No blogging from me today (other than this, obviously). I'm taking a group of students to the Land of Lost Content, a sure contender for Shropshire's oddest museum. It's basically an old warehouse filled with the contents of the charity shops nobody ever goes to. Old detergent boxes, 1950s underpants, a telephone exchange, Wham records and a very disturbing collection of golliwog memorabilia. You can see the disturbing photos I took last year here.
The name of course is from A. E Housman's 'A Shropshire Lad', which also features the line about Shropshire's 'blue remembered hills'. The irony is of course that the narrator is looking to Shropshire from Herefordshire, and the subtext of the poem is homoerotic… which would no doubt horrify the tweedy Tories who like the line but have never read the poem. It amuses me though.
Talking of homoerotic, the only book I've acquired so far this week is Rhys Davies' 1947 The Dark Daughters, a rather melodramatic Lear retelling which features the first Welsh cocaine abuse in literary history. Davies was proper Valleys boy (though not a miner) whose works carry a considerable homosexual charge, albeit one rarely mentioned by his contemporary reviewers. Apparently this books is 'sustainedly unpleasant' and carries hints of 'perversion'. Excellent.
I'm hoping the bus breaks down - otherwise I get back to the Hegemon and go straight into another meeting, damn it. Have a good day.
1 comment:
Didn't Half-Man Half-Biscuit have a song called 'A Shropshire Lad'? Quite good I seem to remember.1
Post a Comment