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Cluster index: Alan Wall

Birthing the Minotaur.

Thursday, 18 May 2023

Alan Wall: ‘The price of civilization is our emotional crippledom. You want the Taj Mahal, Michaelangelo, aeroplanes? Then go buy yourself a mental walking-stick.’

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Of Entropy and Knees.

Wednesday, 12 April 2023

Alan Wall: ‘Dyer has noticed that he’s started to get on a bit, and he’s noticed that a lot of other people have too. So he has become interested, not only in the question of his knackered knees, but also in the question of late style. So, what is it, exactly?’

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The tramp’s companion.

Sunday, 19 March 2023

Alan Wall: ‘The essayistic mind-set has an open aperture at both ends. It does not close itself off with conclusions. It remains provisional, in order to dance on the page.’

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The first 80 years of Bob Dylan.

Saturday, 28 January 2023

Alan Wall: ‘The aristocracy to aim for was the aristocracy of the road. It was the lineage described in Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory. It was there in the great blues tradition of Blind Willie McTell and Robert Johnson. You keep on moving from town to town.’

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The Persistence of the Song.

Tuesday, 18 October 2022

Alan Wall: ‘Blues has had an incalculable influence on modern song. Many of the basic riffs of the Rolling Stones come straight out of standard blues refrains: Keith Richards has been an assiduous student of black music.’

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M. Baudelaire’s nightlife.

Friday, 16 September 2022

Alan Wall: ‘Nineteenth-century France does appear to be full of fellows slagging off their old mums at every opportunity, and having tea with them the following day. Oedipus reconciled, eh. Baudelaire’s trial for obscenity took place in 1857; Flaubert’s in 1859.’

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Two short poems.

Monday, 1 August 2022

Alan Wall: ‘You promised me
your imprimatur
But I knew in your heart you were
always a traitor’

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Why I am not a philosopher.

Monday, 4 July 2022

Alan Wall: ‘I do have a fondness for the philosophical miscreants, the delinquents of the humanities block. Kierkegaard is at his best when he is destroying the philosophical pretensions of Hegel.’

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What are poets for?

Sunday, 29 May 2022

Alan Wall: ‘Tarn spends a lot of time looking back, including over the religions and the peoples he has studied. He has an insatiable curiosity where cultures are concerned. He looks forward too, with Solomonic gravitas.’

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Midrash.

Wednesday, 27 April 2022

Alan Wall: ‘When Christians decided to impose their figural readings on the Hebrew Bible, and to employ typology, they deemed the text before them to be allegorical, or at least to have allegorical potential.’

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The Beatles: Yeah x 3.

Thursday, 31 March 2022

Alan Wall: ‘So cataclysmic were the changes, that we cannot re-think ourselves into a history without the Beatles. If the Stones really were an alternative, they were an alternative that couldn’t have evolved the way they did without the Beatles. They even recorded their compositions.’

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Pop Songs.

Monday, 27 December 2021

Alan Wall: ‘ You could half-whisper into a mike, and you were instantly in a bedroom, disrobing. Leonard Cohen was very close to the mike. There was a reason for this: in any orthodox sense, he couldn’t sing. He was endearingly aware of the fact.’

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Etymologizing.

Wednesday, 1 December 2021

Alan Wall: ‘Etymology is mostly strict and scholarly these days. Even to the point where it contradicts our presuppositions. Faced with the word ravenous, we might reasonably suppose that a raven lives there. After all, this is a big, commanding, eye-plucking bird. Pruk-pruk. It used to make a feast of our dead, lying around after battle – maybe it will again one day. But here the etymology disappoints.’

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Chaos is come again.

Sunday, 30 May 2021

ALAN WALL: ‘It seems to me that Shakespeare had understood early on that order is performative, not static. It must be re-enacted constantly, or it collapses back towards chaos. Order is a dynamic affirmation. Every time we write a poem, or enact a play, or sing a song, we are asserting order.’

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Representation by millimetres.

Monday, 22 March 2021

Alan Wall: ‘G. K. Chesterton once remarked that the phrase ‘He has lost his reason’ is often the precise opposite of the truth. He has lost human affection, any sense of balance, any residue of charity or compassion, but his reason continues. Whirring away in a vacuum. And that is Dr Strangelove.’

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