Steve Schwartz schrieb: >The harm of Beethoven is that most people don't like the music. It thus >creates a schism between intellectuals and normal people. This is bad. >Intellectuals are bad. Intellectuals are troublemakers. Normal people >are God's Gift. Therefore, we really shouldn't have Beethoven. It doesn't take Beethoven to create a schism between intellectuals and normal people. This schim will always be there. And there will always be intellectuals. Like me. Troublemakres, eh? I take this as a compliment. (And the world would be much poorer without Beethoven, by the way.) >Schoenberg isn't avant-garde. But even if he were, so what? I have >absolutely no interest in the avant-garde because it's avant-garde. So you like the good old stuff - which once was avant-garde. See how strange you argue? >Of course I would, because Hafiz has influenced that tradition, especially >in the late 19th century and in the 1960s and 1970s US. The "deep image" >school of American poetry came under Hafiz's (and Persian poetry in >general) influence, just as the late 19th century and the Twenties were >influenced by Japan. That doesn't make Hafiz a Western guy. He remains Oriental. Robert