Robert Southey and the Three Bears

Samuel Jay Keyser is Peter de Flores emeritus professor of linguistics at MIT. His most recent books include The Mental Life of Modernism, MIT Press, 2020 and Turning Turtle:  Memoir of a Man Who Would ‘Never Walk Again,’ 2020. The latter is gratis at turningturtle.pubpub.org. He is editor in chief of Linguistic Inquiry, an MIT Press journal and its sister monograph series. He is a jazz trombonist with The Dixie Sticklers, a Dixieland band and with the avant-garde jazz orchestra, Aardvark, the oldest continuing jazz ensemble in the United States. Keyser’s The Pond God and Other Stories won the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award in 2004.

Notes

[1] I am indebted to Fred Lerdahl for awakening my interest in Goldilocks and Ray Jackendoff for many, many enlightening conversations that helped to shape what follows.

[2] The full version complete with illustrations can be found here: aversimasini.blogspot.com/2010/12/robert-southey-story-of-three-bears.html

[3] youtube.com/watch?v=-SjoZIkYnbQ

[4] Bettelheim (op.cit.) makes this observation.

[5] The Cundall version destroys this symmetry: “Out little Silver-hair jumped; and away she ran into the wood, and the Three Bears never saw anything more of her.”

[6]  Although the Margulis experiment establishes the reality of aesthetic pleasure attached to repetition, it does not shed light on why this should be so. That is something for the neuroscientists to conjure.

[7] I argue elsewhere that repetition of the same/except variety is found in poetry, in painting and in music as well as Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/PeHYLZ7