A buoy called Homer

As noted previously, large, yellow, rounded-cylindrical marker buoys are found bobbing just off the coast here. I call them Homers, but have only just found out why.

Ezra Pound’s Canto II includes the lines:

It seems that Homer liked going to the beach and–disorientated, entranced by the snorting of the mermaids (Greek mermaids being related to Catalan ones)–wandered off it one day into the cool Aegean. His hairless pate (say no to Samuel Butler’s Sicilian girlies!) was observed just in time as it floated back in the general direction of Asia Minor, whereupon a local entrepreneur marketed buoys and similar life-saving devices in the likeness of the great man. The use of yellow-painted buoys should be interpreted less as a sign of Simpsons-driven cultural decline than as a natural reaction to the development of image rights law.

Trevor @ 11 August 2004 11:39 AM

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Comments

1. Geoff
   3:10 PM on 11 August 2004

   Mad dogs and Englishmen have brain transplants in August.

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