This is a re-post from 21 September 2011. I dust it off in dedication to my friend Dr. Vito Caiati, historian and old-school scholar who is excessively worried about typographical errors in his missives to me. He is not alone; he has recently been joined by long-time blogger buddy Tony Flood who shares Vito's worry. I forebear to mention still others. We scholarly types are punctilious, and rightly so; but this here's a blog, and a dedicated blogger maintains a pace that allows for stumbles and falls.
Don't get me wrong: love and respect for our alma mater, our dear mother, the English language, mistress and muse, enabler of our thoughts, demands that we try to avoid errors typographical and otherwise. But let's not obsess over them.
Transmission of sense is the name of the game, and if that has occurred, then communication has taken place.
................................
An old friend from college, who has a Masters in English, regularly sends me stuff like this which I have no trouble understanding:
I trust that you ahve emelreis of going pacles with your presnts in cars before the days when the shapr devide came and deliniated clearly the music that our presnts like and the stuff that was aethetically unreachabable to many of thier generation. That was a haunting melody, The Waywared Wind, and it spoke of an experiencethat was really more coon to a ahlf generation away from the WWII generation. It was actually a toad bod for its time. Same year bourght us Fale Storms come Donw From YOur Ivorty Towe, the great pretender, and other romantic and innocent songs. But it also brought Hound Dog, which shocked the blazes out of my parents and all of their peers. It was even sexual. It was just animal. And, no it was not specificailly Negrol; it was worse it was p;oor white trash with side burns on a motocycle. It woldn't matterif the B Side of every platter ahd been one of those great gospel tunes those guys did; that stuff was not urban, mainline, Protestant stuff, but anekly backwoods stuff where there are stills and 13-year-olf brides, that the Northern boys had heard about in the WWII barracks and hoped that they would never have hear about again as they went back to either their Main Line P:rotestant or Catholic urban llive, whether they belonged to a country het or not or woudl have to wait a while, say until their GI Bill college educations started enabling them to play golf. But that was still a good summer of rthe last of the sweet songs that memebers of several gneratons could enjoy together
Talk about spontaneous prose! No grammatical or spelling hang-ups here. My friend is an old Kerouac aficionado too, and this is one of the more entertaining of his missives. Is it the approach of October that frees and inspires his pen? My friend's a strange bird, and the above just came straight out of his febrile pate; he didn't compose it that way to prove that typographical errors are compatible with transmission of sense.
A curious watershed era it was in which the sweet and tender was found cheek-by-jowl with the explicitly-referenced raw hydraulics of sexual intercourse. Take Little Richard, perhaps the chief exponent, of the devil's music, worse than old Swivel Hips himself. "Good Golly Miss Molly," he screamed, "she sure likes to ball/When you're rockin' and a rollin' can't you hear yo mama call."
That was actually played on the radio in the '50s. To ball is to have sex, and 'rock and roll' means the same thing. And so there were Southern rednecks who wanted the stuff banned claiming that R & R music was "was bringing the white man down to the level of the nigger." That's what they said; I'm just quoting. To mention a word is not to use it.
I maintain that the best R & R manages to marry the Dionysian thrust with the tender embrace, the animalic with the sweetly romantic. The prime example? Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman. One thing I love about Orbison is that instead of saying 'Fuck!,' like some crude rap punk, he says, 'Mercy!' Another little indicator of how right my friend is in his analysis above. And how far we've sunk since the (relatively) innocent 'fifties.
Billl,
Thqnkks for the dedicatton,
Posted by: Vito B. Caiati | Monday, June 05, 2023 at 12:59 PM