From Genesis to Revelations

-- by JLS
---- for the GC

---- JASON K. WAS WONDERING about my attribution of "The Truth" to him, and wondered if it was the 'it' of "it rains". No. Rather to his reference to "Poe, was it?" -- i.e. Poe was an "it" -- implicatum. :). (Under, appropriately, "Iberian Grice") and this comment in "Art in the Grice College" or something. Jason brilliantly writes:

NOt all clubs [etc. 'The Grice Club'. JLS]
are as misguided as to interpose themselves
between the obscured informational load of
the text and its revelation without
having the law to compel people into their arms.

Actually, that would not be (but then why would it be a bad idea.

He continues, and note above the interesting link between "The Revealed Truth" and Style -- I use this header because it was the title of a book project by the club-founder (sort of): Grice.

Academics of the sort I was surrounded with

Sorry, but I have to disclose them. They will love your remembrance:

[add name ot those two scholars, eventually and incidentally. -- the 'add' is a self-reminder, to me, JL].

are, finally, participating in their own continued marginalisation, which seems small recompense for the frissons that visit them during an 'unpacking' of a particular Butler or, another prose fiasco, Fredric Jameson.

Exactly, what they SHOULD do (seeing it's a college of arts, and I've seen PHILOSOPHERS Doing it) is use visual media. As Jason notes, LaButler does speak 'normally'. I will have to find about Jameson. If he manages to _elocute_ the airless passages he must have a good lung capacity. Apparently the Chinesemen love Jameson and there is a photo of a caricature of a Chinese caricature of Jameson in the wiki entry for Jameson.

But what do you mean by that precieux 'frissons'? Surely it wasn't _you_ opposing the grand revealed truths of the Masters and Mistresses, right?

Jason continues now more on a strict Gricean key:

There is also how this approach
of encoding a message so that only a
small group can decode it, how this fits
with the Gricean maxims and does
this reveal how the CP invokes
(always? in extreme cases?) its
darkside of an Uncooperative Principle
with regards to 'everybody the
message is not intended for'.

Yes, there's something of it. But recall that Grice kept the ties of his cricket club (that he would use as suspenders in Berkeley) and would often get offended when people (usually rude students) stared at them and misdescribed them as 'pieces of string'.

The 'raison d'etre' of a cricket club is to EXCLUDE all those who are not members of it (i.e. the cricket club).

I think this Relates, as Kramer sees it, to Victor Borge's dance --.

The odd paradox of 'exclusion' -- my favourite is the advertisement for Polo Ralph Lauren -- is that 'we exclude by including'. Or we include by excluding. I.e. there is the prestige in the exclusion but there's no real exclusion unless you include. The maximal Gricean author of them all expressed it most clearly and sans implicature, when he (Yogi Berra) said:

"That restaurant is always so full that nodoby goes there anymore"