perpetuating this thread

thefool75 <*no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com*> · Fri, 02 Jul 2004 16:38:15 -0000

to avoid doing the above I'm not going to go into a rewrite -- but 
Jerry, you misunderstood my post...read it in light of the previous 
one by Adelman...I wasn't talking about Nats tossups or anything of 
the kind (and by "experience" I didn't mean "knowledge" which you can 
readily gather by referencing the previous post)

btw, one of my two complaints with the ACF Nats editing was what they 
did to my GW tossup -- they added the "surveyor" clue way too early 
in the question (heck, I probably learned that about Washington in 
first grade) (the other was their adding a giveaway to the opening of 
my "Hittites" tossup -- and people were buzzing on it).

two people in the room both knowing the first clue (unless we have 
Subash and Yaphe in the same room, etc.) is not a good thing.  I've 
noticed a weird tendency in some packet writing for the first clue to 
apparently be deliberately less obscure than the second or third clue.

Under no rationale is Heine obscure.  Though I'll grant that 
obscurity can be awfully difficult to define...there are plenty of 
pieces that are familiar to anyone who attends classical concerts on 
a regular basis that are generally considered to obscure for qb 
tossups (like Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs).  Art is full of 
similar examples.  In Germany, Kleist is genuinely a household name, 
commensurate to Mann and second only to Goethe...I'll grant that 
outside of German lit fans and QB'ers, he's not well-known in the US 
(although apparently Doctorow is a fan)...on the other hand, Hesse is 
barely read in Germany these days but is obviously oft read here.  
For contemporary novels apparently too obscure for qb, consider White 
Teeth or Mating -- yet both are readily familiar to the non-qb type 
who regularly reads the NY Times Book Review.  Other than an 
Amsterdam tossup, I've never seen Ian McEwan come up -- but under 
virtually any calculus, he is not obscure in the least...(I'm 
actually fine with a moratorium on contemporary lit altogether, but 
plenty of lesser writers such as Kingston show up all the time).  

ok, I'll shut up now....