I know, Patrick, rather than line dancing I have my eyes on becoming
World Tiddlywinks Champion, I'll have to spend a year in training
though before I launch my bid: jogging 7 miles every morning before
breakfast etc, you know, as the demands of international sport are
immense.
Best
Dave
2008/11/24 Patrick McManus <[log in to unmask]>:
> David Depression it's all that poetry stuff you read
> Take up line dancing or something!!
> Cheers Patrick
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of David Bircumshaw
> Sent: 23 November 2008 21:19
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: A fitt
>
> 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-da
> aaaahn.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
>
--
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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