Henry Porter
R. Bentz Kirby
LMM wrote:
>I believe Henry Porter is the full name of author O. Henry.
>LMM
Did O Henry ever write film scripts? I have always loved that line:
The only thing we knew about Henry Porter is that his name wasn't really
Henry Porter
or something close to that. Maybe his name was O. Henry.
--
Bentz
boc...@scsn.net
last_leaf
In article , "R. says...
>
>
>LMM wrote:
>
>>I believe Henry Porter is the full name of author O. Henry.
>
>>LMM
>
>Did O Henry ever write film scripts? I have always loved that line:
>
>The only thing we knew about Henry Porter is that his name wasn't really
>Henry Porter
>
>or something close to that. Maybe his name was O. Henry.
I hate to do this, because this thread has given so many so much
pleasure in so short a time, but all good things must come to an
end. O. Henry's real name was William Sydney Porter, not Henry
Porter. On the other hand, if you prefer to ignore this post and
continue along with this thread anyway, it's really quite okay with
me.
nate
In article <5vsv8i$r...@drn.zippo.com>, LastLeaf says...
> On the other hand, if you prefer to ignore this post and
>continue along with this thread anyway, it's really quite okay with
>me.
Ainge bit Rollins!!!!
- nate
R. Bentz Kirby
I think that Rollins bit Ainge. Whatever, take it to the Celtics group.
Hey, I'm on that mail list. I think I will take it there myself. :-)
Peace,
WALI STOPHER
** Reply Requested When Convenient **
Forgot original name of this thread, sorry. So,
in "Brownsville Girl," the mysterious narrator
who may or may not be "Dylan" or somebody
"Dylan" was that day in the song and some girl,
woman, come "roaring up in a cloud of dust to
the place where Henry Porter lived . . . the one
thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter was
that his name wasn't Henry Porter." Or
something like that--I love that song, and the
way Dylan strings together common phrases of
American English to tell a wonderful story,
transcending cliche and reclaiming our
language.
Anyway, Wayne Walker asked about Henry
Porter and LMM replied:
<I believe Henry Porter is the full name of
<author O. Henry.
Close, LMM, very close. O. Henry was the
pseudonym of William Sydney Porter
(1862-1910), the short story writer who
invented the unexpected surprise ending.
Worth going to the library for. When he lived in
Austin, he put out a newspaper, "The Rolling
Stone." (!)
I can't remember for sure, but I think this was
after he got out of jail for being an embezzling
bank clerk. Also don't remember his stories.
Seems like we studied them in high school
maybe?
Does anyone know of someone actually
named Henry Porter?
There was also a prince of Portugal known
as Henry the Navigator.
Maybe a more important line is the one
"Ruby, with her red hair pulled back," says:
"Even the swap meets around here are getting
pretty corrupt."
Pete Oppel
Isn't the playwright Sam Shepherd credited with co-writing Brownsville Girl?
Does anyone know who contributed exactly what to that song?
Tom Krill
Pete Oppel wrote:
Sam Shepard played a hot shot pilot in Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff"
-The movie adaptation. :-)
--
Tom Krill
http://www.freeyellow.com/members/einsteinfoyt/index.html
http://home.att.net/~curtisturner/
________________________________/
"THE ROPE OF YOUR JUSTICE
ALWAYS HANGS BEFORE ME" -krill
________________________________/
Matthew Zuckerman
Pete Oppel <Smoke...@aol.com> asked:
>Isn't the playwright Sam Shepherd credited with co-writing Brownsville Girl?
>Does anyone know who contributed exactly what to that song?
Dylan and Shepherd wrote "New Danville Girl" and Dylan re-wrote it a year
or so later as "Brownville Girl." All of the additions in the second
version can pretty safely be credited to Bob, but as for who wrote what in
the original version is anyone's guess.
Matthew
_________________________________
Matthew Zuckerman <zo...@globalnet.co.uk>
tr...@mind.net
Pete Oppel wrote:
>
> Isn't the playwright Sam Shepherd credited with co-writing Brownsville Girl?
> Does anyone know who contributed exactly what to that song?
Yeah, it was Shepherd, but I don't know who did what. Has anyone here
besides myself seen that Esquire* article he wrote in the form of a
short play about himself and Dylan?
Wonder if I still have that.
Annnnna
--
<tr...@mind.net> | Ben, Shelley, Matie and/or Anna | Enough Earls! |
I read that once....or dreamt it.-- Chris Peterson on "Get A Life" |
****HAIL*ANDY****110 on the Earl Count | Just ignore alt.slack.devo|
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*I think. It could have been another magazine, but I'm pretty sure it
was Esquire.
catherine yronwode
There was an African-American author who passed for white in New York in
the 1940s, His name was Anatole Broyard. At the time, he was celebrated
for having written "with great sensitivity" about "the Negro People,"
but behind his back it was speculated that he was black. Anyway, another
author, Chandler Brossard, wrote a roman a clef in which he revealed the
truth about Mr. Broyard, and gave him the fictitious name of Henry
Porter. An extremely copmplex article about these two men, their
writings, and their feud was published in The New Yorker magazine and
quoted here last year.
From Deja News:
> Subject: Brownsville Man: Henry Porter
> From: br...@u.washington.edu (E. Church)
> Date: 1996/06/14
> Message-Id: <4ps3jc$j...@nntp4.u.washington.edu>
> Newsgroups: rec.music.dylan
>
> Anatole Broyard was by all accounts a brilliant and driven
> man, a shrewd operator and a cutting critic for the New York
> Times. In the latest "New Yorker," a profile reveals he was
> the epitome of Greenwich Village sophistication, a ladies man,
> a "hip" and knowledgable writer who also happened to be black--
> a secret he never revealed because all his life he "passed" as
> white. He was very light-skinned and became furious when anyone
> even suggested he was black. A complex man, to be sure, who could
> destroy a career with a few choice words, he carried the secret of
> his race throughout his days, enjoying the company of the avant
> garde literati and a succession of beautiful women. It is inevitable
> for a man like this to make enemies, and some struck back in their
> writing. Chandler Brossard, who had been best man at his wedding,
> had a falling out with Broyard and wrote an unflattering portrait
> of him in the 1952 novel, "Who Walk in Darkness." A hustler, a user,
> an opportunist, the Broyard character hid the fact that he was
> black. His name in the book?
> Henry Porter.
> The conflicted, secretive man nobody knew what to make of.
> In fact, the first line (that Broyard forced them to change in
> the American printing of the book) was:
> "People said Henry Porter was a Negro."
>
> Maybe all they were sure of was that his name wasn't Henry Porter.
>
> Bob in Seattle
But speculation does not stop there. Here is another Henry Porter, one
with a cowboy theme:
> Subject: Henry Porter FOUND
> From: ba...@yfn.ysu.edu (Jesse J. Anderson)
> Date: 1996/09/03
> Message-Id: <50i9e4$p...@news.ysu.edu>
> Newsgroups: rec.music.dylan
>
> I was watching Rawhide in a hotel room in Nebraska Saturday night
> (the second half anyway), and this particular episode dealt with
> a jailbreak and a man who finds a girl who won't say a word and plays
> like it's his daughter. Apparently he has something to do with the
> jailbreak. Anyway, Clint Eastwood figures out what's going on and
> confronts the guy, who claims his name is Henry J. Porter. they prove
> he's lying, but can't figure out exactly who he is. I am convinced
> this is where the reference came from in the song "Brownsville Girl,"
> as the crux line about Henry Porter certainly is true in the show.
> Jesse
And now, through the magic of Deja News, here are my previusly posted
comments on this song and why i think the Henry Porter reference is
probably to Broyard and not to Rawhide:
> Subject: Re: Brownsville Girl lyric details - queries
> From: catherine yronwode <yron...@sonic.net>
> Date: 1996/10/04
> Message-Id: <32559E...@sonic.net>
> Newsgroups: rec.music.dylan
>
> Christopher Rollen sent me an e-mail thanks for the exegesis on
> American slang in Brownsville Girl," which prompted a reply forom me,.
> On being about to send it to him, i decided to float it by rmd, too,
> just in case anyone has a comment..
>
> Christorpher,
>
> I'm glad you could use my "Brownsville Girl" thoughts -- and here are
> more, which i send along because i know that as a Brit you might not
> catch the references:
>
> In the chorus, the lyrics are, "you're my honey love." That is a
> direct quote from Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters' R&B song of the
> 1950s, "Honey Love." Their song is a fairly standard uptempo love song
> ("let's you and i get cozy, just like two fingers in a glove" etc.),
> and ostensibly has nothing to do with the landscape of the "poor white
> trash" South/Southwest evoked in "Brownsville Girl" because Clyde
> McPhatter and the Drifters were black, not white.
>
> However, the copied phrase sticks out -- and there are bits in
> "Browsville Girl" that seem to be about crossing back and forth across
> the colour line -- the reference to the "something about me you liked
> that I left behind in the French Quarter" [of New Orleans] and to the
> 2nd woman (the one who "ain't you") having that "dark rhythm in her
> soul" -- so that i think it is fair to say that the quote of the
> McPhatter line is deliberate.
>
> Now, this black/white ambiiguity is made even clearer if one recalls
> that there was some discussion in rmd about "Henry Porter" and the
> recently deceased author Anatole Broyard who was a black man who
> passed as white beginning in the 1940s and who was the subhject of a
> story which, as i recall, was about a black man named Henry Porter who
> was passing as white man.
>
> One other thing i recommend. Plot the song on a map of the U.S.A.
> Notice where Amarillo, The Painted Desert, Corpus Christi, New
> Orleans, Brownsville, San Antonio, and the Great Divide (where, on the
> west side, one will see "the sun comin up over the Rockies"), and The
> Panhandle are. Now notice how the narrator wants his lover to take him
> "all around the world." Ironic, isn't it? He can only describe a small
> slice of the world. And that in turn evokes another song that Dylan
> certainly knows and has known for years -- "Hang Me O Hang Me" also
> titled "I've Been All Around This World." This is an old "badman
> ballad" (probably dating to the late 19th century) recorded by Dylan's
> friend Dave Van Ronk in the early 1960s. The song is a first-person
> narration by a man who has committed a murder and is ready to give up
> and face death, because he's "been all around this world" and is tired
> of running. The irony in that song is that the singer can only give
> this paltry account of his extensive travels: "Been all around Cape
> Girardeau and parts of Arkansaw." Cape Girardeau (pronounced "Jurdo")
> is a small town on the Mississippi River in Southeastern Missouri,
> near the Arkansas state line.
>
> Finally -- the wrecking lot of "Brownsville Girl" is, of course, a
> junk yard -- as in "From a Buick Six," with its "junkyard angel" and
> its conflated references to heroin and wrecked cars. Furthermore, the
> "Brownsville Girl" narrator complains that his lover left him in
> Mexico to find a doctor. This brings to mind "Just Like Tom Thiumb's
> Blues, which also features an "angel" and in which the dangers of
> trying to find "the harder stuff" in Mexico are explicated fully.
> "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" takes place in Jaurez, directly on the
> Texas border, and this opens the possibly that the doctor the
> "Brownsville Girl" sought was one who would write her a prescription
> for heroin.
So...uh...EDLIS agents: Is there a Henry Porter page in "Things Twice"?
catherine yronwode
c...@luckymojo.com
Lucky Mojo Curio Co: http://www.luckymojo.com/luckymojocatalogue.html