Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
She was in a more interesting story than the one about Te'o and his girlfriend, which still came down to win one for the Gippper.
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Damn that flu bug!
- Thread starter maureen
- Start date
She was in a more interesting story than the one about Te'o and his girlfriend, which still came down to win one for the Gippper.
Sharon Bowman
Sharon Bowman
Disagree. There is nothing interesting about EB's story. (That is the point.)
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Disagree. There is nothing interesting about EB's story. (That is the point.)
First, you are responding to the narrator's handling of the story. The story has every element of a standard melodramatic adultery plot, not least because Emma makes sure her life is like the ones she reads about.
Second, even if I agreed with you that there is nothing "melodramatic," which is what I take it you mean by interesting, her story is endlessly more interesting (if you take her story to be about the conflict between her desires and the world she lives in) than the story we were told about the dying girlfriend who only wishes for the Notre Dame football team to win the game.
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
Prof. Loesberg ftw!originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
... to wine the game.
Sharon Bowman
Sharon Bowman
I like your stealth "wine." Good tip of the hat.
I think the interest in this story is not the dying pseudogirlfriend, but rather the whole Potemkin village of stories and layers of who-knew-what.
Adultery is ultimately dry to the point of crumbling.
Or, as Nabokov said, "Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional."
I think the interest in this story is not the dying pseudogirlfriend, but rather the whole Potemkin village of stories and layers of who-knew-what.
Adultery is ultimately dry to the point of crumbling.
Or, as Nabokov said, "Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional."
originally posted by SFJoe:
This will be interesting to watch. Those are goofy guys, and there are a lot of people who don't believe they can actually make real quantities of their vaccine.
It makes some sense. We found a lot of cross reactivity in vaccinees to strains other than the ones in the vaccine.
It could have been previous exposure or something else, but it was an interesting and consistent finding.
Sharon Bowman
Sharon Bowman
VLM, I thought your post was going to be about Flaubert.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
I like your stealth "wine." Good tip of the hat.
I think the interest in this story is not the dying pseudogirlfriend, but rather the whole Potemkin village of stories and layers of who-knew-what.
Adultery is ultimately dry to the point of crumbling.
Or, as Nabokov said, "Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional."
Yes, of course, by the time Nabokov wrote, the plot had become a cliché. And Flaubert handled it as if it already were (but it's worth remembering that Anna Karenin[a] appeared between 15 and 20 years later). But that's a far cry from saying that there is no story or that the story as story is uninteresting, except in the sense that Oscar Wilde noted that after all the nineteenth century poetry and paintings, sunsets are completely clichés, the joke that Nabokov was rewriting.
Sharon Bowman
Sharon Bowman
Putting aside the point that adultery is not a "plot" (like saying "life" is a plot or "marriage" is a plot), I don't think that there was something inherently cliche about it by the time VN wrote as opposed to a hundred years earlier. It has been a plot device in "modern" literature since Tristan et Iseut.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
There is an adultery plot (there is also a marriage plot), in the sense of a commonly used and recognized set of events with a certain set of thematic concerns, that is important to 19th century literature (and is essentially different from the courtly love plot, of which Tristan and Iseult was an example). It was at least enough of a cliché when Nabokov--who taught 19th century fiction at Cornell--was writing so that there had been numbers of critical works on it, though not yet Tony Tanner's I don't think.
Ian Fitzsimmons
Ian Fitzsimmons
Not to hijack the thread, but there was an NPR Science Friday segment on the flu today, useful for the lay person. Recoverable as podcast.
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Disagree. There is nothing interesting about EB's story. (That is the point.)
First, you are responding to the narrator's handling of the story. The story has every element of a standard melodramatic adultery plot, not least because Emma makes sure her life is like the ones she reads about.
Second, even if I agreed with you that there is nothing "melodramatic," which is what I take it you mean by interesting, her story is endlessly more interesting (if you take her story to be about the conflict between her desires and the world she lives in) than the story we were told about the dying girlfriend who only wishes for the Notre Dame football team to win the game.
Whether we chalk it up to the narrator's handling of the story or the story itself, I'm with Sharon on this one: EB is just boring.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
originally posted by Cliff:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Disagree. There is nothing interesting about EB's story. (That is the point.)
First, you are responding to the narrator's handling of the story. The story has every element of a standard melodramatic adultery plot, not least because Emma makes sure her life is like the ones she reads about.
Second, even if I agreed with you that there is nothing "melodramatic," which is what I take it you mean by interesting, her story is endlessly more interesting (if you take her story to be about the conflict between her desires and the world she lives in) than the story we were told about the dying girlfriend who only wishes for the Notre Dame football team to win the game.
Whether we chalk it up to the narrator's handling of the story or the story itself, I'm with Sharon on this one: EB is just boring.
I believe you are evaluating the novel, which I don't quite think puts you with Sharon, but maybe I'm wrong. If you don't like Madame Bovary though, I don't even want to know what you think about Sentimental Education.
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
Thread drift back to topic.
Question for the epidemiology types hereabouts: Just spoke to a work-fellow who says he gets the shot every year and every year it makes him sick with the flu. He has no egg allergy. Should he stop taking the shot? What does the CDC recommend for people whose immune systems fail to respond correctly? Is he a child-murderer if he doesn't take it?
Question for the epidemiology types hereabouts: Just spoke to a work-fellow who says he gets the shot every year and every year it makes him sick with the flu. He has no egg allergy. Should he stop taking the shot? What does the CDC recommend for people whose immune systems fail to respond correctly? Is he a child-murderer if he doesn't take it?
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Thread drift back to topic.
Question for the epidemiology types hereabouts: Just spoke to a work-fellow who says he gets the shot every year and every year it makes him sick with the flu. He has no egg allergy. Should he stop taking the shot? What does the CDC recommend for people whose immune systems fail to respond correctly? Is he a child-murderer if he doesn't take it?
Self report fail.
Maybe he gets sick, maybe not. The shot is 100% not giving him the flu. He should wash his hands more.
To add some more anecdotes, the two people who did not get vaccinated in my office both got sick.
A little thing to remember. If you get the shot, there isn't a 68% chance you won't get sick. There is either a 100% chance or a 0% chance. If you do get sick, then the shot may ameliorate symptoms and shorten infection.
Don't be an idiot.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
If there's a 68% chance that you are one of the people who won't get sick or a 68% chance that you are in the group who absolutely won't get sick, if you prefer that wording, and thus a 32% chance that you are in the group that absolutely will get sick, then a normal speaker of English would indeed be correct to say that there's a 68% chance you won't get sick. Your distinction is correct, but it doesn't change the way one has to think about the issue, unless one already knows which group one is in.originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Thread drift back to topic.
Question for the epidemiology types hereabouts: Just spoke to a work-fellow who says he gets the shot every year and every year it makes him sick with the flu. He has no egg allergy. Should he stop taking the shot? What does the CDC recommend for people whose immune systems fail to respond correctly? Is he a child-murderer if he doesn't take it?
Self report fail.
Maybe he gets sick, maybe not. The shot is 100% not giving him the flu. He should wash his hands more.
To add some more anecdotes, the two people who did not get vaccinated in my office both got sick.
A little thing to remember. If you get the shot, there isn't a 68% chance you won't get sick. There is either a 100% chance or a 0% chance. If you do get sick, then the shot may ameliorate symptoms and shorten infection.
Don't be an idiot.
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
If there's a 68% chance that you are one of the people who won't get sick or a 68% chance that you are in the group who absolutely won't get sick, if you prefer that wording, and thus a 42% chance that you are in the group that absolutely will get sick, then a normal speaker of English would indeed be correct to say that there's a 68% chance you won't get sick. Your distinction is correct, but it doesn't change the way one has to think about the issue, unless one already knows which group one is in.
32%?
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
If there's a 68% chance that you are one of the people who won't get sick or a 68% chance that you are in the group who absolutely won't get sick, if you prefer that wording, and thus a 42% chance that you are in the group that absolutely will get sick, then a normal speaker of English would indeed be correct to say that there's a 68% chance you won't get sick. Your distinction is correct, but it doesn't change the way one has to think about the issue, unless one already knows which group one is in.originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Thread drift back to topic.
Question for the epidemiology types hereabouts: Just spoke to a work-fellow who says he gets the shot every year and every year it makes him sick with the flu. He has no egg allergy. Should he stop taking the shot? What does the CDC recommend for people whose immune systems fail to respond correctly? Is he a child-murderer if he doesn't take it?
Self report fail.
Maybe he gets sick, maybe not. The shot is 100% not giving him the flu. He should wash his hands more.
To add some more anecdotes, the two people who did not get vaccinated in my office both got sick.
A little thing to remember. If you get the shot, there isn't a 68% chance you won't get sick. There is either a 100% chance or a 0% chance. If you do get sick, then the shot may ameliorate symptoms and shorten infection.
Don't be an idiot.
Well, the probability for any individual is 0 or 1. 68% only comes into play when calculating the costs, in lieu of knowledge of group.
Actually, that isn't how one ought to make decisions under uncertainty.
You look at the probability of an event and the cost. It really is a pretty cut and dried case of rational = yes, irrational = no.
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
There is an adultery plot (there is also a marriage plot), in the sense of a commonly used and recognized set of events with a certain set of thematic concerns, that is important to 19th century literature (and is essentially different from the courtly love plot, of which Tristan and Iseult was an example). It was at least enough of a cliché when Nabokov--who taught 19th century fiction at Cornell--was writing so that there had been numbers of critical works on it, though not yet Tony Tanner's I don't think.
I read "the marriage plot" during my all-too-short retirement. I liked it better than his previous novel.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
I'm not sure what you mean that 68% comes in when calculating the cost. If it is the case that 68% of people who get the shot don't get the flu, then without any other knowledge of what will put one in one group or another, one's chances of not getting the flu if one gets a shot are 68%. If 68% represents 68% of something else, I don't know what the figure is even doing here.
The argument with regard to one's actual chances being either 0 or 1 I've heard deployed to argue that there's no such thing as probability. I do not take you to be arguing that. I just take you to be obfuscating in favor of a position that doesn't need such obfuscation but doesn't merit such rhetoric.
The argument with regard to one's actual chances being either 0 or 1 I've heard deployed to argue that there's no such thing as probability. I do not take you to be arguing that. I just take you to be obfuscating in favor of a position that doesn't need such obfuscation but doesn't merit such rhetoric.