(no subject)

[tree_and_leaf]

I just googled 'O my America', while trying to find the title of a Donne poem (it is, of course, "Elegy: to his mistress going to bed.")

The first hit was the poem; all the rest were blogs or concerned a book of that title, with the exception of another link to the poem on the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

The targetted ad was for 'Erotikartikel megabillig!!!!'

I sometimes really do not want to know how Google 'thinks'.

Comments

[lucullean.livejournal.com]

it apparently is thinking along all the right lines...

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes. And no. I suppose it depends how kinky you think Donne was (mind you, going on 'Batter my heart', the answer is, pretty.) But all the same, it's not as if it's Rochester!

[rivrea.livejournal.com]

Now I am indeed wondering how the respective Google ad for Rochester would look like...

[tree_and_leaf]

It's possible that it would be illegal in most countries!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, I think it more likely that it would probably be a Bishop in the Episcopal Church.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

If you think that's bad, try this: http://www.jstor.org/pss/3189162.

Notice that it ascribes "imperial" ambitions to the tiny England of Donne's time, that could barely cope with Irish insurrection. And this sort of crap is published in peer-reviewed magazines by a supposedly first-rate university such as Johns Hopkins. Just shoot me now.

[tree_and_leaf]

I currently can't get at the article, but 'imperial' is certainly a poorly chosen term. I do think that it's legitimate to look at the colonialist (or probably pre-colonist!) rhetoric with in the poem - but I think that saying that it's anything more than a combination of contemporary ideas about men as the lords and heads in a relationship, analogous to the king as lord and head of state, with the dizzy sense of having found something new and wonderful and unspoiled that comes with being in love is almost certainly over-freighting the poem. And sloppily chosen terminology in the title certainly doesn't help.

[caulkhead.livejournal.com]

I can't get at the article either, but I wonder what on earth the author made of The Sunne Rising - "Ask for those kings whom thou saw yesterday" and so on.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

"I often quote meself - it adds polish to me conversation" (Andy Capp)

This essay will tell you why I regard any mention of colonialism/imperialism in Donne and Shakespeare's time as a perversion of historical understanding: http://fpb.livejournal.com/304174.html. (There is also a short little epilogue, written a few days later: http://fpb.livejournal.com/306618.html.) To sum it up, to project imperial fantasies on the Europe of 1600 is provincial, ignorant and unhistorical.

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

I remember Elegy 19 fondly from A-level days; I think that Google is thinking along the right lines (although indeed, I *dread* to think what it would make of Rochester ...)