June 2009
23 posts
Tennysonian ... stagnant vowel-music
Take ‘the avenues are spread with brittle floods’ not from ‘Idylls of the King’ but from ‘The Laurel Axe’, a sonnet I quoted as dispositive evidence of Hill’s mastery in a piece I now wince to recall.
First I notice the alveolar n, ds and t:
the avenues are spread with brittle floods.
Then the bilabial p and b:
the avenues are spread with brittle...
II The Naming of Offa
A pet-name, a common name. Best-selling brand, curt graffito. A laugh; a cough. A syndicate. A specious gift. Scoffed-at horned phonograph.
The starting-cry of a race. A name to conjure with.
A pet-name, a common name. — ?Geoff, Offa
Best-selling brand, — ?Jif [new in 1969] (Annwn has Omo)
curt graffito. — ‘f— off’ or ‘— off’
A laugh; — eff or Off as...
“I doubt Bay is very political, more of an art for arts sake type.”
– Poptarts
Iran more
i fear this has become a revolt of the state against the people. i fear that we have been misled by the internet into thinking we know more about it than we do. and as the west’s attention wanes, i fear the ruthlessness of selfishness in perpetuation of power, and the panicked resort to foreign policy as a tactic in the service of this perpetuation, which even as it subdues a people alerted...
“He bought a satellite dish, so that the family can now watch the BBC’s Persian...”
– A resident. I support the licence fee
“A friend met a man online, and after their first date he came back to her flat....”
– ‘load’ is Gold’s
note
We believe in ghosts because the more terrible thoughts are that we are alone, that this is all there is, thoughts whose speaking aloud will help us resolve the essential answers, I am, all this is here
“To the music of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody they played through the night,...”
– St. Petersburg Times
“Amazon should at least send you a sticker when you buy a book on Kindle so you...”
– Yglesias
“I also know that Iran’s women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen...”
– Roger Cohen
A poem
Something recent that went south in the making. I preserve it for Google, and penance.
Here is what you yearn for, it is what you fear: it is the library scrimmage-stair, legging ampleness of women here.
A knell! a knell: we could have had a villanelle. (On aching banks obliquity sinks.) A vault of feminine care
the cathedral battens cheer. Some sing defaulted claps of work’s reliable bell;...
For the Iranian Greens
Always go to Larison for a foreignpolicy mindfuck, his scepticism is constitutional and so fresh. He was brilliant in August on Georgia. What he misses here perhaps is the obviousness to every adult Iranian of the fact that the ‘Green’ reformism is one the Americans must prefer—and that its success, in any degree all the way up to its assumption of power, would favour American...
I probably have this wrong
Is it the case that as one’s argumentation gains rigour, one’s premises assume greater importance? If so at utmost rigour your argument is actually vulnerable, given its entire investment in premises for whose own rigour it does not vouch but to whose detail it demonstrates perfect faithfulness. This only says that the rigorous arguments most likely to succeed are those that begin with...
Holidays →
Not to be here
Know what, I was rereading Larkin, and it’s funny how minor he looks. I’m not sure I understand his popularity or reputation. This anointing by The Times to Britain’s no. 1 postwar writer confuses me. Not only not the greatest he is not great, though he has great lines:
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And...
Oliver Kamm is wrong →
“Are we just at the rolling cock-up stage of government?—Fawkes has his...”
At a reading of the Movement poets
Well, dapper tiny Amis sat a row in front of me, and peacocked out before questions at the end. Fonseca his wife is fit. Conquest is 92 and death in a chair really. Thwaite was chipper with anecdotes about Enright and Empson. Raine was rosy like an alcoholic. I can’t believe he is taken seriously as a poet—it’s surely all the assertion of his personality and the criticism. Fenton...
The only blogpost one need ever read →
Heffa
Musicianship appalls, diffuse as commas; lone tinkerings before he breaks the warchest out; the free bar’s effect on cones from twelve to three. Fraught as apostrophe; for: what metal grip of paws or saltier group will man the tiller squallways this time, through this of Galilee’s lash might skipper (genitive contraction, contraction genitive) true the parchment boat of right right-handed grammar?...
LEAR is a worm in the head
Certain analogies between the audience and Lear: the play is as inevitable as fate; believing it a kind of madness.
What Lear knows is not what the play knows!
‘Looke there, looke there’ primarily because S was ruthless and we do not want Cordelia to be dead. ‘Cordelia is dead.’
But Lear says it, and in his senility is contriving or wanting to convince himself that something terrible he...
Aliens, late, after Relentless and so little sleep
If there were advanced technological life in the galaxy, wouldn’t we know about it by now?
Sufficiently advanced to affect us, could it be benign?
Solution to Fermi: In order to survive long, you have not to signal your presence. (But a civilisation advanced enough to destroy another from a distance probably wouldn’t need signals to see it.)
What does biology predict are likely...
Cruise
The stippled face of depths to sink, of pitch, cold, breathless drink; the dip and mend and crest of miles to go before a rest, miles to go before a rest.
