Still, I hope God isn't an old, black dude with wandering hands or a tiny Canadian woman who doesn't know the meaning of the word 'ironic' either.

Yes, those things are true, though I don't really care whether Alanis Morrisette knows her lexicon - people generally don't know it - and the main thing to me in terms of a divine image is to change the channel from time to time. Folks gravitate to narrow universes, and it's the job of creators to yank them out of those. To change the channel from time to time. Otherwise, you get the phenomenon Julie describes.

Cheers,
John

I know John, I agree. I was joking, should have added a smiley face. Also, apparently Alanis Morrisette is 5ft 4, which isn't tiny at all. She looks smaller.

As for this poem, I agree largely with what James said in post #16. I don't have a problem with 'we are men. men make fire in woods', but the ending comparison just seems, I don't know, unnecessary and adds nothing.

Smiley faces are cool.

Cheers,
John

PS b/c I can't resist. I believe they originated in Germany in the anti-nuclear power movement. Those little yellow smiley faces started showing up all over Europe on badges in the late 70s. The things I tell my German classes.

I feel so sorry for Alanis Morrisette. She's spent the past twenty years being schooled incessantly by pedants about the true meaning of "ironic." I'd say she's got a pretty good grasp of the concept now.

Gasp, John, do you mean that totally, totally realistic Forrest Gump scene was inaccurate? Perish the thought.

(You might actually be conflating the smiley with the nuclear disarmament symbol, which features a juxtaposition of the semaphore signals for N and D, and which is widely referred to as the "peace sign.")

Wouldn't it be ironic if I didn't know what a pedant I am?

The origin of the smiley, according to Reader's Digest anyway, and Wikipedia agrees. It doesn't get truer than that.

Pedantry was so much more work before Google :)

I think she knew very well from the start that she was using "ironic" incorrectly. It was part of the voice and the humor of the song, an irony unto itself. It's part of what makes the song so successful. A feature, not a bug.

Ha. Julie, yes, sorry for being the latest in a long line of pedants labouring under the impression that they're being original and/or amusing by making that point. Ironically, I knew I sounded like an arse as soon as I posted. Or is that ironic? It is tricky…;)

Roger, I'm not buying that, though. Or, hold on, are you being ironic?

Thanks for the links, Julie and Matt! Julie, your link has this detail: "Working with New York button manufacturer NG Slater, some 50 million happy face badges were produced by 1972." Which may have been a breakthrough moment. So that's the end of that story.
Here's a link to the Atomkraft badge, released in 1975 and as the site says, "ubiquitous worldwide" soon thereafter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiling_Sun

Cheers,
John

Huh! I've never seen the Atomkraft Smiling Sun before. Maybe I'm too young. (As a fifty-year-old, it gives me inordinate pleasure to say that.) More likely, the fact that my family moved from the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area to the absolute boondocks of the Mojave Desert in 1976 tests the limits of the Smiling Sun's ubiquity. The badges were certainly not around anymore when I returned to the Bay Area to attend UC Berkeley for six years in the late 80s and early 90s. Thanks for sharing it, John.

And I think those of us still in the thread may have just set some sort of record here for wandering the farthest off topic, in multiple directions. High fives all around! (And Matt, we might actually be able to get Google to sponsor this thread. I know a guy....)

I thought Alanis was ironic.

Julie: "And I think those of us still in the thread may have just set some sort of record here for wandering the farthest off topic, in multiple directions. High fives all around! (And Matt, we might actually be able to get Google to sponsor this thread. I know a guy....)"

Here’s tae us! Wha’s like us? Gey few, and they’re a’ deid!

Cheers,
John

This should get us back to the original topic of Harrison's poem.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/75...n-sex-cake-ii/

... and that seems fair enough. It's not performed, like Harrison's comparison, over the prone body of some hapless and nameless semi-participant. It is more democratic.

Cheers,
John

Update: maybe hapless is a bit strong. But then again, maybe not. People deserve to be people when they are being put up for show.
I also think of this from Seinfeld: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvOsNPPS8l0

The structure reminds me of certain Cavafy poems--memory of a lost time of pleasure, followed by brief lament. And that makes me question whether this brief time (also "a thing that passes") pays tribute to a long-lost friend. In that case, the narrator would have no reason at all to invoke a specific woman because he has no way of doing so. He is then limited by facts (whether autobiographical to Harrison or created.)

I dislike the opening because it makes me think of cartoon farts: ridiculous.

As the mother of boys who grew up camping and the wife of someone who tumbled up in a blue collar family, I find the stump business quite apt for what young guys do when camping and carousing in the woods. The quickness, the hurling lights and shadows, the hiss, the awakening of birds: these are more vivid for me than anything else in the poem.

I'll stand by what I said. While there's no doubt that this poem shows talent, I have to question the poet's vision, based on the close. Which is, to be kind, unoriginal. Lazy. Or worse, deliberately appealing to an audience who is sympathetic to the same. Hoagland knew how to do this.

Keep in mind that Harrison had his eye torn out when he was a kid by a girl with a broken bottle. They were arguing about something.

I don't care if he were run over by a bus.