How is anything written by Gil Brewer "peripheral" to our discussion? Brewer is a major contributor to the genres the list is built on, so anything he wrote is of interest in filling out our picture of him as a writer, no different from David Goodis's air warfare stories, Fredric Brown's horror or sci-fi writing, various authors' work in the western field, etc, all of which have been discussed here. As has the pseudonymous soft porn work of Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake and others. So Brewer's work in this genre is absolutely on topic as far as I'm concerned.
Now as for the quotations, anyone who might be offended was given fair warning about their graphicness. And personally, I found the quotations quite interesting. I once heard Westlake refer to his works in this area as "euphemism books," since, paraphrasing him, the job was to get as close as possible to the real subject without using certain words. Of course, he was writing in the early '60s. I would hazard a guess that Brewer was writing after the 1966 reversal of the obscenity ruling against Naked Lunch, as his description is far more graphic and specific than Westlake's or Block's. And I would not be able to make that comparison without the actual quotes.
So I would definitely vote that discussion of the books and the excerpts from them are entirely appropriate here.
Mark
> To: rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
> From: foxbrick@yahoo.com
> Date: Sun, 30 May 2010 01:08:28 +0000
> Subject: RARA-AVIS: Admin: Well, these Brewer openings are pretty peripheral to Rara-Avis's subject
>
> So, I'd like to know if anyone's offended or otherwise feels that this goes beyond the pale of our remit here.
>
> It is rather peripheral, at best, and could be delivered offlist, but I'm not offended myself...but am curious about a general sense of the membership here.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Todd Mason, co-conductor, Rara-Avis.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 30 May 2010 EDT