h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest."
Jane Austen - Mansfield Park.

I have been following the Great Intelligence Kerfuffle with stunned amazement. One abandoned thread on Peer Review, one protest thread on Peer Review, postings of explanatory articles, threads of recrimination and justification spiralling outwards...where will it all end?

Smile practice time!

Hi, Azara:

"Where will it all end?"

Perhaps it won't. To end, there would need
to be some way of getting closure.

Behavioral scientists have suggested that
the act of expelling a member from a group
tends to produce anxiety among the remaining
members even if they supported the expulsion.

I am completely unfamiliar with the way the
BBC does business. For all I know, they are
happy with the way Mark and the others have
handled things. Generally, they would only
have a problem if Mark had not followed
the rules they set down.

Perhaps things will quiet down somewhat
in the late Autumn. I have always found
that tempers are temperature-sensitive.
Things that seemed worth fighting about in
July or August no longer seem so in January.

All the best,
Paul H

Every time things seem to quieten down, something happens to stir the whole matter up again. I have to say that apart from my fateful 'yikes' post, I have gone back to being an observer, and of course to working on my own entries.

I see that you have referenced a couple of my opera entries in your 'Musical Play' project. Thank you! When I saw that your project would deal with the musical play from the middle ages onwards, I was wondering how you would deal with the demarcation between the musical play and opera - I think you have done it very well. I would agree that singspiels and ballad operas are very borderline, and belong just as much in the history of the musical play as in the history of opera. I'm not quite so sure of the 'emotional response' part - I think a lot of the strength of the French, Italian and German opera traditions is that they evoked this same direct response in their audience. After all, it was an opera that set off the Belgian revolution in the 1830s - not many musicals have had that much of a response!

Anyway, I think your project looks very promising. I'm not well enough up in the musical tradition to give you any help with it, but if you want a general opinion on anything, just let me know!

Azara

Thanks.

The last two decades of the 20th century
will be the hardest period to write about,
what with so much recycling of stories that
were already getting long in the tooth--
did the world need another take on Phantom
of the opera? Also, I wasn't paying as much
attention.
Ah, well.