It does very well, Lawrence. And I get it, what youre working your way into & through.... The series will grow, & should prove very interesting, indeed....
Doug
On 2012-02-10, at 4:33 AM, Lawrence Upton wrote:
> Hi Doug
>
> This is a really good question. Yours are -- I *was going to say usually
> are but I don't remember any bad ones -- but this is especially good,
> going way beyond a notional _why are you writing funny?_
>
> And, leaving aside Ms Stein's _why don't you read the way I write?_, I
> shall endeavour to answer.
>
> I thought it best not to say anything about these poems initially.I have
> said so much in recent times; and I do not yet have a clear idea of what I
> am doing... Questions may help me learn if people wish to ask them. I
> think that is preferable to clearing my throat and saying: Now let me tell
> you next about *this book
>
> I am not consciously using a particular form or dialect of speech, though
> it might well fit somewhere. It doesn't sound unduly odd to me and I
> associate it, quite possibly wrongly, to the builders' _make good_ when
> they fill cracks in plaster, render a wall etc.
>
> And let us not forget J Luc Picard's _Make it so_
>
> I do want him to sound, sometimes anyway, a little stilted or odd for a
> variety of inchoate and less than inchoate reasons. He lived a long time
> ago. (What language he spoke is another matter. Depending on where in time
> we place him it may be that the British Celtic languages had not
> differentiated themselves from each other *according *to *scholars *of
> *such *matters -- though there would surely have been as much variation as
> there is at any time or place, not quite the same thing. I don't want to
> rely too much on any one position, which saves me mugging up on them all
> beyond what I pick up by following my amateur scholar's nose, because
> it'll change and change again as research and speculation follows research
> and speculation.)
>
> I want to be vague about when he lived. I quite him being around when the
> Romans had recently left. I want him around when the Vikings arrived. And
> a bit later wouldn't hurt. They all have interesting possibilities
> although it's his psychology which interests me rather than, pace Ms
> Renault and others, his realistic story.
>
> I am no Mary Renault and do not have the inclination to try. These stories
> and accounts of Elidius have come down from such a variety of supposed
> sources, some of them literary enhancement and even invention, that there
> needs to be a degree of inconsistency if it is to be _believable_. e.g.
> Arthur, Tristan
>
> (I don't want it to be too believable though. I think I have told here the
> story of someone thinking I am the son of a Polish-Ukrainian doctor
> because I once told the story of one such in first person performance; and
> that wasn't useful. (Nor was the person who thought my simulation in that
> performance of a man dying was a simulation of me masturbating, and
> complained.))
>
> That line, _make open_ etc wrote itself from my subjectivity. I cannot say
> that I thought through this or that and chose the words; not consciously.
> It came out of what Csikszentmihalyi calls flow... It is the man himself
> -- Elidius not the Hungarian American, with a slightly clumsy slightly
> pompous way of speaking; also, I suppose, a desire to control -- not just
> opening but making open - when I open you you'll stay open. Elidius'
> perceptual attitude is that when the door is closed, it's to stay closed
> an d he attributes the same will-power to the inanimate. His concern is
> with the dead, or so he thinks, and they are not kept from him even by
> walls. I know from the many texts I am working on that he is somewhat
> reconciled to the dead's incursion. It's also his perception that the wind
> and maybe everything out there is going to wreck his attempt at privacy
> and security.
>
> How's that? Maybe the best I can do. And thank you very much for your
> energising interest.
>
> L
Douglas Barbour
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http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
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What dull barbarians are not proud of
their dullness and barbarism?
Thackeray
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