Saturday, April 19, 2008

John Betjeman’s muse: so you are the one, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn

We have quoted bits of the poem about Miss J. Hunter Dunn.*
From the Times of London:

Most people thought that Joan Hunter Dunn, who died earlier this month, was a product of John Betjeman’s vivid poetic imagination. Then, in 1965, The Sunday Times Magazine revealed that she was real and had lived exactly the kind of home counties life Betjeman fantasised about in his famous poem A Subaltern’s Love Song.

I was able to tell the real story of her life because Godfrey Smith, the inspirational editor of this paper’s magazine in the 1960s, came up with an idea for a whole issue entitled Where Are They Now? and all of us on the staff were asked to find well known people who had dropped out of sight.

Hunter Dunn was the most famous heroine of popular poetry at the time and Betjeman was on his way to becoming a national treasure through his television broadcasts. I remembered someone from the BBC, at one of those long liquid lunches of the time, saying he was sure that Betjeman had based his poem on a real girl he had known and that it ought to be possible to find her....MORE


*Most recently, in
"Help Wanted: Trader/Blogger".

Looking at the pictures in the post below I realized I'm tired of winter.
The lady attorneys are talking about how the spring fling in the Bahamas might not compare to the St. Tropez Regatta and I'm humming Southern Cross*
(and "I like big Butts"; help).
The ideal candidate will be 28 with twenty plus years at the market.

I.Q.
- Blogging: 80 seems to be the cutoff.
-Trading: a buck-fifty will still find ways to lose money but the rationalizations will be pure poetry (see below)....

Salary: negligible. Bonus: see essay question.

Essay question: Can you trade your way out of a paper bag? Explain.

Writing ability: Booker Award or equiv. and 500 words explaining why the first line of Blake's
"Augeries of Innocence" is superior/inferior to Betjeman's
"A Subaltern's Love Song".

Marketing-
Design, plan and implement:

Brit Poetry Smackdown 2008.
Blake vs. Betjamin