Did Kate put it there?

[hsut@purdue-ecn.ARPA (Tsun-Yuk Hsu)]

	Doug brought up some interesting points in his interview with Kate:
if there's a fairly transparent allusion or pun in some poem or lyrics,
is it REALLY there if the writer denies he put it there intentionally?
Harlan Ellison, for example, likes to claim that his stories are very
simple and straightforward, and complains that people read too much into
them. It's interesting that John Bush claims that the wordplay in his
lyrics is intentional, while Kate denies many of the puns Doug and other
lovehounders found in her lyrics. Maybe John Bush, being a poet in the
more traditional sense, is aware of wordplay and punning on a more
conscious level, while Kate does things more on a subconscious level.

	Another theory (close to what Structuralist critics think) which
sidesteps the problem of the author "subconsciously" putting things into
the text is that which sees texts as constructs, analogous to 
mathematical constructs. You can build a mathematical object (such as
some weird graph) and not realise all its properties at the moment you
created the construct. Same thing with poems and other text. Maybe Kate's
lyrics has all these puns which she was not aware of.

	Of course there are problems with this view being applied to
foggy, non-mathematical things like poetry. Using this approach, a critic
can almost say anything he wants about a text. If the author of the
text denies having put something in the text, the critic can always say:
"It is an inherent property of your text, you just didn't see it."

	BTW, Doug, I'd love to get some of John Bush's poetry too...


					Bill Hsu