potato love

john Right on skipvia -- I'm with you and the peasants.

I do a little Wordie dance of joy when I see Weird Al and 17th century poets quoted back to back. Nov 4, 2007

skipvia Ah. Had we but world enough, and time...

My lot's with the peasants in this one. And Weird Al, of course. Nov 4, 2007

xdrstrangelovex "You might as well face it, you're addicted to spuds"
-"Weird Al" Yankovic

Nov 4, 2007

perhapsolutely "our vegetable love should grow / vaster than empires and more slow" Nov 4, 2007

seanahan It's a brilliant term from a brilliant writer.

Also, it describes how I feel about potatoes. Nov 4, 2007

skipvia While I agree that heartless, selfish cowards are responsible for writing much of the history that we keep (Hitler, Amin, Stalin, Bush), I'm not sure that genocide and blind allegiance should be the standard by which we measure importance.

If it's conditional, it's not love. I can't prove it, but neither can Bellow. Nov 4, 2007

john In Saul Bellow's Herzog, it's a kind of unthinking, uncritical, peasant form of love:

"Hearts quaking with cheap and feeble charity or oozing potato love have not written history."

and

"Potato love - emotional plasma that can circulate in any system." Nov 4, 2007