Amen.
On 21/01/2008, Joseph Duemer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> All true, Dom. Also, you just know that a critic who can write, "Hill
> taxes
> the reader to buy a good library, or — in these fallen days — sail the
> traitorous Internet between the lies of Scylla and the damned lies of
> Charybdis. A reader must want to thumb through dusty pages, or dustier Web
> pages..." is full of shit.
>
> jd
>
> On Jan 20, 2008 3:42 PM, Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > "Hill has made brutally plain that the common reader is of no interest
> to
> > him"
> >
> > This is quite significantly false. I'm afraid I don't have a copy of
> > the earlier Clutag "Treatise of Civil Power" - now that I'm not trying
> > to build an academic career by driving my horse and my cart over the
> > bones of Hill's oeuvre, I'm not quite the completist I once was. I do
> > have the Penguin volume, however,which I think is very good and which
> > says a few things about honouring the intelligence of "the common
> > reader" (whom Hill in a recent radio interview referred to as "a
> > natural aristocrat of the spirit", cribbing I think from Lawrence)
> > that I wonder at Logan's simply ignoring in this fashion.
> >
> > There are two things Hill's current critics habitually do that I find
> > particularly tiresome. One is moral exhibitionism, exhorting the
> > reader to imitate the critic's efforts at decoding, say, _Speech!
> > Speech!_ as if so doing might somehow make you a better person (like,
> > e.g., your humble critic). The other is making a big fuss about the
> > obscurity of his references, the normal method being to pick a couple
> > of especially obscure ones and explicate them just to make the point
> > about how terribly erudite and perspicacious one needs to be to handle
> > this stuff (so unless you're as clever as me, dear reader, you might
> > as well not bother). I simply don't think that's true; I think Hill's
> > verse does most of its real work at some distance from its points of
> > departure, and tracing the path back to the latter is an optional
> > exercise: it depends on whether the poem itself makes you curious
> > about its field of reference, and sucks you in. Reading Hill's poems
> > has at times prompted me to investigate all sorts of recondite areas,
> > and that has been one of the pleasures of them, but they are
> > emphatically not calling for some sort of ideal reader who has read
> > everything Hill has read and thought everything he has thought about
> > it.
> >
> > Dominic
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Joseph Duemer
> Professor of Humanities
> Clarkson University
> [sharpsand.net]
>
--
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aburke/
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