The examples of Celine and Lou Harrison speaks to my point that our "quiz bowl" knowledge is sometimes severely skewed from most other arguable measurements of importance or greatness. In the case of Celine: William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac considered him a god, going so far as to take a pilgrimage of sorts to meet him. Chuck Bukowski and Kurt Vonnegut both paid tribute to him inside their books. Not to mention that the books themselves are excellent, and appeal the the college-age reader much more than most authors we ask about. Go to amazon.com and read the reviews under "Journey to the End of the Night" and you'll find I'm not the only person who thinks so. In the case of Lou Harrison: I had a roommate in Madison who was the modern classical DJ at the community radio station, and when I asked him who the most important composer still living in the was, he had a hard time deciding: Phillip Glass or Lou Harrison. Now, considering how much he has permeated pop culture, I'm not surprised that Glass comes up often to Harrisons' never, but compare him to say, John Adams (who comes up soley because "Nixon in China" is easy to remember and because his name is John Adams) or to the fact that John Cage comes up in nearly every tournament, you start to wonder. I'm not asserting that these people should come up often, only that in terms of being important and/or interesting they meet every criteria we could purport to use to sort the "askable" from the "unaskable" other than how often they're asked about. Were we basing questions on college curriculums, the game would look much different than it does now. Were we basing it on what people were likely to learn about in their day-to-day life, it would look completely foreign. I've been puzzling for nearly ten years as to what makes a quiz-game-worthy question and what doesn't, and I'm still unsure. Jer
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