[New-Poetry] Ashes, ashes, we all fall down

[Robin Hamilton]

  the mention of "supreme fiction" makes me want to say Harold Bloom (but I don't see him necessarily saying 'old is a real bitch')


  Chris

  *******************


  Both:


              C)  Life is a ravishing disappointment, most of the time, but oh well.

  and ...


              D)  Getting old is a real bitch, but the supreme fiction never dies.

  ... involve register-jumping.  Is this more Brit than USAmerican?  (Dorothy Parker uses it, and don marquis, but hey, who pays attention to them?)

  My ear quivers a little at "Getting old is a real bitch" -- a real bitch?  Um.  Perhaps, "Getting old is the [sic] real bitch."  There's a mush of possible adjective/adverb/verb usages there.  It's not that cant [especially] and slang don't have rules, but that the rules tend to be distinctly slippery.

          A Gallus Whore

  ("Gallows Thief" would be more polite, but over-egging the pudding.  As Bernard Cornwell did in the title to one of his novels, basing the cant there, not surprisingly given the catastrophic mis-steps he makes, on James Hardy "thrice transported" Vaux.

  I mean, you could have a term of admiration couched as "a gallus thief".  But a gallows thief is simply tautological.

  Actually, even "gallus whore" (like Peddler's Greek in a lunatic footnote which has even reached the Third Arden Edition of As You Like It) is slightly off.   ***   

  "Gallows whore", yes, that's actually extant in some broadside ballads, but by the time the term transmogrifies (in the West of Scotland and America) to "gallus", it has slightly shifted meaning as well as orthography and/or pronunciation.

  Just a pedantic little aside.

          The Putative Author of Morts and Blowens.)

  *** Bob:  The ear of that aside is dedicated to you.  Have you noticed it?  I've even seriously thought of posting a bad-tempered comment on it to SHAKSPER, ever since I identified the source sometime in the 1850s.  But so much trouble, especially given the way SHAKSPER seems to be going at the moment.

  Robin

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