MDDM Ch. 72 Dixon and the slave driver

[Terrance]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> >speaking only of the text now and your personal reading of it,
> 
> The text doesn't exist apart from my reading of it.

Thank you,  Doug. I've been waiting for you to admit that this is your
position.  
Now that you have, all's cool and summery. I'm sure you are not the only
one on this list that holds this position. There are some of us willing
to admit it as one of many  possible positions along a pluralistic
spectrum. 

Ever heard of "Affective Fallacy"? 

I have quite a few colleagues who read al ot of political stuff. When
they were younger men and women they read literature a bit, but now they
do so only once in a blue.  I've noticed that they tend to react with
great Emotion to any kind of text. Also, one of the reasons I can't
stand to read Counter punch  or any of that other stuff you post is that
these colleagues of mine fill my ears with that stuff every time we go
out for a drink. It's like listening to a bunch of Wall Street analysts
on a Monday morning, they come into work full of the talk they picked up
reading all the financial periodicals over the weekend and in the papers
and on the tape since trading opened in Japan. All the same jargon, the
same jokes, the same metaphors, analogies, and so on. 

The idea or the premise that the book, M&D or a the Aeneid, is an
"object" has been challenged by recent lit-crit theory. 


Turning and turning in the critics gyre
the mirror walks the type of punctuated,
pale fire
Surely some postmodern parody is at hand
and what fragmented alienation 
her tower of tapestries crumbled and torn
slothfully slouches on the couch forlorn? 

Aghghgh metriks! 

Now he is scattered among the hundred 
cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar
affections;
To find his happiness in another kind
of wood
And be punished under a foreign code
of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.