----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, July 30, 2005 4:03 PM
Subject: Re: Cummings
> ----- 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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