[lit-ideas] Re: Tuesday Hermeneutics (Was: Monday Poem)
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:22:18 -0700
On Oct 23, 2007, at 8:27 AM, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx wrote:
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'm happy to try.
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'.
Charlton is an area of S.E. London, near Woolwich. It has a football
team. I lived there for a few weeks when we were between houses,
which is to say that we had to move out of the house that we'd sold
and couldn't yet move into the house that we'd bought. It was a grim
place.
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.
I think the shop sold trusses of various sorts, devices for people
who wanted to avoid the surgical repair of hernias. But why young
adults had to be kept out is a bit of a mystery, hence the
speculation that they had a second line of business. It's hard to
imagine that there was a sufficient market in trusses. What else
would they sell? Male corsets perhaps? Condoms maybe? I thought
the place worth including in a poem because it was so much of an era,
but it's not something I can describe further because I never went in.
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.
One of my seminars this semester, in an art college, is "History from
Fifty Defective Newspapers." I bought a stack of nineteenth century
newspapers on e-bay and we are trying to figure out what can be
learned from this "defective" archive. My task is usually either to
suggest where further information is available or to supply some of
same, hence the discourse on hernias and prolapsed bladders, which
were so much the bane of nineteenth century women that you can still
find chairs with built-in potties. I far I also told them about
McDowell and Sims and the early history of gynecology--a long time
ago I taught the history of medicine--which may have been too much
indelicacy for that hour of the morning.
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.
We did try to race leaves in the gutter just as you race objects in a
stream. And yes I was considering both innocent and experienced
understandings of "gutter".
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.
Of Loeb, I am entirely innocent; I know nothing about the subject. I
am a modern historian, straying sometimes towards the early modern
period, but not tempted further back. My current weakness is
encyclopedia Britannica. I just bought my third set, which will
allow me perhaps to say a thing or two about the transition from the
eleventh to the thirteenth edition. Or maybe I'll just enjoy the
essays.
Best wishes,
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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