Dominic: Thanks especially for the link, within which is yet another link
to a very good article on Cecil Sharp.
Kelman's worth the considerable effort it takes to read him.
Mark
At 08:45 AM 3/18/2005, you wrote:
>Kelman is on my to-read list. I got fed up with Irvine Welsh around
>the time he seems to have realised he could make serious money out of
>this stuff. The writing starts to turn into a commodity. That
>objection rests in its own way on various assumptions about
>authenticity, of course.
>
>The English trad folk scene is probably the most precious about
>authenticity, with the least justification. Calling it a "living
>tradition" neatly fudges the fact that the parts of it that are most
>alive are the parts that are least traditional, as well as the fact
>that the majority of its adherents are middle class urbanites. I mean,
>I rather *like* modern folk, although its recorded manifestations seem
>to have fallen somewhat under the spell of "mellow acoustic (tm)"
>production values...
>
>Meanwhile, I note that substantive debate about such matters is
>happily ongoing: http://www.mustrad.org.uk/enth36.htm
>
>Dominic
>
>On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 23:12:26 -0000, Robin Hamilton
><[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > > When it comes to language, I think any quest for an "authentic" speech
> > > will inevitably get snarled up in dense thickets of philology. And as
> > > thickets come, there are no denser...
> > >
> > > Dominic
> >
> > Yup.
> >
> > It's a narrow example, but I became interested in an aspect of this when I
> > came on "The Confessions of Nat Turner" (the original, not the Styron
> novel)
> > transcribed the night before his execution by a white middle-class New York
> > reporter, which made Turner sound like a white [etc.] ...
> >
> > Par for the course, and a stunning example of what in my wilder moments I'm
> > inclined to describe as "linguistic genocide".
> >
> > ... what itched my brain was that the only examples of "authentic" (?)
> black
> > 19thC American speech -- Mark Twain, Melville in "Benito Cerrino", _Uncle
> > Tom's Cabin_ and Joel Chandler Harris -- that I could call to mind were all
> > by white middle class [etc] ...
> >
> > I may be missing something, or lots of texts, but this always puzzled me.
> >
> > Alice Walker has a ferocious denunciation of Harris (that I disagree with)
> > along the lines that he stole or expropriated the language.
> >
> > The only comparable English example that I can think of is Francis Berry in
> > "Morant Bay".
> >
> > To go back to the Glasgow Language Wars, I was in a pub once when Tom
> > Leonard and Jim Kelman were discussing how you could tell exactly which
> side
> > of a housing estate someone was brought up on -- turned on the distinction
> > between "yin" and "wan" -- "wan i uz, Jimmy," versus "the Big Yin.
> >
> > My ear was never that good, but it was interesting to hear the two discuss
> > this.
> >
> > It's also interesting to compare James Kelman's early story, "Nice tae be
> > nice", with almost everything else he's written. He and Tom Leonard
> adopted
> > quite different strategies in this area.
> >
> > Robin
> >
>
>
>--
>// Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
>// bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov
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