Remarkl
2 min readDec 27, 2020

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Back in the Dark Time, before Ms. Bosch was born, there was a thing called a Listserv. Listservs were email groups, self-selected recipients of mail from each other about the subject to which the listserv was devoted.

The only listserv in which I participated was called Philosophy and Literature. Record of it has pretty much disappeared, as listservs were not searchable by the web. You can, however, still find the user's guide on-line, https://www.andreas.com/phil-lit/ ;young people may find it interesting in a museum-y sort of way. One of the two administrators, David Meyers, passed away in 2014, but the list itself had decayed, mostly, in my view, because users could not resist bringing politics into the space. Plus ca change...

Anyway, we spent years on Phil-lit discussing the intersection of its eponymous disciplines, and to this day, I tend to weave literary references into my public posts. https://remarklj.medium.com/the-trumpman-show-76691f08f64d A post I did on the relationship between beauty and truth survived for a while on the website of a teacher who participated in the group, but he has since taken it down.

The founder of Phil-Lit was Denis Dutton, who also founded Arts and Letters Daily, an invaluable resource for the curious reader. https://aldaily.com/ Denis, who died in 2010, also created the Phil-Lit "Bad Writing Contest," certainly an attempt to "reconcile" literature and philosophy by noting some of the less decipherable bits of philosophic writing. He was especially fond of the post-moderns, who have a way of using more words per useful idea than any other school of (for lack of a better word) thought. http://www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm

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Remarkl
Remarkl

Written by Remarkl

Self-description is not privileged.

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