MDDM Ch. 72 Dixon and the slave driver

[Terrance]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> Mr T:
> > Thank you,  Doug. I've been waiting for you to admit
> > that this is your
> > position.
> 
> My pleasure.  The text still exists in the books on my
> shelf, Pynchon's included, the pages and the words on
> the page are there, just as the Tree remains in front
> of our house here,  the Bay and the Pacific blue in
> the distance west. But once I pick up the text and
> begin to read, it doesn't exist apart from me (the
> same thing happens when I encounter the Tree --
> "interbeing" I think the Buddhists might call it), I
> enter into it and it enters into me, I bring to it all
> the "texts" I have experienced, and it brings into me
> all the "texts" that it has experienced.  As you might
> agree, this is not a new way to think about a book.

Right, nothing new. What about balance? How does one determine if while
reading a given text, say M&D, one is not too preoccupied with one's own
emotions and what one brings to the encounter with the text, including
the texts one has read? How does one know if while reading a balance is
not being maintained between what one brings to the text and what the
author put into it? 

Is one more prepared to read postmodern literature if one reads a lot of
postmodern literature? Is one more likely to get the allusions to super
heroics in GR if one has read a lot of comic books? 

If a person wants to read and appreciate encyclopedic fiction, should
one prepare to read it by reading other encyclopedic fictions or reading
encyclopedias? 

A pluralistic approach does not admit that all texts are worth reading.
One has to decide what to read. Even Harold Bloom can't read everything.
Some books are better than others and some readings of a book are better
than other readings of the same books. This last may be true for the
same reader at different times. 

> 
> > a pluralistic
> > spectrum.
> 
> Nothing but.
> 
> >I can't
> > stand to read Counter punch
>  > or any of that other
> > stuff you post
> 
> You can choose not to read it. (You seem rather choosy
> about what to include your pluralism.)

Of course, it would not be pluralism with that choosiness, it would be
relativistic oooozzzynesss. 


> 
> > these colleagues of mine fill my ears with that
> > stuff every time we go
> > out for a drink.
> 
> That's one of the problems with bar drinking, no
> control over the environment, gotta keep pounding
> those beverages to drown it out.

Kinda like not having total control over things, like the environment,
but we don't go to bars, would run into too many of our students there.