At 08:40 AM 8/25/99 -0500, Robert Kibler wrote:
>I wonder if Pound would see his Cantos as a work to comfort during those
>certain times late in the night, far from home?
 
Hrmm... my little offhand comment seems to have provoked reams of
rhetoric on the comforting-ness (or not) of the Cantos.  I should
point out that what I actually said was
 
 I wonder what proportion of this list's
 readers comprises those, like me, who read EP only for pleasure and who
 find the Cantos, in particular, the only pages that will serve the special
 needs of certain times late in the night or far from home.>>
 
So I didn't actually use the c-word, and I'm not sure that comfort was
really what I meant; but empirically the Cantos seem to make their way
into my travel bag, and into late-night repertoire, disproportionately
often.   I'll mostly decline to provide exegesis on my own email, except
to note that a familiar pleasure is a comfort indeed.  Beauty may be
difficult, but then... anyhow, the original footless claim that EP was was
primarily EngLit fodder certainly deserved the flak it got, not
just from me.  And further, he asked, provocatively, why should the
literary academy waste its time on any work that is not a source of
pleasure?  I can say those kinds of things because I'm a semiliterate
computer programmer. -T.