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Unread 01-09-2014, 12:40 AM
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John Whitworth John Whitworth is offline
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Default Speccie Competition Culture Shock

Our team has done better. But Martin Parker and Bazza were there. Good chaps! Don't you love 'bloviating'?

Lucy Vickery 11 January 2014
In Competition 2829 you were invited to imagine what Philip Larkin might have made of the news that Hull has been anointed 2017’s City of Culture.

Despite its unpromising image, this city-of-culture-in-waiting has nurtured a wide range of creative talents: from poets such as Andrew Marvell and Stevie Smith, to the playwright Tom Courtenay, the film director Anthony Minghella and folk legends the Watersons. And of course Larkin himself, who sought refuge in the university library from celebrity and the metropolitan literati.

Most of you had the poet conform to his self-perpetuated image of right-wing curmudgeon, but there was a glimpse here and there of a softer side too; that quiet voice of celebration that sits alongside the familiar detached world-weariness.

Brian Lavery, Steve Baldock and D.A. Prince stood out in a strong field. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £30 each. The extra fiver goes to Melanie Branton.

So Hull’s been named the capital of culture?
Now hordes of gawking tourists will descend.
The council must be pissing in their knickers
At the thought of all the money that they’ll spend.

There’ll be no decent jazz, just mindless pop songs
With thuggish, thumping basslines (what a bore!)
And ‘artists’ building childish installations,
As no one’s ever taught them how to draw.

I have no Truck with gurning, shrieking luvvies
Who gobble public funding for ‘the arts’
And populate their gaudy, blaring freakshows
With a cast of brute neanderthals and tarts.

In fact, I loathe this ‘culture city’ business —
A vulgar stunt to lure the bored and thick…
But, if they must perpetuate the circus,
There’s places worse than Hull that they could pick.
Melanie Branton

‘This was Philip Larkin’s room, he wrote
There at that very desk. It’s kept the same.’
She’ll point to books, a pair of specs, and quote
A cliché someone published in my name.

The culture freaks will nod and look impressed.
‘He would have been so pleased for Hull.’ What balls!
I would have seized an opening to protest
At such insensitive theatricals.

This city does not need imported fame:
It has the Ferens showing world class art,
The Truck where northern drama gains acclaim,
And music and museums at its heart.
So who’ll take charge defining culture’s sweep:
Some oaf who thinks that jazz is not the thing,
One who disdains the secrets of The Deep,
And can’t tune in when local voices sing?
Alanna Blake

In a spot-prize winner’s unbelieving daze
The city learns that it’s the judges’ choice;
Accustomed to indifference, their praise
Gives reasons to be wary, not rejoice.
What pass is sold for buying into this?
Why take the sudden soft-hand pat on trust,
Not fork two fingers in an upward thrust
To say We’ll keep our sense of how life is.

Far better stay with notions of their own
Than have Artistic Commissars rehearse
That poetry can only be subverse
And jazz long screechings on the cacophone.
Worse still, the city, as my long-time host,
Will feel constrained to fund a walking tour
With guides to try and summon up my ghost
And track the printed fossils of my spoor.
W.J. Webster

Side by side, uneasy pair,
Hull and Culture, fish and fowl
Forced together cheek by jowl
By irony’s unkind decree
To breathe a marriage’s sour air
Of mutual disharmony.

Their conjoined miseries will reign
While Beowolf in modern dress
And street-art outside M and S
Will show Hull’s fucked up kids that here
Could lurk a far more irksome pain
Than unemployment, fish and beer.

One year of Art’s pretentious ills
On show in every dismal street
Where Hull and Culture failed to meet…
And all that will survive are bills.
Martin Parker

They wind you up, these quango bods,
When choosing cities to promote.
Their final choice defies the odds
And sticks in everybody’s throat.

To wander through the streets of Hull,
Revolted by the fishy smell
Or crapped on by a passing gull,
Means getting a foretaste of hell.

It has a university,
But so does everywhere these days,
So why not Leicester or Dundee,
Or any hole where students laze?

We’ll hear from now till breakfast time
The bollocks about heritage,
The usual bloviating. I’m
For jumping off the bloody bridge.
Basil Ransome-Davies
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Unread 01-09-2014, 02:37 AM
Martin Parker Martin Parker is offline
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John,
Don't forget the recently Spherified Melanie Branton.

PS. "Bloviating" has defied my dictionary. Does it involve sheep in any way?

Last edited by Martin Parker; 01-09-2014 at 02:41 AM.
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Unread 01-09-2014, 02:45 AM
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John Whitworth John Whitworth is offline
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My apologies to Melanie. I did not know. This is something I found on the internet about bloviating.

Bloviate

Pronounced /ˈbləʊvɪeɪt/Help with IPA
This word — meaning to speak pompously — is almost entirely restricted to the United States; it doesn’t appear in any of my British English dictionaries, not even the big Oxford English Dictionary or the very recent New Oxford Dictionary of English. Yet it has a long history.
It’s most closely associated with U S President Warren Gamaliel Harding, who used it a lot and who was by all accounts the classic example of somebody who orates verbosely and windily. It’s a compound of blow, in its sense of “to boast” (also in another typical Americanism, blowhard), with a mock-Latin ending to give it the self-important stature that’s implicit in its meaning.
The word is actually much older than Harding; Fred Shapiro of the Yale Law School has recently turned up several examples from the middle of the last century, such as this one from the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Ohio in 1851: “The bloviators attempt to disturb the proceedings of this Convention”. This and other examples suggest it was at first a local word in Ohio, Harding’s home state. Bloviate may be a back-formation from the noun bloviation. This would fit with the US fashion in the early nineteenth century for expansive mock-Latinate words like sockdolager, hornswoggle and absquatulate.
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Unread 01-09-2014, 03:04 AM
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basil ransome-davies basil ransome-davies is offline
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Thanks, John. That's interesting. I certainly picked it up from US sources (in one crime novel front-line cops refer to a politically appointed DA as 'the bloviator') but it's such a good word for its purpose that I'm surprised it hasn't migrated to the OED.
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Unread 01-09-2014, 03:37 AM
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Now you have used it, Bazza, it surely will.
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Unread 01-09-2014, 05:10 AM
Rob Stuart Rob Stuart is offline
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Congratulations to all our winners. I'm heartened to see so much swearing permitted in a Speccie competition. I have always maintained that swearing can be both big and clever, as much of Larkin's work proves.

I can't resist pendantically pointing out that Tom Courtenay is an actor, not a playwright as Lucy seems to think.
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Unread 01-09-2014, 05:14 AM
Adrian Fry Adrian Fry is offline
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Tom Courtenay played Larkin in a one man show some years back. Perhaps he compiled the show himself, Lucy's confusion arising therefrom.
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Unread 01-09-2014, 05:19 AM
Martin Parker Martin Parker is offline
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Rob,
I was tempted to point out the same thing. But as an abject fawner I was reluctant to antagonise a Judge. Let us hope your card has not been marked -- for too long, anyway.

PS. Can anybody tell me, in words of one syllable or less, how to alter my "Location" from Devon to "East Dorset."

Last edited by Martin Parker; 01-09-2014 at 05:24 AM.
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Unread 01-09-2014, 05:42 AM
Melanie Branton Melanie Branton is offline
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Well done, Martin and Basil. For what it's worth, I'd have given you the extra fiver - in fact, I thought I'd be lucky to get an honourable mention this time, but I'm not complaining. I shall take the money and run.
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Unread 01-09-2014, 06:32 AM
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basil ransome-davies basil ransome-davies is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rob Stuart View Post
Congratulations to all our winners. I'm heartened to see so much swearing permitted in a Speccie competition. I have always maintained that swearing can be both big and clever, as much of Larkin's work proves.

I can't resist pendantically pointing out that Tom Courtenay is an actor, not a playwright as Lucy seems to think.
I am absolutely with you, Rob, on the swearing issue. F***** A.

Last edited by Alex Pepple; 01-09-2014 at 10:17 AM. Reason: Basil: Please be mindful of Eratosphere guidelines - obscenities not allowed in discussion threads.
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