Workers by Hand and Brain

[tree_and_leaf]

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.

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

It reads as if someone is going to borrow the metre of Jabberwocky, which would have been fun...

[scionofgrace.livejournal.com]

::falls about laughing::

When you find yourself using "eschatological typology" in context, you know you've taken your first steps down a very slippery slope...