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Sitaram
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Joined: 14 Sep 2005
Posts: 1079
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 Posted: Sun Jun 18, 2006 2:59 pm Post subject: John Barth Egroup |
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Some while ago, I subscribed to an egroup devoted to the life and works of John Barth
I think you can subscribe by emailing to:
johnbarth@yahoogroups.com
with the word SUBSCRIBE in the subject and body of the email.
I have learned some very worthwhile things by reading this egroup.
I have not been diligent lately in reading their posts, which have accumulated in my in-box.
I shall try to read through them today, and return here to post some interesting tidbits.
The most recent post seems to be by an Iranian/Persian scholar who is translating varous books into Farsi.
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I chose to translate Vonnegut's Timequake because it was (and still is) his last novel and I had just finished my M.A. thesis on Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse-five. Furthermore the book was offered to me by a prominent publisher and the offer was too good for me to put it down. TQ can not repeat the past successes of K.V. such as B of C, or SF5, but it is still a very good book because of its plot structure, which is highly experimental and even different from the circular narrative of SF5. It's just a hotchpotch of everything Vonnegut has experienced or still experiences in his life. I may include it in may article on Hypertext Fiction.
I believe too that the first and second stories of Chimera can be read and enjoyed on their own, but Barth by choosing Chimera, which has, as you know, he body of a goat, the tail of a snake or dragon and the head of a lion, weaves the stories together internally. Very clever of him. Sure I will tell you about the stories which I will include. Until now I have chosen Lost in Funhouse, Title, and Night-sea Journey. And yeah there is a good chance of publishing them if the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, doesn't understand that the narrator of the Night-see Journey is a sperm. They are all the only barrier, if I can overcome that and they consider the stories as "Not Harmful for the Common Faith" Barth will be published in Persian too.
I prefer the novels which have a "more scenic route" too, and maybe that has made me a huge fan of Barth. But I like to have a research on the hypterxtuality in literature because it has a great potential for innovation. Moreover I believe in order for a writer to be rebelious, as you put it, he mustn't be a radical or at least I prefer him not to be like that.
Hurray for the "old rebel"
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And here is an excerpt from Barth's essay, "What Writers Do"
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Writing is an action, a different action from talking. The only
conceivable reason for engaging in writing is to make something
relatively permanent which one might otherwise forget. That would seem
to imply that one thinks there is some value in the thing not to be
forgotten -- either some value already achieved, as in the case of a
good recipe for scalloped potatoes, or some potential value, as in the
case of a love poem which stinks at the moment but has the right
spirit and might get better under revision. Writers of the Melvillean
class, that is, "serious" writers, write only in the second sense:
they write works that with luck and devotion may be improved by
reivions -- or, in the end, works that have been improved, so that we
may class them with other human treasures, such as good recipes for
scalloped potatoes. If one looks at the first drafts of even the
greatest writers, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, one sees that literary
art does not come flying like Athena, fully formed, from Zeus's head.
Indeed, the first-draft stupidity of great writers is a shocking and
comforting thing to see. What one learns from studying successive
drafts is that the writer did not know what he meant to say until he
said it. A typo of "murder" for "mirror" can change the whole plot of
a novel.
-- John Barth, essay "What Writers Do"
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Glad this is of immediate use to someone. There are various obscure resources on the internet which, once discovered, become precious for those with a need. There is a website for http://www.annieproulx.com which is run by one of her sons, Morgan Lang (if memory serves me). Until March, it had a very active message board. There was always the slim chance in one's mind that their post might reach Ms. Proulx's attention. But in March, they shut the forum down, promising a new forum at some distant future date.
I am certain that the Barth egroup has searchable archives. If this is not the case, let me know, as I have many of their old mailings in my e-mail, going back a year or more. So, if there is an urgent need on your part, I could go through them and forward useful ones to you.
We could start a significant thread here and invite their interested members to participate.
By the way, (and this is a real non-sequitur), yesterday I developed a very simple htlm f-r-a-m-e-s application to allow someone to browse html documents on a CD by category. The CD has a file which launches the index.html automatically when it is inserted in a drive (for the benefit of the technically challenged), though certain caveats suggest that this feature will not work on all versions of Windows. I can say that it worked on my XP professional.
You may download this technical wonder as a zipped file from www.toosmallforsupernova.org/f-r-a-m-e-project.zip
Or, click upon this following link to visit my blog post, where you shall find a working link to the download:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm...25-421B-A79DC448DF0BB3A7808251203
If you do chose to download, you must modify the above URL by removing the dashes from the word f-r-a-m-e, since this forum censors that word for security reasons.
This demo model has dummy topics labeled nav1 through nav34, in a top horizontal f-r-a-m-e, which load dummy document titles in the leftmost f-r-a-m-e. When you click a title, it displays the html document in the 3rd central f-r-a-m-e. If you click on the title in that document, then the document is displayed in a new window, which may then be maximized. You can get a feel for how it works with these dummy categories and documents, and then if you decide to use it for a project of your own, you may easily modify the simple html files. And if you do decide to comence such a project, then check out the fabulous powerful free editor that I use at http://www.pspad.com
Perhaps some of this can serve you in your Barth project. Then you have only to make copies of the DC, send them to folks, and they can browse and read to their heart's content.
PPS - I have here a paperback entitled "Further Fridays," a collection of essays, lectures and other non-fiction by John Barth. If you let me know your topics of interest, I can try to skim through it quickly for some material. That would be a fun way to build a large Barth Thread.
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