----- Original Message -----
From: "Marcus Bales" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, July 30, 2005 11:47 AM
Subject: Re: Cummings
> > Better known as e.e. cummings, he was cheekily nicknamed "mister
lower-case
> > highbrow", and his typographical habits affected a mighty army of
subsequent
> > poets, most popularly don marquis who invented the comic figures of
archy
> > and mehitabel, sternly abjuring dull capital letters.
Somebody emailed me recently to point out that don marquis was born "on this
day" in 1878.
> This misses the point of Marquis's "Archy and Mehitabel" poems
> entirely, sort of like saying that Wordsworth affected Lewis Carroll.
>
> Marcus
I've always been perturbed or bemused about the marquis/cummings connection.
Actually, marquis wrote classic Dorothy Parker light verse in lower-case --
{Mind you, didn't cummings too sometimes?}
-- think Hermione's Little Group of Advanced Thinkers -- and marquis' use
of lower-case is programmatic, predicated on archy's physiological inability
to work the shift key on a manual typewriter in a New York newspaper office
in the thirties.
... *not* where was cummings was coming from at all.
And why does no-one ever mention +The Cruise of the Jasper-B+, one of the
most stunningly funny novels ever written?
An Impractical Roach.
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