I think, Christopher, that ideas like being a UQer, an American, an
Ozzy, a Paddy, a Jock, are rhetorical labels of reference that we
employ in order to attempt to comprehend each other, they are most
certainly inaccurate, as are all maps, but if such slipshod woodwork
(mixing me metaphors here!) helps us to talk at least we have a
somewhere to begin from.
Best
Dave
2008/9/10 Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]>:
> <snip>
> if you mean not getting cultural references such as those you've given which
> may be known by UQers, but not by non-Europeans, I disagree with you. [JP]
> <snip>
>
> I'm sorry but I find the idea that cultural references have to be known a
> priori both totalitarian and grotesque. Surely one good thing that poetry
> really can do now is to secede from that norm, which is made up of
> advertised, public space; to reassert the excluded, and to make life
> difficult for the reader just as that process of exclusion (*you can't say
> this; you must instead say that*) makes life difficult for everyone in the
> first place by making parts of a community silent and/or invisible. (As you
> did, for example, when you excluded those two thirds of the US population
> whose roots are NOT in the UK.)
>
> There's a Michael Frayn play set in Cuba. At the start, two characters
> strike up a conversation in Very Careful Simple English. In fact, they are
> both 'English', as (eventually) they discover. Stephen V has an interesting
> post, also relevant, on the Poetics list in which he speaks of a form of
> *self-appropriation* in which 'each occurrence absolutely mimics its
> previous manifestation without any response to its new environment. As say,
> the way a Marriot Hotel will architecturally mimic other Marriot Hotels'.
>
> Surely it's deracination and displacement rather than ancestry that leads to
> these situations, to jokes becoming Jokes in that mugging show-and-tell sort
> of way? And it's precisely the growth from those discarded roots, growth
> from below, which will help to turn such involution into something better.
>
> CW
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'How to speak a different language and still be understood?
> This is *communication* but we might call it politics, or we
> might call it life.' (Judith Revel)
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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