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31 October 2004. Geof Huth replied to yesterday's blog entry as follows: |
Bob, Lots of disagreements with your responses, but no need to go into them in detail. I'll note, however, that your response to the Bulwer-Lytton comment misses the point by addressing the rationality of the sentence, rather than the effectiveness of it. That is how rationality can work against us.
Oh, and Bennett is famous enough now to either catch on and be considered great or to disappear into nothingness or to be remembered as a remarkable avant-gardist. We can do what we want, and occasionally--I grant you--an individual can effect a mass change of opinion. But that is exceedingly rare. Essentially, the individual as an individual is meaningless in a process of massessment.
Geof
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One comeback to Geof is this quotation from the Internet concerning Edward FitzGerald: "His masterpiece, a translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, appeared anonymously in 1859 and passed unnoticed until Dante Gabriel Rossetti made it famous." But it's probable that if Rossetti (and then Swinburne) hadn't publicized Fitzgerald's translation, someone else would have. Massessment is complex, and the importance of any given individual may be small, in most cases, but I can't see how it can possibly work if no individual individually fights for that which he wants granted high cultural status. Geof seems to be saying that critics are irrelevant. I wonder how he thinks massessment works. What happens to a work after being published (which has to be considered a loud expression of support for the body of work by the individual publishing it)? Does it just sit somewhere until enough people have passed it and massessment materializes out of thin air--regardless of what has been said about the body of work?
I must add that my response to the Bulwer-Lytton comment absolutely connects with my point, which was that the Bulwer-Lytton sentence was not ridiculous, something determinable, it seems to me, only by judging "the rationality of the sentence." To assume that I was making a full-scale evaluation of the sentence demonstrates how irrationality can work against someone. I consider the sentence, incidentally, quite effective, as well as not ridiculous. It is succinct, clear and presents a vivid background to whatever is going on. It's not original nor brilliantly poetic, but more than passable for what it is intended to do.
Ed Conti also commented on my entry about major poets. He seemed to want define a poet as major if he is in the top hundred poets of a century. That would make Hecht a mojor poet, in his view. But I don't care how a poet compares to others of his time, only how good he is. So I would grant the title of major poet to the top ten thousand poets of a time if they all qualified, and to none, if none did.
Now back to the topic Geof and I are arguing, whether an individual can affect massessment. My copy of PowerPoint arrived yesterday afternoon and I installed it a few hours later. No instructions arrived with it, nor does it seem to include any kind of tutorial, so it took me a while before I could figure out how to do anything with it. Now, however, I have three "slides" of a slide show done and have run the show on my computer. The way it works is you click "view the show." Slide one appears, in the case of my show, a title. Then by clicking "enter" you click through the slides you have one by one. Big deal? It would seem so, but I'm feeling like king of the universe because I can do it. All the great things I'll now be able to do!
A simple one would be to collect all my mathemaku, in order, on a CD as a slide show, with texts commenting on each. What I'm really excited about, though, is making presentations for teachers. An introduction to visual poetry, for sure--but also appreciations of famous poems. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" is the first I thought of. I have several ideas as to what I might do to it by using each line, or part of each line, or even each word, as a slide, with comments--and (the biggest yow) doing something visio-poetic to each slide.
Believe it or not, I truly believe I can make big bucks doing these shows. I picture myself trying them out where I sub, and at my friend Carol Mahler's classes for home-taught students (where I will be doing two workshops in a couple of weeks and now hope to try my very first PowerPoint presentations at), then trying to sell copies locally, and hope word-of-mouth gets me other buyers in Florida, and then in the country at large.
Yeah, I've had big thoughts like these many times in my life, and not one came true. Oh, well, one thing I'm sure of is that I will enjoy making these presentations.
Oh, this relates to the debate twixt Geof and me because I expect to make presentations that will help persuade people of the value of visual poetry and make a significant contribution as an individual to its final massessment--and to the massessment of my own poems.
Yow!
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