Mark, that's the best joke I've seen on Britpo for quite a while.
On 27 Nov 2014, at 15:25, Mark Weiss wrote:
> Alliteration is overdone in the phone book, if you ask me.
>
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Nov 27, 2014 8:56 AM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical
>>
>> Hi Michael,
>> As Van Morrison has it in one of his songs:
>> "When people understand what I say,
>> There'll be days like this."
>> As well as when he cites Blake's Four Zoas or Patrick Kavanagh, his own
>> compositions sound mercifully different from the telephone book. Though I
>> regret missing what must have been a galvanizing performance from the
>> Toronto Telephone Directory.
>> Jamie
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [log in to unmask]
>> Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2014 11:55 AM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical
>>
>> Hi Jamie
>>
>> I didn't understand everything you said but if I were to perceive and argue
>> for lyricism in a phone-book context that would be very far indeed from
>> conceiving it as a practical song-text, so I think Van Morrison's
>> hypothetical honour would be saved.
>>
>> Obviously the shared assumption of this classic of blurb-hyperbole is that
>> the telephone directory is NOT a good song-text; and of course I agree with
>> this. Popular song is very much wedded to the drama of shaped syntax so I
>> don't think name-lists or street-signs have a lot of potential as
>> song-lyrics. For me one of the core fascinations of sound poetry is how do
>> you give it that line in the absence of syntax, how do you stop it being
>> just a succession of sound-effects.
>>
>> I think most of us recognize a list to be a mechanical sort of thing,
>> something it would be a challenge to put any feeling into reciting. But
>> there's no doubt that a list can sometimes be very eloquent. I always
>> eagerly examine the shopping lists that other people leave in supermarket
>> trolleys, though it feels a bit intrusive to be doing it, they betray so
>> much about someone's life. Few diary-entries can evoke memory so precisely
>> as an old list of , say, debt-juggling or gift ideas for relatives. We
>> nature-lovers are addicted to itemizing our field experience in "arid"
>> lists.
>>
>> The counterintuitive prominence of the list as a structural component in
>> modern poetry maybe has something to do with a recognition that description
>> always detracts from the bare name. Say "elm" and in a certain sense you
>> say all; more than if you try to evoke "the scrubby tangled weave of
>> coarsetoothed leaves" or something of that sort.
>>
>> I'm rambling.. blame the web conference I'm listening to.
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