(no subject)

Which seems like a good opportunity to post some folk songs, both on weaving: one full of working-class pride, the other - specific to the context of the jute mills in Dundee, which were particularly bad - showing the other side of the coin. And they're both testaments to a vanished world - at least in this country. The children and grandchildren of the prosperous weavers in the first song are almost certainly doing other things - even in the Borders - but while no-one on Dundee has the specific problems of Mary Brookbanks, herself a weaver, there are surely many men and women elsewhere who would recognise it. Maybe you're wearing something they made right now.

( So let us aye be merry over a bicket of good ale )

( Shiftin', piecin', spinnin' warp weft and twine )

Workers by Hand and Brain

Alternatively, have this not tremendously well-scanned, but heart felt, poem by the unfortunate editorial reader of a book of essays on ethnographical theory, which I am currently struggling with:

The Hermeneut's Dilemma, or, a Jargon Poem

Twas prelapsarian, and the hermeneut
Sat huddled with his faithful trope,
Sunk in thaumasmus, idly strumming his lute,
Lost in subversion with nary a hope.

Then with heartfelt apoplanesis he crier,
O come, interlocutor, give me your ear!
In my pathopoeia I've slandered and lied;
Now of my grim project this discourse you'll hear.

I've dabbled in foul phenomenological rites,
And joined in a secret synechdoche,
Squandered my recieved knowledge in bibulous nights,
And embraced epistomological heresy,

O but now my metonymy is too great to bear!
This ecphonesis has become too deictic to hide!
I've lost all the poesis I once held so dear...
And, with typical hypotoposis, he died.

Jane Kepp, in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, ix.