Letters to the Editor – 1997

Uwe Günther writes:
Subject: guess you are boring

I was just flowing over your page about my hometown Cancun and I was really pissed because of your comments. I don’t know what kind of you are but how can you judge about something, you don’t even know? Maybe you should write something about the cooking from your mother the next time. I’m not sure you know what she’s doing, but maybe you appreciate the taste.
Uwe

Anne Lewis writes:

Hi there.
I was surfing the net in desperation of finding some information on, among other things, post modernism and Yahoo! spat out your home page as a prime starting point. I couldn’t help but notice however, that your site is dedicated to a certain Richard McEllwee who in your many pictures bears an undeniable resemblance to THE Richard McEllwee of Sherman’s March and Harvard film school fame. Being a film student at Northwestern, I have seen Sherman’s March on several occasions and praise it highly. Is this just a strange coincidence or are we talking about the same man? I would love it if you would email me back if you get a chance. My email address is [email protected]. Thanks — and great site!

P.S. What’s this about Clementine and the Marine Corps battle hymn?

Don writes:

Re stuffed camel:
I just could not believe that this was possible! Now that the timely and traditional turkey dinner is overwith, I have a new idea for Christmas and the neighbors. Thanks for the needed humor.
Do you know the best place, besides the zoo, for camel?

I think they are still raised and used in the South West. A quick web search didn’t turn up any leads. There’s a camel market in Luxor, though. (Don added in a followup note that he heard about the recipe on a talk show.)

I’m not the chap to answer this but the ever helpful moggin provided the following.

Could you be any less specific? Here’s a few, off the top of my head. Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era is wonderful — definitely my top recommendation. The Modern Tradition, ed. Ellman and Feidelson, is a big, fat teaching anthology. Oxford Press has a smaller one, edited by Kermode and Hollander, with a tighter focus; Modern British Literature is the title. There’s a helpful collection of essays called Modernism, ed. Bradbury and McFarlane. Modern Poetics is a nice anthology of statements by poets like Yeats, Pounds, Frost, and Eliot (ed. Scully). Lots of good stuff there.

Lori Casanova writes:

Loved your horse stories!! As a riding enthusiast of days gone by, I truly related to what I’ve read so far (haven’t quite finished it yet, but the rest will make for great Thanksgiving day reading). Spent an unforgettable summer as a fairly inexperienced rider wrangling horses for an outfitter in Wyoming. The best experience of my life! Best wishes to you, and happy holidays….

Lori very kindly replied:

Thanks for your response to my E-mail. To answer your question, I ran across your page on The Daily Menagerie, which is the default page on our computer. They highlight different people’s web pages every couple of days, and when I saw “Back in the Saddle Again…”, I knew it would be something I’d want to read!

P.S. The URL is http://www.thedaily.com/menagerie.html.

Which brings me to the abstract of your wonderfully fictitious book Nabokov. I really enjoyed it. Not what I was looking for, mind you, but enjoyable all the same.

I’m glad you enjoyed it. I’ve always wanted to read the book myself – it sounds interesting.

Dave writes:

Enjoyed your website. I didn’t see any reference to the Sartre cookbook, perhaps I missed it in my haste. It’s a nice segue between your recipes and the literary items.

Copy of the cookbook is on the philosophy page at www.gac.edu

carson jockell writes:

Hi
I was just about to pull the plug on my internet subscription when I happened to run across your site. I have never laughed harder at any other written page. Please keep up whatever it is your doing. There are those of us out here in cyber space that need and appreciate this stuff!

I dunno, this is kind of scary. I mean here you were, about to give up the internet and get a real life and probably win the Nobel prize or something, but no, you had to go read my site and now you’re hooked again. That’s sobering. Makes me realize my moral responsibility for unborn children of Afghani goat herders and that sort of thing.

Hmmmm. Some of my pages seem to have turned out to be unexpectedly useful. Pity.

I won’t say it is the best (I think that depends on what comes naturally to you) but it is very good. The best alternative that I know about is the Trachtenburg system. I don’t have a copy of it anymore and don’t remember the details. One merit of the system I used is that it is easy to learn and to understand. The one suggestion I do have is that you practice intensively for a few days.

Jonny Evertsson writes:

Who r u ? Where r u from? What do u do ? How old r u ?? I found your site and just got so curious (I was searching for some information about the tuatara)…U r funny !! U may wonder what kind of idiot I am…well I´m a 17 year old Swede. Nikita is my nick if u ever chat on irc…please say hi.

Alex Quisenberry writes:

(I live on the Texas Gulf Coast – Corpus Christi)

My friend at Dupont liked your Darwin Awards well enough to send me the story below. Down here we have neither frozen lakes nor $400 payments on $30000 vehicles, nor would we go duck hunting with #8 loads, but the message is clear. While these two fellows missed out on the Darwin Award THIS TIME they would surely seem mentally qualified to achieve Award status NEXT TIME.

Now, I don’t KNOW whether this is actually true, but who would make this shit up?

Tony Carulli writes: Your essays are great , however i wish you would write more on your definition on heroes.
thank you, tony carulli

Suford Lewis writes:

Mr. Harter –

I should have resisted, but I found my way to your home page via a search for my own name in Alta Vista and there was your page on “Proper Boskonian – The Gory Years” as the 43rd reference. So, now that I have found Billy, wandered around and read a lot of your stuff, I have to comment on your comments about … Fairy Tales.

Fairy Tales are not structured as they are because they are for children. They are descended from oral narrative and epic poetry and bardic tales and “the oral tradition” … whatever name scholars are currently calling it – stuff that was meant for adults and meant to both explain the world and tell/reassure everybody about about “how it was meant to be”. They are contradictory because they usually have two or three cultures overlaid on them. Try picking the Christianity out of Beowulf; transcribed in the 8th century by a monk, it is clearly not a Christian tale!

All the “literary” theory is very artist self-conscious and, you rightly point out, inappropriate. The old bards may have shaped the artistry of the tales they told but the tales themselves were already known to most of the audience. There are not many bardic societies left but there are still a few places in the world where their social interactions can be studied – it is more like sociology than literature. I get most of my knowledge of all this from The Singer of Tales by Alfred Lord and The Serbo-Croation Heroic Song by Milman Parry.

(Aside on Milman Parry – Poor sod, he really wanted to study classical Greek but some charismatic scholar in the field, who had a theory that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the way they were because they were transcriptions of an oral art form, persuaded him at a conference in Paris to travel through the back woods of Serbo-Croatia in a broken-down truck with a bicycle electrical generator to run a wire-recorder to record native illiterate bards performing their 3-hour to 3-day stories to the accompaniment of a one-stringed “lute” called a gusla. I can just see the academic good old boys arranging for this promising young fellow to get funding and visas and what-not to go off and prove their current speculation. He was well-rewarded, I guess, he founded the discipline at Harvard – where they still have all the wire recordings – and got honors and tenure. He made three trips to SerboCroatia in the teens and twenties.)

As soon as people (from Pete Seeger to Alfred Lord) start to study folk-lore and narrative they start to talk about archetypes and normative constructs and symbolic events. All of which is a fancy way to discuss what fairy tales have summarized as “the moral”. These things were meant to be lessons – history, morality, good examples, bad examples, explanations of why we are good or why we currently are in a bad situation. Enuma elish (the Babylonian Creation Epic), Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, the Mabinogian, the Sagas,… the Bible, … Burnt Njal, Cattle Raid at Cooley, the Kalevala, Beowulf, …

You pushed one of my buttons – I have much too much to say on this subject and how this johnny-come-lately, pansy “literature” stuff has perverted it and how SF and fantasy is more the real stuff of narrative, &c;, et cet., ET cetera! but I really should go home…

– Suford

And whenever alta vista resurveys my pages you will find another reference in If we had won in 71 in case you are interested in what happened to you in other universes.

I expect you are right about bardic tales – you know a good deal more about these things than I do. I will plead that that the review is written from the viewpoint that Bristol Bradlee would have had – she is, after all, a certified academic even if she doesn’t exist.

On the other hand I don’t think things are quite that simple. The big bardic tales, beowulf and company, were treated as literature even before literature became too big for its britches and became Literature. The small stories, the ones Grimm and company gathered, were not recognized as literature until late in the game.

It seems to be that there is a difference between stories like Hansel and Gretel and stories like Beowulf. It seems to me that there are really three different venues – village stories, noble stories, and tribal stories. In the latter category are stories like traditional American Indian stories. The latter may be the ultimate progenitors of the others.

However I agree with your assessment that they are explanatory and that they are usually archaic with cultural overlays. As a note on this the Sioux mythology (White Buffalo Woman, the sacred Black Hills, et cetera) are clearly of recent origin. The Sioux were of eastern origin and did not reach the plains until the 1700’s.

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Robert Harter

Subject: Stuffed Camel

… (snip)… Spread any remaining rice on large tray and place camel on top of rice. Decorate with boiled eggs and nuts. Serves friendly crowd of 80-100.

Friendly Crowd of 80 to 100?????? That must be an awfully hungry group as well as being friendly!!!!

It does seem to be a case of stuffed arab as well as stuffed camel, doesn’t it. Maybe it’s one of these feasts that lasts a while.

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Dustin Cook writes:

Thank you for your poems I enjoyed them all. Keep it up. I’ll check later for your latest additions to your site.

Thank you for the kind words. I am pleased that you appreciated the poetry. I don’t know about new poems – that’s a matter of chance – but I keep adding pages to the site, about 5-10 a month, so it’s worth while checking in now and then.

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Zack Keedy writes:

Subject: your postmodern creationism page:

Thanks for taking the time to put your page up. I laughed for a good hour. thanks, man. This stuff is priceless.

You’re welcome. It’s there to be enjoyed. Some people take it seriously though – I worry about that sometimes.

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jan c. schindler writes:

Hi, Richard,

I usually read the usenet groups rec art book and postmoderism which is where I found you. Your site is trully amazing. I had to put it on my bookmark list, there is so much stuff there. I read thru your article on Toto and the Elgin Marbles,I never saw the connection until now. I wonder if my art history professor would appreciate the insight?

I am a painter, studying for my master’s at the moment. I have bumped into the postmodern (mostly) French writers. I posted a request on its connection with art and got some good suggestions. (were you the one who suggested the Norris book on deconstruction?) Anyway, I can find material on the theories and I can find references to postmoderism in articles about specific art but I haven’t found anything that relates art theory to postmodern theory. I guess what I am looking for has to do with how postmoderism has influenced (or not) artistic thinking. Ah well….

I am in the early stages of getting my own page which actually means I haven’t decided on what to do. I don’t think it will be quite as elaborate as yours. I am very ignorant when it comes to this computer stuff. Hey, but I am learning!

I’m pleased that you like the site; I thank you for the kind words. Amazing is probably the appropriate term, although one can think of so many terms that might be used, e.g., a monument to undisciplined creativity. One could take that statement as a judgement and, by implication, an artistic dismissal, were it not for the fact that effect is an explicit, stated objective. If you like you can think of it as a metaphor for life – not the life of human beings but rather an ecological deme. As such there are multi-stranded interconnectivities. There are moments of tightly crafted beauty but it is not about tightly crafted beauty. Life does not extract and concentrate beauty into little museum pieces; it produces it almost accidently and yet necessarily. Nor is everything in a deme essential to the deme; a deme is the product of a historical evolution of complexity in a particular environment. This is here because it happened to be here and prospered; that is here because it is an essential element of the deme. Et cetera. A deme is a partial unity of partially ordered complexity. Each deme, however, has its own individuality, the whole stamped with a personality.

On the other hand you can think of it as the product of a bower bird courting immortality.

You have aroused my curiosity about the connection between Toto and the Elgin Marbles that you see. The piece is a collaboration, much like a jazz riff, a point and counterpoint of little fantasies. This is not so easy a thing to arrange in painting, although I have watched cartoonists happily create improvisational collaborations.

It wasn’t I who suggested the Norris book. I am not exactly knowledgeable about post-modernism. For what it is worth it is my impression that there are really two post-modernisms. One revolves around literary and philosophic theory; it is the common element of approach of such writers as DeMann, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan. The other is a label of style which can be almost anything. I suspect that post-modernism as art theory really does not exist. Postmodern theory is a theory of text which attempts to appropriate visual art as text.

Good luck with creating a site. With luck you may create a site which is a real artistic statement rather than the godawful graphic abortions that infest the web.

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Tian Harter wrote:

Hello,
I was sort of curious what Harter web pages were out there. I enjoyed yours. Try checking out mine:
http://members.aol.com/tianharter/index.html

I took a look at your pages and liked them. Here are a couple of more Harter pages (no relation)
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~harter/homepage.html (Robert Harter)
http://members.aol.com/KQA7432/index.html (Steve Harter)

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lu ducharme writes:

I just stumbled on your web page. I will show it to my boy friend as soon as he commes back with the bed. I really like it and I am sure I will go back to it more than once; the same for all those neat links you propose. excuse my english if there is something wrong; scott usually corrects me when it comes to everyday communication. Aurevoir!

Your English is fine. The thought that my web pages are just the thing with which to greet your boy friend and the bed is a bit daunting in its implications. I’m not sure my pages are quite that interesting.

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jerry and judy write:

How do I subscribe to ~g (sci.astro)

You have a great site!! Where do you find the time? Hope I have time to read it all. Keep it up!!

If the speed of expansion of the Universe one second after the big bang had been smaller by one part in a hundred thousand million million the Universe would have recollapsed long before now!

Conversely, if the speed of expansion of the Universe one second after the big bang had been larger by one part in a hundred thousand million million the Universe would be so expanded by now that we would not even be able to observe any other galaxy that was not gravitationally bound to our own Local Group. (Very few galaxies probably would have formed!) (No heavy elements = no life!)

My conclusion, we live in a perfectly balanced, closed universe which has oscillated forever and will oscillate forever. There probably are an infinite number of other oscillating universes outside? of ours but we will never know anything about them!!

In some mythical way the U must be beautiful (according to Einstein)! If the reality we point to expands for a trillion yrs ( how many do you want?) and then ever so slowly starts to contract due to gravity to complete the symmetry that we perceive in every other natural system, how can we be wrong? Nothing in nature is truly infinite/asymptotic, it would invoke an unfathomable deity—

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ddgfc writes:

I read your note on earthworms for food. I was once offered a hamburger, the meat portion made entirely of earthworms. Not being hungry enough I declined the offer. Your note was the first time I’ve come across any other reference of earthworms for food. Have you come across any real evidence of the practice of eating earthworms or was I falling for the three card trick? I enjoyed your page.
Fred

ddgfc continues:

Hi Richard
Thanks for answering my e-mail. I think I’ll stay with steak and eggs. I saw the article in one of your web pages, I think you may have written it with tongue in cheek. Worms are a hobby for me.
Regards and thank you,
Fred

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Ellen Harter writes:

I just recently became a Harter, and frankly, now I’m worried! Just kidding – great web page!

Welcome to the granfalloon. You have commendable taste both in your choice of last names and your appreciation of web pages.

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Steve Harter writes:

Dear Richard:

As one from the Harter clan, I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed perusing your web page. My wife, Ellen, discovered it one evening and told me about it. The Harter line of which I am a part is from the Upper New York State (Mohawk Valley) crew, but there must be some genetic heritage which we share. After reading through selected areas of your website, I can understand Ellen’s comment to me – “You do come from a strange bunch!!”

Some evening after the kids are in bed, I’ll continue through your website. We’ve been working on one ourselves (mostly Ellen’s effort) – when it’s launched we’ll email you with the address.

Until then – “From the halls of Clementine…” (one ex-jarhead to another) – all the best

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Tony Lewis writes:

The on-line NYNEX directory lists 28 Harter entries for Massachusetts, although you are the only one in Concord.

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Martin Jukovsky writes:

Fascinating Web site you have there. Very rich, very labyrinthine.

Thanks. That’s exactly the reaction I am striving for – that is, if there is any coherent policy associated with it at all.

I was led to your site by your message on the sf newgroup on “The Cold Equations.” I can’t remember whether I ever read the short story, but I just finished viewing the Sci-Fi Channel’s film of it. I must agree with you that it evades the moral issues while pretending to face them. The film then tries to put icing on the moral cake by giving the hero a triumph of sorts at his trial (where he gets to make a speech, and is sentenced to the mines for 15 years, but the guards — won over — initially refuse to escort him away). As you say, it’s not the unforgiving, uncaring universe that is at fault, but the company bureaucracy that runs the space service.

Oh Lordie. I’ve never seen the film version; from what you say I don’t want to. It sounds like they’ve taken a flawed story and butchered it. The thing that is a little discouraging is all of the response is the obstinate refusal of most posters even to consider the point. Sigh.

You are two years older than me (I’m 59), and I go back far in sf fandom (7th Fandom, Ellison before he sold his first story, conventions where the attendees could be counted in the dozens, the Gestetner as the machine you dreamed about). I haven’t been active for decades, though I return to reading sf often (usually the 40s and 50s). One of the Web search engines led me to a history of fandom in which I am a participant.

I did some letter hacking in the late 50’s but really didn’t link into fandom until the mid 60’s. On line fan histories – yeah, I’m in one too. Fascinating and scary – what one does in one’s mad youth is not lost even though one industriously forgets it. Fandom just started exploding about the time I got in. Tricon in 1965 was my first worldcon – it was big, big, big with about 600 attendees. Some of the people you knew are still active.

I dropped out for about 15 years. Of late I’m dipping my toes in the water to make some reconnection – mostly hitting the convention circuit a bit.

Your name sounds familiar. You probably have been immortalized somewhere in something that I’ve run across.

Good meeting you.

Likewise.

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Robert Mickus

Nice page, very nice. I will reference it often while scewering the misinformed.

Well, you’ve certainly come to the right place for misinformation.

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Ted Samsel

Liked your web site.
esp the Rio Hata bit…

Glad also someone “here” is older than I am besides Fido & McCarthy. (& Granny Yarnot..)

I’ll pass on the martoonies, but I do take gin with tonic, thankyouvedymuch.

I hate Cancun. I do like Isla Mujeres, though….

(“here” is the rec.arts.books newsgroup)

You know, that’s an interesting question. How well can you tell how old someone is from what they write in a newsgroup? Or in a fanzine for that matter?

Cancun, well I won’t say I hate it, but I’ll not be back, I suspect. The funny thing is I liked Puerto Rico. I alternated between staying in old San Juan and wandering all over the Island. Wanderlust, that’s the ticket.

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Scott Faust writes:

Re Post Modern Creationism:

It was not Erasmus Darwin who put forth the courageously consistent (if ultimately silly and perverse) theory of creation with appearance of age. Nor did he ever propose or believe anything remotely along this line.

The man you have in mind is Philip Henry Gosse, and his 1857 book _Omphalos_ (the greek word for “navel,” signifying that as part of a consistent created order Adam must have born this physical testament to a umbilical cord which never existed).

You are right, of course, about Gosse; I knew about him. I was under the impression that Erasmus Darwin had propounded the same theory. It seems I was wrong – there is nothing unusual about that, alas and alack.

However I don’t think it much matters; the whole thing is a crock anyway which was never meant to be taken seriously even though some people do. I think I’ll leave it the way it is. It’s much more, ah, poetic to contrast Erasmus and Charles.

No expert on Erasmus, but I think I would know about this. Erasmus was a free thinker. In the works I do now something of, the most he ever expressed was a noncommittal deism. He definitely wasn’t big on creationism, and was sympathetically inclined toward many of the religious (and political) radicals of his day. (He was an outspoken admirer of the secularism of the French revolution, for instance.)

Both his son Robert Darwin, and later Robert’s son Charles, liked to quote Erasmus’ quip about Unitarianism (the religion of the Wedgewood clan with which the Darwins repeatedly intermarried) being “a featherbed to catch falling Christians”.

Have enjoyed your pages, btw.

Being a Unitarian is very convenient in a society which expects you to be some kind of Christian.

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Thanatos writes:

Saw you in the scifi thread. noticed the tiac. Checked out webpage. I really like the Waiting for Godot section.

Thank you, kindly, sir. Some people think that I don’t take very important things seriously. They’re right. I don’t.

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Ray Slagle writes:

Dear Richard,

I am a premedical student with a newly found interest in paleoanthropology. I just started reading Johanson’s and Edey’s, “Lucy, the Beginnings of Humankind,” and have only made my way through the first three chapters which are concerned with a background to the first Hominid finds.

In these chapters the authors introduce and briefly discuss Piltdown Man. However, while making mention of the fraudulance of Piltdown Man they don’t expound on the issue, as it is not the focus of the book.

The subject of such fraud piqued my interest and I wanted to learn more about it. So, I turned to the Inter-Net thinking, “Good luck finding anything with much detail.” The first site I came to was yours and after reading it I had to ask myself, “How much more detail could a person want?”

I just want to say thanks for taking the time to author such an informative, detailed and generally well put together web site on the subject of Piltdown Man. I am sure that there are many thousands more out there like myself – as is evinced by the number of people visiting your site since May of this year – who find it so convenient to be able to simply turn on their computers and have at their disposal such great information as you have to offer. Web sites like yours are what makes the Inter-Net such an invaluable resource. Keep up the good work, Please!

As a general rule I don’t print letters associated with the Piltdown man page. Either they are of the “Gee, I had a paper to get done tonight and you just saved my life” variety or they are comments from the host of people who keep me honest. In some cases I suspect the writer would not want their teacher to know where they did their research.

Ray’s letter is a bit of an exception and it is very much appreciated. The Piltdown page may not be very important in the larger scheme of things but it is a little piece of a larger picture – an international collaboration of scholarship, free, and accessible to everyone who has access to the internet. When one puts together a resource it’s nice to know that people use it and find it useful, even though you don’t know who they are. It’s also nice to hear about it now and then.