At 09:47 PM 1/17/00 EST, CB Rizzo wrote:
>Mr.Morse:
>What exactly were you responding to? It's difficult to either agree or
>disagree with you when it seems that you mistook a specific line, from a
>specific context, for a general statement about technological advances, viz.,
>computers. I'd very much like to hear your opinion...within the context of
>the conversation. At no point did I mean to imply that all of humanity is
>becoming lazy due to computers.
 
I think I was mostly responding to Richard Kennedy's e-epistolary rationale
for the eclipse of Thomas Wolfe's reputation -- that and Edward Said's
complaint about computers, assuming Robert Kibler's paraphrase is accurate.
("Edward Said, in his address to the MLA at the recent convention in
Chicago, suggested that computers are making students lazy lightweights.")
The problem with such claims is that they aren't ideas, they're tropes.
They have no factual basis; in fact, considered as sentences, they don't
even have subjects. In the sentence "Computers are making students lazy
lightweights," for instance, the real thematic work is done by the verb
phrase "are making students lazy lightweights." By contrast, the noun
"computers" is just a placeholder. Substitute "Women" and the only real
change is a change in venue: from the MLA convention hotel to the lawn of
The Citadel.
 
Of course Pound himself sometimes succumbed to that grand fatuity, the
notion of tradition. But after all, what is the first real piece of
hypertext? The Cantos!
 
Jonathan Morse