[Milton-L] RE: Harold's delightful comment

[Watt, James]

Dear Harold:

I got many laffs out of your delightful post. In the delightful book CONVERSATIONS WITH JOSEPH BRODSKY, the laureate comments
on the opportunistic shifts taking place amongst the intelligentsia in the former Soviet Union of late: "There's another nuance here that
I feel is the basis for this psychology.  What these people have in mind is not so much what they once were and how much they used to
earn but the fact that they were players. They were real people.  It's an attempt to prove the reality of their own existence, if only in
the past.  For instance, someone says, 'I used to be chief engineer at a major plant.' In Soviet mythology, a chief engineer was someone
who dealt with real problems, right?  The same thing happens when someone says, 'I was a prominent member in the Union of Soviet
Writers.'  Of course, I find all this profoundly antipathetic, but when I hear all these speeches now, I try to detect a certain sentiment
in them because --well, what kinds of judges of these people are we?
Volkov: 'Judge not lest ye be judged.'
Brodsky: That was not said about the communal appartment; that is on a somewhat higher level.  Nonetheless.

And this kind of 'rediscovery' as one advances towards the final curtain is even more entertainingly done in his poem, 'Fin de Siecle,' 
which opens as follows:

The century will soon be over, but sooner it will be me.
That's not the message, though, of a trembling knee.
Rather, the influence of not-to-be

on to-be. Of the hunter upon --so to speak-- his fowl,
be that one's heart valve or a red brick wall.
We hear the whiplash's foul

whistle recalling vainly the surnames of those who have loved us back,
writhing in the slippery palms of the local quack.
The world has just lost the knack

of being the place where a sofa, a fox-trot, a lampshade's cream
trimmings, a bodice, a risque utterance reigned supreme.
Who could foresee time's grim

eraser wiping them off like some chicken scrawl
from a notepad?  Nobody, not a soul.
Yet time's shuffling sole

has accomplished just that.

I know there are many many reasons NOT to read Brodsky in the same afternoon as J.M.  But when you remember the Hobson poems
and some of the richer games in Samson (NOT mentioned by the critics) it doesn't seem such a stretch to imagine the two of them
chuckling together in a quiet corner of the Elysian Fields.

Jim Watt




________________________________________
From: milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu [milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu] On Behalf Of Harold Skulsky [hskulsky at smith.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 11:47 PM
To: John Milton Discussion List
Subject: Re: [Milton-L] Symposium on Milton's Samson

I have had time to read only Stanley Fish's little talk (on four things
one can do with SA). There is nothing particularly arresting in it, as
far as I can see, and certainly nothing new. But I would be much obliged
if someone have the kindness to explain the miraculous transformation on
display here.

The Fish of yore I knew and despised was a fellow traveler of Rorty at
his nihilistic worst, given to shamelessly outré manipulations of
whatever text was at his mercy — in short, the phenomenally popular
operator of a three-card monte game whose time had come. The Fish on
display in the current little talk is a cuddly elder statesman, a
venerable teddybear of old-fashioned historical intentionalism (is
Hirsch still with us?), gently rapping the knuckles of anachronists and
other poachers in the margins of other men's books, and leaving behind a
tinkle of mild but affectionate laughter. Perhaps the miraculous
transformation is merely another (unremarkable) reminder that what goes
around comes around. Still, I can't resist the suspicion that there is
something afoot here — something important that eludes me.
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