no one is going to benefit from a pissing contest, are they? Booth's back channel comments represent perhaps the most petty elements of academe, and at the same time, in my opinion, Bob Scheetz' posts are aggravatingly cryptic and all too Pound-like. But it would probably be wrong to assume that those back channel comments represent the full character of Booth, just as it would be difficult to deny many of the intelligent observations to be found in Scheetz' cryptic diatribes.  
    Let's just let everyone pose as they will, and go onward to the next point of contention, which is likely to be found not too far up the road anyway.
 
Robert E Kibler, PhD
English and Humanities
Valley City State University
[log in to unmask]
701-845-7108
 
-----------------------------------------------
 "Pay no attention to names. Investigate 
into the reasons things are as they are."
    Chu Hsi, The Great Synthesis, 3:27b
 
>>> bob scheetz <[log in to unmask]> 01/22 5:05 PM >>>
christopher,
     cutting thru yer ridiculus pose,
itz all too clear...and you can't know how much
it pains me to say it,
i'm the only one on the list making arguments,
...pointed and lucid argumnts, about the poetry.
 
but in all seriousness i would really like to know
if yer offended by my posts,
what in the hell could possibly interest you about ep?
 
yerz,
bob
 
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Booth, Christopher <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Friday, January 21, 2000 4:28 PM
Subject: Re: Thanks and query
 
 
>Hi, Joe:
>
>Your patience in responding to the heated Scheetz is admirable. I find him
>empty and full of himself and a material of which his persona seems
>redolant.
>
>He hasn't actually said anything about Pound or poetry in his many posts.
He
>spammed the TSE list too for a while (I haven't been following their posts
>for a good while now, so he may be posting there yet), and when people on
>that list criticised the inarticulacy of his posts and accused him of being
>unclear in his messages and compared them to Pound's obscurity and
>ideosyncratic spellings, etc., I expected to find him later turning up on
>the EP list.
>
>Lo.
>
>Perhaps that's how he heard of Pound....
>
>Your last two paragraphs very neatly shot down his recent blather, though I
>don't expect THAT to be felt.
>
>Anyway, a good response, and a measured and patient.
>
>Chris
>
>> ----------
>> From:         Joe Brennan
>> Reply To:     Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
>> Sent:         Friday, January 21, 2000 9:27 AM
>> To:   [log in to unmask] 
>> Subject:      Re: Thanks and query
>>
>> In a message dated 01/20/2000 11:23:36 PM Eastern Standard Time,
>> [log in to unmask] writes:
>>
>> << Erik,
>>       Regarding typewriters, i.e. technology's formal effect
>>  on "writing", there's Nietzsche's famous saying that he
>>  philosophized "with a hammer;" punning on the mechanism
>>  of the typewriter, but meaning the iconoclastic force of his exposition.
>>
>>  So... The animistic notion of technology is really just
>>  a old red-herring, arising from the bourgeois
>>  fetishizing of technology, trotted out biennially by
>>  the latest photogenic "intellectual sex-pot" like McLuhan.
>>  There is no essential effect.
>> >>
>>
>> well, there is certainly not this effect, but outside of such a loaded
>> observation, there is certainly some effect, which is probably not
>> generalizable from person to person, as regards both the influence or the
>> extent of that influence.
>>
>> << Similarly, the question regarding the influence of Pound's
>>  Cantos,  seems also to imply a suspect notion of literary influence:
>>  bourgeois reification, copyright, of that (the platonic)
>>  which can't be commodified.  And, where it occurs,
>>  (as in say, Browning's influence of Pound) this type of influence
>>  is just trivial, footnote-ish stuff. >>
>>
>> again, the issue of influence can't be brushed off so easily, although
the
>> exact extent of such influence is probably, in most instances, impossible
>> to
>> gauge.  however, one can certainly understand the "commodification"
>> objection
>> to the use of influence in critical exegesis, especially in those
>> instances
>> where the "influence" is held to be decisive, usually to support some
>> (admittedly trivial) overarching perspective.
>>
>>
>>  The essence of the Cantos is, as we say today, deconstruction;
>>  and its thematic well as stylistic is the
>>  logically necessary outcome of an attempt at
>>  radical platonic exposition,
>>  the laying open human truth
>>  sans embellishment (the hallowed paltry dodges,
>>  metaphysical and  rhetorical); that's to say, an
>>  anti-art art...the diabolical inversion of "art pour l'art,"
>>  or nihil-ation.
>>
>>  But, having once seen this, the inexorable hermeneutical
>>  progression is to thematize, metaforize, totalize,
>>  ...nso on, IT ("deconstruction");
>>  which, as we used to say, is the box we're in today,
>>  "the wind which will not subside."
>>  The Cantos poetizes the wind which we all feel.
>>  ...'n everbody's doin it, no?
>>  So do we more properly speak of the influence
>>  of The Cantos or the zietgiest [the spirit of the times]?
>>
>> this is true among literary critics, but what of those who engage the
>> method
>> of the cantos at the level of investigation and presentation -- that is,
>> of
>> poets actually engaging this thematic and this stylistic in their poetic
>> expression?
>>
>>  What could literary influence possibly mean here?
>>  ...simply running on interminably and incomprehensibly
>>  in vers libre about nothing?
>>  ...Jerry Seinfeld?
>>  don't know?
>>
>> the fallacy here stems from the desire to put everyone into the same bag
>> of
>> hot air.  everyone is not a critic, nor does every critic approach the
>> cantos
>> at the level of deconstruction, nor does every act of deconstruction
>> reflect
>> the same parts.
>>
>> joe brennan
>>
>>
>>  thanks
>>  bob
>>   >>
>>