------------------------------ Content-Type: text/plain blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 24 Today's Topics: Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) List problem Re: Pam van Schaik Re: Introductions TO RALPH DUMAIN Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1): SENSE VS PSYCHE Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) Re: "unsuscribe" Blake and Marx Re: BLAKE AND MARX COMPARED Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1): SENSE VS PSYCHE Re: Blake and Marx Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1): SENSE VS PSYCHE Re: List problem List problem RE: BLAKE AND MARX COMPARED ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 08:32:16 -0500 From: "Gordon Barentsen" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) Message-Id: <9603310832.ZM22492@sunlight.ccs.yorku.ca> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii On Mar 30, 11:40pm, Ralph Dumain wrote: > Subject: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) > BLAKE AND THE MODERNS -- EXERCISES IN COMPARISON (1) > [...] > worthwhile essay in this volume. I am inherently suspicious of > comparative studies, especially when it comes to Blake. So many > have misappropriated Blake for pernicious ends -- Yeats, Ellis, > the Surrealists, Raine, Harper, or some of the dumbbells in > cyberspace who would link Blake to the Zen Buddhist interpretation > of quantum mechanics -- all based on dubious comparative methods, > which in the final analysis rest on abstracting certain properties > of Blake that correspond to their own interests -- e.g. the > imagination -- and reducing Blake to the level of their own > paltry, reactionary ideologies. I feel to spit. > This touches on a question to which I have yet to find a satisfactory answer. Can one really, in the end, "misappropriate" something? After all, isn't there always a gap between the subsequent generation and "what the poet really said/meant" (assuming such a thing is reachable)? Romantics like Byron and Shelley didn't have a problem with it when they appropriated Satan as the Romantic Hero, even though Satan's positioning after Book IV of Paradise Lost makes it all too clear that Milton was (of course) less than sympathetic with the Fallen One. Following this line of reasoning, it seems to me like this is saying that punk culture, when appropriating cultural symbols like the swastika, safety pin, etc. didn't know what they really meant, and that they had it all wrong. What if people who appropriate(d) Blake KNEW what they were doing, and CHOSE to leave certain things out? It wouldn't be the FIRST time something like that has happened...and perhaps that is the REAL virtue in such comparative studies....studying the ways in which the subsequent generation is divergent from and antithetical to the "first generation." - Gord ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 09:38:11 -0500 From: "Leslie O. Segar" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) Message-Id: <315E98D3.4CC2@wmblake.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In his article BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) (3/20/96) Ralph Dumain wrote: > So many > have misappropriated Blake for pernicious ends -- Yeats, Ellis, > the Surrealists, Raine, Harper, or some of the dumbbells in > cyberspace who would link Blake to the Zen Buddhist interpretation > of quantum mechanics -- all based on dubious comparative methods, > which in the final analysis rest on abstracting certain properties > of Blake that correspond to their own interests -- e.g. the > imagination -- and reducing Blake to the level of their own > paltry, reactionary ideologies. I feel to spit. It's an excess of bile. It'll pass. Alas, though, it probably won't. Poor Ralph, in his stony den, scrutinizing sinning schoolmen through his narrow orb, will remain locked in constant agony. I can't address Ralph's specific criticism of the essays he reviewed, because I haven't read them, but I can comment on some of his innuendo. It seems to me that Ralph would have us read Blake only as a subject of Academic study, to be dissected and analyzed by those who have mastered and declared absolute fealty to a set of fixed and arid intellectual tools. Anyone who reads Blake as a source of current inspiration is accused of "misappropriating" him "for pernicious ends". (In what way, Ralph, were Yeats' ends pernicious?) And those of us who find in Blake some quite remarkable articulations of a world view and a cosmology that has only in this century found more general articulation by physicists and mathematicians, are dismissed as "dumbbells in cyberspace". Ralph seems able to deal rationally only with those commentators who place Blake in a Western philosophic tradition that ended a century ago: the only essay he reviews favorably is one that relates Blake to Marx; in his review of Horn's essay on "Blake and the Problematic of the Self", the only topics which Ralph engages for any other purpose than to spew vitriol are those involving the relationship between Blake's thought and the thought of Hegel & Kant. I suspect that I'd agree with Ralph's opinions on many things -- Harold Bloom is full of shit, there's a lot of inflated hooey in postmodern criticism, Jacques Derrida is hopelessly French. But I sure don't find his style of criticism persuasive. I a following article, BLAKE AND THE MODERNS (2) -- HEGEL, Dumain again wrote: > I am a great > admirer of Ginsberg, but he is an airhead. His analysis of Blake > is one-dimensional. His speech published as BLAKE AND YOUR REASON > is most instructive about Ginsberg's strengths and weaknesses. > The strength is the very literalness with which Ginsberg analyzes > Blake's imagery (the literal imagination) -- interesting to see > how one poet absorbs another. But the weakness lies in Ginsberg's > inability to grasp Blake's thinking. Indeed, Ginsberg's own > shallow pop culture Buddhism, his narcissism and > characteristically American anti-intellectual superficiality and > mechanistic conception of mysticism, his self-abasing discipleship > to petty thugs like Pound, Casady, or his dishonest gurus -- this > entire complex of Ginsberg's mentality make it impossible for him > to deal with Blake's intellectual vision on its own level. That > Ostriker cannot recognize this is damning, but then, that > shallowness too is typical of the American artsy-fartsy crowd. > May old Nobodaddy protect me from Ralph's admiration (not that I'm in any imminent danger of attracting it :-) Come now, Ralph: "deal with Blake's intellectual vision on its own level"; what the devil is that supposed to mean? It comes at the very climax of your denunciation of Ginsberg; it is, in fact, the very substance of that denunciation; yet it is a totally meaningless phrase. I'm not defending Ginsberg; I've never liked his poetry, although I am enormously fond of the public man. But what has he done, aside from reading Blake very subjectively, to deserve such vilification? Throughout the discouse on this list, it seems that there are two purposes at work -- some of us wish to learn more from Blake; others wish to learn more about Blake. A single-vision focus on either purpose destroys imagination and hampers creativity. Accepting Blake as a prophetic guru, unrooted in time and place, outside of any philosophical or literary tradition, ignorant or dismissive of passing events, could lead one to read Blake the way believers read Revelations; that is likely, I would agree with Ralph, to lead in some pretty unproductive (and possibly even threatening) directions. On the other hand, insisting that the only proper approach to Blake is to treat the man and his work as simply one more 18th Century poet/painter -- a puzzle in intellectual history to be resolved by the patient application of academic discipline -- is to diminish the marvelous and unique resonance of Blake, to close our ears & eyes to the distinctive (and disturbing) message that his words and images carry for moderns. It seems to me that Ralph falls pretty consistently into the second error. LOS " ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 09:43:52 -0500 From: "Leslie O. Segar" To: blake@albion.com Cc: postmaster@canrem.com Subject: List problem Message-Id: <315E9A28.12E7@wmblake.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Whenever I send something to this list, I get a bounceback from postmaster@canrem.com, with the following message: Unknown user 'paul.hoy' at canrem.com Can paul.hoy be removed from the list, or can the list be configured so that the error message does not come back to the sender? Have others had this problem? LOS ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 08:51:19 +0000 (GMT) From: Marcus Smith To: blake@albion.com Cc: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Pam van Schaik Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > When you speak of the difference between the two types of wine, > I'm reminded that quite a bit of blood was shed over this issue. > The consubstantiationists believed that that the wine really was the blood > of Christ and the sacramental wafer was the actual body of Christ, whereas > the transubstantiationists felt that the wine and wafer were merely > symbolic. In some sense this parallels Blake's emphasis on the symbolic > in opposition to Newton's "single vision". Matthew: isn't it vice-versa? Marcus Smith ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 09:07:04 -0600 (CST) From: William Neal Franklin To: blake@albion.com Cc: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Introductions Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Sat, 30 Mar 1996 Heather Newsam (HXNEWSAM@ualr.edu) wrote: > The major work I have done with Blake, and I guess you could call it my favorite > reading, is the idea of pre-existance in his poetry. I wrote an extensive > paper that applied Middle Eastern Religions to the Book of Urizen and > at the same time Wordsworth's Intimations Ode. Heather--I'm curious as to what you mean when you write that you "applied Middle Eastern Religions to the Book of Urizen." Did you take ideas out of Middle Eastern Religions and apply them to the poems as elements of a critical paradigm, or did you identify Middle Eastern religious elements in the texts of the poems and explicate them--or what? Interesting idea--welcome to the discussion. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 10:41:48 -0500 (EST) From: izak@igs.net (Izak Bouwer) To: blake@albion.com Subject: TO RALPH DUMAIN Message-Id: <199603311541.KAA03431@host.igs.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Dear Ralph, dear dear Ralph, While we were all sleeping last night, you did such a lot of work. Thank you for sharing it with us. Ever since you came into our lives, I have felt like living in a Sarajevo of the mind. Or is this what the Mental Wars of Eden are like? I somehow wish we could all go back to the BARD/EARTH discussion, to where you on the eleventh of March asked this question: "But there is a sense that interests me in which Blake may be more materialist.. than others.. I've never seen anyone ask this question before, but this is my question." I am interested in the neurology of the fall and the neurology of redemption.(So, Matthew Dubuque, please keep on talking too.) Ralph, I share your utter dedication to Blake, ever since the early seventies when I saw Thomas Altizer calling hom the greatest prophet in Christendom since St. Augustine. But please, Ralph, can we stop the excessive vituperation now.Although maybe, just maybe, you picked up this bad habit from the late, great William Blake himself. Gloudina Bouwer ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 09:36:39 -0600 (CST) From: William Neal Franklin To: blake@albion.com Cc: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1): SENSE VS PSYCHE Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I've heard this more than once, this bashing of critics who go beyond the boundaries of the empirically provable domain of facts. I think I perceive two camps in this discussion. One group wants no part of anything not demonstrable in the records and in the orthodoxy surrounding their reading; the other group wants the freedom to explore the possibilities implicit in the poems themselves, without the constraints put on the project by strict adherence to rules of evidence. Just for my own edification--what exactly is the problem with Kathleen Raine? I use her essay "On the Mythological" and find it quite useful in elucidating the problems of mythic poetry. I suspect that not everything she has published is as useable as this, but this piece is very good. On what grounds is she to be trashed? Is it because she identifies the psyche as a reality to be taken quite as seriously as the domain of the senses? Is it because the rules of the game change uncomfortably when we deal with the realms looked into by poets of the spirit? Is it because discussions of the soul are locked into the world of words, which can never accurately signify their signifieds, and so can never reach the level of certainty demanded by the Historicists? For those interested in reading Raine and deciding for themselves whether or not she is [what was the word used?] "despicable," I recommend the source of the above mentioned essay, *Defending Ancient Springs*. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 10:38:52 -0500 (EST) From: "Avery F. Gaskins" To: Subject: Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) Message-Id: It isn't only the reactionary ideologues who reduce Milton to their level. I have yet to see Dumain do anything but reduce Milton to his leftist ideology. Avery Gaskins ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 11:01:56 -0500 From: VSpirito@aol.com To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: "unsuscribe" Message-Id: <960331110156_366403676@mail06> Please unsuscribe me from mailing list. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 11:48:48 -0500 (EST) From: "Victor N Paananen" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Blake and Marx Message-Id: <199603311648.LAA155308@pilot06.cl.msu.edu> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Length: 1964 11In my William Blake, Updated Edition, published earlier this month in the Twayne Series (now Simon and Schuster Macmillan), I argued that Blake and Marx have a shared perspective and of course cited Minna Doskow's brilliant article (as well as Marx and Lenin.) David Punter's book on dialectic and Blake was also very helpful. I had to reconcile my treatment of Blake as Anglican Evangelical in the 1977 edition of the Twayne book with my "Marxist" Blake, but that was not so difficult. I am now teaching an M.A.-level course in Blake and Shelley from a Marxist angle, and I have found Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness, which I assigned, a very helpful bridge. Romanticism--some versions of it--and Marxism offer similar resolutions to the deadend in bourgeois philosophy announced by Kant when he was left with the unknowable "thing-in-itself" (which is nonsense to Blake and Marx with their emphasis on experience as the only realty, in which subject and object are engaged). I wish that I had drawn more on Lukacs in revising my book, but maybe the Lenin will be almost as helpful although there is only one piece of his that I draw on. (Like Shelley, Lenin started as a crude materialist but came to see that too is "metaphysics.") During the twenty years during which I have been "hid" as a Blakist--I'm not sure that I really qualify as one--I've been working on Marx and Marxists. I finally did a review of Thompson's Witness Against the Beast in which I expressed my regret that this great Marxist did not push on to show that, especially at the philosophic level, Blake and Marx (Thompson's own "pantheon") have a lot in common. There are many Marxist books on Blake, of course, and I would name, particularly, Jackie DiSalvo's as full of exciting comparisons. Paul Breines had an article in SiR twenty years ago that looked at Romanticism and Marxism through Lukacs--I did footnote that in my updated 1book. Best wishes, Vic Paananen ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 09:45:56 -0800 (PST) From: Ralph Dumain To: marxism2@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU Cc: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE AND MARX COMPARED Message-Id: <199603311745.JAA10688@igc4.igc.apc.org> Rahul, Rahul, why do we always talk at cross-purposes when our views seem to be so similar? >Is there anything gained here from this comparison, in the way >of understanding Blake better, understanding Marx better, Can't be sure. >or understanding anything else better? Definitely. In various posts, both private and public (on several lists), I have hinted at possible understandings to be gained from the triangulation of Blake, Hegel (and Young Hegelians such as Feuerbach), and Marx, particularly in understanding the relations between individual thinkers and traditions, the capacities of people to formulate an understanding of their world based on educational, historical, social and personal circumstances, all to the goal of understanding how and why people think about the problems they are trying to solve. My point was never to say "Hooray! -- there are commonalities to Blake and Marx" and leave it at that. There are differences as well as affinities. To understand the affinities means to delve beneath surface appearances. That Blake may have a deeper kinship to Marx than to Coleridge might surprise some people, but it is not a trivial comparison, for it delves beneath appearances and lazy classifications in search of the deeper dynamics animating a person's thought and life's work. >I must protest against the cretinous nostalgia expressed here. >This is the first bite of the apple; the radical disjunction of >oneself and one's consciousness from the universe at large is >the first step on the road to humanity ... I agree with you here. I did disagree with both Doskow and Horn on this matter. I was gentler with Doskow than I should have been, perhaps. I believe both have misunderstood Blake here, and I specifically condemned Horn. >From my own limited experience with Blake, I think he's far too >sophisticated to whine about this like so many anti-rational >freaks today. That was my point exactly in my criticism of Horn. Doskow is not credible on this specific point, but I think the bulk of the essay holds up. >To me, putting Newton and Locke in the same sentence is >blasphemy. Sorry for the confusion. I was merely summarizing the author's argument; this is not my own opinion of Newton. Newton's theology is also important in understanding his entire view of the world, and not just the physical synthesis for which he is so justly remembered and honored. However, when you throw in the other parts of Newton's world view, you have a less satisfactory synthesis than if you just considered his physics. More comprehensive metaphysicians such as Descartes and Leibniz were nonetheless inferior when it came to physics, so Newton proved himself to be a worthier laborer in the vineyard of his chosen specialty. Apparently you recognize that I refused to endorse the petty bourgeois view of the subject-object distinction. I wrote: >>So I do not agree with this inadequate characterization of >>Blake's treatment of the subject-object relation and always >>remain suspicious of any attempt to reduce Blake to a petty >>bourgeois subjectivist philosopher, though this is a minor >>quibble in this case, since I think that Doskow is above >>reducing Blake to that. So you did get my point after all. And you respond: >I like this view of Blake much more, because it leaves open the >option that he sees the eventual salvation of humanity, as Camus >does in the Myth of Sisyphus, in struggle. I think Marx would >have been in sympathy with this as well. Exactly. This business about the loss of imagination and the subject-object distinction bothers me -- I hinted at this by calling it "bloodless" -- because it ignores the very strife and struggle, oppression and rebellion, that is so ubiquitous in Blake's prophetic poetry. Blake's apocalypse is a slave revolt: kings are overthrown, prisons are opened, and the first one to sing the song of liberty is the Black African. This is revolution, and not the reactionary mystical horseshit touted by the likes of Kathleen Raine. This notion of reducing real conflicts to an inner psychodrama belongs to the likes of the Nazi collaborator Carl Jung. It is absolutely contemptible and must not be tolerated. For Blake, the fundamental ontological category is not matter but the imagination, but still the divisions are real and not merely a subjective illusion. Universal Mind is a reactionary objective idealist abomination; who else but Blake will protect those precious minute particulars? >A few historical points: this reactionary objective idealist >notion is actually foreign to Hinduism, and can pretty much be >traced to a response to Buddhist influence. >The word feudal here is not really accurate. Feudalism in the >sense we think of it was barely present in India and not at all >in China. Thanks for cleaning up my sloppy formulations. But apparently you do understand my point about the correlation between Universal Mind and the prerogatives of the priestly elites that governed the odious slave empires of antiquity. Translated to our time, this world view means fascism, as exemplified in Carl Jung, admirer of Franco and collaborator with the Nazis. >Do you mean here "the end of the purely contemplative existence >of a tiny minority of human beings?" Yes. The vast majority of humanity have never had the material or psychological leisure to contemplate anything. They live in a world "where thought is crushed beneath the Iron Hand of power." >One could as well say they envisioned the end of enslavement to >material conditions or even the end of purely material >existence. Yes! This is true of both Blake and Marx. And the end of enslavement to material conditions means the end of the intellectuals as the embodiment of culture. This perspective was common to Blake, Marx, and C.L.R. James. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 12:48:15 -0600 (CST) From: hmm To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1): SENSE VS PSYCHE Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Sun, 31 Mar 1996, William Neal Franklin wrote: > I've heard this more than once, this bashing of critics who go beyond the > boundaries of the empirically provable domain of facts. I think I perceive > two camps in this discussion. One group wants no part of anything not > demonstrable in the records and in the orthodoxy surrounding their > reading; the other group wants the freedom to explore the possibilities > implicit in the poems themselves, without the constraints put on the > project by strict adherence to rules of evidence. If it's worth anything, I think there's a little more going on than simply going 'beyond the boundaries of the empirically provable'. I've been caught in the middle of these arguments before (occasionally because of my work), and I've found two types of critics who stretch these boundaries. They both make (sometimes) educated guesses, speculate, deduce, but cannot prove their points. The difference is that some are more than willing to admit that their explorations are simply explorations; others try to create new laws with their speculations. These, who are probably in the minority (as is usual in this sort of thing), tend to give the others a bad name, giving rise to the urge to bash all critics who take certain liberties with unprovable theories. At least, this is the problem from my standpoint. I don't really care that much about what an artist meant, except as a point off curiosity. I read literature for what it can give me, not what it gave readers 200 years ago. If I wanted that, I'd read history. And I have no problem with critics taking certain liberties with works (hell, you should see some of the things I've done with Blake in my personal interpretations). But I do have a problem with those who take those liberties without allowing the rest of us to take ours. sorry if this is scattered... m c647749@showme.missouri.edu ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 96 15:07:02 EST From: Kevin Lewis To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake and Marx Message-Id: <9603312020.AA17712@uu6.psi.com> Vic, Thanks for these comments on Blake and Marx. And thank you, Ralph Dumain, for your measured, patient treatment of the issue in Minna Diskow. This helps. My question is how could Blake and Marx *not* display points of similarity, seeing as how Marxist thought (put aside the political program) can and perhaps ought to be read historically as a later, secularized extension of Christian eschatological thought. I guess here I mean particularly the radical Joachite theory of history: the application of the doctrine of the mystery of the Trinity to the periodization of history. This is the tradition of the Eternal Evangel, the Everlasting Gospel, yes? Morton (and Altizer) saw it in Blake. Thompson's Muggletonians are not in this tradition, and perhaps this is why, as Vic wishes he would have, Thompson did not push the comparison with Marx further. Kevin Lewis ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 96 15:49:28 EST From: JMOSER41@PORTLAND.CAPS.MAINE.EDU (julie moser) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1): SENSE VS PSYCHE Message-Id: I understand what is being said about allowing certain freedom in analysis/criticism/interpretation of a creator's (specifically Blake's) creations. I've also seen (as was mentioned in the last post) a split between those who approach a text in that some view their arguments as facts, while others will acknowledge that the argument is just one among many. But, I've also seen where taking the ideas of this last post (ie. leaving a text wide open for any interpretation) leads (or rather, can lead) to a sloppy, self-satisfying interpretation. You say that you don't care about what people reading the text 200 years ago thought, or what the author intended. That makes me curious because I don't see how we can understand the codes and conventions within a text if we ignore historical/authorship approaches. When I first read "The Chimney Sweeper", I had no background of either the author or the time period. What did I get from the poem? Well, for starters I misinterpreted it. But even if I hadn't made grave errors in my reading, I surely fell short of the complex, rich meaning that I later read after learning a bit of history and a bit about the author (for example: that the children's cries were the lisping calls of young ones offering their "services"). While I agree that people should have freedom in their interpretations and readings of any text, I have seen this freedom lead people astray in their ability to argue their points. I have seen people say "well, this is what the text means to me and therefore it exists in the text", without making a worthy argument. I've even done this myself in the past, only to find later that my subjective interpretation was not all that I had thought it was. It's great to be free in interpreation, certainly. Be cautious though with subjective experience. It's worst use is as a license to create emotinally invested arguments. I've seen too many people become emotionally involved in their arguments and become hurt when a counter-agrument is made that smashed their theories into small fragments. *shrug* or maybe not. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 15:49:19 -0600 From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: List problem Message-Id: <96033115491912@womenscol.stephens.edu> I have been receiving the bounce "paul.hoy" as well, and wondered if it were a problem with my own account or server. If it is happening elsewhere, perhaps something could be done to unsubscribe the absent hoy? Tom Dillingham ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 96 16:49:15 -0800 From: Seth T. Ross To: blake@albion.com Subject: List problem Message-Id: <9604010049.AA06913@albion.com> Content-Type: text/plain > Whenever I send something to this list, I get a bounceback > from postmaster@canrem.com, with the following message: > > Unknown user 'paul.hoy' at canrem.com > > Can paul.hoy be removed from the list, or can the list be > configured so that the error message does not come back to > the sender? Poor Paul Hoy. His email has been periodically going down since I started the Blake list in November 93. I know he wants to receive the list traffic, but now I've taken him off, again. Unfortunately, the list cannot be configured so that bounced mail does not go back to sender. As far as I know, that's just the way Internet mail works (good old RFC822). I've been purging the list of old and defunct email addresses -- the list software does this automatically to some extent, but it doesn't work as well as my copy, find, paste, and delete hacking. Note the unsubscribe instructions below. Please unsubscribe before you give up or close an account -- that will help me minimize the annoyance of bounced mail. Cheers, Seth List-maintainer =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- BLAKE ONLINE ADMINISTRIVIA To leave Blake Online, send an email message to blake-request@albion.com with the word "unsubscribe" in the SUBJECT field (putting it in the body of the message may or may not work), like so: TO: blake-request@albion.com SUBJECT: unsubscribe Your address will be automatically unsubscribed. Occasionally, the automatic unsubscription mechanism fails. In that case, please DON'T send the request to the entire list distribution at the address blake@albion.com. Please use the address blake-request@albion.com for all administrative queries. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 19:16:03 -0600 (CST) From: RPYODER@ualr.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: RE: BLAKE AND MARX COMPARED Message-Id: <960331191603.2029bc8c@ualr.edu> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Blake, Hegel and Marx. My, my . . . so this is what it's like to read Blake without the Bible. It all sounds like the Spectre to me: "I am your Rational Power O Albion & that Human Form / You call Divine, is but a Worm seventy inches long" (J 29:5-6). -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #24 *************************************