Matthew
I think this is in danger of becoming a needless argument. If young writers
are emerging in Wales who reinvigorate the literature I'm only too glad. If
they are.
I hardly think R.S.Thomas was a supporter of Welsh colonisation.
As I said in a post to Lawrence, regarding the language, I have faint hopes
of the North, of the idea of Gwynedd, but that remains to be seen.
Believe me, working-class self-deprecatory humour is not peculiar to Wales.
I know rugby union is a working-class game in Wales, unlike much of England,
but sports mania does not indicate cultural florescence, otherwise the
pub-centre of Newcastle on a Saturday night is an artistic renaissance, and
standing among a crowd of Liverpool supporters at Whiteheart Lane hearing a
guy goin 'fucking yids' without stop for half-an-hour represents the growth
of awareness of others, while watching a guy getting all his ribs kicked in
Aston Park by about a dozen Villa supporters because he wasn't one of them
is obviously a street art recreation of Goya. You might like to know too
that the number of Welsh speakers in the South has been greater than the
North for a longtime, the difference being that the speaking communities of
the South are not as homogenous as in the North.
But any honest response to Welsh culture today has to compare it with that
of Scotland or Ireland now and I'm afraid the comparison is not favourable.
best, wearily
david
----- Original Message -----
From: Matthew Francis <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 11:38 PM
Subject: Wales
> David
>
> I understood the inverted commas as distancing *you* from the phrase
> 'Anglo-Welsh' but felt they implied you were attributing it to
contemporary
> Welsh poets and thus suggesting a complicity in their own colonization.
> Whereas it is precisely this generation of Welsh writers, not your praised
> generation of the Thomases, Saunders Lewis etc, who have rejected it.
'Welsh
> writing in English' is hardly a handy label, but by no means bad English,
> and it seems it will have to do.
>
> I nearly left sport out when attempting a characterization of the Welsh.
The
> fact is that it is important to them (and to me, and a great many other
> people, as a matter of fact). I don't see why it should be denigrated.
Rugby
> is both a symbol of Welsh national identity and a link with the industrial
> past - it is a working-class game here, and has traditionally served to
> strengthen social bonds among work colleagues.
>
> As for the Welsh sense of humour, it's difficult to explain. We English
have
> long complimented ourselves on ours (I'm not sure anyone else shares our
> high opinion of it), but we reserve most of it for close friends and
> suitable occasions. The Welsh, on the other hand, seem to find everyone
and
> everything funny, themselves most of all, and it's difficult to have a
> conversation with anyone, friend or stranger, without ending up laughing.
> This is a huge change after living in the South of England all one's life.
>
> Welsh still is a language - I hear it spoken practically every day,
> something which cannot have been the case in Anglicized South Wales for at
> least fifty years or so. And there are plenty of poems and novels being
> written in it. (Gwyneth Lewis writes in both languages.) It seems to me
> you're romanticizing Wales's past at the expense of the reality of its
> present. Anyone can point to the great dead and ask where are their
> equivalents now? It's an old, tired rhetorical device. They've sealed
their
> reputations by dying, whereas the mediocrities of those days have been
> forgotten. Contemporary Welsh writers are as intensely involved in the
> political
> and cultural issue of Welshness as any of their predecessors have been.
> They are not wannabe English or American, nor are they caricature Welsh.
> The country deserves better than the easy dismissals it has so often had
> from
> the English.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Matthew
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: david.bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 07 February 2001 01:37
> Subject: Re: A caution
>
>
> >Matthew
> >
> >There seems to a mild problem of perception on this list about the use of
> >inverted commas as a stylistic device of stylistic to indicate
distancing.
> >That was the context of my employment of 'Anglo-Welsh'.
> >
> >I'm afraid that the flourishing of a moniker like 'Welsh writing in
> English'
> >rather suggests that its perpetrators do not know how to. Write in
English,
> >that is, whether Welsh or not.
> >
> >I respect the work Peter Finch has done over the years, but he is just
one
> >guy, and at the same time he's allowed himself an all too accomodating
> >attitude to obvious mediocrity. I say this in sorrow, not anger, Wales
> needs
> >writers, writers to speak for it.
> >But they're all dead.
> >
> >I really don't share your valuation of sports-mania as an indicator of
> >cultural well-being, while self-deprecatory humour is prevalent
throughout
> >this here isle, it being a country for many of ritual daily denial, like
a
> >Russian queue.
> >
> >As for the accent, it used to be a language.
> >
> >But, as I said before, I'd LOVE to be wrong on this, the perception gives
> me
> >no pleasure.
> >
> >regards
> >
> >david b
> >
> >
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: Matthew Francis <[log in to unmask]>
> >To: <[log in to unmask]>
> >Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 11:46 PM
> >Subject: Re: A caution
> >
> >
> >> David writes:
> >> >
> >> >
> >> But I was thinking of a) the utter of unotherness of industrial South
> >Wales
> >> these days, that is it has a popular culture that is largely just as
much
> >> sub-American as
> >> England's and b) literary Wales has lost its identity, there are a lot
of
> >> 'Anglo-Welsh' poets aren't there who write flat mainstreamy kind of
stuff
> >> (Peter Finch might not like that statement but he's just one guy) but
> even
> >> more so Welsh literary culture now may be one of the least distinct in
> >> Europe: the Thomases are dead, Saunders Lewis and the London-Welsh
David
> >> Jones too. I gather there's some kind of kick still in the North, but
no
> >> really strong voice. Wales 'reads' to me like a culture that has truly
> >> collapsed under a colonial weight.
> >> >
> >> >
> >> I'm not the best person to reply to this, being still fairly new to
> Wales,
> >> but I'd better try anyway. Industrial South Wales has of course changed
a
> >> lot, being largely post-industrial these days. But it still has a great
> >deal
> >> of otherness as far as I'm concerned. Some of this has to do with the
> >> landscape, that will never be quite tamed in the way that so much of
> >England
> >> has been. Then there is the accent, the loquaciousness, the dry
> >> self-deprecating sense of humour, the sports mania (I have just
witnessed
> >an
> >> entire nation, male and female, young and old, gripped by the
collective
> >> hallucination that they were about to defeat England at rugby), a
> relaxed,
> >> couldn't-care-less attitude (about things other than rugby) which was
not
> >> all what I would have predicted in from an area with a tradition of
> >> Nonconformism. I have been made very welcome here, but I'll always be a
> >> foreigner. At my badminton club I was partnered in doubles with a boy
> >about
> >> 17, on the grounds that we were both English. 'How long have you lived
> >> here?' I asked him. '11 years.'
> >>
> >> In some respects, the otherness has increased, since Welsh is more
> >prevalent
> >> than it has been for many years. If the spread of Welsh (encouraged by
> the
> >> media, the Welsh Assembly and legislation on bilingualism) seems
> >artificial,
> >> it's no more so than the revival of Scots which has been such a
fruitful
>
> >> influence in Scottish poetry. Anglo-Welsh, by the way, is not the
> >preferred
> >> term nowadays; it's been replaced by the rather more longwinded but
less
> >> loaded Welsh writing in English.
> >>
> >> Peter Finch may be only one guy, but he isn't the only one who would
take
> >> issue with your comments about contemporary Welsh poetry. For a good
> >> cross-section, may I refer list members to the Welsh poetry edition of
> the
> >> net magazine Slope at http://slope.org/slope/this.html ?
> >>
> >> Best wishes
> >>
> >> Matthew
> >
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