When I was a child I was a big fan of The Beatles. I knew all their song lyrics by heart — I still do.<\/p>\n
I also loved the writing of Katherine Mansfield. When I read her 1920 short story Miss Brill<\/i>, I was struck by how similar it was to ideas within the song Penny Lane<\/i>.<\/p>\n
In particular, when Paul McCartney writes “and though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway,” he is essentially summing up the entire story arc of Miss Brill<\/i> in a single line. This isn’t completely surprising, when you consider that when McCartney was a boy in Liverpool, he would very likely have been introduced to the work of Mansfield.<\/p>\n
In any case, this would certainly not have been the only time he snuck literary references into his lyrics. To take just one example, McCartney’s lyrics for Maxwell’s Silver Hammer<\/i> open with a clear shout-out to one of his literary heroes, the absurdist late nineteenth century writer Alfred Jarry.<\/p>\n
What is curious to me is that nobody seems to ever have noticed the reference to Miss Brill<\/i> within Penny Lane<\/i>. I’ve scoured the Web — supposedly the container of all random human knowledge — and there appears to be no mention of it.<\/p>\n
Like the song says — very strange.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was a child I was a big fan of The Beatles. I knew all their song lyrics by heart — I still do. I also loved the writing of Katherine Mansfield. When I read her 1920 short story Miss Brill, I was struck by how similar it was to ideas within the song … Continue reading “Miss Brill in Penny Lane”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20640"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20641,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20640\/revisions\/20641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}