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From: "Chris Jones" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, August 15, 2010 4:03 AM
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: owning canada

> On Sat, 2010-08-14 at 23:24 +0100, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>>
>> Or perhaps the obliteration of attribution is a suppression of the
>> gay
>> voice?
>
> Robin, you have the question, spot on

And not just outright suppression, and not just gays, but blacks, women, and 
the working classes -- virtually any outlier group.

The treatment of Edward Lear is pretty much par for the course, and I 
suspect the way in which Clough and Stevie Smith are marginalised ties in. 
It's actually more *effective in terms of neutralization to co-opt rather 
than simply abolish.

Though there's the case of the linguistic genocide perpetrated on the 
nineteenth century black American voice (think Nat Turner) ...

The study of cant writing from the beginning and up to the present day is 
riddled with this, the careful, whether intentional or not, neutralisation 
of the most powerful voices and speakers, and the quite casual abandonment 
of scholarly standards when it comes to the presentation of cant texts. 
Hey, who *needs to edit them properly, or work out who wrote them or put 
them back into their original context?  It's only pig shit ignorant  toerags 
on the Street writing the stuff after all.

And thus we get the anglicisation of "De nite afore Larry was stretched" and 
the effective obliteration of 1780s Dublin street speech.

Does the term "tokenism" seem relevant here?

Ah, don't *start me ...

Also, in this area, it doesn't help to have a sense of humour, as Thomas 
Dekker found out to his cost, both as a writer of cant texts and as a 
commentator on them.

            :-(

Though, better to light a candle than curse the darkness, thinking about 
this, I may have fallen into the trap myself when it comes to John Leigh. 
Just occurs to me that I've accepted without really thinking about it that 
his play _Kensington Gardens_ was a cop-out, with Leigh trying to mask his 
gay identity:

"The portrayal of the effeminates who appear in John Leigh's  _Kensington 
Gardens, or The Pretenders_ ( 1718 ) is more implicitly censorious. Leigh 
was a much employed actor at Lincoln's Inn Fields, nicknamed "Handsome 
Leigh" for what Chetwood called his "particular amiable Form, and genteel 
Address." But Chetwood qualified these charms by remarking that Leigh "might 
have been in the good Graces of the Fair-Sex, if his Taste had led him that 
Way." 31 One might expect him to provide a more sympathetic portrait, but in 
fact, the two effeminate characters in Kensington Gardens, Varnish and 
Bardach, are delineated more negatively than Baker Maiden; and Leigh, who 
specialized in the roles of lovers and heroes, was careful to play the 
romantic lead in his own comedy."

    -- Laurence Senelick, "Mollies or Men of Mode? Sodomy and the 
Eighteenth-Century London Stage," _Journal of the History of Sexuality_, 
Volume: 1. Issue: 1. Publication Year: 1990. Page Number: 49.

Given the proven ability of writers on cant and anyone associated with it to 
get things entirely ass backwards, so to speak, it's entirely possible that 
the above paragraph is a load of utter bullshit.

Right, me off to read _Kensington Gardens_ *carefully [at last].

Cheers,

Robin

> , could I say. Whichever way, a gay voice is obliterated. And wasn't
> this the gay liberationist's critique of Language poetry. Which is why I
> perhaps find Charles Bernstein's ballad for his son, The Ballad of the
> Girlie Man
> —For Felix
>
>
> The truth is hidden in a veil of tears
> The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear
> A democracy once proposed
> Is slimmed and grimed again
> By men with brute design
> Who prefer hate to rime
>
> such a sad ballad.
>
>
> -- 
> have chronic fatigue syndrome so may be delayed in reply or brain fog 
> weird
>
> just to let you know that's all, Chris Jones.
>
> Blog: http://abdevpoetics.blogspot.com/