A relative outsider with no axe to grind, I am impelled to comment on the
recent "Lind-wurm" thread (the dragon of formalism) and its turn to the
aggrieved putdown in your last mail, Kent: I don't know whether it is
Candice's remit to "moderate" discussions on the list, but it is very much a
moot point whether she "handled the affair quite badly" ~ that sounds like
bossy bluster to me, as does all the affronted talk of "scorched earth",
"perpetrator", "ad hominems" (a completely misapplication of the term, odd
in one who deals with language...) etc etc pp. Candice's "hypersensitivity
to criticism is legion by now" ~ what is it, some kind of self-replicating
demon? It seems to me that she has evinced little tendency to
hypersensitivity during the time I have been hanging around. "Please don't
try to start something": I thought YOU had started something, but in any
case the tone of this last mail in its self-righteous and insinuating
("poetry, which is where most people have for the most part been", Candice
by implication not) dressing down is pretty insufferable.
I don't think that anyone with any sense cares a falaffel about Lind's hazy,
ill-informed vituperations, but if you're all that upset about the public
resonance he and his kind have, why not write a modern _Dunciad_ in mock
heroic couplets and slay the dragon with his own weapons in some publication
with rather more diffusion than poetryetc?
