Re: Reactions to the secret vice (was: Steg's wonderful sig.)

On Wed, 10 Nov 1999, Sally Caves wrote:

> Heh heh heh... I like to think that your J.R. Clark Hall was so readily
> available, or do you, like me, keep your library on your desk?
> Maddening
> system of organizing and you can hardly see the computer.  Diving in
> here,
> she pulls out:   oh eck:  _Difference in Translation_, by Joseph F.
> Graham.
> Containing that famous inscrutable essay by Derrida, Tours de Babel.
> What's that doing here?
LOL.  My library is on my desk -- in great piles.  I have to shove them
aside to grade papers every two weeks, and they just build up on the
edges, spill over onto the window sill, other desks, the floor.  My office
mates think I'm a joke -- and I am.  Pulling a book out at random, I find
. . . the riverside anthology of literature, second edition, published
1991, and never used for anything, bought used at a book sale out of pity
and lust for poetry.

BTW, my newest translation from the quote on the board in my office:

enkavefazeapo enshemoduheapo pelue maetaveo
word-workers (are) string-makers of the world, unknown.

by Peresio Balesio Shelio

Or, in the original:

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
--P. B. Shelley