Holsten Export? That's of no importance at all. WHO IS SYLVIA? This Plath thing just rumbles on and on, like a steamroller. Possibly that's impressive. Sylvia Plath is not mentioned in the outstanding Go-Betweens song 'Karen'. It rhymes 'Standing by the counter' with 'all the problems that I encounter'. But it does not do so as well as one might hope. I shall save my response to the Plathites for Papercuts#5:Caleb's Legacy, where I think I should perhaps say something on this. Hm, perhaps I should use a pseudonym. BUYING THEIR ICE-CREAMS FROM SOMEONE ELSE The streets of these other towns still drift with people wheeling like seagulls. The waves of middle age lack glamour - I don't notice till I try to take a ton of pictures of them. The new familiar iconography diverts few observers. Bollard streets, and bins. I saw a teenager today in a Nirvana T-shirt. I calculated that this was something like seeing a teenager (say, 17) in a Smiths T in 1994. I loved the Smiths in 1994 and love them still, but in 1994 the Smiths on a teen would have looked a tad retro, as it would today. (In 1994 the kids wore... Nirvana T-shirts.) That is not, of course, a case against it. Far from it, possibly. Over a 50p refill I finished Franny & Zooey. It really is a bit of an oddball of a work. It's a funny thing how the two protagonists are both said to be gorgeous. That's always convenient. I must try it myself. What is it about the kids in the towns? Are they into heavy metal or something? I can't quite figure them out. The style seems to date back to the mid-90s or so. They never talked to me back then, anyway. OH! IT'S ANOTHER!! Who really blew me away was the geezer Peter Miller. He sought to return to 'goalmouth scrambles', and I thought: but there were such scrambles today, Miller, as Tottenham Hotspur were abjectly humbled by the mighty Stockport County. No? Oh. Never/Mind, as we used to say in the pre-retro days. Well, Miller went on. YOUR MAKE-UP NEEDS A SHAKE-UP

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You just wait until I get round to reading that Sylvia Plath Diaries book with a segment of orange in my mouth, a plastic bag over my head and my belt round my neck, which inadvertently causes my trousers to fall down.

Gosh, I don't know. I just don't know. How does SP relate, anyway, to your preference for the ugly and stupid? STANLEY WASN'T LIBERATED BY FRANCE, OR ANY OTHER REVOLUTION

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Is there really someone called Stanley Fish?

Oh, yes. He's proud of that name. They say that he was the model for David Lodge's character Morris (sp?) Zapp. And that was a long time ago. Fish has had an influence on me, you know - much more than I'd have expected in the days when Nirvana were around. I'D LIKE TO BE IN HISTORY But Miller went on.

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Yes, I think non-fiction does become historical in

a different way to fiction. Look at Edgar Allan Poe.... I think perhaps, generally speaking, considerations of entertainment are put to one side when non-fiction is being allotted its historical value, resulting in a surprisingly high chart placing for Virginia Woolf. This is just so thought-provoking that I don't know where to begin. Does anyone else? You know, a lot of people find VW very entertaining. Some folks find SP entertaining, too. Oranges or no. CAREY, GET OUT YOUR CATTLE I must return, quick as a green arrow, to that Mitchell thing. It moves me when on 'My Old Man' (1971) she sings 'Me and them lonesome blues / collide...'. But it doesn't move me cos of the lyric - far from it. The melody, the swooping delivery, the characteristic rich piano chords, have made my heart swim since I was a child. I have never known what she was singing. It devastated me again tonight, and I looked at the lyric sheet. And, well. The idea of 'colliding with the blues' is actually OK. But the rest of that chorus reeally doesn't have the poignancy it *ought* to have. On paper it just looks like dull bluesy standard stuff. So what I'm thinking is that we have here a version of Eliot's 'Objective Correlative' (1919), for which there was a disjunction, a disproportion between the emotion and the literary means by which it was expressed. In 'My Old Man' there's a disjunction between the banality of the lyric and the melancholy passions that its delivery inflames - to the point when it's best not to know what she's singing at all. Hm. Nobody mentioned *this* in THE MESSAGE (1999). I could be exaggerating the poverty of the lyric. But I still think that the dynamism of this song's melody is perhaps more striking than anything on, say, "Holiday" or "The Charm Of The Highway Strip", and that is saying something in my book. Have you read my book? It's called 'Joni Mitchell vs Early Magnetic Fields', and will be published by Manchester's Carcanet Press later this calendar year. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+