Brian Patten: ‘He was a small, dapper man, quiet and circumspect. Trying to prise any information out of him was like trying to open a safe with a book-mark. During one of his last illnesses, I managed to get him out of his tiny flat near Russell Square and into a wheelchair. I pushed him around town. Our route, as seemingly erratic as a butterfly’s, was dictated by Bernard – or rather by whichever beautiful woman he wanted to follow behind in the wheelchair.’
Hence my annoyance when some pontificating clown was talking on TV about “modernising” the House of Lords, smirking at his own zeitgeistiness that since this is now the twenty-first century we ought to have a democratic, ie elected, second chamber because that would be modern. And yes, it was a Liberal Democrat.
This latest volume (edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden with unblinking attentiveness to the reader’s every need) covers the years 1926 and 1927. In this period, Eliot falls to his knees in St Peter’s, Rome, to the astonishment of his companions; is privately received into the Church of England; becomes a British citizen; and fails to get into All Souls because some fellows (“sons of the manse”) denounce his poetry as “obscene and blasphemous”.
Peter Riley: Noon brings this to poetry through his placement of the authorial self, you could say centrally but not subjectively – it is a perfectly objective attention to particulars as a means of attaching the whole (“the general makes me more specific” – Sonnet 1). Lyrical description is perhaps a good label for what Noon gets up to. The song qualities enhance the description and the description holds the singing to realities.
Roger Kimball: The campaign against genuine individuality is much further advanced today than it was in 1940 when Buchan wrote. We seem further than ever from the “manly humility” he prescribed. Which is one reason that rereading John Buchan is such a tonic exercise. His adventures are riches that help remind us of our poverty. If, as Montaigne wrote, admonition is the highest office of friendship, that counsel is a precious bounty.
H. D. Traill: One has resolutely to think away all the brass bands and banners, as of a Salvation Army procession, which confuse and vulgarise the advance of English literature, before we can discern the truth which fortunately is at bottom indisputable, that during the Sixty Years of the Queen’s reign that advance has been real and great.
Peter Riley: What is demonstrated by Oystercatcher is the great range possible within a broad concept of the continuity of modernism, which means in effect that whatever the ambience of the poetry there is a strongly verbal textuality. Whatever it is concerned with, however it approaches the world, it takes no words for granted, but turns them on their sides and holds them against the light until the balance of intent and accident is clear.
Jim Mussell: ‘When we stop reading, the book returns… Yet the book’s insistent materiality is there all the time, offering up marks to be recognized as words, pages to be turned, the weight of the volume to be accommodated by our bodies. The act of reading is predicated on the form of crafted material objects and the application of learned behaviour; the resulting text effects a further transformation, changing the relationships between reader, text, object and environment.’
‘[Irony] protects one from emotional openness which might destroy or just weaken one, and it turns the experience toward intellect and away from emotion. I learned that by my long immersion in eighteenth-century literature, where the urge is constantly outward from oneself; that is, not to try to undertake deep voyages into the self, but, rather, to escape the self, look out at society, see what’s going on, and then comment on it. Irony is a great help there, to protect oneself from self-regarding emotion, which has always been an enemy of mine from the start.’
As we move into the digital age, the well-made copy has come to occupy a familiar, almost nostalgic middle ground between the aura of an original and the ghostly quality of a computer file. A mass-produced paper book, though bulkier and more expensive, may continue to be more desirable because it carries with it this material presence.
Peter Riley: ‘The judging criteria, being tied to a system of familiarity and recurrence, are inevitably subjective and inevitably self-propagating. What chance is there of objectivity in an art where there is no common agreement as to what constitutes its qualities?
Will the new NYPL still support scholars — especially the independent scholars who need it most — and give students a chance to know and love real books as well as their digital shadows? Can public library budgets support the constant upgrading needed to keep a digital workspace usable?
By TIM WALKER [Independent] – From the ancient Roman calendar to Facebook’s brain-melting new “Timeline” profile layout, most of us are accustomed to visualising history as linear; a middle, book-ended by arbitrary beginnings and ends. And yet, timelines designed as a single straight axis, with a regular and measured distribution of dates, have only existed […]
[From the announcement online] – Seventy writers, mostly from the East Midlands, will be reading from their work at ‘States of Independence’, an events programme at the Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Oxford Street, Leicester, on 17 March 2012. The event also features participants from independent publishers and writing organisations staffing bookstalls and displaying their […]
Those hunky, tousle-haired, philosophical Americans.
Antony O’Hear: If only ‘we simply could dismiss Professor Romano as the Humpty-Dumpty of higher education (he is, apparently, something called Critic-at-Large of The Chronicle of Higher Education) and move on to something else – reading some philosophy, perhaps. ‘