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----- Original Message ----- From: "MJ Walker" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 5:49 AM Subject: Re: "I'll Huff and I'll Puff" > First reactions to this: both intense & laid-back, it's allegorical itself > in a suggestive, unfixed way. It makes me think of Canetti (*Die > Blendung*) and Rilke (the 10th Duinese Elegy) without actually referring > to them, yes, and Zarathustra too: that is, it has a long historical > perspective, while retaining your usual suggestion of alternative reality. > Something is breaking down - a possible entente, but the breakdown may be > the condition of the poem. Its sadness arises from the implications of the > beginning, but the occasion itself is couched in terms of pleasing > asperity. I like this very much, Fred - sometimes your long ones lose me, > but that's my loss, not yours. Tremendously (the word is advised) > concentrated & thought-provoking. Those walls are really "load-bearing". > Martin > P.S. I always have to correct the apostrophes in your texts - it's very > difficult to read something with so many question marks all over the > place. Don't you have Plain Text? M.J. -- I PUT it in Plain Text!! If I don't they are transmitted double-spaced. I don't know what's wrong -- maybe because the original text is in my usual Century Gothic 12-point? --- Glad you liked this. The Tenth Duino was a huge formative influence on me when I was 21, in '67. Sitting in a dark apartment on northside Berkeley reading it, then trying almost instantly (and quite unsuccessfully) to imitate it. --- At one level I see the fool with the backpack, trying to barge in, as religious fundamentalism, right-wing ideologues; at another in terms of Nietzsche's "slave revolt"; and at deeper levels as something integral to creativity (and even to "taste"). Kafka, from the Zurau Aphorisms: "From the true opponent, a limitless courage flows into you."