[lit-ideas] Allusions living free...
- From: Ursula Stange <Ursula@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 26 May 2004 16:46:35 -0400
I've been reading John Lye's tag line (We're chained to the world and we
all gotta pull) for years now (on all three lists) and it always makes
me smile. Coincidentally, this afternoon I heard the song they come
from. A dark and ominous album. I've been a Tom Waits fan ever since I
heard his famous line about 'better a bottle in front of me than a
frontal lobotomy' on the Merv Griffin show (back in the early seventies,
would be my guess). Sometime later, a friend brought over "Small
Change" and I fell in love with 'Tom Traubert's Blues.' I didn't think
things could get better than that, but then I saw Margie Gillis dance to
that song. A life-changing experience. Small Change also had the
wonderful song, "Step right up," with the great line, "the large print
giveth while the small print taketh away." It was years before I
realized how that line echoed the Bible (chapter and verse escapes me
now, but I did look it up once).
Allusions have always fascinated me. I loved learning that Khan's
speech from his burning spaceship about "from hell's mouth I spit at
thee" comes almost verbatim from the middle of Moby Dick. And the
lines in Moby Dick which Ishmael speaks about 'and I alone am left to
tell the story' come from the middle of the Book of Job. The world is
such a rich tapestry of texts speaking to each other (and the
postmodernists sum that up in the ugly word, intertextuality!).
Another favourite tale like this has to do with the cartoon cat
Garfield. My son had the show on one day (again in the early seventies
and the episode had to do with a horse's head in the bed. Went right
over every child's head, but kept the writers and the parents amused.
There's so much poetry in the world.
I'd love to hear others' stories of allusions living free in the world
or caught in the wild. Pity the poor unread kids today who don't catch
them.
Quoting all the lines from memory,
Ursula
John Lye wrote:
>"We're chained to the world
> And we all gotta pull."
> -- Tom Waits
>
>
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