Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

whatever chaotic way) offer the ability to accumulate insight at some social
level; they are what can get us beyond M. Thatcher’s "no society, just
individuals" position.
4. What I say in point 3 is intended to make you understand that what I say in
point 2 is true.
5. I’ve been fired from positions both academic and in commerce, in both cases
(repeatedly, by the way) for the same reason, for having an idea. In commerce,
at least usually, it was because the idea didn’t work. In the academy? Just for
having an idea.
6. When I quoted Hugh of St. Victor on exile, it was not so that you (dear
reader) should have your consciousness perfected by the right position, but that
you might take in and "experimentally" share a response. Again, the goal is to
accumulate and distribute some largest possible sense of human response.
Nothing is more foolish than to spend one’s days distinguishing between on the
one hand vulgar marxism and on the other hand a marxism appropriate to the
changes in the organization of capitol. None of us can know at all what the
structure of capitol is. For one thing we are part of it, for another only a
bounded thing can be "analyzed" (but, see above), and it is not that. And,
finally, why do we wish to constrain the mind to appropriate response, when it
is the mind that makes that world of capitol. Make something else.
7. I now work for myself. That’s what I learned. If anyone would pay me, I’d
teach for myself (I do seem to know a great deal; drop over some time - you
probably know a lot too), but they don’t so instead packet filtering routers,
virtual circuits, negotiation, managing payables and receivables, closing
complex deals, usw. are my daily fun, and I do mean that. They call for no
analysis. James, at least so I think, knows about such devices too. Having
known each other for going on 2 decades, you might wonder why we’ve never
worked together.
8. Grad student, quit school. But, I can’t tell whether Steve Evans or Patrick
Phillips or Jeffrey Timmons or Eric Pape or others (very few women, very little
evidence of a point of view of color, very little sense of a specifically Jewish
pov, very little in any sense specific to anything whatever, informed by
anything not on the other guy, yeh guy’s reading list. If you are on faculties,
quit. Anyway, Ron’s right; your industry is heading for a collapse, it has lost all
justification.