It's impossible to be the Darnielle completist I am. On top of the maybe 400 commercial objects ("8 to 20 On a Weapons Charge is a bonus track from ~1It's impossible to be the Darnielle completist I am. On top of the maybe 400 commercial objects ("8 to 20 On a Weapons Charge is a bonus track from ~1 copy of Taking the Dative"), there are: a complete but unreleased album, three dozen online-only ephemeral downloads, a hundred covers, a hundred live-only bootleg-only songs, a hundred more known "missing" songs, dozens of songs with no attestation but a title or a verse, and who knows how many more we couldn't snatch from him out of the air. Some of his best have been performed exactly once, and probably never again.
There's two good strong pages of JD here, plus his hand in picking and ordering some really ordinary student poetry. It's sort of nice that it's so ordinary; if the bar were higher it would leave people behind, and poetry is now the last place to leave anyone behind. (Except the reader.) It's sort of terrible that the ordinary student art in here will attend much greater success, commanding heights, just because it is in here.
Scott Annett's 'Cranes' is quite nice. Alexander Freer's 'Preliminary Communication' is an unsuccessful attempt at my favourite, difficult sort of poem, the bipartite-contrasted-abstract+concrete thingy, more than three words to a line. Felt nothing for the photos.
I was a student writer, in fact more of a student writer than a student. What makes student writing? Earnestness, of course, and the attendant humour gap. An excess of night, nakedness, ribs, blood, pain, the word "fucking" but not much fucking. Syntax shortage. Sensual tongue effects without sensible teeth. Formulas hidden behind frantic formal experiment and pique. Derivativeness as homage. Either sensitive outsiderdom or cartoonish total radicalism or both.
It's hard to imagine that student writers could get over themselves, could become less clumsy, could settle into themselves, could understand others, could try to actually affect the world. But apparently some do, like Darnielle....more
We spoke o girds, scuds, quines, bleedy doctors… I’m richt glad the auld words still come back like migrant swallas, black shears o the gloamin. Marx
We spoke o girds, scuds, quines, bleedy doctors… I’m richt glad the auld words still come back like migrant swallas, black shears o the gloamin. Marx we hadna heard o, only the Marx brithers. This was oor grunwork, the hard pan o oor lives. A sma bit street that hirpled doun a brae. Whitever roads I took since then I began wi workin fowk in granite tenements. Aa the lave was superstructure.
A sincere internationalist in an indecipherable local dialect, like many Scots poets. Allusions to Mallarmé and Valéry, Pushkin and Eurydice, in a voice they'd only stare at....more
Better for learning to read poetry than write it. I think I read this three times, obsessed as I was with an art that would let me talk, talk clearly Better for learning to read poetry than write it. I think I read this three times, obsessed as I was with an art that would let me talk, talk clearly and obscurely, give me weight or the semblance of weight....more
Far better than his far more famous novels. Bitter and randy but often sensational, bringing flowers
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guid
Far better than his far more famous novels. Bitter and randy but often sensational, bringing flowers
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness down the way Persephone goes, just now, in first-frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is married to dark and Persephone herself is but a voice, as a bride a gloom invisible enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms of Pluto as he ravishes her once again and pierces her once more with his passion of the utter dark among the splendour of black-blue torches, shedding fathomless darkness on the nuptials.
There's about 6 duds for every one of those - as always, a Collected is never judged by its hit rate but by its best. His philosophy is rank nonsense ("Sexless people transmit nothing."; "The machine shall be abolished from the earth again; / it is a mistake that mankind has made;") - as always, this has no bearing on the poems. What do I care that he is the most unsound voice in the great unsound choir of English literature?
The dirt-cheap holly-green Wordsworth paperbacks are where I got my first education. (I think this is what older generations got via Dover Thrifts or Pelicans.)...more
I don't want to hector Homer. But somehow this was both boring and evil, both childish and didactic. I won't belabour the book's immorality, since it I don't want to hector Homer. But somehow this was both boring and evil, both childish and didactic. I won't belabour the book's immorality, since it is so obvious; it's the near-total absence of artistic merit that is apparently not obvious. I found nothing in it worth reading or quoting until Book 9, nearly half way through. Songs of praise of warmongering pirates. (People love pirates, and I say let em. Just don't call them paragons.)
The ideology is dad porn, a set of thin, obvious, animal values. "Kings do whatever they want - death for messing with a noble; don't cross the priests; offer huge sacrifices; always do what your husband and dad say; the unlucky and the disabled are cursed and to be shunned; blood is blood is blood."
The ghost of Agamemnon answered, “Lucky you, cunning Odysseus: you got yourself a wife of virtue—great Penelope. How principled she was, that she remembered her husband all those years! Her fame will live forever, and the deathless gods will make a poem to delight all those on earth about intelligent Penelope.
(Odysseus sleeps with half a dozen other women and demigods, most of them begging him to, and needless to say suffers nothing of it.)
There's no mention of the suffering of the several cities he sacks, or the many tacitly raped women. Dozens of people are murdered for being rude, though. For a quasi-sacred text there's a surprising amount of unpunished priest killing (e.g. Leodes).
The structure is awful: we see almost nothing of Odysseus for the first quarter of the poem, instead following his son around as he listens to a series of boring old men. Most of Odysseus' feats are not shown, are instead related by him as unaffecting stories. (I suppose we could amuse ourselves by treating this as unreliable narration, but they certainly didn't.) And the poem doesn't end at its climax, instead meandering on through another few books of pointless back-patting.
(Should I go easy? After all, this is groundbreaking work, the prototype of art. Sure; I'll go easy if you stop hyping it and making everyone read it as an exemplar.) (It's not that they could easily have been otherwise. Too poor, too lawless, too near to nature.)
It must be a cliche among classicists that the 'Classical' civilisations were not classical in the sense of being austere, logical, tasteful, or contemplative. That they were not Apollonian, that only a handful of people in them were. I hope my rant here is not just me being misled by the modern sense of "hero" - but the fact is that Odysseus wins, is praised endlessly, and his rights trump all else.
This isn't just me being clueless, post-oral, and close-minded: The ancients were well aware that the ending is unsatisfying crap. One popular headcanon was that, after Odysseus slays the suitors, he is immediately exiled from Ithaca, set adrift again. Cue the music!
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One reading of Odysseus' name is as variant of the verb 'to be hated'. So a calque might be "King Punchable of Ithaca". ("the most unhappy man alive")
Odysseus is treated incredibly well by almost everyone, despite his crimes. Complete strangers oil him up and dress him in fine "woolen cloak and tunic" eleven times, and he is given precious weaponry and potions for nothing several times. This is supposed to reflect on him, but instead it shows the Greek ideal of hospitality, one of the few nice things in that culture.
He appears to sincerely miss Ithaca (his status more than his wife), weeping frequently. But he also fucks about all the time, for instance staying an entire year voluntarily enjoying Circe.
It is completely unclear what O does to deserve his fortune. (Whereas his misfortune is always directly linked to his own machismo or idiocy.) The only virtues we see him exercise directly (not counting brute aggression and discus throwing) are courage and cunning (specifically lying). Ok, he also makes one good speech:
'Listen to me, my friends, despite your grief. We do not know where darkness lives, nor dawn, nor where the sun that shines upon the world goes underneath the earth, nor where it rises. We need a way to fix our current plight, but I do not know how...
I suppose we can put the rest down to charisma, the oddest and least rational of human powers.
'It seems that everybody loves this man, and honors him, in every place we sail to.'
Everyone extols him without him ever demonstrating the virtues they extol. (Politeness, propriety, wisdom, strategy...) Every other idiot is "godlike" at something or other, and seeing the state of their gods you see how this could be true. At least it's funny:
He went out of his bedroom like a god
King Menelaus, you are right... Your voice is like a god's to us.
Majestic, holy King Alcinous leapt out of bed, as did Odysseus the city-sacker. Then the blessed king, mighty Alcinous, led out his guest...
(The gods are stupid mirrors of Greek nobility; for instance they have supernatural slaves, the nymphs.) This at least is a philosophical difference between them and I: in their superstitious idealist mode, properties aren't for describing the present, but instead the timeless essence of a thing:
Ships are "black", "hollow", "swift" or "curved", never "brown", "slow" or "wobbly"... Penelope is "prudent Penelope", never "swift-footed Penelope", even if she is moving quickly. Telemachus is thoughtful, even when he seems particularly immature.
All the feats of the heroes are totally dependent on the power of gods. If they say you can't sail, you can't.
His skin would have been ripped away, and his bones smashed had not Athena given him a thought.
Athena poured unearthly charm upon his head and shoulders, and she made him taller and sturdier, so these Phaecians would welcome and respect him.
Without Hermes or Athena constantly intervening, O would be nowhere, achieve nothing. One nice tension here though:
But death is universal. Even gods cannot protect the people that they love, when fate and cruel death catch up with them.
One of the few times I felt sympathy for Odysseus was when he was trying to lead his men, who are mainly large-adult-sons. (Same with the suitors.) One breaks his neck falling down a ladder. They undo a month of work by playing with the bag of winds. Several times they are totally paralysed by their wailing and tantrums.
As when a herd of cows is coming back from pasture into the yard; and all the little heifers jump from their pens to skip and run towards their mothers, and they cluster round them, mooing; just so my men, as soon they saw me, began to weep...
The other men... wept for those that died. I ordered them to stop their crying, scowling hard at each.
Odysseus occasionally draws his sword on them for backtalking him, or running around like Muppets. Their deaths are roughly equally due to Odysseus' aggression and avarice, and their own foolishness.
I cheered the uprising against him, who are completely in the right. But of course they lose, because of mere divine intervention.
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OK I lied: I will talk about evil. Though by the end of this I was jaded and dismissive, the aftermath of Odysseus slaughtering the suitors still struck me as an atrocity unusual for the genre:
"When the whole house is set in proper order, restore my halls to health: take out the [slave] girls between the courtyard wall and the rotunda. Hack at them with long swords, eradicate all life from them. They will forget the things the suitors made them do with them in secret, through Aphrodite..."
"I refuse to grant these girls a clean death, since they poured down shame on me and Mother, when they lay beside the suitors."
At that, he would a piece of sailor's rope round the rotunda... just so the girls, their heads all in a row, were strung up with the noose around their necks to make their death an agony. They gasped, feet twitching for a while, but not for long.
I've read de Sade, Kaczynski, Himmler, Houellebecq, Egan and Watts at their most dyspeptic; it's not that I'm squeamish about real or fictional evil, or that my sulking sense of justice blinds me to aesthetics. This sort of thing happened; nothing cannot be said; maybe even nothing cannot be said beautifully. It's just that, again, there is nearly no nobility and no classicism in this. I am so glad this culture is gone.
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Did its audience know the story was bullshit? Or was it scripture to them? (Like most scripture, it is pathetically ignoble, violent, and self-serving.) Well, they don't seem to have had scripture, not even Hesiod. So Homer is more like Dante or Milton for them: not sacred, but pious and moralising.
How big was mighty Troy? How noble was godlike Odysseus? How petty their pantheon? How long this epic?
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* Even thought-provoking bits like the lotus eaters or Cyclopean anarchism are over in less than half a page.
* Surprised when Zeus was described as "husband of Hera".
* The "no man" pun thing was so stupid I had to put the book down for a couple of days.
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Normally I would stop reading a book this bad, but I read it to prepare for Ulysses, so I dragged myself through.
Wilson's introduction takes up a quarter of the entire book. It's good and sane but repetitive, taking pains to spell out all the ignoble and questionable, all the ugly and clumsy parts. I don't know how she keeps up her enthusiasm for the book, in the face of them, but more power to her.
Plus two points for Wilson's intro and demystified translation....more
Poems from people not known as poets, yielding a equal mix of dedicatories, doggerel, and diamond. Their styles are mostly preserved, epitomised: the Poems from people not known as poets, yielding a equal mix of dedicatories, doggerel, and diamond. Their styles are mostly preserved, epitomised: the big grim novelists (Lessing, Coetzee, Fowles, Murdoch, Golding) write enormous grit-tooth verse;
Heads bowed down or thrown Backward open-eyed Here and there are dark With terrible deaf pictures. Sounds rise up and vanish Into a pitted dome. It continues to rain. The acoustics being imperfect some people fidget.
Something which is pure is come To a high magnetic field. Cry out as it passes on When shall we be healed?
Raymond Briggs, a quiet, brutal elegy; David Lodge, some good meta jokes; animal bits from Jan Morris and Stella Gibbons; Wodehouse, two wonderful gossipy hyperboles. Adams manages to pick out the only Naomi Mitchison poems I don’t like. A lot of unbridled sentiment, e.g. Arnold Wesker depressing his children, Francis King's lies spiralling down, Enoch Powell lying awake listening to his wife's asthma; the writers aren't expecting the irony-making pressures of publication, or the obsessive polishing of any work that will be identified with them. So it's free indeed. Until Adams. ...more
800 heroic couplets written off the cuff for a friend. Pompous, showy, and forced: I love his idiocies, I love his verse footnotes, which are as long 800 heroic couplets written off the cuff for a friend. Pompous, showy, and forced: I love his idiocies, I love his verse footnotes, which are as long as the original poem again and arraying all his beetling, piecemeal research into his age at least: cell biology, crank psychoanalysis, early sociology, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, all the arts and sciences nominally in his pocket. Anyway half of the idiocy is forced on him by the genre, epic verse, which always sounds damn silly to me (not that I mind silliness in my high art, but I do mind people being silly and not admitting it):
Tonight a scrambling decade ends, And strangers, enemies and friends Stand once more puzzled underneath The signpost on the barren heath Where the rough mountain track divides...
A weary Asia out of sight Is tugging gently at the night, Uncovering a restless race; Clocks shoo the childhood from its face, And accurate machines begin To concentrate its adults in A narrow day to exercise Their gifts in some cramped enterprise. How few pretend to like it: O, Three quarters of these people know Instinctively what ought to be The nature of society And how they'd live there if they could. If it were easy to be good, And cheap, and plain as evil, how We all would be its members now...
How grandly would our virtues bloom In a more conscionable dust Where Freedom dwells because it must, Necessity because it can, And men confederate in Man.
But wishes are not horses, this Annus is not mirabilis; Day breaks upon the world we know Of war and wastefulness and woe...
The New Year brings an earth afraid, Democracy a ready-made And noisy tradesman's slogan, and The poor betrayed into the hand
Of lackeys with ideas, and truth Whipped by their elders out of youth, The peaceful fainting in their tracks With martyrs' tombstones on their backs, And culture on all fours to greet A butch and criminal elite, While in the vale of silly sheep Rheumatic old patricians weep...
One critic, screwing up all his strength, called Auden's bad style, which NYL is supposed to be an instance of, "snide bright jargon", which is a perfect compliment! (if you don't view limpid repetition of what every other sensitive outsider has said before you as poetry's point.) I've not read it alone on New Year's Eve like you ought to, but I will. ...more
Amusing mnemonics and proverbs, mostly from ancients and Victorians. Includes a canto explaining exactly how James Watt’s steam engine was different a Amusing mnemonics and proverbs, mostly from ancients and Victorians. Includes a canto explaining exactly how James Watt’s steam engine was different and several songs to remember the list of English monarchs and US presidencies, etc. ...more
Gaudy and hectic word-associations, with only tenuous formal or thematic links to the actual Rubáiyát, presenting itself as a translation but fizzing Gaudy and hectic word-associations, with only tenuous formal or thematic links to the actual Rubáiyát, presenting itself as a translation but fizzing with verve of its own. A nerd culture devotional.
(Vine was a video fragment website; Wine is an excellent Windows emulator.)
Teeming with clumsy nerdy ephemera, but I think it will be worth reading in 10 years. Let's see. Works much better aloud.
Wonderful: sincere, grotesque, solemnand shrugging; both elemental and goofy. Rhymes are delivered straight. Going by the ambient temperature and theWonderful: sincere, grotesque, solemnand shrugging; both elemental and goofy. Rhymes are delivered straight. Going by the ambient temperature and the coverage of light, Paterson lives very near to outer space.
so for all that we are one machine ploughing through the sea and gale I know your impulse and design no better than the keel the sail
A unique, dry view of family life here; sneaking downstairs so as not to disturb them with your inexplicable angst. There's even a painfully goofy evocation of the mating call of the Wire magazine reader:
Though I should confess that at times I find your habit of maxxing the range with those bat-scaring frequencies ring-modulated sine-bursts and the more distressing psychoacoustic properties of phase inversion in the sub-bass frequencies somewhat taxing you are nonetheless beautiful as the mighty Boards themselves in your shameless organicising of the code.
Which is best read as a scherzo. Half of it's written for a dead friend or in homage to lesser-known world poets; I rarely get poems like that. I don't know why I'm cavilling; this is the best collection I've read since... the last Don Paterson. Sentimental by his standards but bruising by poetry in general's. Teetering upright....more
Hooray for the only poems I can read in French!* Nursery rhymes, but with razorwire not far beneath. The simplicity (loads of basic nouns repeated dozHooray for the only poems I can read in French!* Nursery rhymes, but with razorwire not far beneath. The simplicity (loads of basic nouns repeated dozens of times – “oiseaux” and “roi”, “oiseaux” and “roi”) makes me look look nervily over my shoulder – for the real attacker.
Flickers between the Classical general and the wattle-byre specific. All really personal – but not in the universally interesting melodramatic way. ItFlickers between the Classical general and the wattle-byre specific. All really personal – but not in the universally interesting melodramatic way. It is personal in the way that hanging around the vestibule of a friend of a friend of a friend’s house when one didn’t know they were dropping past and one quite needs the toilet is personal. Also, it’s full up with the (apparently haute Irish?) obsession with Attic Greece. One or two amazing ones – see “Amelia’s Poem” :
Amelia, your newborn name Combines with the midwife’s word And, like smoke from driftwood fires Wafts over the lochside road Past the wattle byre – hay bales For ponies, Silver and Whisper – Between drystone walls’ river- Rounded moss-clad ferny stones, Through the fenceless gate and gorse To the flat erratic boulder Where otters and your mother rest, Spraints black as your meconium, Fish bones, fish scales, shitty sequins Reflecting what light remains.
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