PS Alison
when I hit moments of depression, and I've been doing a lot of that
lately, even when I consider the whole of human culture, the words of
Mistah Kurtz, that Eliot once liked so much, echo in my mind;
'The horror, the horror'.
I don't think there are any bursaries, grants, publishing
opportunities, personal endorsements, literary prizes available for
that.
2008/11/23 Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>:
> Hey David - By that token, practically all of our literature is
> impossible to touch. All of Elizabethan poetry is tainted by
> colonialism and imperialism, etc etc. I find it rather more
> problematic - and fascinating - from the point of view of its gender
> stuff. If you mightn't have wanted to be a man in that society, you
> most certainly didn't want to be a woman.
>
> For all that, I just like it. I even like that you can see the joins,
> or that there are those weird ellipses where the poetry leaps from
> here to there, or where another story begins and ends with the barest
> of warnings.
>
> Translating it culturally! Hmm. There might be legends in their own
> trousers hanging around in local pubs who think they're Beowulf, but
> the thought makes me blench. There actually aren't modern equivalents
> for the story of Grendel or his mother, or the dragon and, to be
> serious about it, there's a starkness in the poem which I'm finding,
> from my point of view, quite illuminating. There ain't nothing _nice_
> about Beowulf, and leaving it in its time and place means we can make
> of it what we will. I guess I'm primarily interested in seeing how it
> might be cast effectively in plain contemporary English as (from my
> point of view) a gripping narrative.
>
> I never saw the most recent movie, but Hal Duncan's review is
> hilarious - http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2007/11/i-am-beowulf-youre-going-daaaaahn.html
>
> "...At this point, anyone who's read the Anglo-Saxon source text might
> well be stroking their chin. Grendel's Mother was a super-sexy
> babe-demoness? I don't remember that in the original! One might grow
> more curious still when Beowulf proceeds to shag aforesaid super-sexy
> babe-demoness rather than dispatching her. Um... isn't that, like, a
> *radical* departure from the original? we might ask. No matter; all of
> these considerations pale into insignificance against the key question
> raised by this representation of Grendel's Mother: just how Mother
> Dearest, given her barbie-doll smooth and entirely slitless pubic
> mound, manages to get it on with both Beowulf and Hrothgar -- here
> revealed as Grendel's father, ye see, to provide a nice pat theme of
> parental responsibility as opposed to all that complex guff about the
> conflict of Christian belief systems with autochthonous religion and
> mythology; remember, it's about "the Age of Monsters", not the age
> of... well... the Christianisation of Northern Europe. Fuck that shit!
> It's about Monsters! Big 3D Monsters THROWING SHIT OUT AT THE
> AUDIENCE!!! But, I'm getting off the point, so, yeah, how exactly did
> she shag them? And from which orifice did she drop her sprogs? Sure,
> sure, others might ask *why*, given that Beowulf is all about "the Age
> of Monsters", we have Grendel's Mother as a stereotyped Evil Sexy
> Vixen rather than the ass-kicking, man-munching Monster of the source
> text, why she has to use her "womanly wiles" on the hero rather than,
> well, going mano-a-mano with him in an underwater slug-fest cause she
> ain't nobody's bitch, motherfucker. Me, I just want to know *how*.
>
> "It may seem that I'm overemphasising the importance of Grendel's
> Mama's labia-lack. To be sure, I have to confess I'm not quite sure
> what Zemeckis was trying to say by this, so it's entirely possible I'm
> missing something important. I can only be sure that we're *meant* to
> take this as highly significant from the close-up crotch-shot of
> Grendel's Mum that, in Imax, cannot fail to impress with it's
> in-yer-faceness (It's a giant gold barbie-crotch and IT'S COMING TO
> GET YOU!!!)."
>
> xA
>
> On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 6:11 AM, David Bircumshaw
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Anglo-Saxon literature was of interest to white supremacists like
>> Pound or Tolkien, which doesn't mean that people who follow on in that
>> are of the same ilk, the trouble is that of taking on a poisoned
>> chalice.
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
>
--
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
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