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Cluster index: Alan Wall

Representation by millimetres.

Monday, 22 March 2021

Alan Wall: ‘G. K. Chesterton once remarked that the phrase ‘He has lost his reason’ is often the precise opposite of the truth. He has lost human affection, any sense of balance, any residue of charity or compassion, but his reason continues. Whirring away in a vacuum. And that is Dr Strangelove.’

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The Metaphoric Graveyard.

Tuesday, 16 February 2021

Alan Wall: ‘Obviously, the words are not always to hand. Words disappear; they fall out of use irretrievably, particularly when a language substantially changes form.’

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Blossoming under a black sun.

Friday, 15 January 2021

Alan Wall: ‘This paralysis of spirit leads to remarkable feats of intellectual observation. It can also lead to hideous stasis. Benjamin reckoned one great solace the melancholic had was allegory. Allegory transposes the vital organic figures into a tableau, in which meaning dictates characteristics and movement. Once more we are seeing dialectics at a standstill.’

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‘No Worst There Is None’: Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Thursday, 3 December 2020

Alan Wall: ‘Hopkins is exercising extreme intelligence inside this text; he is helping the words to locate themselves with maximum vigour and force. This is the ultimate vindication of the task of the philologist-poet. To find eloquence not in smoothness, but in the jagged soundings of potent speech.’

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The poet as essayist.

Monday, 2 November 2020

Alan Wall: ‘When George Oppen wrote ‘Of Being Numerous’ in the 1960s he was a writing a consciously, formally democratic verse. It fragments and recombines. It celebrates the ‘shipwreck of the singular’. The ‘I’ has been fractured. It is no more an isolated entity, a singularity that commands its world.’

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A Note on Inscape, Descriptionism and Logical Form.

Thursday, 20 August 2020

Alan Wall: ‘They have achieved a significant form that grafts them on to one another, as though they were organically related, or at least symbiotically fused. The space between them ceases to be homogeneous, and becomes shaped instead. Homology signifies a shared origin in function and development. For example, pectoral fins, bird wings, and the forelimbs of mammals – all are homologous, whereas bird wings and insect wings are merely analogous.’

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Viduities.

Wednesday, 1 July 2020

Alan Wall: ‘We are outnumbered by the dead. Should they all return at once, our world would be crowded, perhaps beyond endurance. Bob Hope waits in cryonic suspension, ready for that moment when the medical technology can restore him to the ranks of the living, where he might once more set the table on a roar, as Yorick too had done, before they laid him in the earth, before digging him up again. A prolepsis of archaeology.’

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Just a smack at Auden.

Tuesday, 16 June 2020

Alan Wall: ‘What Sansom discovers in the stanzas of this poem is a fair bit of confusion. Auden didn’t know what would become of the world (who did?) and has become intolerant of his own previous facility in diagnosing the world’s ills.’

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Shakespeare’s dysnarrativia.

Monday, 27 April 2020

Alan Wall: ‘What happens if your dysnarrativia is willed? What kind of language are we looking at if the subject deliberately disconnects from communal usage and expectation, for whatever reason? Hamlet does just this.’

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Considering ‘I’, alone.

Monday, 23 March 2020

Alan Wall: ‘The poetic “I” occupies a special space. What Roman Jakobson calls the poetic function permits the written word within the written space to float relatively free of referentiality; to foreground the gestures of its own linguistic play, its fictionality.’

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Remembering Ovid.

Monday, 25 February 2019

Alan Wall: ‘Ovid’s long gone, breathing the salt wind of the blackest sea/Exiled to his outpost where the priests/All recommend a sacramentum of barbarity./Write (if you must) with old coals on the dungeon walls.’

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Walter Benjamin and the City.

Monday, 4 June 2018

Alan Wall: ‘Had Le Corbusier been given his way in the early twentieth century, then the Parisian Babel would have been translated entirely into Esperanto; a modern synthetic language of the Enlightenment: modernism rendered as a form of aesthetic hygiene. But the city photographed by Atget survived, for a while anyway. Benjamin obsessed over Atget’s images, which he reckoned had drained away the auratic entirely, and produced something different in its place. ‘

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1922, that liminal point.

Saturday, 19 May 2018

Alan Wall: ‘he significance of the year 1922 is beyond question. Kevin Jackson in Constellation of Genius calls it Year One of modernism, and Ezra Pound took to dating his letters from the date of completion of Ulysses. This was the end of the Christian era. Yeats had already remarked, after watching Ubu Roi: “After us, the Savage God.” ‘

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Looking back in anger.

Monday, 23 April 2018

Alan Wall: ‘Kitaj was obsessed all his life with Cézanne, and Cézanne certainly believed that everything needed in life and art was here, right before us, but we had to learn to see with utter integrity, and that meant ridding ourselves of false visual conventions. It is not the subject-matter of art that makes it lofty, but its method of perception. ‘

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Midrash.

Friday, 30 March 2018

Alan Wall: ‘How reconcile the holy text of Genesis with modern cosmology, which we now know to be true? Hebrew scripture being canonical. Well, God makes everything in six days before signing off for the Sabbath. But look hard at the words.’

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