SB wrote an EDNote where he asks "that further buttals and rebuttals anent B.Boyd's piece pass the Nabocentric litmus test."

Fearing to fail the Nabocentric litmus test but, as I hope, still before our list, like Modern Literature as it seems, becomes a new scientific discipline, I hasten to bring up Italo Calvino's ( Numbers in the Dark, If on a Winters Night a Traveler) views about the new relationship between author and reader.
Contrary to many Nabocentrics for whom no man is an island without a palmtree gnomon rising smack in the centre ( one of the images that describe an insular vicious circle found in "The Enchanter" - NB: this item is to pass the NC-Litmus test ), Calvino "has himself stated that the author is of less importance than either his work or its audience. His assertion that good literature may someday be produced by a machine, but that a human reader, with all the primeval memories of the race, is necessary to give the work transcendence, is consistent with his notion that fable precedes myth. The storyteller may be mechanical, and for this reason many fables fail to transcend the ordinary, but every once in a while the tale takes the reader into a place where the taboos must be reordered, and here the fable ascends to mythic status." 

In agreement with Vic Perry [ "Art, happily, demands neither usefulness nor correctness, although many works of art are useful and many are correct. But never all, and therein
lies the lasting appeal. Biology demands "success" while art does not. Art can be built with good ideas and bad ideas, and more to the point, ideas do not answer to flesh just because they are produced by flesh."] I add my humble opinion that Art will only remain Art while human readers continue to defy normative patternings and stay closer to Myth than to Science. Jansy Mello