I love the Bobby Fischer comparison.
Yes, Hill was noted for being, a cat word, :
fastidious,
Lifting the spicy lid of my tact
To sniff at myrrh
so a transformation from feline choosiness to the cat's-play of triumph has
a certain consistency.
I'll think about getting Odi entire (I've read about a third of it in
excerpts)
best
On 30 May 2012 12:30, Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> There's a marvellously catty footnote to one of Hill's essays where he
> refers to Larkin as having been afforded in later life almost
> unlimited credit at the bank of Opinion (or words to that effect). I
> do wonder whether some similar glamour isn't in effect with the late
> Hill: since he's known to be "difficult", to be a champion of
> difficulty even, every line he sets down is taken to vibrate with
> manifold theologico-etymological co-implications. Even the duff lines,
> only some of which are deliberately duff.
>
> In a way, I like that he'll write a duff line, squint at it, make a
> feeble joke about its duffness and move briskly on - inasmuch as
> that's part of the performance - but there is a point beyond which the
> meta-clowning of a Frankie Howerd - oh, please yourselves! - ceases to
> make up for the direness of the actual material.
>
> There's lots in Odi Barbare that I really like, and the overall sway
> of the poem is (for me) pretty compelling, but that's more down to the
> rhythm than anything else. Three times I went into the Waterstones
> near work and nearly bought Clavics, and three times I found myself
> looking over the contents, going "nah..." and walking out
> empty-handed. In the end, I picked up a copy at Hill's reading at the
> Southbank Centre, and stood in line for him to sign it. It's not all
> bad. But, my God, some of it really *is* bad.
>
> An editor competent to sift through Hill and separate the
> worth-keeping from the not-worth-keeping would be hard to find,
> though. His late verse seems designed to run athwart of the
> conventional literary competencies with which one might approach it.
> Some of that is - mischievously confessed - misdirection, the
> manipulation of prestige. I used to play chess against a boy who made
> all kinds of bad moves, real howlers, in a way that befuddled normal
> tactical thinking (I remember hearing that an element of Bobby
> Fischer's genius was his willingness to surrender advantages that a
> nonplussed opponent would be too intimidated to exploit); at the same
> time, he often seemed to manage to manoeuvre his knights into
> positions where they could skewer you in unpleasant ways if you
> weren't careful. Late Hill seems to me to be playing in a similar
> style: you're never quite sure when he's being a patzer. All of which
> reminds me of the epigraph to one of Prynne's more frustratingly
> opaque collections: "Anyone who takes up this book will, we expect,
> have done so because at the back of his mind he has a half-formed
> belief that there is something in it."
>
> Dominic
>
--
David Joseph Bircumshaw
"We are shallow, mababaw ang kaligayahan."
-* F. Sionil José*
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