Date: Fri, 7 Nov 1997 20:15:35 -0500
From: George Trail <gtrail-AT-UH.EDU>
Subject: Re: PLC: 2b: After Irene Hossack


[Brackets, per usual, g]
>>
I wrote:
What I think I can do is bring willing people into a
>> relationship with a text which they could only haphazardly accomplish
>> otherwise. Those people can benefit from the experience of my life in
>> the
>> presence of these texts, and can learn to "hear" the voice(s)
>> emenating
>> from the printed page center crowded.
You responded:
>I can't see that as specific to poetry. I feel the same when I teach
>Kant to my students. Only Kant's style is one of the uggliest in the
>history of human writing.
[I agree utterly. I say as qualifier, I read little German (enough to pass
the doctoral exam requiring competence in two languages beyond the
native--a really silly shit idea) but from that little I am willing to
subscribe to the idea that I.K. was created by his translators--which
advances my notion that philsophy follows lit, rather than leads it. ]


You cite my:
 Nevertheless, I am pretty certain that "those
>people can benefit from the experience of my life in the presence of
>these texts, and can learn to "hear" the voice(s) emenating from the
>printed page center crowded"
and comment:.

>What you're talking about, I think, is not poetry and its compelling
>extasies. It is about teaching and making love, in a way, to one's own
>students.

[Its awful to bust in here. But its more than that.]

Hopefully they can indeed share the pleasure we have reading
>things to them, teaching things to them, and -- I'm very sincere about
>that -- actually loving them. All of them. During the precise course of
>the lecture. No less, no more.

[I was much taken with Reg's post on food. I have had similar experiences,
some of which were made possible by filter crackers like cannibus sativa,
or , in relxed circumstnces by, what did Burton render it as, "a loaf of
bread, a jug of wine, and thou"]?

g




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