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On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, John Kinsella wrote: > R I C said: >And as for the "well-why-shouldn't-he-if-he-can-get-away-with-it" >defence, it stinks. > >From Tracy: > Why? For some (setting aside Motion's personal situation, which I > still believe is his own business), getting paid *what they can* for a > reading, a workshop, whatever, is a matter of survival. Not all poets > have secure jobs or access to social security... - well, my argument isn't with the principle of poets getting paid - I hope that's clear - but with the application of a market-driven (and therefore narrowing) scale of payments. But let's NOT set aside Motion's own business (as it were), let's recognise it as being not a one-off, but something that happens over and over again. It's precisely the laissez-faire attitude to his (and others) professorial greed which exacerbates the plight of poets without jobs or ss - who have indeed a right to be paid fairly, as you say. The *what they can* which you asterisk is depleted to a series of isolated puddles all the time by the fiscal drainage-system described earlier. Don't ask me what I propose to DO about this imbalance, but, let's not pretend it ain't there. signed, old world ecosocialist %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%