Wednesday, 14 November 2018
Michael Blackburn: ‘At this advanced stage of the left’s heretic-hunting psychopathy we know there’s no need either to take these accusations seriously or to engage in an intellectual rebuttal of them. There’s no point arguing with cretins. I should think that Scruton is sound enough to withstand this (it’s an unpaid position, so there are no financial implications) but whether the politicians are is another question.’
Saturday, 3 November 2018
Anthony Howell: ‘All they are looking for is chic literature
Suited to an Ormolu bookshelf in the hameau de la Reine:
A dalliance in delightful Kentish Town; the owner
In her Busta shorts, the builder in from Dalston.’
Thursday, 1 November 2018
Jerry Palmer: ‘The personal experiences that compose these memoirs – as well many novels based on them – entered the public domain to become parts of the collective memory of the war. If few of them survive as literature, the fact that there is a collective memory of the experience of a war that ended a hundred years ago suggests that they had their impact, at least cumulatively. ‘
Thursday, 1 November 2018
Pt 6, Sec 3: ‘the weight of the past, its vast, dignified and largely unknowable accumulation, lay mostly hidden, albeit magnetically drawing the mind to dwell in its presence, a presence that even given the prior, biological fact of death, refused to die and was still here animated in its own afterlife while the present flitted above it: and that it was the present that constituted the unreality: our shared, changeful and indeterminate present with its transient, mobile, superficial procession of calculable minutes which were haunted by our sense – in comparison with the semi- or imaginatively perceived wholeness of what lay behind – of incompleteness.’
Antony Rowland: ‘The whole sequence is, in a sense, a response to The Life of Charlotte Brontë, because Gaskell’s book merges acute observations of mid-nineteenth-century Haworth and its environs with questionable accounts of the wild, vicious natives: Gaskell is rightly accused of perpetuating the ‘Brontë myth’ of the parsonage family growing up in the forgotten wastes of outer Yorkshire.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘We are slipping back into the old days when we were mere consumers of whatever the media put in front of us, except that as we are given less and less input of our own, those opposing us are given more. There is still hope that freedom of speech will survive the coming suppression. ‘
Gabi Reigh: ‘…she was currently at the height of her desirability. She remembered looking at the cards competing with each other for space, overlapping each other in places, and imagined ringing one of the numbers. What would the voice of an eighteen year old girl waiting for that phone call sound like?’
Saturday, 20 October 2018
Simon Collings: ‘The people who feature in the documentary are mostly the everyday citizens of France, neither superstars nor the extreme poor – though we do meet an elderly man, called Pony, who lives in a shack and makes art from found objects. But some of Varda’s perennial concerns are still there, and are clearly shared by JR. She notices that goats are having their horns burned off to make them more ‘productive’. We meet a woman with a herd of horned goats who believes animals should be respected and left as they are. Varda and JR like this woman.’
Ian Seed: ‘It feels like cheating. I have not had to struggle with my narrative prose poems in the way that I do with other kinds of writing, and yet I believe that the best of them are the only writings of mine that are somehow genuinely themselves. They have needed just a little nurturing from me in order to make their own way in the world.’
Wednesday, 17 October 2018
Michael Blackburn: ‘Sometimes I get the feeling that there are other, deeper, more subterranean forces at work, that cannot be ascribed purely to changes wrought by technology, politics or religion. The latter may just be the excrescences of those deeper forces. Without going all Spenglerian it seems obvious there is an arc to all empires and civilisations, of birth, development, achievement and then decay.’
Michael Buckingham Gray: ‘The wind carries a whine. She cups her ear and follows the sound. Stops. Smiles. And shakes her head at her dog, pacing up and down the opposite side of the river.’
Part 6, sec 2: ‘These changes came in the wake of a long historical process and language moribundity was not in local control. This is no-one’s fault. And the linguistic education mentioned earlier offered contact and familiarity with Inupiaq, but did not propose fluency. Language death remains a tragedy both for those who have lost it, and the world is thereby poorer.’
Saturday, 13 October 2018
Anthony Costello: ‘Coleridge’s eye poems sets him apart from other Romantic poets. Eyes are central to dozens of important poems and present in the form of significant phrases and lines in hundreds more. They are present as basic descriptors: ‘dark disliking eye’, ‘dim eyes’, ‘bright blue eyes’, but then the adjectives become more revealing and turn into adverbs and verbs…’
Thursday, 11 October 2018
Simon Collings: ‘The doctor turned out to be an ex-lover who I hadn’t seen for some time. She asked me if I was free for dinner, and suggested we continue the consultation at her apartment, to which I readily agreed. The building where she lived was close by. ‘
Ian Seed’s ‘true surrealist attentiveness’.
Jeremy Over; ‘The backdrop of the New York ‘School’ of poets seems a congenial one for Seed’s poetry which, especially when in verse form, operates in an identifiably post-Ashberyan mode of lyrical and dreamlike bemusement.