Sinister: more bad breathing upon the listerines

[carle groome]

in the centuries since my last post (ok, weeks. but in the 186,000
miles-per-second world of Sinister, i am light-years behind) i noted a
desultory thread in re: the idea of content; viz, the pop culture and
pop music. especially the articulations of Peter Miller and Youn J. Noh
about the work of Lloyd Cole ...

when i think on't, as i am wont, it arrives bearing the same blithe
controversy that was being promulgated stateside in the 80s as to the
'canon' of literature as the West's abiding standard of shared
references. the upshot of the ballyhoo was, simply, we are becoming
low-class by lowering the academic rigors to admit, oh, stuff like
semiotic revisioning of texts, african-american and feminist studies,
offering MFA's in computer animation, etc. you know the type, right? (a
lot of tosh and bother as to who was controlling the
curricula...amounted to a few editorials and alan bloom's "the closing
of the american mind" getting on the bestseller list for a few weeks.
shows you how far down we are when we only get into these discussions
when it becomes pop controversy, eh?) so, we are, in point-of-fact, in a
post-literate society wherein the concept of a single,
white-judeo-christian, english-speaking body of work is pretty much
irrelevant, considering how multi-culti and polyethno have created
incursions into the common lingua franca (is that right? maybe it means
'french tongue'? naw! couldn't be...?) to become the fair rate coin of
intellectual exchange.

oops. too much high-falutin' MLA-baitin' goin' on in this one. i should
dele this but, as there are so many o-level or a-level or whatevers
(never could make sense of your SAT process) and grad study folk on this
list, i'd best leave it in in to show i'm just as foolish as ye. but let
me shave it down.

i do believe it was dr. johnson who said, in a letter (might've been to
boswell-- might not): "I am sorry to write you such a long letter. I
haven't the time for a short one." Which I take to mean, brevity is not
only the soul of wit but responsible communication. (Unless he was being
extremely Brit and meant that he hadn't time for 'a quick one'...which i
understand means something altogether different over there. and knowing
the good doctor's habits, one doubts he would EVER refuse a quick one.)

but i digress.

what i mean to say is that the allusions to books and movies of a
certain era, the modern generation more or less, may 'date' the
material, but that is also its strength. name-dropping (or, in rap,
name-checking) is the way we transfer information packets (incidentally
boys&girls, this is the ENTIRE foundation of the internet!--the very
life's blood of our lovely little e-mail clusterf*ck) without having to
go into graphic detail. when i say something like "clouds scudding
across a spielberg sky" i am resonably certain that a fair percentage of
my readers will be able to put the picture together without oil paint.
or if i say "an application form as easy to fill out as an infinite jest
book report" i, again, am willing to accept that i may leave a number of
head-scratchers in my wake...and hope that the insightful will help to
clean-up after me.

i mean, c'mon! can anyone really say they get EVERY reference on this list?

BTB--
David White wrote:
"men, dont do that stupid warbly whistling all round
the shop.and if you do dont stand with your hand on
your hip and do andrew loyd webber. its not ladylike."

I've never noticed it in supermarkets but I have noticed that everytime
theres been somebody in my house to do domestic repairs or deliveries (gas
man, electricity man, delivery men or whatever) they always do that warbling
whistle thing. It's never a tune I've ever heard but seems to be kind of
organic in that it constantly changes and doesn't seem to be one tune in
particular. I reckon it must be part of the training. The only other place
I've ever heard them is on trains. Theres generally some old bastard sitting
right behind me whistling away in that incredibly annoying, through the
teeth style that makes the sound penetrate through even the loudest personal
stereo headphones. Grrr.

 and Jan Imgrund followed:
 My driving teacher was possibly the best (or worst, depending on your
opionion about warbling) warbling whistler in the world.
*warblewarblewarblewarble* turn the next right, please *warblewarblewarble*
no, not this one. This one's one way in the other direction. Got you again,
you fool!! *laughwarblelaughwarblelaughwarblelaughwarble*. How on earth are
you supposed to concentrate with that?


i suspect you've forgotten the one spot at which all gents whistle like
a flock of songbirds: the gents; aka, the public urinal. seems to have
something to do with the plumbing. (please feel free to create any
double/triple entendres you may like from this. i prefer being the
straight banana--more or less. which also leads to even more innuendo.)

and that's my 15 minutes of flame.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
    +---+  Brought to you by the undead Sinister mailing list  +---+
    To send to the list mail sinister at missprint.org. To unsubscribe
    send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
    majordomo at missprint.org.  WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister
 +-+  "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students"  +-+
 +-+  "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list"  +-+
 +-+       "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper        +-+
 +-+   "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000   +-+
 +-+       "peculiarly deranged fanbase" "frighteningly named       +-+
 +-+           Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000           +-+
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+