Newsgroups

[Paul Mackin]

>From Skip:

"The difference between mailing lists and newsgroups is the
difference between inviting a group of friends over for wine on a Sunday
evening and putting a billboard that says "FREE BOOZE HERE!!!" in your
front 
yard" - Lazlo Nibble, quoted in the [then] current Wired (p49)


Good quote Skip.

But to me the p-list has a lot less of the feel of eliteness or 
exclusiveness than have other lists devoted to famous difficult
texts.

I'm thinking of the Finnegans Wake and the Eliot lists where most of
the response seems to be efforts by scholars to advance the field
and such businesslike things. (There WAS on Elliot naturarally the big hullabullo on anti-semitism a while back but people quickly returned to the
main show.)

Pynchon is more of a fun list. You feel you can say anything and
contradict yourself the next day with impunity. The ideas can be
abstruse or  silly (not that these are necessarily opposites) and nobody seems much to care. It's kind of sui generis that way.

There IS a lot of intelligence displayed on the p-list.

I've no doubt there are a significant number of serious scholars on the
p-list, mostly lurkers probably (why give it away). But these types apparently don't mind some of the zany goings-on or they would have unsubscribed years ago.

			P.