Carrol
Michael Smith wrote:
>
> On Sat, 10 Apr 2010 09:47:26 -0400
> shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
>
> > i was flipping through Lorie Moore's _A Gate at the Stairs_ which
> > arrived via interlib loan yesterday. In it, the character says that
> > she learned in kollidge that Henry James masturbated the comma.
> >
> > litcritters et al., what does that mean?
>
> Ostensive definition is best, perhaps. Here's a bit from The
> American Scene (1907):
>
> The great blank decency, at all events, was no more broken than, on the
> general American scene, it ever is; yet the apprehension of marks and
> signs, the trick of speculation, declined none the less to drop. Whom
> were they constructed, such specimens, to talk with, to talk over, or
> to talk under, and what form of address or of intercourse, what uttered,
> what intelligible terms of introduction, of persuasion, of menace, what
> developed, what specific human process of any sort, was it possible to
> impute to them? What reciprocities did they imply, what presumptions
> did they, could they, create? what happened, inconceivably, when
> such Greeks met such Greeks, such faces looked into such faces, and
> such sounds, in especial, were exchanged with such sounds? What women
> did they live with, what women, living with them, could yet leave them
> as they were? What wives, daughters, sisters, did they in fine make
> credible; and what, in especial, was the speech, what the manners,
> what the general dietary, what most the monstrous morning meal, of
> ladies receiving at such hands the law or the licence of life?
>
> --
>
> Michael Smith
> mjs at smithbowen.net
> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org
> http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com
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