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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