Sinister: A Dutiful Boy In A Bubbly Town

[P F]

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

>>> 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

>>> 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.

>>> 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 at missprint.org. To unsubscribe
     send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
     majordomo at 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                 +-+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+