Touch of the Foucaults in your thinking here Alison.
Douglas Clark, Bath, Somerset, England ....
http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2005 6:47 AM
Subject: Re: Larkin and bad poets
> On 18/1/05 3:51 PM, "Andrew Burke" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Hey, not a silly question at all
>
> Glad about that, Andrew, and it was nice to read your odyssey through
> "normalities". Reading the Larkin article, I was struck by how much it
> rested on the question of being "normal". Like most people, I used to
> want
> to be the same as everyone else when I was an adolescent - I longed to
> have
> jeans and a windcheater, mainly so I could just be invisible (we didn't
> have
> the same clothes as our peers, as my mother got most of ours from op
> shops).
> Then, a bit later, in my 20s I guess, the idea of being "normal" gave me
> the
> horrors - I had this recurring nightmare that I lived in a brick veneer
> home
> with a chainlink fence around that didn't have a gate, trapped, and that's
> what I thought it meant. May have had something to do with my father's
> constantly iterated desire for me to get a nice husband and "settle down".
> As you say, that's pretty conventional as well, and I rebelled in most of
> the conventional ways. These days I don't think about it much, apart from
> when I'm contemplating my bank balance (or imbalance); I'm just who I am,
> and most of the time that's fine, both the good and the bad of it. Most
> of
> what I am is pretty banal, and that's fine too. Doug's comment (welcome
> back, Douglas!) reminds me of some abnormalities which one is better off
> without, and which I've seen too much of too close to hand to think at all
> romantic. But it also reminds me of how the psychiatric profession and
> other forces can play on the norm in ways that are less than positive, how
> the norm is used to suppress dissent, and so on. And not in just the
> obvious ways, either: mass outpourings of grief, say, can be an
> interesting
> gauge, if one doesn't share them, like when Princess Diana died. I guess
> an
> inner ecological balance is hard enough to find anyway, without worrying
> about what other people think!
>
> Best
>
> A
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>
> --
> This email has been verified as Virus free
> Virus Protection and more available at http://www.plus.net
|