Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

space

Fully automated luxury Victorian quasi mystical/pastoral/arts and crafts gay space comunism world.

the best world.

That feels as good a place as any to say that I finished Jarman's Modern Nature. It's a beautiful book in many ways, with the garden at Dungeness an extraordinary project to take on. But the garden becomes something closer to a figure for Jarman's fight against the entropy of his AIDS diagnosis and a refuge from the useless, flailing rage he feels at the Thatcher government. His recording of its coming into flower also allows for a flowering of memory - particularly to his painful childhood. He was always incredibly productive but the amount he continues to produce (the diary, the garden, the film work, the paintings, the cottage, which in itself functions as an installation) is staggering.

reminded me to check on the campaign to save his garden which seems to have succeeded. maybe because i’ve always been drawn to the dungeness, dymchurch, and rye landscape a single viewing of the garden back when i was a teenager created a disproportionately large imaginative imprint so that i will find myself thinking about it when i wouldn’t have said it was either particularly important or significant to me.

I've always wanted to visit that area; I keep thinking about doing a walking tour of it or something after the pandemic is over. I have a beautiful old naval map of Romney Marsh on my wall but I've never been there.

RE: E. Nesbit: The Enchanted Castle is amazing imo. The Story of the Amulet, the last book in the Five Children and It trilogy, is marred by a hideously antisemitic chapter but is otherwise brilliant. The Railway Children is pretty good but the movie adaptation from 1970 is even better.

I wrote my undergrad thesis on Nesbit, Kipling, and The Jews, ask me anything.

Finished a re-read of Daniel Davidson's brilliant 'culture,' a life-work published only after his death. Truly one of the best poets of his generation, taken too soon and at a most inopportune time, too-- before the internet could really do a good job of celebrating and archiving, but after the most active and bubbly period of little mags and so on.

Today I'm reading workshop poems from various people and a long chapbook from Jason Morris, 'Low Life.'

Lily Dale, I think I thought you were American - probably from your being such a Springsteen expert.

I am American! Just got raised on classic British children's lit.

I'm quite glad to have that piece of reality confirmed.

I picked up THE LATE AUGUSTANS ed. Donald Davie and read a couple of poets.

Thomas Gray: 'Elegy, written in a country churchyard' (1742 or later). This poem is only 6 pages long, 32 quatrains. I thought I knew it but today I'm afraid I realised I had never read it from end to end. It starts by depicting evening falling in a village; the poetic speaker looks at the graves of the poor and considers them virtuous for never having been rich, but also considers that they may have been great talents that were never known: 'mute inglorious Miltons'. What I'd not recalled was the later section where he rather self-indulgently or morbidly imagines his own death and, like Yeats in 'Under Ben Bulben', writes his own epitaph (3 stanzas, where Yeats's was only 3 lines).

I think there is one social or political ambiguity about the poem, namely: is it giving fresh attention and dignity to the lives (via the deaths) of the unknown poor? Or is naturalising their obscurity, in the lines around 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen'? It was William Empson, perhaps in SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL, who made the political criticism, and I have an idea that Raymond Williams for instance later agreed.

I tried Samuel Johnson's 'The Vanity of Human Wishes' but couldn't be bothered to go far with it - so over to Oliver Goldsmith, 'The Deserted Village', a poem I've meant to read for some time due to Goldsmith's importance in Irish literary history.

Fizzles, your recommendation is welcome: I'll try to read Nesbit.

i spent the weekend mornings, the time i do most of my reading, looking through all the alternatives we've been talking about in that other thread, reading intros and pretty much rejecting them all. 5 pages on the typists involved in converting the Lady Chatterly manuscript to a copy for the printers, 5 pages on why we need another translation of War and Peace, the first chapter of Small House at Allington (which broke the 4th wall too much), intro to the Grand Meaulnes about how even the title is a pain to translate, three pages of the Three Musketeers (a page each)...

and wasn't in the mood for any of them, or anything else, but i've got a week before i need to choose.

my kobo has decided it's going to show the cover of War and Peace when i snooze it regardless of whether that's the last thing i was reading or not. maybe that's fate (cover is terrible generic penguin screen, just the title and author and a penguin logo with a thick black border)

I keep meaning to read The Magic Mountain, maybe you have already read that one?

I never read intros before I read the book.

Introductions vary tremendously in quality, length, and intended purpose. It's usually a simple matter to quickly suss out whether reading it will be an exercise in tedium, or the equivalent of being socially introduced to a remarkably talented stranger by a mutual friend.

i was careful to avoid the spoilery intros, these were more the translators notes or the 'notes on the text' about the various editions over the years. Chatterly was interesting in this respect (private italian edition with tons of errors because of language barrier, the two different paper stocks they used, the first typist who kept 'fixing things', later typists who used different punctuation conventions, the different ribbons they used!, pirate editions, expurgated editions for copyright purposes)

Another vote for E.Nesbit. Can't find my original post, but here's the one I read, my Mom's copy of Five Children and It, the Puffin edition, intro by Roger Lancelyn Green, who nails the appeal:
...The trouble with most grown-up people is that, although they may remember some of the things they did when they were children, they cannot remember what it felt like to do them, nor how they thouhgt about them at the time. The other end of the trouble though many of us can think of the most wonderful imaginary adventures, we never know then how to pick and choose and arrange our own stories, nor to write them down in such a way that they can mean to other people even one tenth of what they mean to us
He then describes the roundabout way she came to her gift: married "very young," soon had several kids and a seriously ill husband, "robbed by his partner, like the father of the Bastables." (So her sense of childhood anxieties rang the truer for grown-ups in the same boat, or too near). To support them, she threw herself into writing for grown-ups, but not very well, says Green, and the same was true when she tried children's magazines, until an editor asked her to try putting a book together, and then only near the end did a line, and image, provide a turning point.
Five Children and It has the Bastable kids mysteriously home alone in the country one summer---well, there are a few servants, and the "cottage" is pretty swanky to us proles, but they're at loose ends, wandering around with their distinct personalities and group dynamic, 'til they encounter a critter which they recognize as a fantastical breed in their books, so they pester him into reluctantly granting their wishes, which of course always have unforeseen side effects, which can get pretty wild, and I think (don't have more time to spend looking back through it) *may* incl. some flashes of xenophobia, not that unexpected in 1902.
Also read an intriguing review of a Nesbit biography, when it was published a few years ago: she became maybe the center of a salon, or those English Country weekends at least, known for her warmth, wit, and beauty (so yeah prob on xpost HG Wells' radar).

Also, Nesbit's ghost stories are fucking awesome.

Was confused because I thought you were talking about the Florodora girl Evelyn Nesbit.

Oh yeah, she did that too. Very versatile.

Had to feed the family, you know.

In THE LATE AUGUSTANS I read Oliver Goldsmith's 'The Deserted Village' (c.1770). Where Thomas Gray 20-30 years earlier talks of a local village (or even hamlet) as a quiet, unchanging place of serene repose, Goldsmith posits such a village as subject to disastrous social change. Discussing a fictional called AUBURN (he always uses capitals!), he contrasts an idyllic memory of the place as one where games were played and ale was drunk, with a recent history of economic decline and depopulation. I was quite struck by the emphasis, late in the poem, on emigration - to America? - which makes the poem seem much more likely to be referring to Ireland than England. (Or do I underestimate English rural emigration to America in the period? This is all long before the biggest Irish famines.) Here he imagines not just people but also abstract 'rural virtues' taking ship:

I see the rural virtues leave the land:
Down where yon anchoring vessel spreads the sail,
That idly waiting flaps with every gale,
Downward they move, a melancholy band,
Pass from the shore, and darken all the strand.

Goldsmith proceeds in rustic style describing the kindly parson; the knowledgeable schoolmaster, whose learning the yokels can hardly believe; and the pub where people drank nut-brown ale. What has caused the damage? Goldsmith refers to 'trade', suggesting what we might call capitalism. Perhaps this is also somewhat 'globalised'. He also seems to point to simply inequality, between luxury and poverty; rich people take up too much space and resources and starve the poor.

But times are alter'd; trade's unfeeling train
Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain;
Along the lawn, where scatter'd hamlets rose,
Unwieldy wealth, and cumbrous pomp repose.

I feel that this is a poem that asks you to consider it as a real argument, that gestures to an actual history. But I don't know enough of the real history to know how far it's more complicated than what Goldsmith says; if what he says is too simplistic or tendentious. Nonetheless it seems like the strongest work of direct social criticism I have read from the poetry of the era. I add the observation that Goldsmith seems, in this limited and specific way, a precursor to Blake.

I then started on a Penguin book marvellously called THE EARLIEST ENGLISH POEMS, ed. Michael Alexander (1966) and dedicated to ... Ezra Pound!

The book translates Old English into modern English. But it takes on the form that we often think of as old English, rather than being 'modernised' the way, eg, Simon Armitage does with GAWAIN. It's actually very close at times to Seamus Heaney, clarifying slightly for me how much he was trying to draw on this tradition. Even 'word-hoard', I now see, a favourite Heaney phrase, is a translation from Old English.

I've skipped most of the introductory material and straight into the poems, starting with a fragment called 'The Ruin'. It describes a Roman ruin, apparently perhaps Bath, as seen by an Anglo-Saxon after the Romans' departure.

Bright were the buildings, halls where springs ran,
high, horngabled, much throng-noise;
there many meadhalls men filled
with loud cheerfulness: Wierd changed that.

'Throng-noise' is precisely the kind of term Heaney uses (not just in BEOWULF). The weird-looking word 'wierd' turns out to mean 'what is, what happens, the way that thing happen, Fate, personal history, death'. That seems to cover most things.

I also read the testimony of the poet Widsith, which mostly just lists different European tribes; and 'Deor', which seeks comfort by recounting bad events then saying 'That went by; this may too'.

I used to have that Gray poem memorized. Took a quarter-long class as a junior in high school on "Politics in British Poetry" which was taught by a PhD candidate at Yale. He was an awful teacher, but I did get exposed to Marvell, Gray, and Clare, among others, at a quite early age for a USAmerican born in the early 80s.

I'd venture to say that Clare is among the most important poets for me, particularly as regards the politics of his work.

I like the turn toward poetry this thread's taken.

"...Churchyard" made an impression on young me, and, as it happened with the Bible, I was surprised when I'd see how popular discourse had absorbed bits of the verses. I like how this era of English poetry could wax philosophical in a languid just-thinkin'-about-things way that would disappear after Shelley, Wordsworth, and, later, Arnold.

I had a helluva 18th century Brit lit professor who taught me to love Pope, still do.

I'd venture to say that Clare is among the most important poets for me

I discovered Clare in the late 1970s, but only because I was haunting libraries and digging on my own as deeply as I could into poetry. No one paid him any attention at that time. I place him high, too.

Pope is such an odd duck. I love/hate his work in about equal parts. He formalizes everything into a kind of perfection, and that formal perfection includes his worst habits, too.

the rat-tat-tat relentlessness of the heroic couplet can prove exhausting, but I cans still read Windsor-Forest and Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot with pleasure.

i finished lolita! good book

Aimless, you might like one of Clare's biggest contemporary fans, Peter Culley. He passed away in 2015, but his Hammertown trilogy is really lovely postmodern take on "the walking poem." Sort of like if Clare had been witness to the rapid suburbanization of Vancouver Island, in particularly the city of Nanaimo. One of my favorite poets, and he works mostly in verse forms, too!

ty, ttitt. i'll look into him.

i am now embarking on dennis cooper's george miles cycle, starting with closer

FWIW Iain Sinclair also wrote a contemporary walking appreciation of John Clare: EDGE OF THE ORISON (2006). As I understand it he connects his own name with Clare's.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/546/54613/edge-of-the-orison/9780141012759.html

It occurs to me that I should read that book, if I didn't have so much else to read.

I love Edge of the Orison. I mean, it's peak Sinclair (obfuscatory, self-indulgent, digressive) but it's got a peculiar energy. I think about it often.

Breaking up the erudite discourse here for another two bits of vapid celeb gossip courtesy the Hardy autobio:

a) Jacques Dutronc was supposed to be in Raiders Of The Lost Ark
b) Serge Gainsbourg tried making a movie in the early 80's and had Robert Mitchum, Alain Delon and Dirk Bogarde all turn him down for the lead role

Lol, somehow I thought you meant a Thomas Hardy bio.

I enjoy those mid-century poets - Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, Thomson - in a slightly cold way, like I read and look at say Gray's personifications bumping around or the careful ethical language sliding into passions or trying for bardic wildness and think 'interesting', but I've never really loved them.

I've been thinking about Pope a bit over the last year. I made this sometime last spring:
https://twitter.com/autodunce
because all those neat and tidy couplets seemed a good fit for twitter.
It's been fun to watch it run. There's been something a bit queasy about watching the pope-machine at work, rhyme by rhyme, but it's now made it through to the stuff I love - Moral Epistles and Imitations of Horace, with the Dunciad to come - and I marvel at what he pulls off, over and over, inside the heroics.

T^he first 2 books by Steven h gardner turned up yesterday. Or that is in the Punk related series Another Tuneless racket.
So I read his article o Rocket From The Tombs which had appeared in Big Takeover in a slightly different guise in 2004, not sure if I saw taht at the time it came out. Quite good anyway. So looking forward to reading through the rest of this.
Seem to be quite well written anyway.

& cover a lot of bands I half know about and a few that I don't really know much about

2 volumes are Origins and Punk I think the next 2 cover post the original punk era

Brad, keep us posted on your progress with the Cooper. (I am very biased, as evidenced by my shelf of Dennis Cooper books).

oh, and Aimless, for a small sample of Culley:

http://users.speakeasy.net/~subtext/poetry/culley/poem1.htm

I look forward, now, to Paul McCartney's book of lyrics - not because I need the lyrics written down (again), but for the prose commentaries edited by Paul Muldoon.

Brad, keep us posted on your progress with the Cooper. (I am very biased, as evidenced by my shelf of Dennis Cooper books).

― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Tuesday, February 23, 2021 10:59 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

fuckin rocks so far

I finished THE EARLIEST ENGLISH POEMS. Here are some further notes.

'Beowulf': I'm afraid I don't really know this text. I will try to read it in full when I can. The translation features quite a nice speech from a Watchman or Coastguard asking Beowulf and his sailors why they are arriving on his shore.

'The Wanderer' and 'The Seafarer' are a pair of quite comparable poems about ... wandering seafarers; men who have been exiled from the courts of their Viking or Saxon lords and are now roaming the sea, cold, wet, alone. 'The Wanderer' is also framed by a couple of stanzas written from a Christian perspective, as though presenting the intervening poem as a cautionary example.

Here's an example of the syntax of 'The Wanderer':

Awakeneth after this friendless man,
seeth before him fallow waves,
seabirds bathing, broading out feathers,
snow and hail swirl, hoar-frost falling.
Then all the heavier his heart's wounds,
sore for his loved lord. Sorrow freshens.

I suppose that compared to modern English syntax it is very compressed and minimal. The last sentence is grammatical in our terms but as minimal as it could be. Sometimes, as in the previous sentence, no verb appears. It is sometimes as though the focus is on presenting the most pungent possible combination of few elemental terms, as unmediated, unsurrounded by excess words, as it can be. (You could argue that 'Awakeneth' is an unhelpful archaism.)

'Hoar-frost' is a repeated term through both poems. The element of the sea is sometimes vividly figured in such kennings (combinations of two words) as 'salt plains', 'salt-crests', 'foam-furrow'. A far land is 'flood-beyond'. Worrying about a coming voyage, a man is 'sea-struck'.

Here 'The Seafarer' talks of how nature has replaced social life:

The swans blare
My seldom amusement; for men's laughter
there was curlew-call, there were the cries of gannets,
for mead-drinking the music of the gull.

'The Wife's Complaint' is a woman's lament for being imprisoned far from her husband. I think he has ordered her imprisonment. She curses him (I think it's him), and laments:

Here the grief bred
by lordlack preys on me. Some lovers in this world
live dear to each other, lie warm together
at day's beginning; I go by myself
about these earth caves under the oak tree.

There is also a very short fragment called 'Wulf & Eadwacer' (is this all that remains of this text?), voiced by a woman about her lover, amid a love triangle of some kind. It repeats the phrase 'Our fate is forked' and worries of the beloved Wulf that 'if he comes to the camp they will kill him outright'.

A set of Gnomic Verses tell plain truths about the world which include 'Frost shall freeze / fire eat wood' but also, I'm afraid, statements like 'Courage must wax / war-mood in the man, / the woman grow up / beloved among her people'. In other words you could say it naturalises gender roles; but at 1200 years distance I wouldn't want to get into criticising that.

A quite generous set of Riddles are interestingly presented: editor Michael Alexander talks of how the riddle renders non-human objects and animals unrecognisable, and thus creates 'a dislocation of perspective similar to that achieved in the modern theatre by the device known as alienation: a good riddle puzzles and can even be mildly frightening, simply because we do not know what it is that is speaking'. Well said. He also talks of the riddle as akin to the 'invocation' or charm, and the riddler developing 'empathy' which the editor says was first defined by Vernon Lee.

The actual riddles are not very easy to answer correctly. A couple of them are heavy on innuendo, especially one that apparently compares a penis to an onion. Apart from that aspect, the riddles make still clearer Tolkien's use of this era of language and culture.

'The Dream of the Rood' is a poem about the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified. Much of the poem is spoken by the cross itself. So there is a kind of riddle aspect here too, the poem voicing an inanimate object. Interestingly the cross says that it could have deliberately fallen down and killed everyone before the crucifixion took place: 'Fast I stood, / who falling could have felled them all'.

The book ends with a long extract from 'The Battle of Maldon' - which indeed takes place in Essex. It describes quite vividly and immediately how the Anglo-Saxon local soldiers fight against Viking invaders, but are defeated. The English (?) leader Brythnoth quite heroically stands against the invaders and is killed. Some soldiers flee but the main voices are those talking of why they will stay and fight, dying for honour:

Courage shall grow keener, clearer the will,
the heart fiercer, as our force faileth.

I think I see why the bravery is admirable, but the honour code also seems rather destructive, leading men to premature warlike death where they might make better calculations, including other forms of resistance.

I also read all the notes, glossaries, Introduction and so on. I hope I've learned something, starting from a very low base.

I haven't quite finished The Song of the Lark. I've about 40 pp yet to go.

It's more uneven than the other Cather I've read, which is not to say it's bad; it has many outstanding passages and many characteristic Cather insights. However, it takes a startling turn into melodrama for about 75 pages in the middle, with high-flown romantic dialogue and plot devices that would be right at home in stage play of the era. Then it returns to a much closer approximation of Cather's normal keen observation of humans being human. Her prose is, as usual, unimpeachable.

I agree. It's my least favorite of the major novels -- uncharacteristically turgid.

To mention 'The Seafarer' invokes Ezra Pound's translation from c.1912, which the translator Michael Alexander esteems. So I look again at that. Here it all is:

May I for my own self song's truth reckon,
Journey's jargon, how I in harsh days
Hardship endured oft.
Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care's hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head
While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed.
Chill its chains are; chafing sighs
Hew my heart round and hunger begot
Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not
That he on dry land loveliest liveth,
List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,
Weathered the winter, wretched outcast
Deprived of my kinsmen;
Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,
There I heard naught save the harsh sea
And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,
Did for my games the gannet's clamour,
Sea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter,
The mews' singing all my mead-drink.
Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern
In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed
With spray on his pinion.
Not any protector
May make merry man faring needy.
This he little believes, who aye in winsome life
Abides 'mid burghers some heavy business,
Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft
Must bide above brine.
Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north,
Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then
Corn of the coldest. Nathless there knocketh now
The heart's thought that I on high streams
The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.
Moaneth alway my mind's lust
That I fare forth, that I afar hence
Seek out a foreign fastness.
For this there's no mood-lofty man over earth's midst,
Not though he be given his good, but will have in his youth greed;
Nor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithful
But shall have his sorrow for sea-fare
Whatever his lord will.
He hath not heart for harping, nor in ring-having
Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world's delight
Nor any whit else save the wave's slash,
Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water.
Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries,
Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,
All this admonisheth man eager of mood,
The heart turns to travel so that he then thinks
On flood-ways to be far departing.
Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying,
He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow,
The bitter heart's blood. Burgher knows not —
He the prosperous man — what some perform
Where wandering them widest draweth.
So that but now my heart burst from my breast-lock,
My mood 'mid the mere-flood,
Over the whale's acre, would wander wide.
On earth's shelter cometh oft to me,
Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer,
Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly,
O'er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhow
My lord deems to me this dead life
On loan and on land, I believe not
That any earth-weal eternal standeth
Save there be somewhat calamitous
That, ere a man's tide go, turn it to twain.
Disease or oldness or sword-hate
Beats out the breath from doom-gripped body.
And for this, every earl whatever, for those speaking after —
Laud of the living, boasteth some last word,
That he will work ere he pass onward,
Frame on the fair earth 'gainst foes his malice,
Daring ado, ...
So that all men shall honour him after
And his laud beyond them remain 'mid the English,
Aye, for ever, a lasting life's-blast,
Delight mid the doughty.
Days little durable,
And all arrogance of earthen riches,
There come now no kings nor Cæsars
Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.
Howe'er in mirth most magnified,
Whoe'er lived in life most lordliest,
Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!
Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.
Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.
Earthly glory ageth and seareth.
No man at all going the earth's gait,
But age fares against him, his face paleth,
Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,
Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven,
Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,
Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,
Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,
And though he strew the grave with gold,
His born brothers, their buried bodies
Be an unlikely treasure hoard.

Pinefox, thanks so much! Think it might be among my late Professor Mom's books---I know where her copy of Heaney's Beowulf is, keep meaning to check that too---

I read this with interest, thinking of the other modern version. I note:

* Pound's looks like a free translation - he doesn't seem to have scrupled so much about replicating each line.

* He has retained, or used, some kennings: hail-scur, mead-drink, mood-lofty, sea-fare, mere-flood, whale-path, earth-weal, life's-blast.

* He has sometimes used archaisms that may not stand up so well now: for instance: 'Nathless there knocketh now'.

* I think he has made it somewhat more coherent - bringing together the DISLIKE of seafaring and the LOVE of seafaring in the poem and making them, not a puzzling contradiction but more an acceptable paradox; as in 'Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water'. 'Yet' is an important turn here.

* He has sometimes expressed a lot in short terms, for instance using the term 'Burgher' (doesn't this suggest something later, more like Renaissance Germany?): 'Burgher knows not' what seafaring is like.

* On the whole I think he did a fine job, c.1912, of rendering something very old (c.800) modern English; keeping it accessible, emotional; bringing in a tone that was, I think, unusual in the English poetry of the time. (But one would, as usual, need to look carefully and sceptically at that. Every student of English would have focused a good deal on Old English then, after all.)

One could, I'm sure, go a lot further and into detail with comparisons of the original and of multiple translations of this poem.

Thanks Dow, I'm very glad to hear that I've reminded you of this fascinating little book. I mean to read the Heaney BEOWFULF too.

this friendless man,
seeth before him fallow waves,

Some lovers in this world
live dear to each other, lie warm together
at day's beginning; I go by myself
about these earth caves under the oak tree.