Subject: RE: The business of subjects (Administrative Trivia)
From: Raley, Amber (araley@agnesscott.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 10 2002 - 10:05:40 EDT
Tim and fellow fishes,
As a perennial lurker of the bananafishbowl I will gladly chime in with a
shout of "Digression!"
I enjoy all of posts to the list and sometimes the tangential remarks are
the most enlightening.
Thank you for allowing all to freely speak their mind, even those of us who
rarely speak.
Amber
P.S. Has anyone else viewed Pari and would be willing to post your review?
I believe it was Will who gave his review some time ago. I would be
interested to hear others opinions.
As for myself I have still only watched half of the film. I now have a
complete copy but I like where my old copy of the film cut off, with the
Seymour character still rambling on about bananafish (or light-fish or
whatever he called them, I don't remember).
-----Original Message-----
From: Tim O'Connor
To: bananafish@roughdraft.org
Sent: 7/10/2002 8:33 AM
Subject: The business of subjects (Administrative Trivia)
On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 10:02:02PM -0700, L. Manning Vines wrote:
> << robbie and Jim, your discussion ROCKS [. . . .] >>
>
> Thank you. I am glad to hear a comment, especially such a positive
one,
> from someone else on the list. I was about to suggest to Jim that any
> further discussion be taken off-list since I was beginning to feel
like I
> was having a private conversation without any relevance to, or
interest
> from, the list.
Robbie: A note from the peanut gallery here.
I confess I'm not your audience in this discussion, and I agree that
what you're discussing has very little to do directly with this list.
BUT ... I've always hoped that we could be more like a salon, where
people can intelligently branch off into other topics, even if they are
only tangentially related to Salinger. You know, there's not so great a
leap to take this hypothetical route:
Salinger --> US lit --> Euro lit --> Asian lit -->
religious underpinnings of the above --> philosophical nuts
& bolts of religious underpinnings --> Salinger
If we have such a discussion, then there's a point in there where some
action takes place that has little or nothing to do with Salinger. But
viewed with some perspective (of the 50,000-foot kind), one can see that
there is, or may be, a connection.
No need, then, for substantive conversations to be shunted aside. I
admit that there is quite a bit that is subjective about what is and is
not a good and useful conversation. Most of the useless ones die off of
their own accord. The infighting and name-calling conversations require
some intervention, which is where I (rarely) get involved. Most of the
"magic" of doing all this is simply to let things happen as they happen.
A lot is self-governance and not much more.
Events of the last month or six weeks gave me a lot to think about. The
only kinds of conversational direction to which I object here (and as
you know, I favor a gentle hand in these things) are fights for the sake
of fighting.
(Another movie reference: in "Radio Days," the Woody Allen character has
parents who fight all the time, about everything. His example of the
ultimate absurd home fight: His parents in a battle-to-the-death over
which is the "greater" ocean, the Atlantic or the Pacific. And of
course
"greater" is never defined. That is the kind of list interaction that I
would find silly and unlikely to lead somewhere interesting. Is this
wholly arbitrary on my part? Yes. Is it, however, based upon several
years' worth of doing this list-moderation-with-light-hand sort of
thing?
Yes, it is that, too.)
So ... the various infighting that happened and that (productively) took
us to the point of discussing what should and should not be part of the
list got me to thinking about the "rules" governing list traffic. After
several years of having it frozen in one position, and having people
recently brandish those words in an attempt to stop the free exchange of
ideas, I have come to the conclusion that loosening boundaries would be
a good thing. Not revolutionary. Only less likely to cause people
to yell, "Digression!" to halt progress when the discussion takes a turn
they don't like.
Speaking for myself, I would rather have an intelligent conversation
like yours -- even if I am not interested in participating and even if
it is not directly concerned with the list topic -- than have a small
room full of pointy-headed Salingeristas (and that's no smear; I guess
I fall into that camp myself) analyzing the number of commas-per-page
in "Seymour: An Introduction." I am tired of seeing only pointy-headed
Salingeriana, and I believe the lack of "on-topic" discussion --
compared
to the rather robust engagement we found when things strayed to other
subjects -- speaks enormously about how much richer a list we have when
people feel that they don't have to pass their words through the gates
of Saint Jerome for a blessing!
(An aside: It is a strange moment when one does some quick calculations
of the disk usage of a list's archive and finds that the messages
collected very possibly exceed in words the amount of work published by
the author under discussion. Oh, this happens, especially when the
author in question is no longer publishing. But it also rather limits
the subjects to be discussed when the body of work is so small. Oh,
sure, one can take an electron microscope to it and become engaged in
minute details, but that's where your PMLA submissions come from!)
I don't know how connected all these topics are, but they've been
tumbling
through my mind these last few weeks after many of you raised the issue
of
relevance both publicly and privately. So, I think it is time for a bit
of a change in the "welcome" message, which will perhaps give you all a
chance to use that DELETE key a bit more often when you find traffic you
don't care for. But it will at the same time allow people to speak
their
minds more freely.
Will this work? I don't know. But I'm happy to give it a try.
Therefore,
I'd like to ask people to quit worrying as much over whether you're "on
topic" and instead be interesting. Engaging. Inventive. If you're
posting messages that nobody answers, I guess that tells you about the
interest level in what you're saying. If you are rabble-rousing for the
sake of blood-letting, then someone (likely me) will ask that you stop.
I personally dislike "rules" modeled upon the Ten Commandments, so I
simply ask you to humor me a bit regarding how we conduct ourselves.
Ideally, we will see less demands that people quit talking about some
particular topic, and see more talking, more ideas and interactions.
I don't know what will happen -- but I'm willing to be surprised.
I do not mean this to be some kind of pronouncement, either. Everyone
who cares to do so is heartily invited to chime in with thoughts on
the matter.
--tim
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