Listening
exercise: Popular song
Affair on Eighth Avenue
by
Gordon Lightfoot
Vocabulary:
| affair to wear perfume store the down side of town to linger on to entwine ribbons |
And we
came through a doorway somewhere in the night flowing hair to come undone to brush s.t. down warmth treasures |
tin And then we played a game riddle to belong to we must almost be born secrets |
First,
transcribe the lyrics of the song as best you can using only the above vocabulary
for reference. Then find the song on the Internet and check your work. Mark
all the mistakes in red, and enter them in your pronunciation journal. Count
the number wrong and write it in the upper right-hand corner of your paper.
Then answer the questions below. Give
them some careful thought before writing down your answers; approach this as
a poem to be analyzed in the way we do Monday mornings when reading a new poem.
Thought questions:
1. What kind of differences, social or otherwise, are there between the narrator
and the lover he describes in this song? Find evidence in the lyrics that point
to some of these differences.
2. Do you think the narrator looks down on this woman? Why or why not?
3. In spite of the differences between the two lovers, this woman and this experience
seem to hold a special fascination for the narrator. Where does this fascination
come from, do you think?
4. Explain the lines that mention the "game only she could win" and
the "riddle" that the narrator can't figure out. What do these lines
say about the relationship between the two?