Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
>
> Tell me, Carrol, to whom to you conform? Or is the tragedy that
> there's no one around for you to conform to?
>
Well not a tragedy in itself but probably reflective of tragedy. This sent me back to my dissertation (written at a time when I would have called someone crazy if they suggested I might become a marxist). It's as vapid as most dissertations, but one passage I could write today:
He [Austen Warren] attempts to establish two propositions concerning the _Essay_. (1) "In the Second and Third Parts . . .his indebtedness is only for occasional phrases; his plan . . . and his substance are his own" (p. 37). (2) While the _Essay_ is "distinctly and confessedly not a new system" (p. 1), neither is it mere parroting of others ("unoriginal" in some pejorative sense) in so far as Pope had made its doctrines his own.
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Any defense of Pope's originality obviously becomes a re-definition of the concept itself, and that re-definition, becomes an exposition of the place of the concept in Pope's own poetic theory. The latter is a topic both of more intrinsic interest than that of Pope's originality as a critic (we aree more interested in a critic's rightness than in his newness). . . .
Those two frequent quotations I throw in, Mao's if you don't hit it, Lenin's anarchy the price the working class pays stick in my memory because they crystalized for me my own experience in the '60s. They made the point much better than any image I can invent, so why should I not quote them. I wish I had read some Lenin by the time I had a fucking all-night debate with the weatherman Jeff Jones in which he convinced half the local SDS chapter that they were opportunista for supporting the strike of the ISU cooks and janitors. I would have been able to say with some precision what I only stumblingly said that night.
Carrol