Re: more on Coleridge and Xanadu

From: William Benzon (bbenzon@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri 23 May 2003 - 11:26:23 GMT

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    This is great! Thanks for posting it Scott. I mean, the first stanza of
    "Kubla Khan" shows up in *Citizen Kane,* Ted Nelson names his super-duper hypertext system, "Xanadu," Olivia Newton-John does a song, Nick Bantock does a pop-up book of the poem. And now this.

    BB

    on 5/22/03 10:49 PM, Scott Chase at ecphoric@hotmail.com wrote:

    >
    > William Benzon has posted about possible influences on Coleridge and his
    > writing of Kubla Khan, including the 18th century Philadelphian naturalist
    > William Bartram (aka "Puc Puggy"). Well the influence of Bartram may be
    > subtle, if actual, but there's a not so subtle impact Coleridge has made on
    > the artifacts many Rushians (followers of the power rock trio from the Great
    > White North) have stored in their compact disc collections. There's a little
    > ditty (well at just over 11 minutes a long ditty) on the Rush CD "A Farewell
    > to Kings" called "Xanadu". Don't know whether Coleridge's case was
    > cryptomnesia, but with an opening verse like:
    >
    > "To seek the sacred river Alph
    > To walk the caves of Ice
    > To break my fast on honey dew
    > And drink the milk of Paradise...."
    >
    > there's no mistaking this one by Rush and lyricist / uberdrummermeister Neil
    > Peart.
    >
    > Rush's performance of this may be quite efficacious in passing the influence
    > of Coleridge (and perhaps Bartram?) down the generations...well at least if
    > people buy stuff other than Britney Spears and N-Stync when they shop for
    > music :-)
    >
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    =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit

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