A question for you, Dave. Where are you going with this? Pace your
comments about knowing about those who or what our ancestors are
about, and I agree with it, however your comments ascend at times into
polemic and leaps of logic such as the final sentence. I wonder what
lies behind this single-minded pursuit? What is it Nietsche said? If
you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you? But
then, as much as fashionable people today want to ignore it, someone
has said that god is dead. Bury the idea, discredit the authors. It's
there, just as Alan Moore laid the tombstone for Superman.
I note your favorable comments about Larkin and the disconnect you
made between his letters and his poetry. If anything, Larkin
condescended and looked down that long, dour nose in his poetry,
hating those post-war consumers. The hatred for fancy European
theorists, the general distaste for the working-class shared by a lot
of the working-class "who made good." A while, before I was ill, I
used to catch myself burying my past, showing a Larkinesque disdain
for the working class. I've changed for the better I hope. I wonder
even now if some undergraduate is cementing Larkins' pornography with
his poetics ah, he mysogyny of it all.
The duchamp readymade has a long lineage in the art-world, it is much
mocked by the right-wing press. However, as much as people (the Daily
Mail, say) deride such Duchampean or Picabian japes, we have to deal
with it; it is there, people, well, me included make these things.
It's not going away, as much as you'd like it to. Engaging with it
rather than denying it would seem to be a more fruitful option but to
each their own.
Roger
On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 8:13 AM, David Bircumshaw
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Thanks for posting that link, Max.
>
> I think it worth observing that the piece reminds me that the roots of
> English language modernism are in the culturally segregated
> aestheticism of the 1890s - this is where the looking-down superiority
> of Pound, Eliot and Stevens originates, and that the fetish of
> 'experiment' divorced from content reinforces that.
>
> 2008/5/11 Max Richards <[log in to unmask]>:
>
>
> > On 12/5/08 3:45 AM, "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> >> And an intriguing wandering it is, Christopher. I don't pretend to
> >> 'get' it all yet, or at least so far as to respond coherently, but I
> >> think I tend to agree with you. I wonder about those of us who do find
> >> ourselves working the fragment & the non-narrative (at least in some
> >> ways) while also feeling that we do need to remember, or to do what
> >> battle we can with 'historical amnesia' (wonderfully examined, in one
> >> area, in a piece by Marilynne Robinson in the latest Harper's). I
> >> admire the use of narrative as a means, but it's not my means...
> >>
> >> Doug
> >
> > Robinson's Harper's essay:
> >
> > http://www.ephblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/harpersmagazine-2008-05-00
> > 82007.pdf
> >
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> David Bircumshaw
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
>
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
"She went out with her paint box, paints the chapel blue
She went out with her matches, torched the car-wash too"
The Go-Betweens
|