Roman Turovsky at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > The funny thing is that old postings in those flame wars are nowhere as > interesting as they seemed at the time..........
I'm afraid they weren't as interesting as all that at the time, Roman. What's interesting (or, for that matter, persuasive) to the writer in the heat of combat is a far cry from what's interesting to the reader. BTW, what is a "roach assumption"? Is this a characterization of methodology, or of substances that affected your sobriety in making it? Or some rule of thumb about the visibility of actual visible cockroaches to hidden ones? And as long as I've sort of touched on it, I know this is OT, but in light of recent remarks by Roman, Stewart and Matanya, the following excerpt from a set of program notes I recently finished somehow seems relevant: "While in the hospital recuperating from his heart attack, Shostakovich read through a collection of poems by Alexander Blok.... The dark tone of Blok¹s poems must have matched Shostakovich¹s mood. When the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, a longtime friend, asked him to compose songs for cello and soprano for Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, Shostakovich turned to Blok¹s poems. A few days after he finished the cycle on February 3, 1967, he told a visiting friend that though he had conceived it well before Rostropovich¹s request, he was unable to compose it until he found a bottle of brandy that his wife‹who was otherwise vigilant and ruthless in keeping her ailing husband away from potentially harmful substances‹had not hidden thoroughly enough. After a reviving shot of the brandy, Shostakovich said, he finished the cycle in three days." Cheers, Howard
