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Re: Writing, language, & consciousness
Jesse S. Cook III (jcook@AWOD.COM)
Thu, 3 Oct 1996 13:31:46 -0400
On 3 October 1996, Douglass Drozdow-St.Christian came out of the woodwork with:
>at some point in the vapourous morass of email, jesse cook quothe...
>
>>But isn't the initial act of reading at least the
>>start of an interaction?
>
>>>Ron, you must be working too hard. Your logic is in disarray here.
>>>Reading
>>>is the start of an interaction only on the Internet, unless you have access
>>>to the author of a book or other work of literature. If the author is
>>>dead,
>>>as I think Samuel Langhorne Clemens is, access is pretty hard to come
>>>by. I believe.
>
>now, apart from the fact that a simple keyword search on reading theory
>or reader theory in any library would provide a wealth of correctives to
>such a naive view of reading, i wonder if mr. cook has ever read and
>acted upon a letter, or a note left stapled to his bib, or a traffic sign
>for that matter....
>
>each different intereactions with printed text, but each intereactions in
>their own way...
>
>mcluhan recognized many things, but most importantnly that the
>relationship between the written or printed word and the reader is an
>interactive one....
>
>however, this all smacks too much of what my old philosophy teacher
>called debating the merits of an absurdity...i mean, i can't beleive,
>after a month of this puffery, that i actually responded to one of these
>posts...
>
>dr.douglass drozdow-st.christian <->
>dept. of anthropology <->
>mcmaster university <->
>hamilton,on,ca,l8s 4l9 <->
Had you read "unless you have access to the author" in what I said above
instead of somehow, unaccoutably, skipping over it, you could have saved
yourself the trouble of responding and us the trouble of reading this
unnecessary response.
Jesse S. Cook III E-Mail: jcook@awod.com
Post Office Box 40984 or
Charleston, SC 29485 USA 201-9573@mcimail.com
"...it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated,
but for our qualities."--Bernard Berenson (1865-1959)
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