Some Words

One of things that I most wish about our culture was that we had a greater range of shared verbal reference. No, check that, let’s be more honest, I wish people shared my verbal references more. That’s about it. I remember studying the Tale of Genji in college and loving the way the characters could all refer to known poetry in order to express the similarities of situations.

As I was thinking about how the name of a song by Why? “these few presidents” would be a great one to be able to reference at certain times. That in turn got me thinking about the content of the song. I tend to pick up on different parts of his songs at different times, but this time I found myself thinking about the whole song, and how it was very similar in content to a Robert Browning poem, maybe most like “Porphyria’s Lover,” but Browning was hardly short of poems about murdering your significant other.