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Showing posts with label <b>irony</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>irony</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, December 28, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">At the core of his email on
irony, Chris Stroffolino asks:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">but</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> it seems that what you're driving
at is the question of WHAT OTHER WORK IS THE POEM DOING BESIDE MEANING (that is
assuming that it IS also meaning, or meaning to mean, which of course is not a
safe assumption in the 20th century)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Beside suggesting that Chris
check his calendar &#8211; it&#8217;s later than you think &#8211; I would concur with his assessment
that this discussion is ultimately about much more than &#8220;just&#8221; irony &#8211; consider
just how far <span class="SpellE">afield</span> the discussion has traveled since
<a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385722414">my
original flip aside</a> concerning Jennifer Moxley&#8217;s poetry &#8211; and would turn
the question rather on its head: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what are the ways in which the poem
manifests meaning? </i></b>Underneath which sits the further question: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what
is meaning?</i></b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">All of which takes me back
to the first three sentences of a wonderful book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/perseus-cgi-bin/display/0-465-05674-1">Philosophy
in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought</a></i>,
co-written by George Lakoff &amp; Mark Johnson, which are presented also as the
first three paragraphs:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The mind is inherently
embodied.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Thought is mostly unconscious.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Abstract concepts are largely
metaphorical.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Lakoff &amp; Johnson are,
among others, founders of what today is called cognitive linguistics &amp;
George has been both a friend and an influence on my poetry for some 25 years.
Nowhere in his corpus are its underlying findings more concisely stated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thought is mostly unconscious</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> is an idea I&#8217;ve, uh, thought a lot about, and have a
great deal more of thinking yet to do. At one level, the concept explains the
possible power of an <span class="SpellE">irrationalist</span> poetics like that
of Jack Spicer. At another, it suggests to me that the reading process &#8211; even
when we are paying the greatest attention, doing literal &#8220;close&#8221; reading &#8211; is
itself more unconscious than not. Both it and the idea that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mind is inherently embodied</i> go a
considerable distance toward explicating the issues posed, for example, by
electric guitars or why poets might take a line such as &#8220;green ideas sleep
furiously&#8221; as meaningful when old-school linguists (the Chomsky generation,
say) do not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thought is mostly unconscious</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> destroys a project such as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tractatus,</i> though not (we note) Wittgenstein&#8217;s later forays into
this same territory. It has, of course, a certain Freudian, if not Lacanian,
ring to it, yet it is not in that psychoanalytic direction that Lakoff appears
to be pointing. Even if we understand reason, for example &#8211; just one mode of
thinking among others &#8211; as a series of syllogistic operations, a number of
multivariable &#8220;if&#8221; clauses that would lead ultimately to the consequence of
&#8220;then,&#8221; Lakoff &amp; Johnson&#8217;s position suggests that what we imagine to be
complex enough procedures with dozens of steps may in fact have hundreds, if
not thousands, conducting not only in our waking life, but elsewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here of course is the
principle behind the idea of waking up to a solution that, prior to a night&#8217;s
sleep, had seemed impossible. Or why anybody &#8211; you or I &#8211; might be able to
apprehend when something someone asserts sounds &#8220;wrong&#8221; to us, well before we
can honestly articulate precisely why. It represents the architecture of the
&#8220;gut feel.&#8221; It is in this sense that a poem like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ketjak</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tjanting</i> can be
understood literally as single syllogisms that cannot, in fact, be paraphrased.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here also is the reader&#8217;s
participation in consuming, and in so doing reproducing anew, any given text.
To have excluded the reader&#8217;s contribution to the meaning of a text may have
seemed &#8220;neat&#8221; to the New Critics in the sense that it offered boundaries that
they might then patrol, but to do also yielded (&amp; still yields to this day)
a kind of literary dyslexia, an illiteracy in the name of reading competence &#8211;
the same illiteracy that sometimes will cause a grad student to conclude that
langpo is &#8220;difficult&#8221; in some manner that the world itself is not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Song approaches the question
of embodiment far differently than does poetry &#8211; as virtually every attempt to
blend the two eventually proves all over again &#8211; but embodiment is essential to
both. The music of vowel &amp; consonant is no less a constituent of meaning
than is any argument the denotative text might make. This is a reality that
might be discounted in one or another tendency within poetry, but it is not one
that can be safely abolished. My own interest in <span class="SpellE">vizpo</span>
is real enough, but it is much more anthropological than it is literary, for
which I make no apologies. The visual is never for me an adequate condition of
embodiment for the poem. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This does not mean that I
require poetry to be &#8220;beautiful&#8221; prosodically &#8211; some of the most interesting in
recent years has, I think, sought out a sonic realm I would associate more
closely with post-industrial life than with song &#8211; </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Barrett Watten</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> or </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Rod Smith</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, to
name two who seem especially adept at this. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Poetry that pays little
attention to how it sounds &#8211; there&#8217;s enough of it out there that I don&#8217;t need
to name names &#8211; strikes me in exactly the opposite way. Such work seems at
times the aesthetic corollary of a serious stroke victim &#8211; unable to complete
its thought. Thus the best argument in the world, if it pays no heed to the
question of embodiment, strikes me as not very meaningful &#8211; a condition of far
too much &#8220;political poetry.&#8221; Even as the simplest lyric is itself always
already political.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">So what is meaning &amp;
where do you find it? Williams called it &#8220;the news,&#8221; but that phrase, bandied
about as much as it is, is often understood in far too narrow a fashion. I
often will find it in a poem lurking not in the words as such so much as in the
vowels, or in the way a phrase alters my expectation (a particularly NY School
approach), in how lines enjamb or a phrase is inverted, in the length of a
line. All to me seem primary modes of meaning. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">&amp; the student who is not
taught how to see, to read these things, has in fact never been taught to read.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, December 27, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Chris
Stroffolino suggests that the term <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">irony</i>
covers up a broader range of issues: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt;">Dear Ron &#8211; &#8211; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt;">I've been wanting to respond to a point you made
on the <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2386027421">blog</a>
about "irony" &#8211; specifically this...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&#8220;I would characterize irony &#8211; the
ability to say one thing while communicating something quite discordant to the denotation
&#8211; as one aspect of humor &amp; an especially important one in this epoch in the
U.S. (I don&#8217;t want to generalize here.) Context is so important in humor &amp;,
by definition, so pliable &amp; subject to change, that it is almost impossible
to ensure that what is uproarious in one setting will remain so over time.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt;">I like this perception/insight. One issue for me
about the above definition of irony (and not with your statement in particular
&#8211; since it's part of a common definition of irony) is that it seems it could
also equally be applicable to a lot of things that aren't called
"irony." That old "New Critical" saw that (I'm probably
slightly misquoting it) "a poem should not mean but be" (or a poem
should not JUST mean but also be) would seem to be very similar to your
definition of irony. Is any awareness of a difference between connotation and
denotation, or between a singular intention and multiple interpretations, or of
a suggestive ambiguity that often is reduced to being read one way, necessarily
"ironic?" If so, then, doesn't the word "ironic" become so
broad that it would become itself a mere connotation rather than a denotation;
that it refers to a mood the reader is in when s/he reads the poem or other
writing-act?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt;">I guess it is because of such "definitions"
of "irony," that I am wary about its usefulness as a critical term.
To label such a process "irony" seems too narrow &#8211; which is why I
often buckle at the way the word "ironic" is used (whether
dismissively or even as a non-pejorative kind of shorthand characterization) to
describe a poem or poet. This also applies to something called
"non-ironic" (since that term presupposes irony)....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt;">I know there is supposed to be a
"serious" vs. "ironic" distinction, that is perhaps
ultimately "musical" (and thus &#8211; I'd argue &#8211; in the ear of the
beholder), but it seems that what you're driving at is the question of WHAT
OTHER WORK IS THE POEM DOING BESIDE MEANING (that is assuming that it IS also
meaning, or meaning to mean, which of course is not a safe assumption in the
20th century). And it would seem that a poem that does, on one level, have
"something to say" may be at odds with itself as a poem much more
than a poem that doesn't have anything to say.....and this may be why
"didactic" or seemingly didactic poetry makes some people
uncomfortable, and why others sometimes crave it.... For me analogies with rock
music songs are helpful in addressing this question &#8211; in part because I took
rock lyrics seriously before I took poetry seriously. When I started taking
poetry seriously, one of the questions I asked myself was: What is it that
poetry must do that song lyrics don't do? What is the equivalent &#8211; in poetry &#8211;
of the singer's "voice" or the guitar solos, etc? There's a lot to
say about this, but, to be brief and tie it more explicitly back to your point,
it seems to be that this question, to you (by your definition of irony), might
be paraphrased as "what must a poem do to be ironic?" Thus, is any
awareness of aestheticism (however "dissonant" or
"discordant" or "clunky" or whatever) in poetry
automatically irony? Well, that's one of the implications I see in your
definition....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt;">Perhaps the more profound issue is the term
"postmodern irony" &#8211; If I tend to see what is often called (though
not by me) "postmodern irony" in pre"-postmodern" writers,
it could be that I'm simply reading them with my own "postmodern"
sensibility, but it could equally be that what's called "postmodern"
irony isn't as "postmodern" as some like to believe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt;">Okay, I'll stop here now &#8211; &#8211; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt;">I just wanted to write because I really
appreciate what you're doing with the blog....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt;">Chris<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, December 19, 2002</span></h2>

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<tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">On the issue of humor, I got emails from several
people. The most detailed response came from </span></tt><st1:personname><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Gary
 Sullivan</span></tt></st1:personname><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">, who advocates a temporal theory
of wit:</span></tt><tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hi Ron,<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I&#8217;m typing this
in Word, hoping I&#8217;ve got the settings correct so you won&#8217;t get question marks
where apostrophes or ellipses are intended (a problem that I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">think</i> I just fixed, but ... we&#8217;ll see
... if not, my apologies).<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Your blog today
touched on two of my favorite topics: humor and context.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Before I start
in on all of that, though, I should say that &#8220;But I&#8217;ve always thought as well
that Pound believed <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mauberly</i></span>
to be a barrel of chortles&#8221; made me laugh out loud. (It was &#8220;barrel of
chortles&#8221; that did it, for what it&#8217;s worth &#8211; in other words, the linguistic
construction, which I&#8217;ll get to in a bit.)<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The thrust of
your argument seems based more on ideas about irony, specifically, and less so
than on humor, or there seemed to be some conflation of the two as I was
reading it.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I think you&#8217;re
right about that Arensberg poem, it&#8217;s not really interesting. But, is it the
lack of context that makes it so? Obviously, some context would help. But I&#8217;d
argue that it would still be a lame poem (for me, anyway) if I knew who <span class="SpellE">Hasekawa</span> was. Also, the &#8220;humor&#8221; there seems more about
something universal than <span class="SpellE">Hasekawa</span> (who may,
ultimately, have been a made-up name, referring to no one in particular). The
problem though isn&#8217;t &#8211; to me &#8211; that it&#8217;s simply humor, but a failed attempt at
humor:<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Perhaps it is
no matter that you died.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Life&#8217;s an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">incognito</i> which you saw through:<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">You never told
on life &#8211; you had your pride;<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">But life has
told on you.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">There&#8217;s
something metaphysical about the humor there, this idea that &#8220;life&#8221; is an
&#8220;incognito.&#8221; But the ideas are so fuzzily presented, we don&#8217;t know what that
really means &#8211; it&#8217;s too abstract. We (or I anyway) don&#8217;t know what he means by
&#8220;Life&#8217;s an incognito&#8221; ... maybe he&#8217;s getting at something about the
&#8220;life-force,&#8221; that it isn&#8217;t &#8220;personal&#8221; or that it&#8217;s invisible? Or &#8220;You never
told on life.&#8221; What could that possibly mean? &#8220;Life has told on you,&#8221; probably
means that <span class="SpellE">Hasekawa</span>, whoever he was, died anyway, as
we all will. I mean, it&#8217;s impossible to tell. My sense is that we probably
wouldn&#8217;t know even knowing who <span class="SpellE">Hasekawa</span> was ...
unless <span class="SpellE">Hasekawa</span> had made some statement about life
and incognito &#8211; in other words, unless this is <span class="SpellE">Hasekawa&#8217;s</span>
language being used against him. In which case, touché, you&#8217;re right. I don&#8217;t
know for sure, of course, but I doubt that that&#8217;s the case here. It seems like
this is <span class="SpellE">Arensberg&#8217;s</span> language here. In which case, the
problem is probably not lack of context, but poor structure.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I really
believe humor requires more than just making manifest enough context for it to
be understood, and that comes from laughing out loud when I was a lot younger
at Woody Allen or </span></tt><st1:personname><tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Don</span></tt></st1:personname><tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">ald
Barthelme or <span class="SpellE">Firesign</span> Theater pieces where I had no
idea what they were &#8220;talking about.&#8221; (Months or years later, I&#8217;d figure it out,
and it was as often <span class="GramE">as not less, not more, funny &#8211;</span>
although there was that feeling, yes, like, &#8220;aha! <span class="GramE">that&#8217;s</span>
what you meant!&#8221; In other words, &#8220;aha!&#8221; and not &#8220;ha <span class="SpellE">ha</span>
<span class="SpellE">ha</span>,&#8221; which happened earlier, bereft of context.) It
wouldn&#8217;t matter, in other words, if I knew who Pound was or, if I did know of
Pound, what <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mauberly</i></span>
was, but that, &#8220;barrel of chortles&#8221; is a completely hilarious construction.)<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Humor depends <span class="GramE">largely<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>&#8211;</span> not
exclusively, but I&#8217;d argue predominantly &#8211; on timing, if verbal, or measure, if
written. Why, in other words, has the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Greek
Anthology</i> persisted &#8211; and not simply as a kind of historical item read in
college, but as something even contemporary poets as well as humorists might
pilfer from, retranslate, read for pleasure, or otherwise use. Epigrams give
less opportunity for context about what is said than they do for the mechanics
of what is said.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">But, again, it
seems like your primary argument is not about whether or not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">humor</i> will last, but whether or not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">irony</i> is read as irony over the years.
Some English students may remember reading Swift&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modest Proposal</i> and &#8220;not being sure&#8221; at first if he&#8217;s &#8220;kidding.&#8221; <span class="GramE">But not me.</span> Because, although there is no real context
presently for that piece <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in the piece</i>,
it always arrives framed &#8211; in an English textbook anthology with an
introductory essay, maybe, or however else one might conceivably receive it (in
a Penguin edition, with footnotes explaining?) Same with <span class="SpellE">Petronius&#8217;s</span>
<span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Satyricon</i></span>.
Context can get carried over by others, by previous readers. Swift is, in other
words, probably <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">less</i> shocking today,
because we often get it with a set-up. Someday, your Stein quote will be <span class="SpellE">recontextualized</span> by a scholar somewhere, and that might be,
for the next hundred or so years, that. Anyway, back to Swift, because as an
example he&#8217;s &#8220;as obvious as an ear&#8221; &#8211; part of his plan, so it seemed, was that
one would <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> know he was being
ironic. <span class="GramE">That readers</span> of the day would internalize the
argument, to some extent, and then come out of that experience, understanding
some level of concomitant participation in the genocide of the Irish. But,
irony of ironies, he&#8217;s now read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">with the
foreknowledge</i> that he was being ironic. And the effect of reading him is,
ironically, diminished.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">That</span></i></tt><tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">,
btw, is the kind of irony <span class="GramE">I&#8217;m</span> often most interested
in. And it does have a very limited, immediate value. We&#8217;ll never read Swift &#8211;
no one will &#8211; as he was then. But I think he&#8217;ll be remembered, and learned
from, mimicked, used, referred to, and enjoyed, for a long time, despite that.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">As you say,
&#8220;Humor is always &#8211; &amp; only &#8211; in the eye of the beholder.&#8221; I agree with that.
But I also believe that meaning/intention and value are also always &#8211; and only
&#8211; in the eye of the beholder. It&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i>
problematic or changeable or contingent upon context, I&#8217;d argue.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How is Celan&#8217;s
work read by those who don&#8217;t know who he was, his history?<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Enjoying the
blog,<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
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<st1:city><st1:place><tt><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Gary</span></tt></st1:place></st1:city></div>
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