Heaney makes the same point about the shipping forecast in, I think,
'Feeling Into Words'. I always rather assumed that Carol Ann Dumbdown
'borrowed' it from there.
Chris opens an interesting subject: anyone who's been brought up in the
North Atlantic archipelago will have been so against the background
radiation of BBC RP accents. This accent is in theory placeless and yet is
supposed to contain something identifiable about nation - how does this
affect our responses to place, I wonder?
cheers
David
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Goode <[log in to unmask]>
To: the moshpit <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 16 February 2000 12:39
Subject: shipping forecast
>Me again. Sorry...
>
>I meant to drop into my previous post a bit from Carol-Ann Duffy's poem
>'Prayer', which uses placenames from the shipping forecast in exactly the
way
>I was talking about. To most listeners they mean nothing (an absence of
>information perversely compounded by the raw data that's reported along
with
>them, which we either cannot comprehend or - if we sort of do understand
it -
>calibrate.)
>
>Yet - as was already a middle-class cliche long before Duffy published
'Mean
>Time' - the shipping forecast operates as a sort of secular litany for a
vast
>constitutency hungry for bedtime consolation.
>
>The invocation of place in a way that allows it to resonate openly without
>actually conveying anything in particular (except, I suppose, in this case,
>coastalness - and, I guess, isolation) is something I like very much indeed
>and wouldn't want to eliminate from my practice or anybody else's.
>
>Are other listmembers comforted by the background radiation of the shipping
>forecast? Or are they hyperaesthetically sensitive to the bum note in
'Sailing
>By', and forced to switch off?
>
>
>
>
>
>Chris Goode
>Director, _signal to noise_
>[log in to unmask]
>
>"The foot is a red herring. I'm willing to be quoted on that." - Peter
Riley
>
>____________________________________________________________________
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