>
>Oy vey. Sure, you can't have irony without something to bounce off of, and
>that something has to be local and arch-familiar otherwise it doesn't work.
So why do you assume that he was beung purely ironic?
>But the melancholy, angry, ironic moods Hendrix was able to evoke argued
>for the reality of historical betrayal: "the rocket's red glare, the bombs
>bursting in air" fade into a police siren.
Did I somehow fail to acknowledge that he was also being ironic? J, this is tiresome, I expect to have to explain obvious points that I actually made in so many words, but not to you.
As for Blake, do you
>really
>think that when he suggested we "build Jerusalem in England's green and
>pleasant land" he meant ..."and nowhere else"?
And where did you get that from what I wrote? But Blake wasn't a rootless cosmopolitan. He was aggressively English,w ithout being the least little bit John Bullish about it. To counter Yoshie's impliedsmal at my own patriotism, for which I invoked, as a referent, Brecht's German patriotism, while she quoted some of his anti-American tirades (he didn't like it here, in part because he was very European in general and Geramn in particular), see Blakes America, with its marvelous hymn to the freedom of the salve. Who of course was anything but free when Blake composed America, I will say, jsut to avert someone's pointing out this obvious fact that Blake knew and I do to. But the poem was called America: A Prophesy.
He built from what he
>knew
>(England) to an as yet undreamed possibility, when we are free from the
>"mind-forged manacles" -- patriotism being one kind of manacle.
One kind of patriotism being one kind of manacle. Blake would have regarded with horror a world where we had no particular connection top anywhere. That he would seen as "Newtonian."
>
>I understand what it means to struggle for justice, freedom, consciousness.
>What I don't understand is how these come to be equated with the interests
>of one particular country.
>
And you mention this to me because? Have I ever said anything to you that suggests that I think such a thing?
jks
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