Peter Riley: ‘Vahni Capildeo’s contrariety is an exemplary way of coping with a cultural condition which seeks to package and label experience according to unsubtle and restrictive categories. She simply says “Yes No” to it, and in the process, with the help of her multicultural resources, produces poems and prose of expansive eloquence and sometimes challenging complexity, which insist on the multi-form, Protean status of the lived realities, as well as the bare paradox-songs and stories…’
Michael Blackburn: ‘I’ve had enough of many other things, but you get my drift. I have the feeling I’m not alone.’
Anthony Howell: ‘I am taken by the notion that the prose poem “forsakes the tool of the line break, just as blank verse forsakes rhyme, or free verse forsakes a standardised metre. Art seems to evolve, to grow, when some time honoured tenet is “let go of” – though this tendency to grow by relinquishment often offends pundits and traditionalists – who may accuse blank verse of “not rhyming”, for instance; ignoring the absurdity of their judgement.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘Each Islamic atrocity in Europe triggers a predictable avalanche of political posturing and journalistic slop. That has changed in some parts but remains posturing and slop nonetheless. Politicians don’t seem quite as keen to leap up and proclaim that Islam is a religion of peace as they used to be or to preach the message that the actions of the terrorists are the result of a deformed form of Islam. The rest remains the same, however.’
E. Grant Duff: ‘Those who look into his book for themselves will find here and there a maxim which will remind them of the age in which he live as the subject of Philip II, Philip III, and Philip IV, but such exceptional cases are rare, and most people will rise from the perusal of the work understanding much better how Spain became great, than how she fell. It ought to be remembered, too, that, as I have already said, the maxims were not collected into one whole by Gracian himself, but by his friend, Lastanosa, to whom also is to be attributed the proud, though perhaps not too proud, title.’
Philippe de Villiers: ‘“The ring has returned to France and here it will stay,” declared Philippe de Villiers, the founder of the Puy du Fou historical theme park, speaking at a ceremony to mark the return of the relic at Puy du Fou, near Nantes, on 20 March.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘The left is not just a system based on a conspiracy theory, it is a religious one and if you wish to leave you have to go full apostate. There are no half measures. Cohen is stuck with half measures and hence cannot accept that leftism ineluctably merges with antisemitism. He may think his being Jewish experiment will only be needed temporarily. He’s wrong: it’s permanent.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘This is not to dismiss or demean the many personal, cultural and economic links between Britain and the US, it’s just that we need our politicians and media to stop pretending it makes us special. If they don’t we’re always going to be in the “Yo, Blair!” category. It’s embarrassing.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘The unfortunate truth, though, is that “olympicly dim” describes so many modern politicians across the world. Many of them are olympian in all the wrong ways. Just look at them: Cameron, Obama, Hollande, Merkel. Olympians in arrogance, deceit, self-delusion , vanity and ignorance of the real world, all of them. We can’t seem to get rid of them and there seems to be no one on the political horizon who is not a similarly stunted bonehead.’
Bram Stoker: ‘May I say, inasmuch as I was Henry Irving’s manager during the whole period of his occupancy of the Lyceum Theatre, and therefore, lest anyone should attribute to him directly or indirectly any of the practices I have mentioned, that at the old Lyceum we did not have a claque, though certain individuals were perpetually importuning us to engage one; and, further, that we had no need for dead-heads to fill empty seats. Of course in all managements there are “lean” as well as “fat” times; but when the lean time showed signs of approach we took care to “put on” the play always ready for presentation on the stage, and by so doing did away with all necessity or temptation to produce an extraneous appearance of public desire.’
Mark Jones: ‘IF SAMUEL PALMER is today regarded as an important and compelling artist in his own right rather than merely an acolyte of the elderly William Blake, the process of rediscovery which led to that assessment can be directly traced back to the efforts of Martin Hardie and Herbert Palmer in the 1920s. Their collaboration on the 1926 exhibition, as fraught and troublesome as it often was succeeded in rescuing Palmer from the ranks of formulaic mid-Victorian landscape painters chiefly through the revelation that in his youth he had been capable of producing the portfolio of anomalous wonders that was the Shoreham work.’
Stephen Wade: ‘As time pressed on and publishing became established as a money-making notion, writers became a nuisance. Basically, there were too many of them. Most failed scribblers could be picked out in society by their flat noses, caused by the door slamming them against the wall as they loitered outside a patron’s door. With literary failure came its trappings and side-effects: most affected areas of the body were the bottom (writers’ bottom’ entered the medical vocabulary in the nineteenth century); the pen-pusher’s palsy (affecting the cheek, which twitches after too much false smiling at agents) and most deadly of all, depression of course, brought on by rejection, and known as the ‘sighing sickness.’ This was caused by too much automatic sighing through boredom and misery.’
Wednesday, 24 February 2016
Michael Blackburn: ‘The best part of the session, however, was reserved for Jezbollah The Lost, leader of Her Majesty’s opposition, who, when recounting how he had been to a meeting of European socialists says he was asked – at this point some Tory wit interject with the shout “Who are you?” The House shook with boisterous jollity. Except for Jezza, of course, and Mr Flim Flam, who was so engrossed in reading something that he hadn’t noticed the commotion and had to have it explained to him by his quivering Home Secretary.’
Benjamin and Surrealism: ‘By smashing any remaining illusion of the continuum of history (another pernicious doctrine, according to Benjamin) Surrealism freed the mind into a simultaneity of revelations. All that ever was is here now, or it has already vanished for ever into the black hole of oblivion. That is the law of the jungle, the truth of dialectics, the inexorable procedure of capitalist development, and it is also the law of art: we either make it new, or we might as well forget it. In fact, we are already forgetting it. We retain what we retain of history in a flash of present perception, a luminous manifold, or it has disappeared into the strata of the unconscionable, which is to say, the pious stacks of archived amnesia. ‘
Refer Madness.
Robert McHenry: ‘It is perhaps telling…that in his prologue to the book Lynch uses the words “information” and “knowledge” an equal number of times, but when, in the epilogue, he turns to Google and Wikipedia, he writes “information” twelve times and “knowledge” not once.’