Listers,
Apologies if this or something like it shows up twice. It's Labor Day in
the US. So we'll try, try again etc...



--On Sunday, August 31, 2003 5:13 PM -0500 Carrol Cox <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>>   I just assumed he was making a joke; a good one.
>>
>>  Yrs.
>>  Ken
>
> Yes, it was a good one, but also (probably) one not appreciated by his
> interlocutor at the time, since she was the butt of it.


  Why do you speculate she didn't appreciate it? There is nothing in what
was quoted to remotely come to that conclusion as probable. How is she the
butt of it? She is the horror? That wasn't the implication, was it? How, at
this distance, as you've noted, is there any way to determine the context
of the conversation? I think you like to see Eliot in a negative light,
Carrol. And, of course, not being unlike the rest of us, he offers
opportunity. But just because Auden or Jacek is taken aback by the insight
offered, is this one of them? The remark, at any rate, is consistent with
some things similarly said in the essays and certainly the poetry. What
lies below is what's on Eliot's mind. What point in continuing to hang
around with him if we do not find that congenial?

Laboriously yours,
Ken

> Or do we assume
> the woman herself was supposed to catch the allusion and be amused
> _with_ Eliot?

  One can be "amused" without catching the allusion.
>
>>
>>  PS Can't speak for cabbage, but am glad someone can.
>
> Pound somewhere sneers at the cheap effect that can be achieved by
> throwing any rotten cabbage on any silk sofa, or something of that sort.
> He give a more precise image in Canto VII:
>
>         "Beer-bottle on the statue's pediment!
> "That, Fritz, is the era, to-day against the past,
> "Contemporary."

 Hurray for Uncle Ez: Fritz weht der wind,
                            zum Cocktailbeteiligten