[lit-ideas] Tuesday Hermeneutics (Was: Monday Poem)
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:27:13 EDT
David, I hope you can do better than L. "Helm" Helm, who, when I offered my
heart-felt interpretation, all he said was that it was 'beyond' what he meant,
and that his creation being too recent, he felt unable to cope with an
exegesis of it.
I did not understand a lot of your nice verse. "Chartlon" is a hue of white?
That's one entry in the OED, 'Charlton white'. I'm not sure what you mean
gentleman's appliance shop. No such thing in the OED. I suppose you mean they
would sell things like shaving cream, but that you'd rather think it was all
pornographic (and women fallen from an honourable life). I can't see how you
can say this belongs to your childhood. It sounds more Victorian to me. On
researching collocations for 'gentleman's', I was intererested in "the
gentleman's C", which was now a B+ and what someone (male) gets just for his
legacy
and good breeding.
I am interested in reminiscences. I suppose the gentleman's appliance shop
applies to your childhood in London.
I can't see why you have to EXPLAIN an ad, Victorian or other. Don't you
find that teachers are on many an occasion asked to explain something that it's
self-explanatory. Especially in literature classes, I find it rather
irritating that someone is explaining a novel which was never meant to be
explained
and that does not need a relevant "Novel Studies" to make it be relevant. Your
other parts I understood better. You teach medicine? I thought you taught art.
Yes, fall (or autumn) is very nice, and I liked your imagery of the leaves
going to the gutter, which reminds me of another Londoner (like you), Gertrude
Lawrence. Noel Coward said she knew about things and that she was proud to
say that she came not in, but from the gutters.
And you have to let me know, under the other thread, what your favourite
Loeb, or the one you'd feel like reading now, is.
Thanks,
Cheers,
JL
"while students write i
consider outside the classroom window the fall of leaves
spinning in the sun
down to ground zero
bright red
bright yellow
like wobbling rockets
out of fuel
i glance back to tell my students a money's worth about
hernias, trusses and prolapsed bladders
explaining nineteenth century newspaper ads
and while my mouth works
like some movie with sound fadeout
my mind brings up childhood
as now it often does
waiting for a bus
on a bleak dark day--what other kinds were there-- in autumnal charlton
standing in the rain beside the panes of a gentleman's appliance shop
a forbidden and forbidding place
where no one under twenty one was allowed
we boys wondered if pornography was in there
or maybe they kept a fallen woman
beneath the counter
and we raced leaves
our gazes intent
upon the gutter."
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