Elton Hocking: ‘Most of all, this banquet was held as a demonstration of protest against Brunetière. Three months before, he had dared to publish in his “Revue des deux mondes” an article which denounced the positivistic and materialistic spirit of modern science, and proclaimed that morality and happiness were to be found not in science, but in the spirit of the Church.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘So much then for these anti-women feminists. They are apologists for a religion that not only despises women and subjugates them to second class status but also violates and murders them. They are advocates for a belief system that attacks the very principles which provides them with the money, education, freedom and opportunity to preen themselves in public on your impeccable correctness.’
Wednesday, 23 December 2015
Robert McHenry: ‘To a degree, the set of cross-references in a text comprises a sort of index-on-the-installment-plan (remembering that to index something is to point to it). They are more useful in being right there in the text, thus immediately informing the reader that the text has more to say on the present matter, but they are less useful in being blind to the reader’s detailed needs.’
Wednesday, 16 December 2015
Thomas Kebbel: ‘The danger to which a young lady is exposed by imagining too readily that a polite gentleman is in love with her; and the danger to which a young gentleman is exposed by imagining too readily that a good-natured girl is in love with him; the misunderstandings that arise from careless conversation, from exaggerated reserve, from overrated pretensions, from all the little mistakes which create the common embarrassments of ordinary society; these are the minor mischiefs which [Jane Austen’s] pen is devoted to setting in their proper light, and no man or woman turned forty will deny that such work may be of great utility, or that anybody who chooses to read her novels with a view to practical instruction may learn a great deal from them. ‘
Anthony Howell; ‘The organisers — Chrissy Williams and Joey Connolly — have brought out a very useful programme and anthology that is well worth getting hold of since it lists all the publishers as well as providing a sample of what they print. The event was described as “an all-day bazaar, market, library, meeting place, performance venue, information resource and more, celebrating the vitality of contemporary poetry in the UK.”’
Michael Blackburn: ‘The London I first used to visit and in which I lived was still a post-war city, much of it tatty, dirty, run-down. If you watch repeats of films and tv programmes set in London up until the mid-1990s you’ll see what I mean. It’s one of my favourite pastimes now, pointing out the litter-strewn streets, the peeling paintwork, the rotting window frames, the mucky walls and pavements. It wasn’t until I was walking along the river from Aldgate to the Strand one morning about ten years ago that I realised London had become a modern city at last, new buildings, cleaner streets, better shops, better transport, and so on.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘Miliband will be seen to be weak because he will have to dance to the SNP’s tune in order to stay in power. Even the normally phlegmatic denizens of England will start to get restive. There are already enough people who are identifying themselves as English rather than British.’
Thursday, 26 February 2015
Spadefuls of meaning: ‘What troubled Hopkins was that the whole manner of signification, and therefore the meaning of what was being signified, shifted according to the nature of the language employed. A dilution of meaning was a change of meaning, and so a shift of usage was effectively a change of mind. And meaning here is not merely lexis; it is syntax too, the way grammatical configuration elicits alternative possibilities from the words thus constellated.’
Anthony Howell: ‘There is a lack of breadth that still dogs the selection process, I think as a direct result of prize-winners apotheosising into judges. In the end it all begins to feel samey. There are far too many “of”s – usually attached to death, love, or something equally gloomy, and so the poems not only feel samey, they feel doomy. Again and again we were urged to confront the death of a loved one or our own death. Surely there is more to poetry than a maudlin sense of nostalgia for those no longer with us?’
Gautier: ‘I wrote, although the hurricane
lashed windows which I always close,
Enamels first, then Cameos.’
Michel Blackburn: ‘Unfortunately, hypocrisy doesn’t figure among the great sins condemned by the liberal establishment. Banksy is thus absolved of being a money-grubbing, faux rebel because he’s an exposer of the truth. He can stick it to The Man and pocket the kudos and the cash at the same time. That’s how the scrubbing out of this piece can be hailed as no less than a “vicious act of censorship”. The little Lenins of the metropolitan establishment love this down-with-the-people, street art stuff. It combines the pretentiousness of the cultural world with a yearning for the authenticity of working class experience, of “real people”.’
Nick O’Hear: ‘Eating too much is the cause of fatness. This is true for the rich as well as the poor. My view is, that despite the explosion of cookery programmes, many people still can’t cook and hate to try. My remedy is to teach cooking as part of the national curriculum.’
Selections from El HOMBRECITO Two Dominican Poets: Frank Báez and Homero Pumarol Selected, Translated, and Introduced by Hoyt Rogers. FRANK BÁEZ AND Homero Pumarol might both be described as homegrown versions of Junot Diaz: native Dominican authors rather than a son of the diaspora like Diaz, but with the same hip originality and with-it verve. […]
Brunetière and the ‘monster banquet’.
Elton Hocking: ‘Most of all, this banquet was held as a demonstration of protest against Brunetière. Three months before, he had dared to publish in his “Revue des deux mondes” an article which denounced the positivistic and materialistic spirit of modern science, and proclaimed that morality and happiness were to be found not in science, but in the spirit of the Church.’