, "The number is fifty-seven.  There are exactly fifty-seven Communists in the U.S. State Department!"  She got the number from a jar of Heinz ketchup on their kitchen table.  Fifty-seven, more importantly, is also the number of the footnote in William Leigh Godshalk's seminal essay, "Some Sources of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet," in Critical Essays on Lawrence Durrell, ed. Alan Warren Friedman (Boston, 1987), 170-71.  In that crucial and historic note, Godshalk reveals Durrell's unattributed source for the inverted mirage passage in Balthazar.


Bruce

-----Original Message-----
>From: william godshalk <godshawl at email.uc.edu>
>Sent: Mar 7, 2008 4:34 PM
>To: Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>, ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>Subject: Re: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
>
 
>But what is the count of wordstaken from any particular writer and any particular work in copyright?How many free words did he have when he waswriting?


From odos.fanourios at gmail.com  Fri Mar  7 17:45:31 2008
From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:45:31 -0700
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
In-Reply-To: <832962.1204933250724.JavaMail.root@elwamui-muscovy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
References: <832962.1204933250724.JavaMail.root@elwamui-muscovy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <47D1EFBB.1050105@gmail.com>

Old Fruit,

I believe Bruce is taking a nearly obscene pleasure in quoting from a 
book to which he knows few people on this list can refer (and largely 
using the citations given by Pine and Godshalk).  Let's level that 
playing field once and for all.

Sophie Atkinson's /An Artist in Corfu/:

http://www.archive.org/download/artistincorfu00atkirich/artistincorfu00atkirich.pdf

or just the text in a much smaller file size:

http://ia360626.us.archive.org/2/items/artistincorfu00atkirich/artistincorfu00atkirich_djvu.txt

Also, for the "smokescrean" of which I stand accused, I can only offer 
the fact that I keep adding information rather than retreating from it 
as my defence.  I've not dodged a single example Bruce -- I keep asking 
you to talk about one of them.  Please.  I've already published on such 
instances (Groddeck and Hutin), so it's a matter of record for me...

So, now that the whole text is here for us, Bruce, can you answer some 
of the specific questions I raised, and perhaps we can still find a way 
to disagree more constructively?  Can you give me your close reading and 
tell me how you think these are wilful misrepresentations rather than 
allusive grabs and creative reconstructions?  The latter is something I 
consider very much available to the creative writer while utterly 
off-limits for the academic.

Moreover, 57 (your lucky number?) falls well within fair use provisions 
under copyright -- just for the record.

Also, for the record, had Durrell's borrowings and echoes come to the 
attention of Faber & Faber, I'm sure he would have spoken with T.S. 
Eliot about it directly...  I don't think it's *any* stretch to tie 
Durrell to Eliot on this matter, nor is it a stretch to see this within 
a very explicit and frequently referenced tradition of writing.

But back to my original request, can we actually analyze some of these 
instances, and Bruce, can you tell me exactly how these instances differ 
from Eliot and Wilde, two figures in an aesthetic tradition to which 
Durrell overtly and repeatedly gestures?

Best,
James

ps: Music doesn't confuse the basic issue in the least -- all of my 
references were to composers who lifted substantial portions of whole 
works from another composer, not something like a theme & variation. 
Perhaps the basic issue is the distinction between a classical source 
analysis and a hunt for plagiarism.  I see plenty of the former and very 
little of the latter, apart from /Caesar's Vast Ghost/, which I've 
already discussed in detail.

pps: before we get into icebergs, let's agree not to allude to 
Hemingway.  This is the tip of the iceberg, and I can send you plenty of 
other borrowings -- they're all quite clear in a source analysis.  But, 
you'll have to wait for me to publish most of them.  I suspect you'd 
plagiarize my work and repeat my information somewhere...  Those sources 
are one of the reasons *why* I find Durrell interesting.

ppps: you mention other analyses of the /CVG/ ms. and its compilation. 
Can you cite one?

From odos.fanourios at gmail.com  Fri Mar  7 17:51:47 2008
From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:51:47 -0700
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
In-Reply-To: <832962.1204933250724.JavaMail.root@elwamui-muscovy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
References: <832962.1204933250724.JavaMail.root@elwamui-muscovy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <47D1F133.6040604@gmail.com>

Might I suggest we take a quick skim through Wilde's "The Decay of 
Lying" before we continue?  I think it may sharpen our knives, errr, 
discussion...  Durrell very clearly failed to head the advice of its 
opening line.

And to add to Bill's comments, /An Artist in Corfu/ bears no copyright 
either.  Next time I'm driving through Revelstoke, I'll see if there are 
any traces of Atkinson still around.  I believe she may have been in 
Canada when /Prospero's Cell/ was published.

--J

From godshawl at email.uc.edu  Fri Mar  7 18:09:57 2008
From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:09:57 -0500
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
In-Reply-To: <47D1F133.6040604@gmail.com>
References: <832962.1204933250724.JavaMail.root@elwamui-muscovy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
	<47D1F133.6040604@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BE.AA.08390.075F1D74@gwout1>

Did no one catch the passage I plagiarized this afternoon?

Bill
***************************************
W. L. Godshalk		*
Department of English         *
University of Cincinnati            Stellar disorder  *
Cincinnati OH 45221-0069      *
513-281-5927
***************************************



From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net  Fri Mar  7 18:28:32 2008
From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine)
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 18:28:32 -0800 (GMT-08:00)
Subject: [ilds] Sophie Atkinson
Message-ID: <12858296.1204943313095.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

James:

I don't know how you do scholarship, but I dig up original texts and cite from them, which is what I previously provided re Ms. Atkinson.  If that is obscene, then so be it.


Bruce

-----Original Message-----
>From: James Gifford <odos.fanourios at gmail.com>
>Sent: Mar 7, 2008 5:45 PM
>To: Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>, ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>Subject: Re: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
>
>Old Fruit,
>
>I believe Bruce is taking a nearly obscene pleasure in quoting from a 
>book to which he knows few people on this list can refer (and largely 
>using the citations given by Pine and Godshalk).  Let's level that 
>playing field once and for all.
>
>Sophie Atkinson's /An Artist in Corfu/:
>
>http://www.archive.org/download/artistincorfu00atkirich/artistincorfu00atkirich.pdf
>
>or just the text in a much smaller file size:
>
>http://ia360626.us.archive.org/2/items/artistincorfu00atkirich/artistincorfu00atkirich_djvu.txt


From godshawl at email.uc.edu  Fri Mar  7 18:40:50 2008
From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:40:50 -0500
Subject: [ilds] Sophie Atkinson
In-Reply-To: <12858296.1204943313095.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa.
	earthlink.net>
References: <12858296.1204943313095.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <26.DE.05263.DACF1D74@gwout2>

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From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net  Fri Mar  7 19:10:14 2008
From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine)
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 19:10:14 -0800 (GMT-08:00)
Subject: [ilds] Sophie Atkinson
Message-ID: <22676591.1204945814901.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

The original published text, as I previously cited in an abbreviated format, not a photocopy, not microfiche, not electronic, not MS.  The thing itself.  When you see a citation, is it normal to ask such a question?

Sophie Atkinson, An Artist in Corfu, Boston/London:  Dana Estes & Co./Herbert & Daniel [1911].  215p.


Bruce

-----Original Message-----
>From: william godshalk <godshawl at email.uc.edu>
>Sent: Mar 7, 2008 6:40 PM
>To: Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>, ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>Subject: Re: [ilds] Sophie Atkinson
>
>original texts 
>
>Please define "original texts." Do you mean "firstdraught manuscripts"? They are fairly difficult to come by,especially in the computer age when writers simply hit delete, and don'tcross out passages for scholars to find and write articlesabout.
>
>Bill 



From odos.fanourios at gmail.com  Fri Mar  7 19:12:18 2008
From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:12:18 -0700
Subject: [ilds] Sophie Atkinson
In-Reply-To: <12858296.1204943313095.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
References: <12858296.1204943313095.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <47D20412.50503@gmail.com>

Bruce, you've slipped it again -- your *pleasure* was obscene (or so it 
seemed, though perhaps you know not seems).

I have no comment on your scholarship, and I don't think I'd tie 
something as pleasurable as obscenity to it if I decided there was 
something to comment on.  Still, if you ever get around to doing an 
actual analysis rather than citing things we've already heard, I'm keen 
to see it.  You might even say I've asked for it...  It's helpful when 
one follows the other.

As for some genuinely pleasurable obscenity, perhaps we should add 
Wilde's role in /The Black Book/ to our chat.  I see borrowings from 
"Prufrock" all over that book, and evidently Old Tom looked on it 
approvingly, though he may have been into the ether that night.  From 
what I've seen, Miller was convinced that the Eliot fragments were 
tributes to himself.

I'm still chuckling over "Old Fruit"...  In good fun, I'm still allowing 
you to pick my moniker, but time's running out.

Cheers,
James

ps: I don't think our exchange is leading into dialogue.  Take a shot at 
me (a free one!), and let's call it a night.  I do, however, remain keen 
on hearing your response to any of my questions.

Bruce Redwine wrote:
> James:
> 
> I don't know how you do scholarship, but I dig up original texts
 > and cite from them, which is what I previously provided re Ms.
 > Atkinson.  If that is obscene, then so be it.
> 
> 
> Bruce

From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net  Fri Mar  7 19:37:51 2008
From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine)
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 19:37:51 -0800 (GMT-08:00)
Subject: [ilds] Responding or Not
Message-ID: <6619863.1204947471781.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

James:

I don't think you're interested in dialogue.  You seem more interested in being literary and chuckling at your own sense of humor.  When you respond seriously to my points, I'll respond in kind to your questions.  I prefer to stick to the argument at hand.  I've already provided the evidence.  Examine it.


Bruce


-----Original Message-----
>From: James Gifford <odos.fanourios at gmail.com>
>Sent: Mar 7, 2008 7:12 PM
>To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>Subject: Re: [ilds] Sophie Atkinson
>
>Bruce, you've slipped it again -- your *pleasure* was obscene (or so it 
>seemed, though perhaps you know not seems).
>
>I have no comment on your scholarship, and I don't think I'd tie 
>something as pleasurable as obscenity to it if I decided there was 
>something to comment on.  Still, if you ever get around to doing an 
>actual analysis rather than citing things we've already heard, I'm keen 
>to see it.  You might even say I've asked for it...  It's helpful when 
>one follows the other.
>
>As for some genuinely pleasurable obscenity, perhaps we should add 
>Wilde's role in /The Black Book/ to our chat.  I see borrowings from 
>"Prufrock" all over that book, and evidently Old Tom looked on it 
>approvingly, though he may have been into the ether that night.  From 
>what I've seen, Miller was convinced that the Eliot fragments were 
>tributes to himself.
>
>I'm still chuckling over "Old Fruit"...  In good fun, I'm still allowing 
>you to pick my moniker, but time's running out.
>
>Cheers,
>James
>
>ps: I don't think our exchange is leading into dialogue.  Take a shot at 
>me (a free one!), and let's call it a night.  I do, however, remain keen 
>on hearing your response to any of my questions.
>
>Bruce Redwine wrote:
>> James:
>> 
>> I don't know how you do scholarship, but I dig up original texts
> > and cite from them, which is what I previously provided re Ms.
> > Atkinson.  If that is obscene, then so be it.
>> 
>> 
>> Bruce
>_______________________________________________
>ILDS mailing list
>ILDS at lists.uvic.ca
>https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds


From slighcl at wfu.edu  Fri Mar  7 19:43:23 2008
From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:43:23 -0500
Subject: [ilds] One cannot copy to unearth the new
In-Reply-To: <47D20412.50503@gmail.com>
References: <12858296.1204943313095.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
	<47D20412.50503@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <47D20B5B.30406@wfu.edu>

PRESS INTERVIEW [from Collected Poems: 1931-1974 (1985) , Faber and Faber  ]

Capacities in doubt and lovers failing?
We feel time freshen but we keep on sailing.

No, sir, I do not cannibalise my fellow-man
In writing of him. I just fict.
Unfashionable if you wish, or even unreal
So to evict the owner from his acts
In propria persona; spit out the bones
When once the bloody platter's licked.

Of course things experienced or overheard
Swarm up the wall and knock;
But we disperse them as they flock
And redistribute, word by silly word.

But when Totals turn up and insist
We give them way; and only then you see,
However chimerical or choice or few,
One cannot copy to unearth the new.

1966/ 1966

-- 
**********************
Charles L. Sligh
Department of English
Wake Forest University
slighcl at wfu.edu
**********************



From godshawl at email.uc.edu  Fri Mar  7 20:57:23 2008
From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 23:57:23 -0500
Subject: [ilds] Sophie Atkinson
In-Reply-To: <22676591.1204945814901.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.s
	a.earthlink.net>
References: <22676591.1204945814901.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <43.F3.08390.FAC12D74@gwout1>

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From godshawl at email.uc.edu  Fri Mar  7 21:07:20 2008
From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk)
Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:07:20 -0500
Subject: [ilds] One cannot copy to unearth the new
In-Reply-To: <47D20B5B.30406@wfu.edu>
References: <12858296.1204943313095.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
	<47D20412.50503@gmail.com> <47D20B5B.30406@wfu.edu>
Message-ID: <E7.16.05263.30F12D74@gwout2>

I hope we can talk about this poem. I but darkly understand it. I just fict.

Bill


At 10:43 PM 3/7/2008, you wrote:
>PRESS INTERVIEW [from Collected Poems: 1931-1974 (1985) , Faber and Faber  ]
>
>Capacities in doubt and lovers failing?
>We feel time freshen but we keep on sailing.
>
>No, sir, I do not cannibalise my fellow-man
>In writing of him. I just fict.
>Unfashionable if you wish, or even unreal
>So to evict the owner from his acts
>In propria persona; spit out the bones
>When once the bloody platter's licked.
>
>Of course things experienced or overheard
>Swarm up the wall and knock;
>But we disperse them as they flock
>And redistribute, word by silly word.
>
>But when Totals turn up and insist
>We give them way; and only then you see,
>However chimerical or choice or few,
>One cannot copy to unearth the new.
>
>1966/ 1966
>
>--
>**********************
>Charles L. Sligh
>Department of English
>Wake Forest University
>slighcl at wfu.edu
>**********************
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>ILDS mailing list
>ILDS at lists.uvic.ca
>https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds

***************************************
W. L. Godshalk		*
Department of English         *
University of Cincinnati            Stellar disorder  *
Cincinnati OH 45221-0069      *
513-281-5927
***************************************



From odos.fanourios at gmail.com  Fri Mar  7 21:09:29 2008
From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:09:29 -0700
Subject: [ilds] giving / Quotations from the daily treaty poets make / With
	men
In-Reply-To: <47D20B5B.30406@wfu.edu>
References: <12858296.1204943313095.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa.earthlink.net>	<47D20412.50503@gmail.com>
	<47D20B5B.30406@wfu.edu>
Message-ID: <47D21F89.2090202@gmail.com>

ANNIVERSARY

For T.S. Eliot

Poetry, science of intimacies,
In you his early roots drove through
The barbarian compost of our English
To sound new veins and marbled all his verses
Through and through like old black ledgers,
Hedging in pain by form, and giving
Quotations from the daily treaty poets make
With men, possessions or a private demon:
Became at last this famous solitary
Sitting at one bleak uncurtained window
Over wintry London patiently repeating
That art is determined by its ends
In conscience and in morals. This was startling.
Yet marriages might be arranged between
Old fashions and contemporary disorders.
Sole student of balance in a falling world
He helped us mend the little greenstick fractures
Of our verse, taught polish in austerity.

Others who know him will add private humours,
And photographs to albums; taken near Paris,
Say, drinking among some foreign dons all night
 From leather bubbles in a tavern: a remark
That silenced a fussy duke: yet these
Alluding and delimiting can only mystify
The singer and his mystery more, they do not chain.
Neither may we ever explain but pointing
To a new star one needs new vision for
Like some late hornbeam risen over England,
Relate it to a single sitting man,
In a high window there, beside a lamp,
Some crumpled paper, a disordered bed.

1980/1948


slighcl wrote:
> PRESS INTERVIEW [from Collected Poems: 1931-1974 (1985) , Faber and Faber  ]
> 
> Capacities in doubt and lovers failing?
> We feel time freshen but we keep on sailing.
> 
> No, sir, I do not cannibalise my fellow-man
> In writing of him. I just fict.
> Unfashionable if you wish, or even unreal
> So to evict the owner from his acts
> In propria persona; spit out the bones
> When once the bloody platter's licked.
> 
> Of course things experienced or overheard
> Swarm up the wall and knock;
> But we disperse them as they flock
> And redistribute, word by silly word.
> 
> But when Totals turn up and insist
> We give them way; and only then you see,
> However chimerical or choice or few,
> One cannot copy to unearth the new.
> 
> 1966/ 1966
> 

From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net  Fri Mar  7 21:24:15 2008
From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine)
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 21:24:15 -0800 (GMT-08:00)
Subject: [ilds] Sophie Atkinson
Message-ID: <3682458.1204953855342.JavaMail.root@elwamui-cypress.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

You're quibbling, Bill.  By this standard, scholarship would never get done, but then maybe that's what textual scholarship is all about, for some, endless corrections and emendations.


Bruce


-----Original Message-----
>From: william godshalk <godshawl at email.uc.edu>
>Sent: Mar 7, 2008 8:57 PM
>To: Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>, ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>Subject: Re: [ilds] Sophie Atkinson
>
>The thing itself. 
>
>Why would you think that the first published edition is the ding ansich? Just think of what stands between the writer and the first edition.
>
>You don't need me to tell you.
>
>Bill 



From odos.fanourios at gmail.com  Fri Mar  7 21:30:10 2008
From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:30:10 -0700
Subject: [ilds] One cannot copy to unearth the new
In-Reply-To: <E7.16.05263.30F12D74@gwout2>
References: <12858296.1204943313095.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa.earthlink.net>	<47D20412.50503@gmail.com>
	<47D20B5B.30406@wfu.edu> <E7.16.05263.30F12D74@gwout2>
Message-ID: <47D22462.6020809@gmail.com>

Bill,

 > I hope we can talk about this poem. I but
 > darkly understand it. I just fict.

I love that verb...  I'm caught by the "found" poem that finds its own 
pathos in the end, as Charles' subject line so nicely shows.

My sense (very tentative at this stage) is that Durrell's playing three 
games here: poetic echoes and allusions, poetic cannibalism to create 
the new, and the genuinely original.  All three are going to happen, but 
when "Totals turn up and insist," it's only the last that counts, though 
you'll likely need the first two to get there.  I also suspect that 
we're not meant to really trust Totals either...  I think of the death 
of every capitalist in his fiction.

I'm stuck too by how we get, as readers, from "Capacities in doubt and 
lovers failing" to "However chimerical or choice the few, / Once cannot 
copy to unearth the new."  That's quite a span.  I'm almost feeling a 
shift from the end of "Blind Homer" (a poem to which I continually 
return) to some Keatsian despair over the immature harvest of unripened 
grain.

Like "Anniversary," I think the poem shows us just how precociously and 
persistently Durrell was aware of his literary precursors, and how 
little the financial 'job' mattered in the face of the artistic struggle 
to reconstruct a tradition (not that the job didn't matter...  It did, 
and it had a craft all its own).  Why is it so unfashionable to talk 
about Bloom?

All that said, the poem is still only "darkly understood," and I like 
that you only fict.  I must ask though, who's sailing, and where is 'he' 
sailing to?  I can't help but look very, very far back in poetry even as 
this poem struggles over how to move forward.  However, that might be 
because I'm looking forward to watching the skeletons in "Jason and the 
Argonauts" this weekend, so some Mediterranean sailing is on my mind.

Without coming up with a genuine interpretation, let me at least say I 
greatly enjoyed encountering the word "unreal" in such close proximity 
to "I do not cannibalise my fellow-man."  Eliot must have been trying to 
toughen himself up as much as possible, so much that they'd need brine 
and 2 months of ageing to tenderize him.  Eliot counted on being 
distasteful, as he'd say.  And whose head was served on that platter?

I like too that the new is only unearthed and not made -- Ezra never 
gets his due in Durrell, and I rather like that.  The artists "makes it 
new" by cannibalising and feasting on his fellow-man, until the moment 
when spade strikes earth and the long-buried becomes the new, having 
been already digested by time and forgetfulness.

Why can't I have more of these poems in my classroom?  Keats, Blake, 
Eliot, and Durrell always open up much discussion, and the few times 
I've had Durrell, we all had great fun.

But that's the general response.  Maybe tomorrow there will be more 
specifically, or maybe I'll just get my editing work done...

Best,
Jamie

william godshalk wrote:
> I hope we can talk about this poem. I but darkly understand it. I just fict.
> 
> Bill
> 
> 
> At 10:43 PM 3/7/2008, you wrote:
>> PRESS INTERVIEW [from Collected Poems: 1931-1974 (1985) , Faber and Faber  ]
>>
>> Capacities in doubt and lovers failing?
>> We feel time freshen but we keep on sailing.
>>
>> No, sir, I do not cannibalise my fellow-man
>> In writing of him. I just fict.
>> Unfashionable if you wish, or even unreal
>> So to evict the owner from his acts
>> In propria persona; spit out the bones
>> When once the bloody platter's licked.
>>
>> Of course things experienced or overheard
>> Swarm up the wall and knock;
>> But we disperse them as they flock
>> And redistribute, word by silly word.
>>
>> But when Totals turn up and insist
>> We give them way; and only then you see,
>> However chimerical or choice or few,
>> One cannot copy to unearth the new.
>>
>> 1966/ 1966
>>
>> --
>> **********************
>> Charles L. Sligh
>> Department of English
>> Wake Forest University
>> slighcl at wfu.edu
>> **********************
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> ILDS mailing list
>> ILDS at lists.uvic.ca
>> https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds
> 
> ***************************************
> W. L. Godshalk		*
> Department of English         *
> University of Cincinnati            Stellar disorder  *
> Cincinnati OH 45221-0069      *
> 513-281-5927
> ***************************************
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> ILDS mailing list
> ILDS at lists.uvic.ca
> https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds
> 

From odos.fanourios at gmail.com  Fri Mar  7 21:45:59 2008
From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:45:59 -0700
Subject: [ilds] Sophie Atkinson
In-Reply-To: <43.F3.08390.FAC12D74@gwout1>
References: <22676591.1204945814901.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
	<43.F3.08390.FAC12D74@gwout1>
Message-ID: <47D22817.2030908@gmail.com>

Bill,

I had a lovely moment with a theory-oriented colleague who'd assumed 
that textual scholars want to find the ur-text, as if we were still 
doing some kind of biblical hermeneutics where the first word displaced 
the rest.  The look on his face when I said I wanted as many texts as 
possible, every single one, was priceless -- it was almost as if he 
realized "we'd" always been doing what he'd always been looking for.

Authenticity is a hoax, a fetish, but that doesn't give me any reason to 
be lax in looking for each text available to me, with or without an 
author (another fetish or just another text?).

That same colleague is a Kundera fan, and in a rather provocative way, I 
noted that Kundera sets up a mass grave in which to bury the 
counter-revolutionary variants of each of his texts (Kundera's famous 
hatred of the archive).  As a reader and scholar, I want each item, 
before and after he changed his mind -- the authoritative version is as 
much a fetish as is the authentic.  I want all of 'em, and hang the 
author if he says I can't have 'em.  I like Durrell because he fed on 
that plurality -- he encouraged it.

And what did Durrell think of Kant?  I can guess...

Cheerios,
Jamie

william godshalk wrote:
> *The thing itself.
> 
> *Why would you think that the first published edition is the ding an 
> sich? Just think of what stands between the writer and the first edition.
> 
> You don't need me to tell you.
> 
> Bill
> ***************************************
> W. L. Godshalk           *
> Department of English         *
> University of Cincinnati            Stellar disorder  *
> Cincinnati OH 45221-0069      *
> 513-281-5927
> ***************************************
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> ILDS mailing list
> ILDS at lists.uvic.ca
> https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds

From godshawl at email.uc.edu  Sat Mar  8 11:19:33 2008
From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk)
Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:19:33 -0500
Subject: [ilds] not quibble, dear sir, but
In-Reply-To: <3682458.1204953855342.JavaMail.root@elwamui-cypress.atl.sa
	.earthlink.net>
References: <3682458.1204953855342.JavaMail.root@elwamui-cypress.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <63.09.08390.0C6E2D74@gwout1>

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From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net  Sat Mar  8 17:45:31 2008
From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine)
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 17:45:31 -0800 (GMT-08:00)
Subject: [ilds] Yes a quibble
Message-ID: <2321093.1205027131265.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Bill, in the context of the original email exchanges, dealing with my abbreviated citation to Sophie Atkinson's An Artist in Corfu [1911], which I called "the thing itself" and which you chose to transpose into Heidgegger's "das Ding an sich" (or whoever the German philosopher was that coined the phrase) -- in that context your comment is a very big quibble.  I now hold Sophie's book in hand, and it is indeed a thing in itself, which is beautifully "Written and Pictured by Sophie Atkinson" (the words on her title page), with her prose and paintings, and which Lawrence Durrell unfortunately did not respect when he plagiarized some of her material.  True, there's no copyright indicated in her book, but that was common in those days (I have many books in my library printed in London during the early 20th century, and they also do not have a copyright notice).  Nevertheless, I'm told on good authority that she was still protected under British copyright laws, and Durrell surely knew that fact but probably chose her book because he knew few people would have access to it (which is not my observation on LD's intentions -- a similar comment, if I'm not mistaken, you yourself, Bill, made once on the list).

Now, when you read a footnote and see a short citation, which is now being encouraged in journals these days, do you normally question the author about his book and ask if it's a MS, first draft, first printing, or whatever?  Do you mentally do all the things that are being done in the Victorian section you quote below.  I think not.  I think you wouldn't quibble, that is, you'd probably accept the citation as a reference to a published book and go on to more important questions, such as why Durrell chose to plagiarize Sophie Atkinson's work.

By the way, anyone who wants to learn more about Ms. Sophie Atkinson can go to the Wikipedia and find an excellent short biography about her.  She led a remarkable life of travel, writing, and painting.  The biography was written by Michael Haag, who, I think, left the ILDS for personal reasons which I am beginning to share.


Bruce


-----Original Message-----
>From: william godshalk <godshawl at email.uc.edu>
>Sent: Mar 8, 2008 11:19 AM
>To: Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>, ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>Subject: not quibble, dear sir, but 
>
>Bruce writes: 
>
>You're quibbling, Bill. By this standard, scholarship would never get done, but then maybe that'swhat textual scholarship is all about, for some, endless corrections andemendations.
>I pass on this Call for Papers which shows, I think, the complexities --some of them -- of print publication. Manuscript and oral publication areeven more problematic. And, of course, scholarship never does "getdone." Something always remains to question and explore andunderstand. We are scholar adventurers.  Richard Altick, we salutethee. Vale atque vale.
>
>
>Victorian Authors, Readers, and Publishers. This session will examinethe relationships between Victorian authors, readers, and publishers withan emphasis on the business of literature. How do authors view themselvesas both artists and workers? How do readers evaluate literature as bothculture and commodity? How do publishers serve as mediators betweenauthors and readers? How does the production of books affect authors,readers, publishers, and their relationships? Proposed papers may dealwith the history of the book, the book as a material object, bookproduction and sales, advertising, reader responses, author studies, orother related topics. Please send abstract and CV to Troy J. Bassett,Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, bassettt at ipfw.edu, byApril 11, 2008.
>
>Bill 




From godshawl at email.uc.edu  Sat Mar  8 18:06:06 2008
From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk)
Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2008 21:06:06 -0500
Subject: [ilds] Kant
In-Reply-To: <2321093.1205027131265.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa
	.earthlink.net>
References: <2321093.1205027131265.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <D8.08.05263.A0643D74@gwout2>

I was thinking of Kant. And, yes, I many times do not check 
citations, and when I do, I often find that they are wrong for one 
reason or another.

Bill



At 08:45 PM 3/8/2008, you wrote:
>Bill, in the context of the original email exchanges, dealing with 
>my abbreviated citation to Sophie Atkinson's An Artist in Corfu 
>[1911], which I called "the thing itself" and which you chose to 
>transpose into Heidgegger's "das Ding an sich" (or whoever the 
>German philosopher was that coined the phrase) -- in that context 
>your comment is a very big quibble.  I now hold Sophie's book in 
>hand, and it is indeed a thing in itself, which is beautifully 
>"Written and Pictured by Sophie Atkinson" (the words on her title 
>page), with her prose and paintings, and which Lawrence Durrell 
>unfortunately did not respect when he plagiarized some of her 
>material.  True, there's no copyright indicated in her book, but 
>that was common in those days (I have many books in my library 
>printed in London during the early 20th century, and they also do 
>not have a copyright notice).  Nevertheless, I'm told on good 
>authority that she was still protected under British copyright laws, 
>and Durrell surely !
>  knew that fact but probably chose her book because he knew few 
> people would have access to it (which is not my observation on LD's 
> intentions -- a similar comment, if I'm not mistaken, you yourself, 
> Bill, made once on the list).
>
>Now, when you read a footnote and see a short citation, which is now 
>being encouraged in journals these days, do you normally question 
>the author about his book and ask if it's a MS, first draft, first 
>printing, or whatever?  Do you mentally do all the things that are 
>being done in the Victorian section you quote below.  I think 
>not.  I think you wouldn't quibble, that is, you'd probably accept 
>the citation as a reference to a published book and go on to more 
>important questions, such as why Durrell chose to plagiarize Sophie 
>Atkinson's work.
>
>By the way, anyone who wants to learn more about Ms. Sophie Atkinson 
>can go to the Wikipedia and find an excellent short biography about 
>her.  She led a remarkable life of travel, writing, and 
>painting.  The biography was written by Michael Haag, who, I think, 
>left the ILDS for personal reasons which I am beginning to share.
>
>
>Bruce
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
> >From: william godshalk <godshawl at email.uc.edu>
> >Sent: Mar 8, 2008 11:19 AM
> >To: Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>, ilds at lists.uvic.ca
> >Subject: not quibble, dear sir, but
> >
> >Bruce writes:
> >
> >You're quibbling, Bill. By this standard, scholarship would never 
> get done, but then maybe that'swhat textual scholarship is all 
> about, for some, endless corrections andemendations.
> >I pass on this Call for Papers which shows, I think, the 
> complexities --some of them -- of print publication. Manuscript and 
> oral publication areeven more problematic. And, of course, 
> scholarship never does "getdone." Something always remains to 
> question and explore andunderstand. We are scholar 
> adventurers.  Richard Altick, we salutethee. Vale atque vale.
> >
> >
> >Victorian Authors, Readers, and Publishers. This session will 
> examinethe relationships between Victorian authors, readers, and 
> publishers withan emphasis on the business of literature. How do 
> authors view themselvesas both artists and workers? How do readers 
> evaluate literature as bothculture and commodity? How do publishers 
> serve as mediators betweenauthors and readers? How does the 
> production of books affect authors,readers, publishers, and their 
> relationships? Proposed papers may dealwith the history of the 
> book, the book as a material object, bookproduction and sales, 
> advertising, reader responses, author studies, orother related 
> topics. Please send abstract and CV to Troy J. Bassett,Indiana 
> University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, bassettt at ipfw.edu, byApril 11, 2008.
> >
> >Bill
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>ILDS mailing list
>ILDS at lists.uvic.ca
>https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds

***************************************
W. L. Godshalk		*
Department of English         *
University of Cincinnati            Stellar disorder  *
Cincinnati OH 45221-0069      *
513-281-5927
***************************************



From durrell at bigpond.com  Sat Mar  8 22:07:43 2008
From: durrell at bigpond.com (durrell at bigpond.com)
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2008 17:07:43 +1100
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
Message-ID: <17181305.1205042863285.JavaMail.root@web05ps>

Hi David....the art of sophistry is perhaps more palatable david rather than referring to the lost art of "lying" - a word now over saturated with negativity...alas another word lost,  torpedoed by moral perjorativity.....DrD    ps. looking forward to seeing you at nsw art gallery after easter!
---- Denise Tart & David Green <dtart at bigpond.net.au> wrote: 
> Sometime back we were discussing how 'true' some of Durrell's book were.
> 
> Both Baudelaire and Wilde were influences on LD. Here is Wilde, paraphased
> 
> The Ancient Historians used to give us delightful fiction in the form of fact, but the modern novelist is presenting us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. Promising young writers with a natural gift for exaggeration are developing a morbid and unhealthy habit of truth - telling and are ending up writing novels that are so lifelike that no one could possibly believe in them.. I make a plea for a return to the art of telling beautiful and untrue things, that noble and lost art of lying.
> 
> For me, the strange, magical, timeless quality of much of Durrell's work stems from some application of this approach
> 
> David
> 
> Denise Tart & David Green
> 16 William Street, Marrickville NSW 2204
> 
> +61 2 9564 6165
> 0412 707 625
> dtart at bigpond.net.au


From odos.fanourios at gmail.com  Sat Mar  8 22:45:22 2008
From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford)
Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2008 23:45:22 -0700
Subject: [ilds] Kant and Cont...
In-Reply-To: <D8.08.05263.A0643D74@gwout2>
References: <2321093.1205027131265.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
	<D8.08.05263.A0643D74@gwout2>
Message-ID: <47D38782.7020709@gmail.com>

Hey Bill,

I recall Richard Pine telling me about a paper you gave in Avignon on 
Durrell's appeal to friends like Patrick Kinross for info on 
Constantinople (a city with which he was unfamiliar), 'as it were.'  I 
know Richard added to this in his most recent edition of /The Mindscape/ 
(p. 320) where he notes that Old D. marked 129 pages in his copy of 
George Young's 1926 book /Constantinople/.  I wonder what's to be found 
in there.

And of course there's his grilling of Austen Harrison for architectural 
accuracy when plotting 'Placebo'.  Richard has also commented to me on 
LD having a notebook with jottings headed 'Might come in usefuls'?  I've 
not seen that, but I trust Richard's memory -- have you been through that?

And lest anyone think I try to cover things up, it's worth noting that 
LD took the title for /Monsieur; or The Prince of Darkness/ from Serge 
Hutin's /Les Gnostiques/.  That's actually one of the reasons I find it 
so interesting...  I saw that by going through the ms., the book, the 
proofs, and the marginalia in LD's library (I read things online too...).

As for Wikipedia, I hear that Stephen Colbert has saved the Elephants, 
or at least Wikipedia tells me so...  And exactly what is the "thing in 
itself" of a Wikipedia entry?  There's so much wikitruth out there that 
I don't know what to do.  Yet, I like these entries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertextuality
   -- and --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastiche

However, I suspect the citations are problematic.

I wonder too about the "thing in itself" for Fitzgerald's famously 
problematic "This Side of Paradise."  How do we read the story 
Fitzgerald didn't write and that exists by a printer's error?  Better 
still, what is that story?  I can hold the book, but it's certainly not 
Fitzgerald's.  Is it a fetish?  Why then Ile fit you...

Best,
Jamie

william godshalk wrote:
> I was thinking of Kant. And, yes, I many times do not check 
> citations, and when I do, I often find that they are wrong for one 
> reason or another.
> 
> Bill

From loisrees at yahoo.com  Sun Mar  9 07:43:01 2008
From: loisrees at yahoo.com (Lois Rees)
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2008 07:43:01 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [ilds] Truth and the ILDS
In-Reply-To: <47D38782.7020709@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <332491.36498.qm@web44911.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>

    
                          
         
       
          

---------------------------------
 March 9, 2008
 Op-Ed Contributor
  Stolen Suffering   By DANIEL MENDELSOHN
           ON a March day four years ago, a very old lady, striking, snowy-haired, unsmiling, was looking at me with disgust. A Polish Jew who had survived the Holocaust, she?d been telling me how she and her young son had managed to keep a step ahead of the people who were hunting them down, and at the end of this stupefying tale of survival I?d looked up at her and said, ?What an amazing story!? It was at that point that she flapped her spotted hand at me in disdain. ??Amazing story,?? she mimicked me, tartly. She fetched a heavy sigh. ?If you didn?t have an amazing story, you didn?t survive.? 
 She was referring to literal survival, of course ? survival at its meanest, most animal level, the mere continuance of the organism. At a time when Jews throughout Europe were being rounded up like livestock or hunted down like game, survival indeed depended on feats of endurance or daring so extreme, on accidents or luck so improbable, that they can seem too far-fetched to be true. 
 A Jewish couple who hid in the attic of a Nazi officers? club, forced to listen as the soldiers below joked and drank after a day?s slaughter; two young brothers who hid in a forest, strapping the hooves of deer to their feet whenever they ventured into the snow to confuse those who were trying to find them; a youth who, the day before the Germans entered his Polish hometown, left home and just kept walking east, until he reached ... China. 
 I heard these stories firsthand five years ago, while researching a book about relatives of mine who didn?t survive. But still they keep coming. Last Monday, I heard about an orphaned Jewish girl who trekked 2,000 miles from Belgium to Ukraine, surviving the Warsaw ghetto, murdering a German officer, and ? most ?amazing? of all ? taking refuge in forests where she was protected by kindly wolves.
 The problem is that this story is a lie: recounted in a 1997 international bestseller by Misha Levy Defonseca, it was exposed last week as a total fabrication ? no trekking, no Warsaw, no murder, no wolves. (No Jews, either: the author, whose real name is Monique De Wael, is Roman Catholic.) To be sure, phony memoirs aren?t news: in 1998 the acclaimed child-survivor memoir ?Fragments? was proved a fake, and more recently James Frey?s credibility infamously exploded into a million little pieces. But the trickle now seems to be a flood. Just days after the revelations about Ms. De Wael?s book yet another popular first-person account of extreme suffering turned out to be a fraud. (This one, ?Love and Consequences,? purports to be the autobiography of a young half-white, half-American Indian woman who was raised by a black foster mother in the gang-infested streets of Los Angeles.) This trend sheds alarming light on a cultural moment in which the meanings of suffering,
 identity and ?reality? itself seem to have become dangerously slippery.
 Each of the new books commits a fraud far more reprehensible than Mr. Frey?s self-dramatizing enhancements. The first is a plagiarism of other people?s trauma. Both were written not, as they claim to be, by members of oppressed classes (the Jews during World War II, the impoverished African-Americans of Los Angeles today), but by members of relatively safe or privileged classes. Ms. De Wael was a Christian Belgian who was raised by close relatives after her parents, Resistance members, were taken away; Margaret Seltzer, the author of ?Love and Consequences,? grew up in a tony Los Angeles neighborhood and attended an Episcopal day school. 
 In each case, then, a comparatively privileged person has appropriated the real traumas suffered by real people for her own benefit ? a boon to the career and the bank account, but more interestingly, judging from the authors? comments, a kind of psychological gratification, too. Ms. Seltzer has talked about being ?torn,? about wanting somehow to ventriloquize her subjects, to ?put a voice to people who people don?t listen to.? Ms. De Wael has similarly referred to a longing to be part of the group to which she did not, emphatically, belong: ?I felt different. It?s true that, since forever, I felt Jewish and later in life could come to terms with myself by being welcomed by part of this community.? (?Felt Jewish? is repellent: real Jewish children were being murdered however they may have felt.)
 While these statements want to suggest a somehow admirable desire to ?empathize? with the oppressed subjects, this sentimental gesture both mirrors and exploits a widespread, quite pernicious cultural confusion about identity and suffering. We have so often been invited, in the past decade and a half, to ?feel the pain? of others that we rarely pause to wonder whether this is, in fact, a good thing.
 Empathy and pity are strong and necessary emotions that deepen our sense of connection to others; but they depend on a kind of metaphorical imagination of what others are going through. The facile assumption that we can literally ?feel others? pain? can be dangerous to our sense of who we are ? and, more alarmingly, who the others are, too. ?We all have AIDS,? a recent public-awareness campaign declared. Well, no, actually we don?t: and to pretend that we do, even rhetorically, debases the anguish of those who are stricken. 
 Similarly ? to return to the world of the Holocaust ? a museum that offers ticket holders the chance to go inside a cattle car, presumably in order to convey what it was like to be in one, can ultimately encourage not true sympathy or understanding, but a slick ?identification? that devalues the real suffering of the real people who had to endure that particular horror. (When you leave the cattle car, you go to the cafeteria to have your chicken salad; when they left it, they went into a gas chamber. Can you really say you ?know what it was like??) 
 In an era obsessed with ?identity,? it?s useful to remember that identity is precisely that quality in a person, or group, that cannot be appropriated by others; in a world in which theme-park-like simulacra of other places and experiences are increasingly available to anyone with the price of a ticket, the line dividing the authentic from the ersatz needs to be stressed, rather than blurred. As, indeed, Ms. De Wael has so clearly blurred it, for reasons that she has suggested were pitiably psychological. ?The story is mine,? she announced. ?It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.? 
 ?My reality,? as opposed to ?actual reality,? is, of course, one sign of psychosis, and given her real suffering during the war, you?re tempted to sympathize ? until you read that her decision to write her memoir came at a time when her husband was out of work, or (we real Jews call this chutzpah) that she successfully sued the publisher for more than $20 million for professional malfeasance. Or until you learn about her galling manipulations of the people who believed her. (Slate reported that she got one rabbi to light a memorial candle ?for animals.?)
 ?My reality? raises even more far-reaching and dire questions about the state of our culture, one in which the very concept of ?reality? seems to be in danger. Think of ?reality? entertainments, which so unnervingly parallel the faux-memoirists? appropriation of others? authentic emotional experience: in them, real people are forced to endure painful or humiliating or extreme situations, their real emotional reactions becoming the source of the viewers? idle gratification. Think of the Internet: an unimaginably powerful tool for education but also a Wild West of random self-expression in which anyone can say anything about anything (or anyone) and have it ?published,? and which has already made problematic the line between truth and falsehood, expert and amateur opinion, authentic and inauthentic identities, reality and fantasy. 
 That pervasive blurriness, the casualness about reality that results when you can turn off entire worlds simply by unsubscribing, changing a screen name, or closing your laptop, is what ups the cultural ante just now. It?s not that frauds haven?t been perpetrated before; what?s worrisome is that, maybe for the first time, the question people are raising isn?t whether the amazing story is true, but whether it matters if it?s true. Perhaps the most dismaying response to the James Frey scandal was the feeling on the part of many readers that, true or false, his book had given them the feel-good, ?redemptive? experience they?d hoped for when they bought his novel ? er, memoir.
 But then, we all like a good story. The cruelty of the fraudulent ones is that they will inevitably make us distrustful of the true ones ? a result unbearable to think about when the Holocaust itself is increasingly dismissed by deniers as just another ?amazing story.? Early on in my research for my book, another very old woman suddenly grew tired being interviewed. ?Stories, stories,? she sighed wearily at the end of our time together. ?There isn?t enough paper in the world to write the stories we can tell you.? She, of course, was talking about the true stories. How tragic if, because of the false ones, those amazing tales are never read ? or believed. 
   Daniel Mendelsohn, the author of ?The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,? is a professor of humanities at Bard College.

     
  
     Copyright 2008  The New York Times Company  
                                
                                         

James Gifford <odos.fanourios at gmail.com> wrote: Hey Bill,

I recall Richard Pine telling me about a paper you gave in Avignon on 
Durrell's appeal to friends like Patrick Kinross for info on 
Constantinople (a city with which he was unfamiliar), 'as it were.'  I 
know Richard added to this in his most recent edition of /The Mindscape/ 
(p. 320) where he notes that Old D. marked 129 pages in his copy of 
George Young's 1926 book /Constantinople/.  I wonder what's to be found 
in there.

And of course there's his grilling of Austen Harrison for architectural 
accuracy when plotting 'Placebo'.  Richard has also commented to me on 
LD having a notebook with jottings headed 'Might come in usefuls'?  I've 
not seen that, but I trust Richard's memory -- have you been through that?

And lest anyone think I try to cover things up, it's worth noting that 
LD took the title for /Monsieur; or The Prince of Darkness/ from Serge 
Hutin's /Les Gnostiques/.  That's actually one of the reasons I find it 
so interesting...  I saw that by going through the ms., the book, the 
proofs, and the marginalia in LD's library (I read things online too...).

As for Wikipedia, I hear that Stephen Colbert has saved the Elephants, 
or at least Wikipedia tells me so...  And exactly what is the "thing in 
itself" of a Wikipedia entry?  There's so much wikitruth out there that 
I don't know what to do.  Yet, I like these entries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertextuality
   -- and --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastiche

However, I suspect the citations are problematic.

I wonder too about the "thing in itself" for Fitzgerald's famously 
problematic "This Side of Paradise."  How do we read the story 
Fitzgerald didn't write and that exists by a printer's error?  Better 
still, what is that story?  I can hold the book, but it's certainly not 
Fitzgerald's.  Is it a fetish?  Why then Ile fit you...

Best,
Jamie

william godshalk wrote:
> I was thinking of Kant. And, yes, I many times do not check 
> citations, and when I do, I often find that they are wrong for one 
> reason or another.
> 
> Bill
_______________________________________________
ILDS mailing list
ILDS at lists.uvic.ca
https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds


       
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From godshawl at email.uc.edu  Sun Mar  9 10:55:54 2008
From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk)
Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2008 13:55:54 -0400
Subject: [ilds] Old D and George Young
In-Reply-To: <47D38782.7020709@gmail.com>
References: <2321093.1205027131265.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
	<D8.08.05263.A0643D74@gwout2> <47D38782.7020709@gmail.com>
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From odos.fanourios at gmail.com  Sun Mar  9 13:35:44 2008
From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford)
Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2008 14:35:44 -0600
Subject: [ilds] The Lost Art of Lying
In-Reply-To: <832962.1204933250724.JavaMail.root@elwamui-muscovy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
References: <832962.1204933250724.JavaMail.root@elwamui-muscovy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <47D44A20.3040707@gmail.com>

> What is important is that none of these
 > examples give credit to their true sources,

Perhaps I'm in error (perhaps...), but what is the second item in the 
bibliography for /Prospero's Cell/?  Do I have some kind of bizarre 
variant in every different edition on my shelf?  What about the second 
paragraph of the Preface Durrell later added?

Gosh -- it's almost like we're being sent off to see how the work was 
constructed, as if it had a method that was remarkably akin to his 
contemporaries, was a big part of the aesthetic point, and even drew on 
the collage-oriented surrealists he was regularly interacting with 
during this period.

I still say that the instances of echoes and borrowings in *all* of his 
works don't bother me (at least what I've seen so far), with the 
exception of /Caesar's Vast Ghost/, and I seriously doubt he was fully 
responsible for assembling that book from his notes, clippings, and 
transcriptions.  Even the biography gives proof that someone else did 
that for him.

But, for the sake of actually analyzing an example, let's look at the 
text Durrell points his reader to: Atkinson's /An Artist in Corfu/.  The 
following passage has been brought to the attention of the list, though 
sadly it seems that I'm the only one who's willing to venture an actual 
interpretation:

--->

Atkinson 1911 (p. 69-70)

IN a good olive year the whole peasant population is absorbed by the 
olive harvest, which lingers from Januar)' till May, and is by far the 
most important crop for Corfu, furnishing practically its only export. 
For this reason it is to be regretted that the olive has not suited its 
internal economy to its responsible position. For it puts forth its 
flowers in April, just when it is most occupied with ripening fruit, so 
if its last year has been prolific it has really neither energy nor 
space to attend to this year's blossoming. Consequently its crops are 
very irregular, and the people dependent on them, at the best not rich, 
are in poor years almost destitute. It is said the peasants are 
improvident but a diet of bread and oil does not leave a wide margin for 
thrift ! They are independent in some ways, possessing their little bits 
of land and clusters of trees, or renting them, at the price of a few 
days' work in the landlord's vineyard. They work freely and as they 
like, and are content in their little society and hereditary tasks. They 
rarely advance or develop beyond these ; offers of comfort, good wages 
and light work hardly tempt them from their fields to town or country 
service. They would feel as exiles from their kind, and would soon 
return to hard work and hard fare in freedom, to the pleasant evening 
gossip in bottega or by the well, and the friendly greetings in the fields.

Durrell, 1941 (p. 91 or 123, depending on the edition[s])

    The Olive gathering is an all-weather business; in the blinding 
February storms you hear the little hard berries dropping to the ground, 
and, if you happen to be standing on the high ground looking southward 
you can see the visible track of the north wind as it strikes the 
valley, turning the olive trees inside out -- so that they change from 
green to sliver and back to green.  Under the shelter of archway and 
wall the women stoop in circles steadily filling their hampers while the 
rain rattles like small-shot in the leaves about them and the first wild 
flowers stir in the cold ground under their feet.
    **But the olive-tree has hardly suited its internal economy to its 
position, for its attenuated white flowering commences in April, just 
when its is most occupied with the ripening of its fruit; so that if its 
previous year's blossom has been prolific, it has hardly the strength to 
blossom again. Its crop is irregular, and the lean years for the 
harvesters are very lean indeed.  Bread and oil as a diet hardly leaves 
any margin for thrift.**
    After the first pressing in the mill-bed the men come with their 
wide-mouthed baskets and gather up the magma, piling its greyishness 
into a wooden press; ...

--->

For me, as a reader, I see Durrell likely sketching bits into a notebook 
as he read Atkinson (hence her overt and direct appearance in his 
Bibliography), but he changes and reshapes.  Where, for instance, is the 
cruelty of April and a month of showers breeding flowers of evil from 
the dead earth, let alone spreading liquor in the ground to engender the 
flower?  (Yes, that's a whack of allusions...).  Durrell grabs directly 
for that and adds its "attenuated white flowering commences in April." 
Durrell also drops Atkinson's views on labour and class with peasants 
who shun security in a job.  Durrell instead grants them a mythic depth, 
in particular in the preceding and proceeding paragraphs.

Moreover, the borrowing and reworking from Atkinson is notably presaged 
by "rain rattles like small-shot in the leaves about them and the first 
wild flowers stir in the cold ground under their feet."  This gunfire of 
rain echoing among the peasants at their work surely goes beyond 
Atkinson and catches at that ache over the war-time loss and assault of 
Corfu that Durrell so keenly felt.  Likewise, Durrell played in his 
poetry with Eliot's appropriation of Chaucer's "Prologue" in "The Waste 
Land" (that's why I posted "Anniversary" the other day) -- hence, I find 
it compelling that when April appears in /Prospero's Cell/, it has a 
reworked tradition integrated into the text with the appearance of April 
showers feeding the vines and leaves and flowers from the earth, which 
it strikes like "small-shot."  This war-like ache, however, only leads 
to "the first wild flowers stir in the cold ground under their feet," 
which is strikingly akin to Eliot's "stirring / Dull roots with Spring 
rain" and Chaucer's "bathed every vein in swich liquor."  Yet, Chaucer 
tell us we need "And smale fowles maken melodye," so Durrell gives them 
to us in the preceding paragraph while Atkinson's image has none.

So, yes, I see Pastiche, and I see lots of it.  Tell me, does "the 
trembling curtain of the atmosphere deceive" and does Durrell actively 
prod us look to other works, other books, other memories "as one might 
enter a dark crystal; the form of things becomes irregular, refracted"? 
  Coming out of his contemporaries, running in a clear line from Wilde 
through Eliot, just what would Durrell be expected to refract if it 
weren't other texts?  He admitted it, sometimes cited it, and frequently 
made such borrowings the aesthetic core of many poems...  In other 
words, it's part and parcel of the *point* of such books, and also very 
much a part of the milieu.

Is it really so mad to see pastiche as a driving impulse here?

After all, Durrell put Atkinson in his bibliography and admitted openly 
in his later preface "In Alexandria a hospitable Greek business man made 
me free use of an excellent library of reference books and I used his 
books not so much as crutches, but as provocations to memory, correcting 
myself by this previous information."  Atkinson is certainly used as a 
provocation to his memory, and those words pop out at striking moments 
not so very distant from Eliot's sense that April's rains are "mixing / 
Memory and desire" while "Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in 
forgetful snow," which gestures rather strongly to an established method.

And, lest by charged with trying to cover up any instances, let me 
actually ADD to them...

There's plenty more, such as if we compare the top of Durrell's page, 
two paragraphs earlier than what I quote above, with Atkinson on her p. 
71.  The mill, magazine, and bunkers of olives jump out, as do the women 
in the rainy season, but here again the differences expand -- Durrell 
grants them shadows that "leap and flap against the gloom of the 
archways, throwing into sudden relief the strings of onions and tobacco 
hanging from the roof, the unruffled chickens lying in the straw, the 
weaving-loom, and perhaps the sagacious evil face of the billy-goat 
munching in a corner."  The most Atkinson offers of this is that they 
are "Rembrandt-like" (though she is also a very lovely writer).

I see much more allusion in Durrell's reworking, with a Plato-like cave, 
shadows, and a darkness in the evil face that Atkinson avoids.  After 
all, we know what will happen to the chickens, and the weaving loom 
broadens the image significantly (weaving as Durrell does), as does the 
relief.

Simply put, I'm inclined to ask "Who were Durrell's literary heroes at 
the time" and "does this reflect an established method extolled by 
Durrell's literary heroes."  If I answer those questions, I'm really not 
surprised, but I certainly have a more exciting interpretive venture set 
before me than I did before I began...

Other interpretations?  Can I see someone do a genuine close reading of 
the two, which I have only shrugged toward here?

Best,
James

From odos.fanourios at gmail.com  Sun Mar  9 13:48:21 2008
From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford)
Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2008 14:48:21 -0600
Subject: [ilds] Truth and the ILDS
In-Reply-To: <332491.36498.qm@web44911.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
References: <332491.36498.qm@web44911.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <47D44D15.4010402@gmail.com>

Lois,

This is indeed an interesting article, and I'm curious how you'd comment 
on this.  For instance, what do you mean in your subject line?

Also, while I must admit I'm not troubled by James Frey, the other 
instances here are quite disturbing.  Did Durrell engage in anything 
akin to this in scope and manipulative vice in his non-fiction books 
(which are admittedly largely fictional)?  I think the comparison may be 
a misnomer, but I don't know it's purpose.

Moreover, is there a difference between Misha Levy Defonseca's tall 
tales and those of Henry Miller or Anais Nin in their purportedly 
autobiographical writings (which we also know are largely faked)?  I 
think there's a highly significant difference, but I'm curious how you 
interpret this scene.  Also, what Durrell texts (or ILDS incidents??) 
are you referring to?  I sense you have something fairly complex to 
articulate, and I'd like to invite you to do so -- it might prove very 
interesting.

Best,
James

Lois Rees wrote:

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> March 9, 2008
> Op-Ed Contributor
> 
> 
>   Stolen Suffering
> 
> By DANIEL MENDELSOHN
> ON a March day four years ago, a very old lady, striking, snowy-haired, 
> unsmiling, was looking at me with disgust. A Polish Jew who had survived 
> the Holocaust, she?d been telling me how she and her young son had 
> managed to keep a step ahead of the people who were hunting them down, 
> and at the end of this stupefying tale of survival I?d looked up at her 
> and said, ?What an amazing story!? It was at that point that she flapped 
> her spotted hand at me in disdain. ??Amazing story,?? she mimicked me, 
> tartly. She fetched a heavy sigh. ?If you didn?t have an amazing story, 
> you didn?t survive.?

 > ....
 >
> Daniel Mendelsohn, the author of ?The Lost: A Search for Six of Six 
> Million,? is a professor of humanities at Bard College.
> 
> Copyright 2008 
> <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html> The New 
> York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>


From richardpin at eircom.net  Sun Mar  9 12:06:43 2008
From: richardpin at eircom.net (Richard Pine)
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2008 19:06:43 -0000
Subject: [ilds] Old D and George Young
References: <2321093.1205027131265.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net><D8.08.05263.A0643D74@gwout2>
	<47D38782.7020709@gmail.com> <B9.98.08390.7A424D74@gwout1>
Message-ID: <014501c88218$c016e110$7494e9d5@rpinelaptop>

Well I did tell you about it at the time, in Avignon. RP
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: william godshalk 
  To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca 
  Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2008 5:55 PM
  Subject: [ilds] Old D and George Young


  I just ordered a copy of George Young's Constantinople. We will see.

  Bill 

  ***************************************
  W. L. Godshalk           *
  Department of English         *
  University of Cincinnati            Stellar disorder  *
  Cincinnati OH 45221-0069      *
  513-281-5927
  *************************************** 


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From godshawl at email.uc.edu  Sun Mar  9 16:26:00 2008
From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk)
Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:26:00 -0400
Subject: [ilds] Old D and George Young
In-Reply-To: <014501c88218$c016e110$7494e9d5@rpinelaptop>
References: <2321093.1205027131265.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
	<D8.08.05263.A0643D74@gwout2> <47D38782.7020709@gmail.com>
	<B9.98.08390.7A424D74@gwout1>
	<014501c88218$c016e110$7494e9d5@rpinelaptop>
Message-ID: <4D.F7.05263.20274D74@gwout2>

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From slighcl at wfu.edu  Sun Mar  9 20:02:33 2008
From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl)
Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:02:33 -0500
Subject: [ilds] Come, drink! The perfect form of public reticence.
In-Reply-To: <4D.F7.05263.20274D74@gwout2>
References: <2321093.1205027131265.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net>	<D8.08.05263.A0643D74@gwout2>
	<47D38782.7020709@gmail.com>	<B9.98.08390.7A424D74@gwout1>	<014501c88218$c016e110$7494e9d5@rpinelaptop>
	<4D.F7.05263.20274D74@gwout2>
Message-ID: <47D4A4C9.30803@wfu.edu>

On 3/9/2008 6:26 PM, william godshalk wrote:
> Richard, I remember your charming daughter in Avignon; I recall the 
> French waiter (male) who kissed me on both cheeks; I remember meeting 
> Stoney roaming about the palace, etc.
>
> But I'll be damned if I remember that you mentioned George Young. And 
> I take all the blame -- I had been drinking.
>
PORTFOLIO [from Collected Poems: 1931-1974 (1985) , Faber and Faber  ]


Late seventeenth, a timepiece rusted by dew,
Candles, a folio of sketches where rotting
I almost found you a precarious likeness---
The expert relish of the charcoal stare!
The copies, the deposits, why the very
Undermeaning and intermeaning of your mind,
Everything was there.

Your age too, its preoccupations like ours ...
'The cause of death is love though death is all'
Or else: 'Freedom resides in choice yet choice
Is only a fatal imprisonment among the opposites.'
Who told you you were free? What can it mean?
Come, drink! The simple kodak of the hangman's brain
Outstares us as it once outstared your world.
After all, we were not forced to write,
Who bade us heed the inward monitor?

And poetry, you once said, can be a deliverance
And true in many sorts of different sense,
Explicit or else like that awkward stare,
The perfect form of public reticence.

1966/ 1964


-- 
**********************
Charles L. Sligh
Department of English
Wake Forest University
slighcl at wfu.edu
**********************