The Poetry of Capitalism

For me, thanks to an aunt who emigrated to Cleveland, Ohio (later, more enticingly, San Francisco) and would send us various Country albums and other items of Americana for no particular reason beyond a certain over-zealous, or so it seemed to my mother, identification with her new home, Walk on By isn't the classic Burt Bacharach song made famous by Dionne Warwick: it's the Leroy van Dyke hit. But he wasn't famous just for that, our Leroy. Before he was a Country singer he'd trained to be an auctioneer – and, happily, in 1956, decided to combine the two:

I'm reminded of all that by this Metafilter post. Yep, the world of auctioneering's still going strong. Try this, or this, or this, which attempts some kind of analysis of the amazing speed and rhythm of the auctioneer's art – though frankly with mixed success. Do their audience really understand them, or are they just showing off?

Werner Herzog did a documentary in 1976 on the World Championship of Livestock Auctioneers in New Holland, Pennsylvania, under the snappy title Beobachter zu einer neuen sprache (a German livestock auctioneer doesn't bear thinking about), or to give the film its English title, How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck. He believed, very Germanically, and perhaps with Adorno's famous quote about poetry after Auschwitz in mind, that auctioneering was "the last poetry possible, the poetry of capitalism". Ah yes. Excerpts here (wait for the guy milking the cow at the end) and here.

Leroy Van Dyke? – still going strong.

Mick Hartley

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