Re: John Holloway debate/McLaren

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mervyn writes
it's just a prejudiced assumption that Holloway
doesn't refer to Blake. I'll bet my bottom dollar that he does!

Alarm bells! Misunderstanding about what I said!

I too will bet my bottom dollar that Holloway's phrase refers to
Blake -- I can do so, thanks to Mervyn who pointed it out! (I can't
for the life of me understand how that particular misunderstanding
arose!). It was a good metaphor and reference, and could easily have
been spelled out in the way Mervyn did. But the fact that Holloway's
allusion to Blake was not revealed as what it was reminded me of TS
Eliot's poetry, where for instance in * The Wasteland * the isolated
words (I can't remember the punctuation)

Carthage!

Burning! Burning!

is an allusion to Augustine's account in his * Confessions * of his
arrival in Carthage as a horny youth. (When I first read it I thought
it referred to what the Romans did to Carthage; maybe there was a
double entendre -- who knows?). This deliberate refusal to divulge
references was a characteristic of "modern" poetry. Whatever about
modern poets, in a book like Holloway's the practice seems, as Lou
said, "precious" (a term I would say further removed from plain
language than cognoscenti or hoi polloi, both of which I'll bet my
bottom dollar are widely understood. But then, the Reader's Digest
feature "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" was very popular).


----- Original Message -----
From: "Mervyn Hartwig" <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 12:21 AM
Subject: Re: John Holloway debate/McLaren


> In message , James Daly <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
>
> > In practice some
> >academics are careerists, some are whores (telling their paymasters
> >whatever it is that they want to hear), some are affected and
> >precious -- and here I think Lou was right about Holloway; sharing
an
> >allusion to Blake with cognoscenti but not letting the hoi polloi
> >(which in this case includes me) in on it is just that.
>
> I don't have a copy of the book in front of me, and going by what
you
> say nor do you, so it's just a prejudiced assumption that Holloway
> doesn't refer to Blake. I'll bet my bottom dollar that he does! He
> certainly does in an article of his I read in *Historical
Materialism*
> (in which by the way he develops a critique of autonomism - so it's
> misleading to refer to him straightforwardly, as Lou and Alex
Callinicos
> do, as an autonomist.)
>
> 'Cognoscenti', 'hoi polloi' - is this plain English?
>
> Mervyn
>
>