Re: [UC] Hack Seminar to Convene September 27

[Benseraglio2]

In a message dated 8/30/2003 7:52:57 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Eug�ne Ionesco is so pissed that there wasn't a list-serve when he was writing.  Thanks Ross for keeping the memory alive. Fred Wolfe Thank you for the compliment, if it was a compliment, but spare me my blushes, Watson!   I had never read Ionesco so I quickly googled him and oddly enough found that he began to learn English at the age of 40:   "Ionesco did not write his first play until 1950. Having decided at the age of 40 that he ought to learn English, Ionesco acquired an English text and set to work, conscientiously copying whole sentences from his primer for the purpose of memorizing them. Rereading them attentively, he learned not English but some astonishing truths--that, for example, there are seven days in the week, something he already knew; that the floor is down, the ceiling up, things he already knew as well, perhaps, but that he had never seriously thought about or had forgotten, and that seemed to him, suddenly, as stupefying as they were indisputably true. As the lessons became more complex, two characters were introduced, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. To Ionesco's astonishment, Mrs. Smith informed her husband that they had several children, that they lived in the vicinity of London, that their name was Smith, that Mr. Smith was a clerk, that they had a servant, Mary, English, like themselves. What was remarkable about Mrs. Smith, was her eminently methodical procedure in her quest for truth. But then, as Ionesco would later write, "A strange phenomenon took place. I don't know how--the text began imperceptibly to change before my eyes. The very simple, luminously clear statements I had copied so diligently into my notebook, left to themselves, fermented after a while, lost their original identity, expanded and overflowed. The clich�s and truisms of the conversation primer, which had once made sense ... gave way to pseudo-clich�s and pseudo-truisms; these disintigrated into wild caricature and parody, and in the end language disintigrated into disjointed fragments of words." " I browsed Rhinoceros quickly and found this funny line "And what's happened to your tie? Lost it during your orgy, I suppose?" Of course I will now work harder to appreciate Ionesco, but in the meantime I find Samuel Beckett and  Louis-Ferdinand Celine ("Love is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite") funnier. But of course we should move this conversation to "Culture" before someone takes a referendum. To subscribe to "Culture" go to: www.purple.com/list.html and follow the directions. "Culture" now has 37 members, about 14% of the number on the main "University City Real Estate, Property and It's So Hard to Find Good Help These Days" list and closing fast.   Ross Bender http://rossbender.org