Devon Boyers: ‘In The Duke’s Children, Trollope writes in both narrative and predictive metaphor, embodying the liminal space between literary movements in which Victorian positivism intermingled with and waned against an increasing interest in empiricism.’
Saturday, 15 December 2018
Franca Mancinelli: ‘Among the hearts on the walls, I search, in jest, the initials of my name. I know they have also come here for me. They have knelt at the wooden pew, lit a candle. I was heading towards death, with the instinct of a migrating animal. But even the tiny divinities of the water and the heavens can be tricked: you find them beached, caught in nets, bewildered by their wounds.’
Saturday, 15 December 2018
After the snowbird, comes the whale pt 6, sec 6: ‘The edge of the beach, the Point’s hook – changing as the tide erodes and builds it – is frozen, sealed down, hard to distinguish from the inshore sea ice, the chaos of the inshore rubble. Transitional and scarcely noticed. ‘Am I on the land or sea?’ the hunter asks in crossing. Does it matter? Transformation of environment which scarcely matters.’
Wednesday, 12 December 2018
By MICHAEL BLACKBURN. WITHNAIL AND I is one of my favourite films and I make sure I watch it once a year just to refresh my admiration for its impressive list of one-liners. If you don’t enjoy the film I can only grieve for you. There are two monstrous characters in the film, Withnail obviously […]
Anthony Rudolf: ‘I was a friend but not an intime, which perhaps enables a certain distance and objectivity with which to write what has to be called an interim assessment, which I hope will be of use to future writers. I have tried to make sense – with occasional deviations, hesitations and repetitions (to coin a phrase) – of the life of a man who loved women and equally loved the all-male universe of his club.’
Saturday, 1 December 2018
After the snowbird, comes the whale pt 6, sec 5: ‘All things come in the particularity of language. When we say what we see, our mouths express things in concretion as the words materially fulfill themselves. Our words have the lexical weight of articulated pieces: harpoon pole, shaft, point, ropes and toggle. And so we give words to ice conditions as wind and water measure out coincident trajectories and transformations. Spring follows winter. Hard light hatches. We study the sun’s progress from the eastern hills out to the ice horizon…’
Thursday, 29 November 2018
David Hackworth Johnson: ‘The feet of nightmare fugues pursue your own journey those nocturnals in leafy shadowed streets where you have been told she now lives and if only you can find the house she will be at the gate haloed in jasmine.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘I don’t know what he or my grandmother would have thought about the EU. They died before Britain joined the Common Market as it was then called. I suspect they may have been ambivalent at best. My grandmother despised the French (“let us down in both world wars,” I recall her saying) and there was little love among most Brits of their age, and my father’s, for the Germans. They had reasons for their hatreds. ‘
Wednesday, 21 November 2018
Peter Riley: ‘It is difficult to speak of groups among contemporary poets. All sorts of assumptions flow in concerning shared and mutual influences, common agendas, internecine conflicts and the group gets spoken of as if it were an independent creature with its own digestive system. How you read any one of them becomes infected with how you might read any other. John James and Barry MacSweeney were “associated” together — that should be enough.’
Claire Crowther: ‘Your life is hard now, I see, a struggle but you are strong.
All their strength is in you and though he is asleep –
No, that is OK, people sleep in their insights’
Kelvin Corcoran: ‘You must go there to set the poem aside. / They know everything about Helen there.’
Ian Seed: ‘In 1894 Jacob left Quimper to study law in Paris, but abandoned his studies two years later to become an art critic. In 1899 he decided to become a painter, supporting himself through a series of menial clerical jobs. When he met Picasso in 1901, the two became friends immediately. Picasso expressed his admiration for some poems Jacob showed him. From this time on, Jacob regarded poetry as his true vocation.’
Thursday, 15 November 2018
Part 6, Sec 4: ‘When the generation of our fathers is still active, we tend to project longevity, even immortality, onto its existence. We imagine it to be an omniscient regime that intensifies the childish sense we have of our own low status. But that experience is illusory. Tulugaq knew, as I did, that Pauyungin’s represented the last cohort to speak Inupiaq with competence and thereby knew things that only the old language could grasp. The language was what enabled the eye and the mind both to see and comprehend the complexity of existence. With the death of the language, the multiple realities residing within that complexity, would become inaccessible.’
In medias res.
Devon Boyers: ‘In The Duke’s Children, Trollope writes in both narrative and predictive metaphor, embodying the liminal space between literary movements in which Victorian positivism intermingled with and waned against an increasing interest in empiricism.’