ABOUT – Entice with Disgust (Part I): It is Sunday again, a day for reflection.
I am reflecting in particular on the tone of disgust that I have been hearing in my ears over the last month during certain phases of writing – "You dirty, old man!", someone is saying. The voice is located in the literary world, and the disgust arises when an older man (I am an older man) is found out to be flirting, in this instance with lyric poetry, an activity reserved for youth.
This is about the occurrence of ‘Dirty Words’ in the imagined community of the literary world (keep my vagabond libido out of it!), the particular ‘Dirty Word’ being the P-eee word: P for Poetry, the object of my other disgusted voice.
On Saturday I had two experiences that threw light on the operation of the other disgusted voice. One came from reading the Guardian newspaper Saturday Review, Milan Kundera on the art of the novel, and what he had to say about the conversion story. The other experience came from listening to Professor David Blank of University of California, Los Angeles give a talk entitled "Matching tops and bottoms: reconstructing a Herculaneum papyrus and an atomist rhetoric" (a City Vagabond aside: the Professor’s talk was given to the Friends of the Herculaneum Society at their Winter Meeting in the rooms of the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Instution – I am of course not a Friend, but somehow managed to wander in…).
I bring my whispering mouth close to your ear in the shadows of what is now become an extended reflection (Parts II, III and IV that follow below). Or is it a caress? – the other voice is already loudly ‘tut-tutting’, having also read in Saturday’s Guardian Review, the Commentary by Giles Fodden on that other ‘Dirty Word’, disgust with the ‘literary’ word itself – "… a bad thing, something elitist, decadent and sexually ambiguous, certainly not socially useful or morally pure".
You see I am already corrupting you.
mmj