I feel I really ought to clarify my apparently inflammatory remarks about pretty girls and their capacity to be intellectuals. I doubt it need even be said, but I made a broad generalisation which, of course, is not universally applicable. No generalisations are. However, I offered a possible reason as to why girls more fortunately endowed with physical attributes than others are less likely to feel the need to develop their mental skills. It is certainly not a situation I accept with pleasure, and nor is it one that is confined to women. I will leave the castigation of men for another day, though. As for "pigeon-holing" or stigmatising, that only applies to those who already derive a certain identity with broad social groups. To those who don't, such general, and obviously no infallible, observations wash away like water off duck in a wet suit's back. Since I am sure that what I wrote was not interesting or worthy enough to warrant being paraphrased, I will leave it at that. Besides which, such intellectual semantics are entirely too unromantic and tedious to bother with, although many do (many of them women, I might add). So I shall, if I may, offer a slightly more beautiful anecdote up for whosoever may be interested. On Thursday I visited a friend at King's College in Cambridge and just as I was leaving a fog descended on the quadrangle. It was so thick that the buildings seemed to become less tangible and take on an ethereal mantle. Around the square open ground lay lamps, and they shone through the mist like little moons trapped on earth. Such a scene was enough to make me feel a rising joy, as if I was witnessing a truly precious moment of beauty passing over the earth. But then, to make matters even better (you see, I am not always so negative; things do get better), the organ in King's Chapel began to flood the quadrangle with sonorous sound, like a hypnotic voice beyond speech. I felt, as I stood rooted there, that there are special times, and they occur all over the world and probably have done since the earth itself was a young thing, when events coallesce to form a natural poetry, as if the world itself were conjuring its own verse. And the point of all that? Oh yes, there was a point, it was not just self-indulgence. The point is, I think, to seek those moments out. They can find you, as this one did me, but sometimes they are elusive. They may be elusive, but they are always worth finding. Trawl the world, rove the sky, climb hills, move your body until you find yourself in the centre of natural poetry in action, when the earth recites its own lines of verse. That, I think, was what Walter Pater meant when he said "to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life". Seek and ye shall find, if I may be so Biblical. Finally, I thought I'd mention one more thing about my dearly departed darling Sylvia Plath. The aforementioned friend once attended a tea party she held when she was studying in Cambridge, and he described her as a self-centred, arrogant litte prig. He was probably right, but that didn't prevent her from being one of the most brilliant, sincere and lyrical poets of the 20th century. I suppose there is another lesson: not all poets are capable of holding congenial tea parties. A lesson worth learning. Ruvi. +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+