Last fall I went to an open mic with my friend Carole Crocco. She sang some songs, they were beautiful. A while later there was another one - she sang, I read a poem, someone made me an origami crane. Last week, Carole opened an open mic downtown with half an hour of just her and her music. The place was packed because, fancy that, lots of people love her! I've had this song stuck in my head ever since. If you're gonna have a song replaying in your brain for a full week, you can't do any better than this.
because you were all wondering what I'm writing my dissertation on, here's a brief synopsis of my 'research context': When James Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry in 1760, he went to great lengths to make the Fragments appear to be authentic remains of an ancient, heroic oral tradition. His reasons for this were largely political, and as such, influenced the content of the epics themselves. As an attempt to establish a particularly Scottish identity, the poems were quite effective. However, to do so required both a simplification and a manipulation of traditional mythology. Stripped of anagogical significance, the Ossian epics more or less represented an Enlightenment version of history, tradition, and mythic heritage. The stories themselves were changed by their very purpose and in turn changed the manner of representing myth in future narratives. Moreover, the emphasis on the Ossian epics as authentic tales from the past, as ‘fragments,’ served...
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