Yes! I gotta yank friendster too.

Lisah, your poor puppy!

Speaking of cargo cults, you should all read Island of the Sequined Love Nun if you like absurdist humor. So funny. Plus, talking fruit bat.

I hear that he's quite shy in person, and loathe to start arguments

He actually sounds like a guy I was friends with in HS. Who was a hypocritical jerk with poor social skills (and this is me saying that, and shut up). I was good friends with him for a long time because he was also very smart and generous... as long as you didn't push the buttons that made him a hypocritical jerk. But any disagreement about abstract issues was taken as a personal attack. And then dancing around those buttons got to be too much... but yeah, I can easily see that happening.

I find it remarkable that people would care so much about poetry that other people are writing

Er, have you met this thing we call "fandom"? That's the whole thing with schisms. The more subtle the distinction in beliefs, the more violently people will defend them, and the more they'll hate people on the other side. To get philosophical [cha-ching!] the eternal question is whether people are more determined to form tribes, or to divide them.

have you met this thing we call "fandom"?

Call me when careers are made and broken over it, though. That's a whole other level of caring and ability to support those opinions.

Sara, OUCH.

He said if he's wearing the spacesuit, the ship will come pick him up.

I say this is solid logic. Thoughts?

It is the plot of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.

I suspect that the internet has only made academic infighting worse.

Yay for jobs! The only problem is you're all moving in the wrong direction. Go east!

Poor dog. Poor Sarameg. Have you tried oil of cloves, Sara?

Poetry seems to be one of those things that may make you famous (probably after you're dead) but will never make you rich, especially now. Even in the '50s and '60s when a lot of important poetry was being written (and, not for nothing, read), Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were still freelancing radio programs and writing book reviews to make money. Plath kept trying to break in women's magazines with short stories.

And then we marveled at a time when poetry mattered enough to people to draw those kind of battle lines.

There are still battles within academia about poetry, though it's the sort of the narrative poets and the new formalists vs. the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. The problem is that the battle is primarily an academic one.

The problem is that the battle is primarily an academic one.

What is the alternative and preferable sort of battle? Unless you're using academic in the dismissive sense, isn't it that by default?

What is the alternative and preferable sort of battle?

An academic battle is going to be sort of closed and internecine. Whereas the battle between Beats and Universities played out within the larger culture. Robert Creeley (a major poet from that era) had a book of poetry that sold well beyond university bookstores.

Lots of people who never went to college bought the anthology I mentioned, The New American Poetry. So the terms of the debate/battle are not going to be proscribed by academia and criticism and journals. The Beats and San Francisco poets (not exactly coeval) taught their own poetics away from the universities. Created a...counterculture.

So, a current cultural war is, like, Team Aniston v. Team Jolie, right??

Hmm, I'm just speculating here, but wouldn't the debate between "Genre" Fiction vs "Literary" Fiction be considered a cultural war?

Oooh ooh! And the recently emerging issue of multimedia literacy and which university department gets dibs, is it the English dept? Film? Comp Lit? Comp Sci? Or do they get their own new shiny dept?

Heh, this game is kinda fun.