TonyH, some reading notes 2015

Isn't it funny, this feeling inside -- no, sorry, not like that, but it is, what I want to say having read something. I'll think of a better intro to the thread in the next few days. Happy New Year.

To have another go - I'm going to try to keep track of my reactions to the books I read this year here and also perhaps to a few films, maybe other things occasionally. As I said elsewhere I find this really helpful and enjoy your responses. I also aim to be brief and unconvoluted. I'm writing after two weeks of holiday, I'll avoid writing when I am very busy I hope, unless I am ready, and hopefully not hurriedly.

My 2014 thread is here

I just totted up some numbers for that last thread's reading and it may inform some of my reading goals. Yes I have to address the TBR pile, but what bothers me more at the mo are the number of books I have unfinished that I do want to finish. I'm going to put a wall of unfinished covers in one of the messages below to motivate me, hopefully I can demolish a few of those bricks.

As I also said elsewhere I'm not good with reading goals and plans, too temporary like Achilles it seems in my reading - but do want to focus better within that. Yes, we know I'll be reading poetry, related stuff, philosophy, novels, whatever comes up. I'd like to read a better balance of male and female authors, maybe some that are somewhere else on that spectrum (last year I managed about 25% female authors, so I want to aim to double that). I'd also like to read voices that I am missing generally, whether by time period or location or gender or sexuality or religion. I posted a bit at the end of last year's thread about my interest at the moment in peace and thought it might be good to read Mandela, Gandhi and/or Tolstoy on their lives - I'm open to suggestions on that subject. I also want to kick start my counselling reading.

Of course I'll do well to even make a start on achieving all this (I'm sure there were other goals) and I am sure to be deflected in my meanderings. Above all to be creative and playful, serious at times, but also able to unstick any stuckness. To do this I'm going to set myself a specific focus at times, one book at a time, but it works best for me if I don't share these until they are complete...and they need to come out of what most interests and excites me, not a sense of should.

Completed books: - now with titles linked to my comment on thread, not the book.

* Fire Songs by David Harsent (19-21/1/15), Kindle ed.
* The Cloud Corporation by Timothy Donnelly (?/2014 - 4/2/15) Kindle & paperback editions for no good reason and from the wogp.
* Shibboleth by Michael Donaghy (Kindle ed. in his Collected Poems) 15-18/2/15 No comments yet
* Errata by Michael Donaghy (kindle ed. in his Collected Poems) ?/2/15 - 24/2/15 No comments yet
* The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (Kindle ed) 9/2/15 - 25/2/15
* Moontide by Niall Campbell 20-22/3/15
* Stay, Illusion by Lucie Brock-Broido 27/3/15(?)-29/3/15
* Stone Milk by Anne Stevenson - 10/4/15
* The Chymical Wedding by Lindsay Clarke(Kindle ed.) ?/3/15-18/4/15
* Four of Us: Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva translated by Andrey Kneller (Kindle ed.) ? - 25/4/15
* Letters on England by Voltaire (iBook ed.) - 26/4/15
* The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers (Kindle ed.) ?/4/15-11/5/15
* Wittgenstein and Psychoanalysis by John Heaton (13/5/15-17/5/15) re-read
* Black Rainbow: How words healed me; my journey through depression by Rachel Kelly (?/4/15 - 18/5/15) (Kindle ed.)
* Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot (4-8/6/15)
* The Perfect Stranger by P. J. Kavanagh (?-28/6/15) (Kindle ed.)
* The Forest of Hours by Kerstin Ekman (late June/early July - 22/8/15)
* Lao Tzu's Taoteching by Lao Tzu translated by Red Pine (Kindle ed.)
* Protagoras by Plato translated by Benjamin Jowett
* What is Art? by L. Tolstoy translated by Aylmer Maude (kindle ed.)
* Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare Arden 3rd edition. Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones (December '14-26/9/15)
* Mrs Shakespeare The Complete Works by Robert Nye
* Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel (Kindle Ed.) (5-6/10/15)
* 40 Sonnets by Don Paterson (6-7/10/15) (kindle ed.) no comments yet
* The Bonniest Companie by Kathleen Jamie (?/10/15-17/10/15) (Kindle ed.) no comments yet
* The Iron Man by Ted Hughes (19/10/15)
* Sentenced to Life by Clive James (8-15/12/15) (Kindle ed.) no comments yet



Short Stories, Plays:

- Funes the Memorious, Jorge Luis Borges (2/1/15) Comments
- God sees the truth but waits, L. Tolstoy
- the essay 'against interpretation' by Susan Sontag (October)


Poems

~ Elvis Presley's Half Hour, Fabian Casas (3/1/15)
~ Sonnets 71-90, William Shakespeare (4/1/15)
~ Sonnets 81-100, William Shakespeare (5/1/15)
~ Sonnets 91-100, William Shakespeare (7/1/15)
~ Sonnets 101 - 110 WS (9/1/15)
~ Sonnets 110 - 120 WS (12/1/15)
~ Sonnets 110 - 126 WS (14/1/15)
~ Sonnets 120 - 127 WS (18/1/15)
~ Sonnets 127 - 154 WS (19/1/15)
~ David Harsent, Tinnitus (Guardian Saturday poem) (19/1/15)
~ Hagia Sophia, Osip Mandelstam trans. Philip Nikolayev
~ W. H. Auden's introduction to a Picador edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, reread sometime in late January, after reading 127-154.
~ some poems by George Barker incl. 'who will speak . . . ' and 'Summer Song' (16/3/15)
~ Wanderer's night song, and another, Goethe (6/4/15)
~ Boris Pasternak, 'February' (15/4/15) and '*** There'll be no one' (18/4/15)
~ the poems from 'The Ilex Tree' in New Collected Poems by Les Murray (5-8/6/15)
~ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot reread 13/6/15
~ Introduction to The Confessions of St. Augustine, Henry Chadwick (30/6/15)
~ Silvina Ocampo - Song, with translators intro
~ Sonnets 123-154, WS (13/9/15)
~ A Lover's Complaint, WS (13/9/15)
~ The Ballad of the Shrieking Man, James Fenton (19/9/15)
~ A Lover's Complaint, WS (22/9/15)
~ completed Martin Seymour-Smith's introduction to Shakespeare's Sonnets

Films, Theatre, Telly, Music:

* 3-Iron, d. KIM Ki-duk (South Korea) (2/1/15) Comments
* La Strada d. Federico Fellini (3/1/15)
* He Who Gets Slapped d. Victor Sjostrom (11/1/15) (complete with live band providing soundtrack, cinema) Comments
* TV - Black, White & Blues - 70's documentary on Blues and its influence on British blues bands in the 60's and 70's, featuring interviews with Champion Jack Dupree and Alexis Korner (12/1/15)
* Alphaville, d. Jean-Luc Godard (12/1/15) Comments
* Ministry of Fear, d. Fritz Lang (16/1/15) cinema Comments
* Les Amants du Pont-neuf d. Leos Carax (17/1/15)
* Airplane II: the sequel (18/1/15)
* tried to watch I'm Still Here but its tone put me right off and gave up (18/1/15)
* Headhunters d. M. Tyldum (22/1/15)
* North by Northwest d. Alfred Hitchcock (30/1/15) cinema
* Inherent Vice d. Paul Thomas Anderson (31/1/15) cinema Comments
* Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) d. F. W. Murnau (1/2/15) cinema (with fab non professional live music/sound) Comments
* Elementary Particles d. Oskar Roehler (5/2/15)
* The Manchurian Candidate d. John Frankenheimer (6/2/15) cinema
* Flesh and the Devil d. Clarence Brown (8/2/15) cinema and live music
* Serpico d. Sidney Lumet (13/2/15) cinema
* Engrenages 5 (Spiral s5) tv
* The Conversation d. Francis Ford Coppola (27/2/15) cinema
* The Victors d. Carl Foreman
* Sunrise: a song of two humans d. F. W. Murnau (1/3/15) cinema
* Earth d. Alexander Dovzhenko (8/3/15) cinema
* All the President's Men d. Alan J. Pakula (13/3/15) cinema
* The Wind d. Victor Sjostrom (as Seastrom) (15/3/15) cinema
* Three Days of the Condor d. Sidney Pollack (20/3/15) cinema
* Le Beau Mariage d. Eric Rohmer (22/3/15)
* Capricorn One d. Peter Hyams (27/3/15) cinema
* Pauline a la Plage d. Eric Rohmer (29/3/15)
* Hiroshima, mon amour d. Alain Resnais (3/4/15)
* Transgender Kids (Louis Theroux) telly (5/4/15)
* Les nuits de la pleine lune (Full moon in Paris) d. Eric Rohmer (5/4/15)
* Eccentricities of a blonde-haired girl d. Manoel de Oliveira (6/4/15)
* A zed and two noughts d. Peter Greenaway (8/4/15)
* Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray aka Summer) d. Eric Rohmer (13/4/15)
* L'Ami de mon Amie (My girlfriend's boyfriend aka Boyfriends and Girlfriends) d. Eric Rohmer (19/4/15)
* Bright Young Things d. Stephen Fry (25/4/15)
* Hangmen also Die! d. Fritz Lang, w. Bert Brecht (25/4/15)
* Bonnie and Clyde d. A. Penn (1/5/15) cinema
* The Marquise of O d. Eric Rohmer (2/5/15)
* Goodbye to Language d. Jean-Luc Godard (3/5/15)
* The Graduate d. Mike NIcholls (8/5/15) cinema
* Meteora d. Spiros Stathoulopoulos (9/5/15)
* 8 1/2 d. Federico Fellini (10/5/15) cinema
* The Way d. Emilio Estevez (9-10/5/15)
* Midnight Cowboy d. John Schlesinger (14/5/15) cinema
* Two-Lane Blacktop d. Monty Hellman (22/5/15) cinema
* The girl at the Monceau bakery d. Eric Rohmer
* True Detective s.1 tv
* Suzanne's Career d. Eric Rohmer
* The Game s1 tv
* mccabe & mrs miller d. Robert Altman (5/6/15) cinema
* Tropic Thunder d. Ben Stiller
* The French Connection d. William Friedkin (12/6/15) cinema
* The Company Men d. John Wells
* Lolita d. Adrian Lyne
* The Last Picture Show d. Michael Bogdanovich (19/6/15) cinema
* Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter d. Timur Bekmambetov (25/6/15) (rilly)
* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell tv
* The Last Detail d. Hal Ashby (3/7/15) cinema
* Five Easy Pieces d. Bob Rafelson (4/7/15)
* Grey Gardens d. E. Hovde, A & D. Maysles & M. Meyer (4/7/15)
* La Collectionneuse d. Eric Rohmer (5/7/15)
* Dog Day Afternoon d. Sidney Lumet (10/7/15) cinema
* Ma Nuit Chez Maud d. Eric Rohmer (12/7/15)
* Station to Station d. Doug Aitken (17/7/15)
* The Angel's Share d. Ken Loach (24/7/15)
* Carry on Screaming (2/8/15) cinema
* An Evening with Fenella Fielding wonderful :)
* The Babadook d. Jennifer Kent (7/8/15)
* Meet the Fockers d. Jay Roach - saw this again somewhere in the last week or two, forget when, love it, fockerised.
* The Mirror d. A. Tarkovsky
* Zero dark thirty d. K. Bigelow
* Five Easy Pieces again d. Bob Rafelson
* Gone baby gone d. Ben Afleck
* A Scanner Darkly d. Richard Linklater
* The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel d. John Madden
* Being There d. Hal Ashby
* The Hunger Games d. Gary Ross
* We Bought a Zoo d. Cameron Crowe
* True Detective s.2 forgot to add this, in the liked it camp
* The Way Back again, d. Peter Weir
* The Bling Ring d. Sofia Coppola, appropriately half watched, "Your butt looks awesome"
* Ida d. Pawel Pawlikowski
* The Thin Red Line d. Terrence Malick Comments
* Winter's Bone d. Debra Granik
* Dancing at Lughnasa d. Pat O'Connor
* Boy Meets Girl bbc tv - I never thought such would be on tv
* Detectorists tv w/d Mackenzie Crook, wonderful
* Top of the Lake tv
* Paddington d. Paul King :) (meets Royal Tannenbaums at times, even Amelie, almost and lots of other bits)
* Destination Gobi d. Robert Wise
* The Imitation Game d. Morten Tyldum
* Alphaville d. Jean-Luc Godard
* Life of Pi d. Ang Lee
* A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night d. Ana Lily Amirpour
* Before Night Falls d. Julian Schnabel
* Made in U.S.A d. Jean-luc Godard
* '71 d. Yann Demange
* A Good Year d. Ridley Scott
* bande a part d. Jean-Luc Godard
* Detectorists s.2 w/d Mackenzie Crook - forgot to add this, how could I, just beautiful.
* Under the Skin d. Jonathan Glazer
* Casablanca d. Michael Curtiz
* A. I. Artificial Intelligence d. Steven Spielberg
* Bruce Springsteen: the Ties that Bind d. Thom Zimny - fascinating story of creativity behind The River, from the man.
* All Aboard! The Sleigh Ride no idea who directed it but beautiful :)
* Midnight in Paris d. Woody Allen
* Ma Nuit Chez Maud d. Eric Rohmer
* Tom and Viv d. Brian Gilbert
* Patience: After Sebald d. Grant Gee
* Un Chien Andalou d. Luis Bunuel
* Vertigo d. Alfred Hitchcock
* Leviathan d. A. Zvyagintsev

articles, essays

- BBC, Tolstoy's secrets to a happy life 1/1/15
- Oh, and drinks were free, Michael Caines TLS review/article on Dylan Thomas 3/1/15
- Pynchon's Blue Shadow, Geoffrey O' Brien (nyrb) 3/1/15
- Emily Brothers, Labour’s first transgender candidate: ‘I walked into the sea. Something brought me back’ (The Guardian) 4/1/15
- Wil Hutton - how a trip to the cinema reminded me of the English distaste for hatred (The Guardian/Observer)I hope he is correct, especially his conclusion 4/1/15
- The Ghost Writer - on Luck Brock-Broido's 'Stay, illusion'. The New Yorker. 10/1/15 & 14/2/15
- DAO article on Claire McGlaughlin's first collection Remembering Blue 11/1/15
- TS Eliot: the poet who conquered the world, 50 years on - Robert Crawford, The Guardian 11/1/15
- Articles on Fritz Lang and the film Ministry of Fear by Bosley Crowther, Glenn Kenny and Dan Shaw (12/1/15)
- Francine Prose, nyrblog, They're watching you read (14/1/15)
- Let the sonnets be unbroken, Harvard magazine review of Neil Rudenstine essays (14/1/15)
- Paul Celan Translating Others, World Literature today (19/1/15)
- David Harsent, Meet the author "If I can't hear the music . . . " (19/1/15)
- The Guardian, David Harsent, A Life in Writing (19/1/15)
- Oxfam article on their report on how in 2015 1% of the world population will own more than the other 99% put together (19/1/15)
- Sappho's new poems: the tangled tale of their discovery - LiveScience (23/1/15)
- Bob Dylan interview aarp (23/1/15)
- a new piano, the guardian (24/1/15)
- Three Presences; Yeats, Eliot, Pound by Dennis Donoghue, Hudson Review (24/1/15)
- NY Times - The Odd Couple - Pound and Yeats Together (24/1/15 & reread 3/2/15)
- more on that 1% and wealth, on the BBC
- Has the mystery of Shakespeare's sonnets been solved? The Guardian (31/1/15)

- Guardian Interview with Laura Marling (1/2/15) not sure what I make of it
- "What Might Have Been and What Has Been": How T. S. Eliot Looked at Lives by Lydall Gordon, Hudson Review (1/2/15)
- Articles on The Manchurian Candidate (first film version) by Bosley Crowther at the time and two by Roger Ebert in 1988 and again in 2003.
- 'A Gift from Poetry: the First Folio and Jesuit drama in Saint-Omer' by Jan Graffius, TLS. (7/2/15)
- LA review of books - Hollywood Bigfoot: Terrence Malick and the 20 year hiatus that wasn't (8/2/15)
- The Playlist - the lost projects and unproduced screenplays of terrence malick
- Variety - review of Knight of Cups d. Terence Malick (9/2/15)
- Roger Ebert review of The New World
- Reviews of the film Serpico by Vincent Canby (1973), Sean Axmaker (date?) and Pablo Villaca (2011 on Roger Ebert.co,)
- Osip Mandelshtam: On the Interlocutor - Battersea review translated Philip Nikolyaev 9/2/15
- Bob Dylan take son critics in acceptance speech - BBC (9/2/15)
- Howard Jacobsen, The Independent - You heard it here first, reader: sex is dead
- LA times - Bob Dylan's musicare person of the year speech
- Poetry Foundation - Q&A Lucy Brock-Broido by Lucy Brock-Broido an interview of herself?
- andrew o'hagan 'I am in love with poetry'
- Guardian Obituary of Michael Donaghy by Sean O'Brien
- Guardian - My hero, Michael Donaghy by Maggie O'Farrell
- The Interior of a Heron’s Egg: Michael Donaghy, 1954–2004 By Joshua Mehigan
- The Singing Line: Michael Donaghy’s Collected Poems, Essays, Interviews, and Digressions by Michael Dirda
- Blake Morrison on Anthony Burgess' reviews and journalism in the guardian
- The Paris Review, the Vale of Soul making
- nyrb - review of Timbuktu d. A. Sissako
- Paris Review interview with Walker Percy
- Boston Review, "Poetry makes nothing happen": W. H. Auden's struggle with politics, Robert Huddleston

Nice articles etc. read in March & April
Articles etc. May
Interesting articles June, July, August
September, mediated

Books I've started that I really really would like to finish (not should) - a wall of gentle prompting:



Oh dear, that's pretty much a year's worth of reading for me, and i could go on and on...and only three women on there...so edited to take off very current projects and redress gender inequalities.

The Intro and the Outro - Bonzo Dog Doodah band

http://youtu.be/8DUEAG5eO6c

Thanks for that Barry, very nice :)

Very fun, Barry, and looking forward to your thread, Tony.

Hi Tony, expecting big things from this thread in 2015.

Hi Rebecca and Zeno, thanks and look forward to your threads too.

3-Iron - This was an excellent and beautiful film directed by Kim, Ki-duk (who also directed the wonderful Spring, summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring) of South Korea.

It has very little dialogue. It follows a young man that breaks into people's houses, but for shelter, he does not steal anything, he repairs things for them, does their washing. Then he encounters a young woman who is physically abused by her husband. We see how this develops. The silence and slowness of how we see them interrelate, wordlessly, is very tender and quite beautiful. Their inhabitance of other's homes may cause us to wonder at identity. Some terrible things seem to happen and they are separated and at this point things get less an less certain, just what has happened, who exists, we get some returns to the homes and lives of the people whose places they used, we follow the woman on her return to her husband, we follow the young man in some harsh times and his rebellion against brutal authority. More cause to make us question just what we have seen. And we come to a beautiful conclusion that questions what we have seen and also what we experience ourselves, I will not spoil that. It's a film I highly recommend. It also had a wonderful soundtrack.

A long term goal will be to watch more of his films, I've seen another referred to as a masterpiece coincidentally since posting here. (It's also not as sexual as the poster above suggests in a superficial interpretation.)

edit 10/4/15 - a caution, I have just missed seeing another of his films and understand now many are much more violent and some even accused of misogyny, so I will explore further cautiously.

I've added room to log short stories and drama, when it is not a whole volume and also somewhere to log articles and essays. I won't say much about them all, but I am curious to do this, and wonder why I haven't done it before, t could seem too micro? maybe it is as I started my threads on the fifty book challenge thread, where whole books were the thing (as I took it).

Funes the Memorious by J. L. Borges - someone suggested this elsewhere when a conversation touched themes that reminded them of it. It was a nice conversation, on recognising each day. This story was very short and wholly wonderful and remarkable - a person with a phenomenal memory that after an event becomes yet more so, such that all his experience is totally available to their memory. The story thinks about what this is like, what it means for the person (I loved the poetry of what helped him sleep, turning to face what he knows he has not seen and can only imagine as a black blank, the relief of this - what beauty I find in that short paragraph) and also what this condition means for knowledge and thinking.

I read it in the collection Labyrinths which is yet another book I have not completed. But I'm not adding it to the wall above. I have read very few of the stories in this collection but they are so rich, powerful, they stay with me long after. I find having read a little it is not easy to go on to another, it is a couple of years since I read one, and whilst there is much I love in them (so many of the tiny yet massive asides, for example some of the footnotes that resonate so much for me - like the idea that every person that reads a line of Shakespeare for a moment is Shakespeare or the idea of Shakespeare as everything and nothing - that Borges is part of my everyday landscape, and I quite like that there is much unknown, to be discovered); but I may also fear him, some of his ideas, his clarity, and I have to think about responses to these. Funes I found more gentle in some ways and it does make me wonder if I should try him more, and maybe if I have missed something where I have found such difficulty -- I suppose the two that stick out to me are The Garden of the Forking Paths and also Death and the Compass, which I seem to remember may both deal with fate and terrible fate, and yet in feeling their difficulty I may be buying into something that is missing, missing for the protagonists, and I need to distance myself and remember some other things, feel them, that are more than this. But still, I'll be sipping from this book cautiously and so slowly.

What I like about Borges (Calvino as well) is the ability to stretch your imagination into new ideas, new ways of thinking, alternative universes that are just close enough to our own to make us ponder on the possibility of their real existence.

I can see that Dennis. I suppose I am tending to come at it another way, finding resonances with this universe, my universe, elements of it that get bypassed usually are given space to breathe and develop, to be, little things I've kind of thought but not dwelt on are liberated and recognised - things I gave not recognised at all fished into form and held up. And this is why I am so troubled by some of this and need to step back, gain distance, and remind myself of what is lost from some of these universes, that I must recognise something else behind these universes.

I once learned of an idea of the Navajo, not just an idea, something they do in their art, in their rugs for example. There is a line from the centre of their rugs to the edge, in a way an imperfection (and I mean to learn more of other examples in art and crafts of deliberate imperfection), but this line for the Navajo is called a Spirit Line. It is there to ensure that the soul or spirit of the maker is not stuck in the creation, as I understand it. I just thought of this in relation to Borges -- and I am not saying he is or is not doing this, I need to think about it in relation to him, it is not a criticism of him -- but my experience of reading him has sometimes been one of getting a bit stuck in the creation, its a feeling I find unpleasant, unhealthy...and yes it may be my reading that is the fault....but thinking about it, in both The Garden of the Forking Paths and Death and the Compass people pursue a path that they cannot escape, that I find harsh and have to remind myself there is more...it may be as much about me as about him, and yes maybe in these examples i need to read it more as a skewed alternative reality. Maybe I over empathise with these protagonists, I just rebel a bit against the finitude presented (and I must now reread both of these I suppose to check these speculations on memory from over a decade in one case, are not themselves mistaken -- thread readers may have to put up with me going out onto limbs at times, but saying these things is helpful to me). Of course such a reaction may be exactly part of what Borges hoped to encourage, and to present their horror.

>10 tonikat: the idea that every person that reads a line of Shakespeare for a moment is Shakespeare

This captures something similar to how I feel when I read the ancients — there is a momentary connection one feels from one mind to another and across hundreds or even thousands of years. The miracle of reading.

Your comments regarding Iron intrigue me. I haven't been going to see films much in recent years and so this film and its director are unfamiliar to me, but you make it sound like something I would like to see.

Also your ruminations about Labyrinths and Borges, etc., have a strong resonation with me. That is a collection one can benefit from rereading from time to time.

I enjoy reading your running commentary. Keep it up!

Thanks Suzanne - Yes, I think a psychodynamic critic may argue that the subconscious of the author may communicate with the subconscious of the reader. But we are seeing something more and feeling it more directly perhaps. (edit 13/6/15 - this may interest you OUP blog - does a person's personality change if they speak another language

3-Iron is available on dvd, unless I say otherwise I'll be watching these films at home (though I fear it is not the same as the big screen).

I suddenly remembered (and am glad I was forgetting) but Eco's Jorge of Burgos used to loom over my thoughts of Borges, and of course he fought so hard against alternative and lighter interpretations. I can see I need to widen my own views of Borges.

you know it is possible to bore yourself with yourself

sure it is

ah well

oi

o

. . .

He Who Gets Slapped, d Victor Sjostrom (1924)

A silent film by the Swede Victor Sjostrom (credited as Seastrom) in his Hollywood days. Sjostrom is someone I know little of but wish to learn more of, though cautiously given the power of films such as this. He may be best known as the old professor in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. I don't remember the details of what Bergman said of him in the autobiography I read of him The Magic Lantern but I think I do remember he was important in Bergman's own development and he had a high opinion of him. Sjostrom directed in Sweden and then the USA and then later returning to Europe but also to the stage as an actor and was clearly influential. He got my attention further when I think I remember seeing a poll of Swedish film critics that rated Sjostrom more highly than Bergman as a director.

So, I was glad of a chance to see this. It's a silent and we saw it with a live band (Helictite) who did a great job, I was unsure of it at first and when I first forgot the sound was not on the film was conscious of it for a while, but they provided a thrilling soundtrack, quite loud at times but that made it all the more striking and sensational.

What a film this is - Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, Jack Gilbert - but the conception is so powerful, adapted from a play by Leonid Andreyev who I must learn more of, and have just now (my own ignorance), this film has such black humour / view of the world. It's really quite Russian in the best and also the most challenging senses, not something I associate much with cinema (my own fault possibly). The film opens with a great clown spinning a globe and this transforms into our hero spinning and earth globe. He's a scientist working on theories in the home of a friend, a Baron, with his wife. Well, he proves all he wants to scientifically but is robbed of this by the Baron in cahoots with the unfaithful wife - but he doesn't know this until the Baron presents the work as his own to he Academy and the scientist is humiliated before the massed ranks of old white men of power in the Academy. This is presented with great power -- it's like the film is operating on a deeper level, it really is like a dream, like a nightmare really, watching it I was thinking do I really want to watch this, should I. The scientist takes this and the loss of his wife by laughing -- and so we move on to what becomes of him, he becomes a clown who people laugh at for his being slapped (yes rather psychodynamically powerful). Slapped by a mass of clowns (creepy!) who to him represent the academy --- the scenes of him doing his act are really quite disturbing, in the way clowns can be and we have not just his disturbing/disturbed clown but a whole sea of them. And He, he's lost, quite lost, a wreck in a way. He sees a ray in a young woman that comes to work as a horseback rider and the film follows that storyline and how he tries to find some recompense (and also save her from the Baron who shows up again) -- but again quite horrific really how he does this, has the last laugh as the film suggests, but what sort of laugh? Really a very emotionally powerful film, such a black humour in the end I did kind of laugh (horribly), whilst being stunned really. It hits chords that seem rarely hit now, do I imagine it? I guess I don't watch much horror and it seemed closest to that, kind of gothic in some ways. His clown hair reminded me of the singer from The Prodigy's in the 'I'm a Firestarter' video. The film closes with a host of little clowns spinning the globe from a frame at it's equator tossing a body overboard, before getting back to business. Or actually it may really ask three questions at it's end, if I remember right - what is life? what is death? (if I remember correctly) and maybe most importantly, what is love? Which now seems a very apposite question to me of the film and its universe, possibly its point....a way out of the universe it presents to remember there may be something more not the complete reality this presents as a nightmare, if I don't remember that, get in touch with something real and good then it's very disturbing.

Francine Prose, nyrblog, They're watching you read

boo in many a way.

it occurred to me, on a tangent, that one day they may invent a way to monitor what we think about whilst we sit exams, just to make sure we have thought right...see comment on Alphaville below.

Alphaville d. Jean-Luc Godard

This was a joy of a film to watch, visually striking and witty. Great leading characters and actors. A wonderful film noir approach to science fiction. And of course from a poetic approach and very importantly, in these times, a film about love -- I love Lemmy Caution's line when interrogated by Alpha 60, that if it understood what he said it would think differently, as he does, like a linguistic love-pill to change things, we need more of that, and I can only agree it is true. I want to see it again now. I also want to read Paul Eluard and especially Capitale de la douleur, as I loved the extracts, but also to see if al the extracts really came from there.

>17 tonikat: Another reason not to get an e-reader, but apparently it doesn't matter whether I do or not for the potential impact on publishers.

Your recent movies are interesting, not least because I have read both Andreyev and Eluard in the last year.

I remember the clown film from some stills and gifs which have circulated on Twitter - really quite striking imagery.

Andreyev is a brilliant writer, Now that I have discovered him I aim to read more.

I came to Eluard out of a desire to broaden the number of Dada/Surrealist writers I have read. So I went out and bought books by Hugo Ball, Phillipe Soupault, Louis Aragon and PE.

In what context did that movie quote his work?

Interesting Zeno. I'd be interested to try Andreyev, i can see why Tolstoy may have criticised him though. The imagery in the film is very striking, it really was dreamlike, nightmare like, it had that tone, it had a tone of a version reality much deeper than that which I usually see but kind of feel is there too. But a version I must challenge.

Eluard was essential to the film - it makes a case poetically, in a way that shows does not tell for the poetic versus the prosaic, versus the logic of bureaucracy or of much of the modern day -- and Eluard's poetry is at the heart of that exploration, the shining example. Im poorly read of French poetry, always wish i could develop my French to read it without translation.

Well I think you've sold me on both of those films.

Seeing the Sjostrom/Andreyev was especially powerful due to the live music, the friend I saw it with described it as an overwhelming experience.

I highly recommend both - Alphaville now has a warm place in my heart.

I will make a note to catch Alphaville when it appears again on TV. Great poster >18 tonikat:

way back at >3 tonikat: I love the idea of your wall of gentle prompting, but suspect if I tried the same thing it would become an entire foundation. It is good to see them like that en masse though, as it offers the possibility of discovering what it is that is hindering progress. I shall have to think about that.

Enjoying the film reviews, but suspect they may never turn up on screens near me. I will check the Criterion catalogue.

I'm so glad I don't have an e-reader. The Good Soldier and Vanity Fair were fine in "real" books.

>24 baswood: thanks, yes it is a nice poster. Hope you enjoy :)

>25 SassyLassy: yes I had to stop myself with my wall, just thought it may be pretty too -- I don't usually think of myself as giving up on books, consciously, but it seems I am a major miscreant at it, I could feel bad. the article on ebook data made me think people may like me not have finished books but may do over a very long period and I wondered what that says about them, if anything, and if such extended reading is appreciated, instead of labelling things as unfinished.

I like my e-reader very much, have to be careful with credit card though.

Last night I saw Ministry of Fear, d. Fritz Lang.

I found it very enjoyable. Visually striking, of course with Lang. It has a reputation of not being one of his best, Greene didn't like it, Lang apparently once apologised to him for it. The script gets knocked too, written by the producer, I think harshly in some ways, it is clunky in some ways but maybe not entirely. (and could the clunkiness be deliberate, part of the nightmare/dream presentation of a possibly paranoid or unhinged few of the world?)

We follow a man released from an asylum who falls into a Nazi spy plot in wartime London. It doesn't overplay his struggle, but I'd like to watch it through again noting his reactions and choices throughout in light of possible paranoia or madness (whatever that is). He's played by Ray Milland who I enjoyed in this, very young, almost unrecognisable, I thought he looked very Jimmy Stewart (picture below for you to judge). It's really very human in it's presentation of him and also how he got into the situation of the asylum, really with a very challenging prior situation of moral ambiguity. We're thrown into a lot of ambiguity, who is a goodie, who a baddie and I liked how that could get mixed up and that's partly what I'd like to review in light of his wellness - he does some strange things, gets knocked out yet when he wakes runs to chase someone, towards bombing, takes a gun without thinking about it, does not report things that happen when he is innocent. In the end things are conventionally resolved, a bit of a disappointment maybe...and the ending may be false, the shot before the end is really possibly very sinister especially given the title of the film. Lang may have been somewhat confined by the script and Hollywood but he seems to sing in his chains, opening up much more in the exploration than a direct line through the apparent, asking questions, playing on emotions and possibility beyond the conventional. Some have revised their view of the film and rightly so -- I haven't seen enough of his other films to compare it, but I want to see this and more of his films now (Metropolis has never appealed, may be due to a Queen video in the 80's).

Oh and an honourable mention for Percy Waram I think who played a policeman who was very interesting, part of that sinister ending possibly, an ambiguity, darkness, about him that was highly realistic and also challenging and for a wartime film unusual maybe. He was great, I'd have thought also an actor made for Hitchcock, but no.

Oxfam article on their report on how in 2015 1% of the world population will own more than the other 99% put together

I calculated a little earlier that 1% of the worlds population is nearly 73 million people. That is larger than the projected UK population by 2020. And the definition of them in 2014 was to have an average of $2.7 million. This is mind boggling...and read the article on how last year ninety people had as much wealth as fifty per cent of the world population. This is staggering and dangerous for enlightenment and freedom, surely...no way to grow, not just economically, surely.

Back to books.

27 another interesting film to contemplate. I like the description of the ambiguous, dark character at the end.

Thinking back on Lon Chaney, his modern reputation along with Bela Lugosi seems to rest on being a horror film star, but he was in some quite challenging films, not least given his long standing association with Tod Browning.

28 I believe much of the present unrest in the world is down to such vast inequalities, even if it manifests by wearing other cloaks.

I haven't seen Lon Chaney much, just know his reputation is horror linked.

Yes about such inequality Dennis, may link to my interest in peace too.

These are mindblowing:

Andromeda, the largest picture ever taken watch the video!

More on Andromeda :O It's full of stars!

Then a shorter film on the largest galaxy in the known universe

I am reading, honest.

>31 tonikat: I am reading, honest.

LOL!

>31 tonikat: WOW!

>10 tonikat: Neil Rudenstine (he works on the ARTstor project and used to be President of HarvardU) recently wrote a book called 'Ideas of Order' in which he reads Shakespeare's sonnets as a continuous narrative instead of a group of disparate poems. I was thinking of this when I read your post, because I've never seen the sonnets that way myself
(Link to an NYT review of Rudenstine's book, in case you're interested. Borges indeed, is to be feared a little! http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/01/books/review/ideas-of-order-by-neil-l-rudensti...

>32 Poquette: but not as much as I would wish

>33 rebeccanyc: yes WOW, I love that

>34 reva8: Hi, welcome. Yes I have heard and read about Rudenstine and want to read his book. I hadn't realised I had written here about the sonnets yet. I have elsewhere and one thing i said is how in the past reading them one a day and not starting at the start and not completing I did not get much sense of process. However with my approach this time I do see order in their order, a journey through love as a process. I have read your link too already, thanks, I liked Maxwell's On Poetry but am disappointed by some of that review, but he can only say what he thinks. I havent claimed having completed the sonnets yet I have 127-154 to reread and also want to finish my Arden introduction chapter and read A Lover's Complaint. I have a pile of other introductions and commentaries to tackle - they have really fuelled me, and I surprised myself by writing some Shakepearean sonnets.

Boundaries to Borges and to his worlds must be recognised, for me anyway.

I've been looking forward to this, though I have the book I've not read it, but having read three other Pynchons I was very interested to see what a movie of a Pynchon book may look like. I'm not disappointed.

I've heard people dismiss the plot, say it is more about going with the flow and I do not dismiss that, but there is plot there. Only at one point did I wonder why he was doing what he did, but I wonder if that he did is not explained more subtly and more deeply by his character. And I like a kind of lack of clear linearity -- so much of this film is about inhabiting that place and time, or that place and time in the Pynchonverse that I like how they inhabit the plot, how it happens to them/him, a ball of string he/they are in.

But yes, the plot is not all it is about. A film about the end of the sixties, inhabiting what was created and facing where they are. A film in some ways about drugs. It occurred to me to think of Doc and Shasta's relationship as a drug, his need for it. Then it occurred to me to see the whole film as an elegy for the passing of the drug of the sixties, their hope, maybe a glimpse of a paradise, all things to each person and then a need for that drug, everything seen in light of its loss...attempts for that magic, a mourning of the loss of that magic.

Then that led me to think of the film in comparison to Shakespeare's Sonnets, perhaps a sequence of them, a phase in love. I'm not sure what that tells me, its not directly like ay of Shakespeares's phases. It does suggest to me how in this phase there is an ever greater sense of passivity in the process of love, just needing its fix, a loss of power in agency and a loss of flexibility in approaches to love. Shakespeare has this too, lost in love, but flexible in his thinking about it at least and recognising and working it through (or does he?). In the end maybe he recognises he's a prisoner of it. Inherent vice. And the film maybe suggests this not just of Doc but a generation maybe, or maybe I stretch it too far, but through it I see an elegy for that glimpse and golden time that passed, that's needed and facing up to what is, the product of each chasing their individual dream whilst each holding on to the dreams in the face of this.

There's a lot of wit in the film, at times I wondered if their wit becomes a parody of itself, takes itself too far, but that maybe is a symptom of their loss of flexibility yet push at their own boundaries. And also, at many points, I wondered how real what was happening was. I'd like to see it again.

It just occurred to me, an idea of some people having uncovered something in themselves or honest to some deep need, somehow more raw, more vulnerable to their inherent vice, hence the crew's comment to Shasta that doc puzzles over, she's more explosive as closer to it, with it more? It's inherent but some have exposed it more? That makes sense of a feeling I had at times of how the characters interrelate of them speaking from the depths of some hard bitten world view and a sense of those world views negotiating each other, I liked that sense.

The Cloud Corporation by Timothy Donnelly

Thought I had better post about an actual, like, book.

I discovered Donnelly's poetry last year, read his first collection twice (see last year's thread). It was a joy to read, as I said at the time in reading him his language demanded at times to be enjoyed on the tongue, aloud - not in naff oh poetry should be read aloud way, but in a fun I want to do this, need to do this way and could make me grin as i did it -- joy joy joy.

I'd got into that collection as I had heard how good this one was. So I moved onto this - and it is just as good, maybe better in fact. Poem after poem of brilliance, full of gems of lines, full of wit, always moving, yet on track even as it explores the rail-side. I've taken time to read it I read about half, then restarted a few months later and stopped again two thirds of the way through and only in this last week went back a bit to read myself back in and read to the end. I'm glad I did as it was a delight again, a ray of light in my working winter.

It's a big book for a poetry collection I think. There may be something about his poetry, having read quite a lot, that led me to need to digest it a bit. It is a poetry that follows thoughts and feelings, his own / that of the writing. Sometimes I have wondered if it is because it is so good at his process if that is a reason I have to stand back or away, as it is not my process. I also sadly have to spend a lot of time in a direct linear, rational, world whilst he sings of another poetic way of being, sings of slipping into it, and the challenges to that for himself -- but for me for whatever reason, sometimes it was rich enough I had to step away, or did not wish to be with this in this way. Maybe it just chimed with my frustration at not being in such a space enough -- and maybe sometimes it was just I was doing other things, it was not to hand.

So, he sings of a process of thoughts and feelings, of spending time with his process with these I think (and I must admit the earlier poems are a bit more distant from me now). He sings of how this process is challenged by the modern world that suggests other ways of being and he sings of how this process reacts to our world, his world. His poetry is very aware of what he is doing - as I said it follows his process with thoughts, ideas, feelings...they slip along...for me it had a curious effect, as like thought (my own) I found I could follow along yet have to go back continually as where I just was has slipped away (and it was so important! Wasn't it? (and beautifully put))....thought and feeling slip along and morph all the time here, yet he is true to his themes, as I say even whilst taking asides he has a greater purpose. In a way it occurred to me that he is weaving or stitching and yet as he does this the weaving or stitching is at the same time about unpicking his thoughts his feelings and the world, it is a very interesting effect and has interesting affect. His weaving and stitching is itself as I say in the form of often gem like insight and phrasing, beautiful, in a way it's a loose weaving, a sketching, I wondered if it reminded me of Picasso, yet although again those parts are sketches they are part of a fully coherent whole, even in its postmodernism something classical I wondered about. Fascinating.

It does follow process, of course I should not even say it is his process, it is process of the writing -- because it is not my own I did step away at times maybe, read too many too fast and i could feel a bit overwhelmed. Often I read and wondered if I felt envy (maybe, is that too strong - a 'oh i wish could get at things in this way, what a good idea', and aware how far I am from this sort of way of being and writing (though I guess he makes it clear he can feel a long way from it too)) envy at being in such a process, and yet not jealousy for what he has done, as it is his work and process, they are not my thoughts. Another curious affect. Yet saying that, is this so different, it is poetry, inhabiting and aware of a poetic view it's just quite aware of it own process of meandering and valuing of that. In that sense it may remind of Shakespeare's sonnets, in a different way, as for me Shakespeare was also very true to his processes of love, of his own processes, and so this too is to a sort of inner dwelling and sometimes reverie I suppose (sorry the Sonnets get everywhere at the moment). Thinking when proofing this post - this thing about the process of the poems, suddenly brought to mind a literal translation of that phrase in Ecclesiastes "vapour of vapours, all is vapour", he seems to be capturing the wafting of the vapour...and in a way that richness I speak of, need to step away, may be just as he seems to have captured it, set it, in the gentlest of ways...or maybe this is my own craziness...or maybe not that but just how it can be difficult, as he says himself I am sure, to slip between the different modes the world requires and hardly recognises reverie, which has no business plan. Yet it could be reveries best response to the business plans of our world.

I'm in my own circles now.

Poems full of wit and that demand to be read aloud, and read again and again and again. It's kind of indirectly direct, poems to swim in and swim with that are of the highest quality and relevance.

Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) d. F. W. Murnau

I think whilst I was enjoying writing earlier I may have got a bit prolix and dense so, to be brief.

I LOVED this. I think it's the first Murnau I have ever seen. I have meant to see him for a long time. I want to see all the films available (so sad some are lost). I loved this from the first shot -- we inhabited Berlin (I guess) of the time, lovely. So many interesting framings and camera shots, he even made someone following a superior along a corridor interesting in how he followed them. I understand the film was damaged, so occasionally in how the walls seem to throb I am not sure if that was deliberate or a trick, want to check that, but I liked that too in a way. Again with live music it was a great experience. We were warned it was long and an hour of it was miserable, but I was lost in it and shocked we reached the end. Yes to this and more please. Such a human film, understanding and not afraid to show how much humans don't do understanding. Tender and beautiful, interesting how it presented the ending, but I am not sure that was wholly happy, after all it was wholly dependent on money, so I thought there was some sad irony there. It may have seemed daunting, a silent film with no captions really, well it was not in the least. Serious fun.

Link to a poem by Timothy Donnelly from the cloud corporation

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241026

>39 baswood: Thanks Barry, if you go to the related info tab from there there are other poems from the collection available also.

Globus Hystericus is one I do not claim to have followed in quite all it's twists and turns, it is in that last group I read recently I want to reread it. Of those they have available I liked 'The Cloud Corporation' and especially 'The New Intelligence' very much. I'm glad I piqued your interest, fancy that though, trying to review poetry without any quotes.

Edit - I suppose I don't really try to write reviews here, just comments, like a shared journal. But it is also possible I dismissed sharing individual poems as I had a sense of tuning into his voice in these collections and that that may be hard to do with individual poems. I was also incorrect to use the word postmodern of his content, it is poetry, and that doesn't work that way.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

I loved this treasure of a novel. We follow Binx, war veteran, man between places social, physical, emotional, spiritual. We follow and in a way Percy's writing allows us to inhabit these places and people. We breathe with Binx, feel with him, think with him. I found it very engaging, soul stirring no less. How I understood when we learn how he could not sit in laboratories in mid summer. And then there is his search, whatever it is it seemed real to me, a need to find something else. And how acute is his honesty to himself to his emotional and spiritual awareness, something he can't share with others, mostly. But all written so lyrically, with knowledge, with wisdom and alive to self, to others and to the world...this it seems to me transcends any aim in his writing, it is just he writes so well. Binx and later Kate's journey really engaged my own feelings for such questions, need to search and to feel a point in being honest to self. It makes me want to complete my Kierkegaard readings begun already and more. Not to mention to read more Percy, all of Percy and about him.

The Moviegoer sounds interesting. Have not read any Percy as yet, although I have had one of his — Love in the Ruins — on my TBR for a long time.

Yes, I enjoyed it very much - I think Percy in a way aims not to have an aim, though I wonder if some sneak in a little...but then he surpasses them with the quality of his writing, vivid. I want to read all his books now. Someone also directed me to the Paris Review interview above, which in a way caused me to question my gushing feelings towards him whilst at the same time consolidated them, I am not sure why, yet, will have to reread it.

Edit - it may have been some of his answers, that he had his answers, which I am not against, but. For the most part they are not present in the same way in the book, although I wondered if the ending is a bit neat, need to dwell on that.

I read Fire Songs by David Harsent a few weeks ago now. I started to reread it but have not found the space to wholly do so. I did start writing a response that became long and meandering and opened up imponderables and gave it up before I disappeared even deeper into my own labyrinths. I'll touch on some of it here. Partly as I'm prompted to write today having read a TLS review of the book.

Fire Songs recently won the T. S. Eliot prize - the review in the TLS seems calculated to deflate, it concludes "Unfortunately, once we have seen past the smoke and mirrors, it becomes apparent that the collection is too often satisfied with unsettling the reader in the most obvious of ways.". This may resonate with some of my own reaction, but I'd never have put it that way and it's view seems to miss something about what poetry is.

Just last week I think I read another TLS review of John Burnside and that seemed to question his lack of rigour philosophically and it made me want to say a 'poet is a person not a philosophy' -- yes there are some poets apparently coherent, but being human as individuals and as a whole in history is a mass of contradiction and diversity, and that has poetry too and also understandings worked to, not complete. I like the TLS, but sometimes I wonder. No doubt they would have a very good riposte. I do need to read them, and a lot more, more, maybe it is my own lack but I think poetry can be valid in showing our mixed processes misunderstandings and personal dead-end headed struggles and not just our right answers, but this is obvious, they must know this? Yet they seem to criticise poets working this through? Can I be wrong? Maybe I should write to them, though I'd fear a certain type of slap down for, of course, my own lack of understanding and education of a sort. But such working through seems key to me, at least for certain sorts of poet/poetry. But who am I in my own mixed-upness.



Fire Songs by David Harsent

I read an interview with Mr. Harsent in which he jokes about how black is seriously his thing, yes I can see that. You may read the title as a friend of mine did and think somehow it may be about songs around a campfire perhaps? But no.

The opening poem 'Fire: a song for Mistress Askew' shows us scenes imagined by the poet of the torture and murder by fire of Anne Askew. She was a lady of the sixteenth century, burned for her beliefs. Under torture she said nothing. Horrific. A horror that may also seem contemporary, sadly. We hear also how this troubles the poet, his horror at the horror, yet he stares at it, shows us his imagining's work on it. The TLS criticises him for being "muddled" in this - "would a "smoking cinder", "black to the bone", still have burning hair and puckering skin?" -- again he's not making their sort of sense (ahh I see now I think this review is by Rory Waterman, maybe I am wrong to attribute it just to them, I thought it anonymous - it is helpful to know it is a different reviewer to that of Burnside). But I see this as a nightmare, a dream, it doesn't make sense, things can happen in any order, it focusses on what horrifies us, replays it if it is gone, brings it back, a vision. He may be torturing himself with it. And the memory works in strange ways about traumatic things.

Now, I can see that this s not to everyone's taste, how this is done, and that does start to touch my own feelings about this aspect of the book. We stare in horror and yet fascination with the poet at this, these, black vision/s. It has an air of the grotesque and also seems to point us to their reality. That may be a view of the world. It may be wrong to ever neglect such a possibility as that may be when it strikes. Yet we must see other views and make them true, for as many of us all as we can.

In reading these poems I was struck at a difference in them to something I found in some prose I read a few years ago - Blood Meridian by Cormac Mcarthy. This was also a book full of horror - yet it looks at it differently, it is not fascinated as Mr. Harsent's poem is with spittle boiling in the death by fire. It steps beyond that into a matter of factness. Mr. Harsent presents us with what we may dwell on as horror. I think the cure for being stuck in that is to be more matter of fact and to remember that what we see may not be experienced in this way by those living, dying, through it. It's tempting to say that may have little glamour, but glamour may be the wrong word, as this is a fascination with horror not something brighter or disguising death. It might also be about sentiment I guess and I remember noting another flash of sentiment, in the poem'Bowland Beth', about one of our last Hen Harriers. One verse goes:

" . . .

That her low drift over heather quartering home ground
might bring anyone to tears."

Yes, I see this, it might. But it might not. I can think of many people I know or have known or have read about that it would not. But it might if we look at it a certain way, if we looked at it as he suggests for example, and yes maybe in the context of the poem. It's not even something I'd want to wholly distance myself from. I'd be interested in more of this side of life from him. It brings us an engagement with what he presents, I like that and this one, here, less about the horror, though the poem is an elegy in a way, about, yes, horror.

There seems great honesty in his writing, to share these things. I liked many more of the poems -- those about rats and Tinnitus, some that may be hard on fools yet more than hard, recognising. But I'd have struggled more with much of the subject matter and how it is presented if it wasn't for these thoughts on matter of factness and finding ways to defuse horror. I wonder at his own take on this, it does seem he wrestles with that - and it seems to me that it is this wrestling and "smoke and mirrors" as the TLS says, that exposes something perhaps - yet I do not know -- I wonder what he'd say.

But poets do this, they don't have all the answers, and by struggling and seeing their vision of things they bring us to our own views and memories. By being brave enough to share that -- and there are many lines and poems of beauty on this collection, he's a poet, showing a vision, it doesn't have to be unassailable.

I guess many in these days are struggling with such horror. He made me think it through again, what if someone did that, thought it through, when lost in horror and drifting towards action. What if someone did that that was tortured by the horror, struggling? Although in the end he concludes with pain and offers more horror as reality, unfortunately true for some, unless they are in the matter of fact as they experience the horror we'd see - but in showing such horror he begs the question of how to reject it and defend against it. I'm repeating myself. It is poetry, I don't agree with it all, but it's also powerful and what poets do, no one is wholly right. I'd suggest work to ensure he is not is of value, both in preventing horror and meeting its visitations imaginary, sometimes real, we may all hope not to know.

Edit - i just found this, though it has some disquieting info about the T. S. Eliot prize - I've not read the review, but add it here as it seems to have a link to Mr. Harsent reading some of his poems from the collection, as I realise I have hardly quoted again (sorry) davepoems on Fire Songs a blog I do think, not read him before so cannot vouch. But now I see he does point to an uncomfortable view of women possibly that I was expunging and maybe ignoring in seeing as within his horror of horror.

Edit edit - read davepoems now, food for thought. Its link to TLS blog about the award of the T. S. Eliot prize is very interesting and I find a better bit of writing from them. and hey i seem to be agreeing, his view (Mr. Harsent's) is not wholly to my taste - and I do wonder what T. S. eliot would make of it.

edit edit edit - I also wonder if Mr Harsent is stepping into making the person of the poet a philosophy insisting on this view of darkness, and it is not one i agree with. I get the struggle with the darkness, but who would insist upon it.

>44 tonikat: This is such an interesting review. I really liked what you said - that a poet is a person, not a philosophy. It encapsulates precisely my difficulty with some reviews (there was a recent Boston Review article on how Auden's thoughts on political poetry evolved, in particularly). You were right about his poems being not to everyone's taste though, I found them very difficult to read and gave up the enterprise entirely.

>45 reva8: Hi Reva, thanks...for a while his technique enamoured me, his play with form and his way with words, but no I tend to agree, and am also wary of how serious it can seem to put this view, when to me it is not the most serious. But yes exactly a poet is not a philosophy, I must heed those words.

Coincidentally I have read that Boston review article on Auden this afternoon and added it to my list at the top, it's interesting in this context too as you say.

>44 tonikat: Enjoyed reading your thoughts, and all your edits.

Very interesting thoughts. I know nothing about poetry but I would think that looking for a coherent philosophy in it, or even for anything coherent, is missing the point. If you have something coherent to say, you don't write poetry, at least not today. But maybe I'm wrong about all this, as I said I don't know anything about the subject.

And I completely agree that a poet is a person, not a philosophy. So is a philosopher, by the way.

>47 dchaikin: thanks Dan - I still need to catch up on the Ecclesiastes thread (and later all the preceding books, which I have not read).

>48 FlorenceArt: Welcome Florence. I totally agree about philosophers. One of my favourite quotes in a counselling book is "Jung was not a Jungian, Freud was not a Freudian, Rogers was not a Rogerian" (Brammer, Shostrum & Abrego (not checked it exactly but very close to those words)), I see those people sometimes as practical philosophers. We can all struggle with this, or lose track of it, I can anyway. Sadly it's not just me and some try to make others fit fixed words, as we all know. Words do tend to get reified.

I'm really glad you said that. I'm negotiating being seen as a poet and need to work harder at doing so, having some experience but few credentials, to both say things well and yet not try to claim any priority. As someone that really believes in Person Centred counselling and so in others and as someone not really from a poetry establishment that's really important to me - we all know poetry in our reading, in our living. But it's a dialogue I'm having knowing I can be clumsy in it, have been. It's best for me not to write too hurriedly sometimes, in enthusiasm (yet that can be the best time to start to write). Some may have seen that recently, which is why I say this here really -- and also try to defuse any claims, if I have them I need to put them better. I had thought I may stop writing about poetry, here anyway - but no, I've just got to try and do it better and openly, carefully. I've usually treated this place as a rough and quite quick place to jot my reactions, I'll still try that approach, it needs care. As we all know we are here because of each other. Ahhh, to listen, yes that's it, am I forgetting.

I think you're right about coherence and for that very reason and also no reason at all you may also be wrong about it. But I think for poets their may be coherence of a vision, also for Mr. Harsent though today I am wondering if he has sought to solidify it into something else. But that coherence is not a philosophy, is more than that, less than that. The vision may maintain coherence even as it changes to mean other things, contradicts itself, possibly.

Getting lost in the words, and how not to, I wonder if it is impossible to teach to avoid this, getting lost will always find a way. It can even be the best of things in the end, necessary. (But listen.)

I was wondering if some that would enforce their version of words on others are lost in the words, but now I also wonder if they are avoiding being lost in them, by trying to fix them to be still and so themselves stand outside of them. (would it fix what can be heard, perhaps?)

A polarity we may all be between, can't think of a way off it now, would like to. I'm meandering.

Think I'll just post interesting articles as i read them downthread as the lists at the top were a bit long and pointless, I wanted to list them here as I post an article various places but had no list so I could find them again.

I enjoyed this and the pictures - having recently read Michael Donaghy's poem 'Lives of the Artists', which posits a response by the statue to Donatello. He Brought Stone to Life by Andrew Butterfield, nyrb.

In fact you can read Lives of the Artists by Michael Donaghy here.

In I think I'll put March articles here:

- Guardian interview with Clive James
- Truly, madly, deeply - guardian article on George Barker
- In Love with the muse, Anthony Thwaite, TLS review of Fraser's The Chameleon Poet, a life of George Barker.
- Guardian article/email interview with Sean Young a beautiful article
- oup blog on why we should read Dante
- nyrblog The Pope is a Christian by Garry Willis
- nyrblog - Tarot Dreams by Christopher Benfey

- this is so wrong, isn't it? and yet
- nyrblog, James Fenton, what I mean by Mexico
- The Guardian, Robert Macfarlane on The eerieness of the English countryside
- The Guardian, Colm Toibin - A tale of Two Poets, Thom Gunn and Elizabeth Bishop an excellent essay
- The guardian - Interview with James Wood, literary critic
- BBC - Columbia: Home of the perfect cup of coffee?
- The Guardian - Sherman Alexie novel tops list of books Americans want censored 2014
- Guernica mag - Night Vision, Geoff Mak interviews Karen Russell
- BBC news on loss of Percy Sledge One great quote about his song, and also later about signing away the rights.
- guardian, philosophers on what 7 films teach us
- Guardian article on the colour blue
- the original TLS review by John Willett of the first English translation of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
- NYRB - Sensual Sappho by Edith Hall excellent article, i read 'Stung with Love last year and already have Ann Carson's translation to read, now I am really looking forward to that.

A little bit about Emily Dickinson on Biography.com.

I've been to (a lot of) the First Newcastle Poetry Festival this weekend. Organised by Newcastle Uni, largely stemming I think from their archive project with Bloodaxe books. It was excellent, from my first event, a discussion on the archive with Neil Astley, of Bloodaxe of course, and Jackie Kay who was excellent and two gentlemen whose names I don't remember (one of the Brtish Library and active on this project, the other from the AHRC and a prof at Glasgow) but who both were excellent about archives and digitising things, as far as I could tell, and given that my eyes usually glaze at thinking about records management. But beyond this to lots of readings (I won't simply list the poets) that were all wonderful, though of course some hit my chords more than others.

One such was Niall Campbell who was new to me and read beautifully, he had a presence and tone that delivered his beautiful poems with quiet authority. So, I had to buy his book Moontide. This is his first full collection. I find it beautiful. It is lyrical but clear, precise. It feels weighed in thought, in feeling and in experience. It's not a book that sells itself to its own wit or an overplay of words, it is steady. In that it's an example to me and a reminder. An excellent first collection, that has been well recognised as such (lots of short listing and the Edwin Morgan Prize I think). It is also a book, as in his reading, that balances its music with silence. That he is in touch with this could be felt in his reading. So it as interesting to read some of his thoughts on this on his blog. And at this blog there is a page of links to his internet published poems, you may enjoy this. I'm glad to have read this collection, and at this point, it gives me pause in my leaps. This is a collection it will be a pleasure to turn back to, I already am.

Oh yes you can also view the Bloodaxe Archive here and fascinating it promises to be.

Stone Milk by Anne Stevenson - who I was lucky to see read at the festival above. I very much enjoyed her reading, impressed by her composure, grace and content.

It led me to go back to this collection which I have had for some time. Initially I found it hard to get into, then when I did try a few years ago the first long poem about a dream encounter with poets in an afterlife led me to abandon it to read Dante first (an ongoing project, stationary at present). I was glad to go back to Stone Milk having heard/seen her read.

I'm not sure I entirely got all of the opening long poem 'A Lament for the Makers', in fact it's now a week or two since I read it. I liked it and her jump off into it in dream, something she does elsewhere in this collection. Maybe I'd get it better if I knew all the poets she mentions better. I did like how it ended, its perspective on poetry and its part in being human.

Anne Stevenson is of course a very well known poet and also famous as a biographer of Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath. I look forward to reading these.

The middle section of the collection, 'Stone Milk', is made up of poems including the title poem, it can be read (click) here with three other poems from the collection. As you may have seen if you have read the poem it has a profound view, recognition of life and of what she seeks, a reality. It could be shaking to apprehend, and yet in doing so perhaps not shaking, just being. I liked all the poems in this section, especially 'Before Eden' and 'The Enigma' which I really like a lot (this last also on her website).

The collection ends with a version of Medea I enjoyed very much - giving Medea quite a say, negotiating what can and can't be said in a way, the possible variations and always variation from reality. Nice thoughts on the poet, who joins the play, and on the gods. Another distillation of fine and clear thinking that leaps into the modern, it seemed to apprehend and make me apprehend the situation.

I hope to read a lot more of her work, this all having made her spring to life for me more. I think I have Bitter Fame, but I'd like to read more of her own poetry especially - and I'd like to reread what Janet Malcolm wrote of her and Bitter Fame in The Silent Woman.

Thanks for posting the link to stone Milk

Yes, thank you! I read and loved the first poem, and added the page to my "to-read" list.

>54 baswood: they really help to give comments a context, I don't like typing in poems, especially if under copyright. I wonder if people could see the link to Niall Campbell's poems in the review before.

>55 FlorenceArt: - it's a wonderful poem, I hope you enjoy the page.

The Chymical Wedding by Lindsay Clarke

A novel that explores alchemy and the possibility of spiritual transformation. It tells stories from the nineteenth century interleaved with some from the late twentieth in the same imagined setting of "Munding" in Norfolk. We meet Louisa Agnew, unmarried daughter of an aristo and her father, both adepts of alchemy - he is summing it all up in a poem, she comes to help by writing an introduction. We meet their new parish priest and their doctor. In the twentieth century we meet a young poet, Alex, whose life is in a mess as his marriage has failed, he travels to Munding for some respite - he meets Louisa's descendent and through him an older poet, Edward, the man who originally inspired him in his reading and Edward's current companion, a young and gifted woman, Laura. We follow these charged particles interacting - themes of poetry, humanity, hermeticism and alchemy, spiritual development through acceptance and dream and reflection and challenge. Its a heady mixture. It goes places, develops in the imagination and the heart - and demonstrates the power and validity of some of those views.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, found it excellent. Very engaging. Sometimes I did feel it may have explained itself too much and yet that may be part of what took me along with it. At its best it got, and got me, beyond that. Maybe it is just me to have that reservation though I saw comments to that effect also on Amazon - I think I read somewhere that Terrence Malick may have once worked towards a movie of it (a great idea I think) and that caused me to wonder what it would be at times without the explanation between some of the dialogue, to read it as play or screen play - but then I may have come to understand less of alchemy, unless perhaps he had a primer to it too. I find it hard to reconcile this reservation I have with the undoubted insight and ability of the writer, at times I wondered if it explained itself too much and was not fully realised only to be hit again and again with evidence it was very fully realised and great insight. Maybe he wrote it deliberately to explain itself in this way - but that is my reservation, that it may have been anxious to join the dots for me in a way.

It has also opened and re-opened some avenues of interest and reading for me in Alchemy, spiritual alchemy and poetry having read that the older poet may have been at least partially a portrait of George Barker, whom I understand the author once lived near. And in reading it as spring is springing it's been a good experience and part of my own pattern of connection to myself and the world and has played a big part in blowing on the flame of my interest in mythology, more on that to follow I am sure.

edit - and read thanks to reva's review, LT strikes again.

>57 tonikat: I loved your review of The Chymical Wedding (it definitely made me rethink how I felt about the book). Also thank you for the link to Stone Milk by Anne Stevenson - I hadn't read anything by her before.

Hi Tony! I've been lurking but not necessarily commenting. Especially enjoyed your review of The Chymical Wedding. It's already on my wish list, thanks to Reva's review, but you've added fuel to the fire!

>58 reva8: - thanks Reva I may always change my own mind too. and >59 Poquette: interested to hear how it burns for you :)

Four of Us: Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva translated by Andrey Kneller

So, the truth I got this small collection cheaply on Kindle. I've read a Mandelstam selected and some of his prose before and a little Akhmatova, and maybe a little of Pasternak's poetry over the years, but no Marina Tsvetaeva. So, I'm not sure I am in a position to tell for sure over these translations (you may be interested I now find a lot of the poems are up for free on the translators website). But I loved the Pasternak and Tsevetaeva poems included - even more than I have liked Mandelstam over the years. If I didn't have a bit of reading lined up that needs attention I'd be straight into more Pasternak, poetry and prose and have already been reading more on him. And Tsvetaeva, what a delight, playful, witty, musical, I want to read read read her, maybe even more than Pasternak. Inspiring.

A taster of a boo really, not many poems, very little biography, but enjoyable. I'll look forward to comparing with other translations.

How interesting to combine poems by those authors in one book.

There is an Akhmatova poem that is included 'Four of Us', which ends with a beautiful reference to Marina Tsvetaeva. All so close in age, I think they'd all met (though am not wholly sure of that). I should have said what is nice about this collection is that it also has the Russian, I always like that, though I am far from making head nor tail of it.

Forgive me Rebecca, having a slow day, getting into gear. I'm glad he had the idea I like it -- he refers to them as poets of the Silver Age, which is a term I need to find out about. We had a question a while ago about authors and characters you'd like to go to a party with, I wonder what time with this four would be like, clearly not a party for so much of their lives. I was very struck by pomes written at a very tender age and before, though even then a flavour at times it was after.

articles update

- the Paris Review - interview with Anthony Hecht
- Paris Review - interview with James Fenton - some discussion of poetry as text or to be performed
- Les Murray's web page see his poem 'Performance'
- TLS poem of the week 'Or' by Peter Scupham
- NY Times obituary Frank Cioffi
- The Independent obituary Frank Cioffi I wholly agree about his lectures.
- Obituary of Frank Cioffi
- 25 interesting words
- Guardian article on Fellini and 8 1/2 by Micheal Newton
- Guardian article on Grayson Perry's Dream House
- Guardian article about NatWest's confusion with a tg customer
- Kei Miller, blog post On effeminacy I read a report this week that a tg woman was stoned to death in Cuba
- Jared Gardner on comic book film
- Guardian - interview with a woman with Swyer syndrome
- Guardian interview with James Rhodes in aftermath of his court decision
- NY times, cynthia Ozick on Harold Bloom's new book
- aeon article on what socialism may look like in future
- guardian - Simon Armitage, making poetry pay interesting, no tips, and David Harsent's sales figures at the bottom!
- Paris Review article the film Hannah Ardendt and on her thinking by Roger Berkowitz

Letters on England by Voltaire (ibook ed)

I finished this a while ago, a free ibook version that I liked. I also managed to buy a version for my Kindle which had an intro and a typeface I disliked compared to the ibook. In fact it's left me preferring the ibook interface on my laptop anyway, seems cleaner. But that's by-the-by. The Kindle version also has a further final chapter/letter, Voltaire on Pascal so I am not claiming I have read that - I am putting it off for my eventual finishing of my own reading of the Pensees, not that I am getting anywhere with that just now.

But back to what I have read - I also preferred this translation to the Kindle copy I read, of those bits I compared - and was shocked at the differences in the translations, those I compared. I read Candide many years ago and didn't enjoy it especially. But this reminded me a little of that tone (or am I imagining that now). Anyway this was a nice window to the eighteenth century and a French view of Angleterre that strikes nice balances, a light touch that can chide France too, gently, as well as England gently (whilst occasionally dropping in mention of roast beef I seem to remember).

I read it as it was the first book on a list of science books in a Guardian article by a science writer (see one of my lists of articles above probably) of their top science books for the general reader. Next stop is Darwin, though before his advised on the origin of the species I have been advised to read the voyage of the beagle. And this was a gentle reintroduction to some science, looking at Smallpox vaccination then Bacon, Locke and Newton, but very easy general reading, a bit primary school at times. However it began with a very interesting encounter with a Quaker that was very immediate before considering other matters ecclesiastical then governmental and then also literary - drama (comedy and tragedy, and also poetry). A thoroughly enjoyable read that began to open the eighteenth century to me and had me downloading free Swift, Pope, Richardson, Gibbon.

I will read him on Pascal, one day. Though with caution as I understand he had issues with Pascal. thinking back on it a bit, I surprise myself to feel almost the start of a headache though, is it just a bit too clever in tone, too up some height of delicacy, balance and clarity with a bit of tongue in cheek? And that makes me think of early T. S. Eliot criticism, some in the sacred wood...or is it that I have just been to the dentist...something to think about. I did like his meeting with the Quaker though, I liked the Quaker and also Voltaire comparing them to Malebranche...at its best it did bring those times alive and the quandaries of alternative beliefs and views of the world, that in some ways had a very contemporary ring of the problems involved, and this side of him is engaging and helps dispel that memory of this that might make me feel that headache.

I read he may have been influenced by Swift in his tone. Must compare them myself.

It was also powerful to read his view of many French manners and salutary to be reminded of how, due to custom, what is right or best or most helpful may be missed, by a whole society never mind an individual. Plus ca change.

Edit - The article on science writing - by Steven Weinberg, only a Nobel laureate - The Guardian, Steven Weinberg, 13 best science books for the general reader.

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers

I have a dim memory that I may have seen some of this interview when it happened in the eighties, but whilst some ideas may have stuck I did not remember Joseph Campbell's name. During a recent week off in good weather I had some great walks and after one of them followed an internet link about Campbell with the title, his motto, "Follow your Bliss", it felt right. At many times that is something I may have automatically tuned out - but I read this and his interesting account of how he came to follow this approach.

So, I started to learn about Campbell - and that led me first to this book. It is interesting also that I have read that all writers should read him - another idea that if connected to a certain way would have led me to certainly steer clear lest I end up like all the rest.

But this book, and that conversation, is a delight. An introduction to his way of thinking about myth -- really quite gnostic, very human, it opens myth up and its point...to open us up to the sort of experience that opens us up to, well to it all, and our interaction with reality, life, death, the lot -- human paths to mysteries, abilities, God and gods no less within us (perhaps The Chymical Wedding amongst other things had put me on this track). It is something I wish I had read many years ago, it felt just the right thing to read and yes just the right time now, hoping to keep in touch with such feelings, more and hence, well in touch with more and what cannot be written. I hope to read all his books, I have another on the Kindle already. The Kerenyi book on the gods of the greeks in my wall of gentle prompting was in a series edited by Campbell and calls to me and I have already done a little other reading as a result. I could not over state how helpful I have found this book.

I've been reading Campbell as well, recently.

I agree about his gnostic leanings, and this fits well with the work I have been doing on the enneagram which I see also as ultimately a gnostic outlook on the world (the universe?)

I've been following your thread. I did the enneagram, it always seems to get me slightly different. You made me think of a gnostic universe, hopefully not an offensive idea. But now I will look again at the enneagram.

Well, I did it again (the enneagram) and it came out slightly different again. Though from the start, the gender question, it flummoxes me a bit.

It occurs to me it is gnostic as it looks inside...but it does so in its own terms, so I have to agree with the labels it gives, its possibilities. Or do I have it wrong? it seems to me that gnosticism gets passed labels to become present to what is not sayable or knowable. Does the enneagram do that? through acceptance of it?

I really like Campbell - he uses much from Jung. He has a way of coming up with apposite quotes from him, and from myths....and I tend to get lost in the labyrinths of Jung and myths and am mightily impressed he digests them to be able to come to such clarity.

I did just write "I am mightily impressed...", oh dear.

It's not that I'm not, but still, I sound like an advert.

I'm mightily impressed that you wrote mightily impressed.

Jung is labyrinthine, often better to read commentators rather than the source here.

Although I am reading an interesting essay on the similarities in Jung and Goethe regarding the numinous. I might quote some of it on my thread. Also in same essay is included reference to the spirit that inhabits all things, including the inanimate (can't remember the exact wording but will look it up and add I to my thread). This hidden life in the inanimate is something that greatly interests me.

The gnostic universe is in no way offensive to me, in fact it is increasingly how I view things. The enneagram has so much in it, still new and e loving from a western viewpoint, so it is open to interpretation. The issue is that people get hold of it and turn it into a money paying proposition (as Myers Briggs did so successfully) and things become proscribed instead of limitless.y open to debate. Maybe a good thing in some ways, but I'm instinctively against such things.

Having said that, the enneagram community is still quite open and liberal in interpreting things, and many of the key teachers a re still quite mystical as opposed to priestlike.

So T. what enneagram type do you believe you might be? And what instinct stacking?

I talk some mighty s**te at times.

Just thinking of reading Jung daunts me, even my Jung reader, some of the best bits. And yet I agree with him so much. Especially in reaction to Freud.

I've done the Enneagram again (link on your thread) and got the same result as the first time I did it, for the main type - and I do not like this result. I got type 6 54%, type 5 46%, type 2 42%, type 3 42% (oh and aggressive and also calm both 42%). Please say that makes me Audrey Hepburn. Though I have done it several times in recent weeks and I assure you thats the first time I came out type 6 for some time. The instinct stacking seems quite consistent spsosx. And its having a go at my health.

I really do find it hard - I think many of my reactions depend on the situation. I have taught assertiveness courses for example and one of the things we teach is how normal it may be to have different levels of assertiveness in different situations, so I find a general question on that poor and hard to generalise about. I just feel this test is asking me to label myself in ways I don't believe in. Its interesting to do and I am curious that I get a variety of results. But in a big way i don't believe t nor want to believe it.

Having said that I also took the test at eclectic energies with the instinctual variant -- I preferred the way their questions were set out. It judged me as type 4 sp, type 6 sp and type 5 so (these last two neck and neck)...I wont list them all...type 2 which came second on the first test came last on this one (I took them right after each other). This feels a bit better...I'll try their test again tomorrow. Please say that makes me Audrey Hepburn too. Aha way down the list (third last) I am type 3 with sx variant, hmmmm, how dare they.(oh i see now it says i'm most likely type 4 with 5 wing and sp.)

I definitely prefer "e loving" to evolving, in the here and now anyway, evolving takes so long, is risky and many dead ends.

I'm interested in that essay on the numinous. The life in all things interests me, respect of it. I saw a nice film late last year that was largely silent and followed the patterns of Pythagoras' thinking of pattern to rebirth (I forget the language for it, ah yes metempsychosis I think)...human, animal, plant and also mineral...mineral seems such a sticking point in some ways to thinking/feeling...its a nice film, set in Pythagorean territory in southern Italy, forget its name now, four something, in Italian, well worth checking out my film list from last year.

But really, I did these types in the interests of science and reserve the right not to fit them.

I saw e loving and decided not to change it, felt like a good phrase.

I can see you (with due respect to your right not to be labeled) as a 4w5 sp.

Well, thx. But that's just it, possible self fulfilling prophecy. Wittgenstein liked to read Freud but he thought that Freud charms us into believing him, and I think that may be true here too.

Having said that any thoughts on my tritype? and when do I get to be Audrey Hepburn? (not very individual of me.) If I am a 4 then I spent my formative years not believing it, shy, conforming.

zeno, I am getting worried about Tony H ......... all those Enneagrams can't be good for him.

Enneagram overdose, an enneagram junkie!

Yes, I've woken up feeling used, labelled, and by myself. And I would say that wouldn't I as a 4.

In terms of Tritype, as a reminder, this theorises that you have a main type, but can also turn to the resources of a type in each of the other two triads (for clarity these are: the Heart triad of types 2, 3 and 4; the Head triad of types 5, 6 and 7, and the gut triad of types 8, 9 and 1).

Interestingly, all your tests suggest you are strong in the heart and head triads but not in the gut.

So it would seem you might have 4 and 6 in your triad, with a third resource of either 8, 9 or 1.

Sp instinct is the most introverted, so not a surprise that you were a shyling. 6 is the most conforming type, although in a doubting, sceptical and apt to rebel kind of way.

Well, I hate to say I told you so but...I did eclectic energies again and got 649, all sp, and it says am 6 with 5 wing (not sure where the 5 came from, that was lower and so again). Reassured to get some gut. I find it hard with people that are focussed on power (read Joseph Campbell on that, the navel chakra, that is very not me). "The loyalist" hmmm. Peacemaker very me, very un me not to be.

I'll try again tomorrow. I go down the list of questions and just realise how I would answer differently in different situations. I can be energetic but not always (is that a psychological thing anyway?) I can be open I can be reserved...I can say this sort of thing of many of them, depends how I look at them. This is also being kind of open posting them here. I remain sceptical and also aware how I could be charmed into this, that word is flashing up to me with loud claxon going off even as the sirens sing another way, as it were (too much with the poetic T).

In humanistic psychology there can be an idea of subpersonalities - nothing to do with schizophrenia, which isn't that anyway - it's an idea that we may have slightly different personalities in different contexts, so maybe a going to work personality and a learning personality and a having fun at the weekend personality, or a speaking to people in authority compared to speaking to sibling personalities, all the same person but different emphases in ourselves and totally "normal". It's an idea I always like and I wonder what the enneagram would make of that. I'd suggest if that is the case my enneagram may be different in different contexts, which is also an idea I like, rather than being ghettoised by type in a way, the range of being human is open to me. but I would say that perhaps, but for others too not just me, as far as they wish. That's important to me. This would also seem less reductionist.

The 6sp sees things in shades of grey, not in black and white if that helps.

Here is the Tritype archetype for the 469 group (ie all six tritypes combinations with these 3 types in):

The Seeker 469.

Original, sensitive, needing peer affirmation.

So the 649 and 694 would fit that archetype but the emphasis would first be on the doubting, sceptical and
Devils advocate qualities of the 6. With the 6sp there is also the overlay of this ability to see all the shades of grey in any question or debate.

hmmm.

Been out for a walk and thinking about it. I can see this, but I can see the previous too. Happened by the library and got John Rowan's book on Subpersonalities.

It occurred to me whether it is a bit denying of human nature of me to be so sceptical. we are what we are, and by no means are we all everything (and neither am I). But then it occurred to me to take a Buddhist slant on this which would go for not getting too attached to it I think, and that's something I agree with. Far too easily in the modern world are we pigeon holed and so pigeon hole ourselves. Now may be that would be bad use of the enneagram, I just think it is an inherent danger that is not appreciated enough when we use them all the time.

I also came in and did it again - let myself rip at it a bit and got another result - type 4 again the individualist with balanced wings, was 4, 6, 1 spspso. 4 and 6 a theme at the mo...maybe I should try some new foci in my life.

Is there a word for that phenomenon I believe can happen to medical students, they read of a diagnosis and may read their own symptoms that way - surely this can be similar. I've read several of the personality type descriptions now and can read aspects of myself in all. I also think this may be affected by what we do every day, so say a person does a lot of helping in their job they may see this as not what they do in their own time of themselves.

In my experience people following a school of thought do not often sit down and pull apart what they are doing as though it may be wrong, instead we seem to dig ourselves in and defend what we have? Do enneagram theorists address such things and their own limits? Also what do they say about falsifiability, as surely that is important in validation. How do they validate these results? Do they allow for someone wanting to be as flexible with them as I'm suggesting?

All personality typing has problems with falsifiability in my view. These are more cults than sciences.

I'm in to stretch it as far as it goes, to see if it breaks.

For the moment I'm enjoying it and finding it fruitful. It has certainly changed the way I see things.

Of course Zeno -- I did write a bit listing my problems with it but held off posting, having a bit of a go at it maybe, as I tried it eyes open and respect that others get something from it.

I guess at bottom I am quite against typing people. I feel it can obscure our view of people as people. I have a great quote from Wordsworth along these lines, from The Prelude, I typed it in once, I think its on another hard drive. Now it may be sometimes some diagnosis or typology may help, but I'm always cautious about it and would wish to still meet a person as a person and not as a type. I think it is too easy that people become whats with these things and there are people that see them like that, through their own misunderstandings. In the modern day we all seem to be types of a sort, in getting jobs, in reputation in all sorts of ways.

I also tend towards Wittgenstein's approach that this is a language game. I'd point out that I baulk at some of how the questions limit my responses, but I go along with this at which pint I am caught in the tests terms and it will always then give a result in its own terms -- it also strikes me that it offers to tell me in a way what i am (something human beings are fascinated with) but does so without any real need for my own inner search on that, in fact it is a bit like a calculator in doing so and these are all reasons I am uneasy with it. I think i mentioned Wittgenstein liked reading Freud but argued that he charms us, and I would argue that this too tends to charm me into accepting what it says. I think it is a mistake to think that any system has a complete knowledge of human nature to be able to type all humans, it is tempting to want to believe it though. It can seem relevant to me and I note some of the consistencies it has given me, but then as I say i can also notice similarities to me in other types and would argue that different aspects may be more apparent in different situations, in person centred theory a bit like subpersonality there is an idea of different configurations of self. It's been interesting, quite powerful and it has led me to starts rereading a short book I have on Wittgenstein and Psychoanalysis and to want to read more such. if I can find the Wordsworth quote I'll post it.

". . . But who shall parcel out
His intellect by geometric rules,
Split like a province into round and square?
Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand, and say
'This portion of the river of my mind
Came from yon fountain'? Thou, my friend, art one
More deeply read in thy own thoughts, no slave
Of that false secondary power by which
In weakness we create distinctions, then
Believe our puny boundaries are things
Which we perceive, and not which we have made.
To thee, unblinded by these outward shews,
The unity of all has been revealed;
And thou wilt doubt with me, less aptly skilled
Than many are to class the cabinet
Of their sensations, and in voluble phrase
Run through history and birth of each
As of a single independent thing.
Hard task to analyse a soul, in which
Not only general habits and desires,
But each most obvious and particular thought --
Not in a mystical and idle sense,
But in the words of reason deeply weighed --
Hath no beginning."

Wordsworth, The Prelude of 1799, second part lines 242-267.

The thou of these lines was Coleridge of course, but I like to read it as the reader too. Cleary he's not writing about the enneagram, I just read typing of people in these lines written long before so much that happens now.

Zeno -- hope my reaction has not gone too far, I respect such things as this tries to do but always come back t this fundamental importance of seeing beyond labels. It is strange as the world is so wrapped up in what it can say and show scientifically and pseudo-scientfically that these aspects of things are often missed, or sometimes assumed to be understood when I think they are generally not.

But all the best exploring what you take from it. I think I was forgetting some of the above which is why I have gone through remembering. I offer my thoughts in the best way and will continue to think about what I may learn from the enneagram, in this context.

Your reaction hasn't gone too far at all. Its your natural reaction after all. I have a lot of sympathy for that, it is my natural reaction too.

I also agree that scepticism and doubt is healthy (and is of course just what a 6SP would do).

I'm glad it's not gone too far.

I've read some more of John Heaton's book and it's reminded me of Greek scepticism and its relevance to Wittgenstein. I reject that my scepticism is due to my type, that is the point. Wittgenstein suggested that when we have a theory it's like being a fly trapped in a bottle: please don't try to trap me in it as I'm breaking free, the bottle is an illusion.

I'm much more interested why I sought a truth in this way and why anyone would claim such truth. It feels like it defines rules of a game that it is then heresy to break, and which denies the ability of anyone to break as it is against the rules and of course predicted by the rules (your last point)?

edit - I'm not taking it badly you teased me with the last thing you said -- but this is core to the problem, words can claim power beyond their reach, and we can give them it. Such things are beyond words.

I enjoyed the Wordsworth and both of your views on personality typing.

I want to find a type that I can live up to, but it has eluded me so far......

One thing I should add about the enneagram in its defence is that it is not about stasis. It aims to show a path for each type to follow in order to escape the restrictions of each type. In this sense it is a kind of system for liberation.

Having said that, I have a lot of sympathy with your view that the bottle is an illusion, T. In fact I would see that as my natural default position. However, I have got to a point where I feel I need to try and believe in something (can one stay an anarchist all one's life?), so I'm pushing this to see how far I can go with it.

That is a good note to make that it encourages challenge - I did ask myself if I needed some new foci in my life as a result of taking the test.

I won't repeat my cautions or expand and specify further.

I respect, and hope I have shown respect, that we may use such tools. After all I was also drawn to try it. My reaction is my personal reaction and frustration when people don't see these things that I mention, always cautious of misuse and blindness to that. But my place, probably like that of many, varies in a field between theses and what is. Maybe I know how badly my own theses can misrepresent me and the world and how lost I can get in them that I need to take the rug out. Your experience is yours and all the best to you with its paths and your own use of them.

Oh, and sorry, that's very me very focussed on the subject -- thanks Bas, but I'm sure you exceed many a type.
Edit- I should say, there is value in being an original,and you, as we all, are.

Black Rainbow:how words Healed me: my journey through Depression by Rachel Kelly

A book about Rachel Kelly's experience of Depression, post natal, and her journey through this and on. It appealed to my own experience (obviously not post natal) in a number of ways and also as she focusses very much on how poetry helped her. I understand she now facilitates groups reading poetry for a mental health charity.

I'm torn in a way, part of me wants to describe this book as brave yet part of me rejects that idea, the possibility it may sound twee or patronising, the ways it may distance from reality. I think it is a hell of a thing to share such an experience in such a way, for others to read - yet in doing so it may help so many, countless more I am sure than would read in any spirit that was not sympathetic.

As a writer I find it difficult to imagine writing such a factual account of such an experience. In reading it I wondered if it captured everything - of course it cannot, who can - but it did capture such a strong flavour of such an experience. When she writes of a long dark night of the soul she really knows what she writes of, in my own experience, it brought my own experience close though different, it shook me to read this, if you know such experience you may read cautiously. There may have been other reasons why I was shaken, a tooth that was stopping me sleeping well too, but I had to engage all my coping techniques around the time I read this as it reminded me of such times.

She does capture the physicality of her illness well. Her unique experience but very graphic. She takes us through how she hung on through prayer and poems, sharing these, and with family support and began to move to recovery with medicinal help. I was surprised how long it took before she sought the support of therapy, but also understood her own reluctance at this and the confusions of seeing therapists that did not suit and so delayed her eventually finding one that could help. But I was surprised it wasn't suggested more long before she sought that path. It ends very positively with her experience of that therapy and how it helps, what she learned, some unique to herself some may be helpful to many others. So much of what she explains may be helpful to others, just in terms of showing such times can be got through, how she coped, how her poems and prayer helped.

There were some things I noticed. In a way I noticed her privilege, many will not have some of the support she was able to have. Her first doctor seemed to be Harley Street. They were able to afford help at home with her children. But I am glad for her. When she later saw a second doctor who spoke of sectioning her and her husband would not have it I wondered how many get so misunderstood and trapped in a system and how many have such a powerful source of support with them as he was (actions I could kiss him for!). So I hope her poetry reading workshops help. The power of writing and poetry to heal is recognised. I've attended training as to such and there is more advanced training than the workshops I went to. I'm so struck throughout by the importance of others to her experience, the love and commitment of family but also significant colleagues, employees, friends and finally a therapist. Hopefully this book may lead others to understand better and may then lessen stigma and encourage more helpfulness out there. I agree about both poems and prayer.

Wittgenstein and Psychoanalysis by John Heaton

I really enjoyed the discussion above, thanks Zeno. It led me back to this very short but very powerful book. Wittgenstein, was a beery swine...no, sorry, that's not it. Wittgenstein, I like him very much. My own reading of his writing has been slight, but reading about him much larger. I must correct that. In thinking about him I often wonder what certain doctors I know would have made of him but am very glad this never came up for him, as far as I know. It's also wise to remember Bertrand Russell's (I think) comment to his wife when Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge 'God has arrived'.

I'd like to read the Tractatus but don't think my logic is up to it, I'd need to do it with others that could teach me. I have read some - by the way, he makes a comment on solipsism somewhere Zeno, that "what the solipsist means is quite correct", but he states that this cannot be said, but may "make itself manifest", but he argues it is unthinkable, as I understand it, and so unsayable. Edit - I've deleted my own argument about this, maybe we each make our own journey with that. I've wondered of solipsism would be a dream or a nightmare Zeno, depending on my mood - I'd be interested in your thoughts. My argument was just about where I may get if I don't say or think it.

But back to this book - Wittgenstein liked to read Freud, but he points out that he feels Freud charms us into believing him, because in a way we want to be charmed by such "knowledge" and over difficult things like sexuality. I love the way he thinks, though he must have been hard work to be with I think. As you know he thinks about language and its limits, oh that more would recognise such things, many a psychologist and psychiatrist for one, how much do they discuss the idea of pseudoscience? There's a lot more to his approach than this, the book looks at Wittgenstein's views of illusion, teaching, Free Association, Scepticism, knowledge, theory, causes and reasons, ritual and the self and compares them to Freud. It's short and explains these issues clearly and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in any of these things and especially to anyone interested in Freud or any later psychoanalysis or therapy of any sort.

I find Wittgenstein's ideas lovely, but slippery, they are ladders it is hard (for me) to put in place again, his ladders, but an example in making them and also in recognising the limits of the power some theories seem to claim, and through them unfortunately some people, who seem not to know it themselves, or deny it.

Edit - ah no, I mis-remembered, it was J. M Keynes who wrote to his wife on "God' arriving, tongue in cheek as I am sure it was.

I noticed that Black Rainbow is Rachel Kelly's only book. I wonder if she had any difficulty finding a publisher.

Difficulty finding a publisher? Not sure why you wonder that Bas (Edit - I wonder why, due to the material?). I have no idea, but I doubt it. She was a journalist formerly on The Times (on property) and later went on to helping a friend edit a poetry app. It's a good book.

Hobbes was fond of his dram....

Solipsism is definitely a dream - but only as long as there are other people around.

Socrates himself was permanently . . .

Of course he gets two mentions and I prefer the second...a lovely little thinker, but...

Very interesting answer on the dream.

Makes me want to read Pascal on empty rooms.

I'm not sure I have an answer, maybe best not to define it,,,,which when i looked at those Wittgenstein passages again today was what I wondered.

>95 tonikat: Sounds like a fascinating book. I love the idea that ...in a way we want to be charmed by such "knowledge" and suspect it is all too true. Perhaps it is the all to human desire to have inside information, perhaps it is just the inexplicable deference to experts that afflicts so many.

>102 SassyLassy: - yes we seem to like to have those existential answers, listen to those that offer them. Must read some more Irvin Yalom soon now I think of it (he being an existential therapist).

June articles

- Vilmos Zsigmond on mccabe & mrs miller (he was the Director of Photography)
- Review of Sufjan Stevens live in L.A.
- TLS review - Beyond the Ideal by Suzanne M. Bessenger, review of 'The Saffron Road' by Christine Toomey
- The Guardian, the Book that Saved me, David Nicholls on P. J. Kavanagh's 'The Perfect Stranger' awwww, and if only I'd known it then too.
- The French - the most productive people int he world
- The Guardian - the French taking more holidays and working less then the rest of us
- The Guardian - Seamus Heaney reviewing Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poetry (not P. J.)
- The Guardian, Experience, I was nearly drowned by a sea lion
- Sydney Review of Books, Widespeak, Lisa Gorton reviews Les Murray 'Waiting for the Past'
- The Australian, Jaya Savige, Les Murray finds brevity in Poetry anthology Waitin for the Past
- BBC r4 start the week with guests including Les Murray
- The Guardian - Modi's plan to change India and the world through yoga
- Mockingbird - "into Great Silence": Robert Bresson's notes on the cinematographer
- Gone native: how Manhattan' richest women follow the laws of the jungle report on 'Primates of the Park' and a later piece on Park Ave in literature They refer to this as anthropology. I'm not an anthropologist to know how far they use the approach and comparisons of zoologists.
- BBC radio, Jeremy Irons reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot to mark it centenary I'm not sure I like the reading altogether (and i usually like Irons reading), but must reread the poem as its been a while.
- BBC interview with world entrepreneur of the year Mohed Altrad
- Financial Review - why remembering and reciting poetry is good for you, C. P. Nield
- Toibin and Banville on their favourite Yeats poem, Byzantium - page with links to lots of other people's favourites too
- The Talks, Woody Allen interview
- Michael moorcock: My Family values (The Guardian)
- scottish book trust - 5 things to say to a man who won't read
- irish Times - why we still love W. B. Yeats
- Irish Times - W. B. Yeats, a towering figure in Irish public life and art
- TLS review (6/2/15), John Berryman, That thing on front of your head by Adam Kirsch - review of four new Berryman editions edited by David Swift - appreciates Berryman's journey to finding his poetry
- TLS review (6/2/15) To enchant the real, Stephen Romer on Laurence Campa's life of Guillaume Apollinaire
- R3 the verb - more Prufrock, looking closely at that reading above
- OUP blog - does a person's personality change when they speak another language
- what happened when this 7 year old trans girl met Laverne Cox
- an interview with Pierre Joris
- John Burnside reviews Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks

July
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
- Roger Ebert on La Collectionneuse
- paris review - quaaludes, wolf of wall street, 'free of one's melancholy self'
I've not been keeping up with my potentially mind numbing listing of articles i like, but this next one i wanted to keep a record of, it made me think the challenge, to reach what in some ways may be a more like a star trek social model, is to make it so.
- Paul Mason, postcapitalism 17/7
- a an Indian view of the BBC
Nto keeping up with myself, lots of interesting things read
- Bjork emails with Timothy Morton exploring her stance
- Prof Peter Beresford OBE lecture on research by those involved, on empowerment & Q&A
- Thomas Merton on poetry and he contemplative life, 1947 some maybe dated views - also a very fixed path, I'd also like to think some experiences are not just for the few, but maybe in diverse forms. It also touches on exactly something Bjork and Timothy Morton were speaking of above, touching the divine by emptying out, whilst they preferred it through filling up as it were.
- Pierre Bettencourt 65 beginnings

August
- David Foster Wallace reviews Edwin Williamson's biography of J. L. Borges in New York Times
- Theology, Poetry - and Theopoetics John D. Caputo foreword to Theological Poetry by Luis Cruz-Villalobos
- Terrence Malick (himself!) on making Days of Heaven (interviewed in 1979)
- you tube - European Graduate School, Simon Critchley, 'The guiltless guilty one'

>104 tonikat: Such a fantastic collection of articles, and I enjoyed that Sufjan Stevens review. Carrie & Lowell- I can listen to it constantly, but not without some difficulty. A challenging album.

Thanks Reva, it is a challenging album. Thanks about the articles, i don't think anyone else has commented on me listing them this year. I thought it would be a way to keep track of them, I'm reading more online as i got a laptop.

It was the centenary of the publication of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' very recently. I didn't know it but I happened upon the reading by Jeremy Irons (above) and then Radio 3's The Verb special (also above) on that reading and talking through it.

I really started reading poetry more seriously very late and this was one way into it. There was an Australian film that took its title from it 'Till human voices wake us', Guy Pearce and Helena Bonham Carter, a film abut grief as I remember it, but then grief was part of my study at that time.

They say it's a poem about middle age. Yet Eliot wrote it at the age of 22 I think (!!). It takes an epigram from Dante, so that points to middle age and some of it's references (parting hair at the back) seem to point that way (suddenly i think of Phillip Larkin). But I get an idea of a youthful apprehension of middle age and seeing a trap or cul de sac and possible panic at being stuck in it. It's a particular view of middle age, or of falling into it. I feel anyway.

I was reminded by The Verb programme on it that Eliot once said something about only knowing how tall you are when you're out of you depth. What an idea. They say it's is a poem of someone not a conventional alpha male (whatever that means?!) (or said so on the programme) - yet it is the poem of an alpha male intellectually and emotionally, yet perhaps one not allowed loose (by themselves or others) - does he dare. There may even be a bit of anger to it. I feel it is a young person projecting themselves forward, imagining that middle age, from that point of view. As a middle aged person of course I find I tend to forget such a young person's view, of the privileges of life lost - of course! This may be exactly what he was trying to avoid. Anyway, he seems to project forward, seek to avoid this...but his answer is not to put his lot in to some goal, to fight this...instead he is woken to reality "Till human voices wake us, and we drown." - no Hamlet like last stand, so human, so modern, so realist, so something known by so many of us. And again I think of Larkin, Aubade say, or Stevie Smith, not waving.

Catching up . . .

Enjoyed your conversation with Zeno about the enneagram. Very enlightening.

>67 tonikat: Also enjoyed your comments on Joseph Campbell. I was lucky enough to attend several of his public lectures in San Francisco in the late 70s and early 80s. It has been a while since I read any of his books, but I devoured him in those years. The Hero with a Thousand Faces is one of his most influential books for me back in my late twenties.

>107 tonikat: I get an idea of a youthful apprehension of middle age and seeing a trap or cul de sac and possible panic at being stuck in it.

I agree completely.

Twenty-two seems like a possible age to me. I always pictured him as a socially tentative student, possibly early postgrad, clutching his sherry at some ghastly faculty event, dressed in his best shabby clothes, and suddenly wondering "Is this all there is? Am I on the right track?"

>108 Poquette: - thanks :) It sounds good to have seen him speak. Hero with a thousand faces is my next from him. It was so off putting before so many people saying things like 'all writers must read him' - many writers who may have liked him must be put off by that, well I was.

>109 SassyLassy: - yes that seems very him. I'm reading the Perfect Stranger in which P. J. Kavanagh told a story of Eliot turning up at his Oxford college and deciding it was too dead for him. Do you know the song 'is that all there is' - you reminded me of it, there was a version in the 80's I liked a lot, forget who did it.

I get the impression with Eliot of a war with categorisation until he can nail things the way he likes, and for himself awareness of the traps of certain ways in the world. He doesn't rebel wholly against categories though, just likes his terms as it were.

On an opposing tack to 'is that all there is' I was struck as I put Kavanagh's name in here once again what a massive thing it is to be able to make such a reference and have a system that recognises and identifies names just like that, wow the interweb and databases and the hours of data entry, what a thing. Imagine having that when you're an undergraduate able to look everything up with ease without a trek to the library? I'm showing my age. Sometimes I wonder if I died and it's somehow part of hell - all the answers I could want, yet still I've (we've in general) not got the ones that count. ah well, it's obvious, but I take it for granted so much now, a wonder.

I have been reading and thinking. What is there to say. To say a word in the world at the moment, I'd only want to ask people to restrain themselves and respect each other, to feel for their truth in mercy, compassion, a fuller life.

I've read some Borges short stories - I liked them, I read more more quickly than I ever have before, but for a few weeks haven't wanted to touch another one (I've been told a reaction Borges anticipated in his readers). I even reread (different translation this time) The Garden of Forking Paths, and it did not rise up like the monster I remembered it as, I liked it more, I was in awe but not in as much fear. I have a friend who I think correctly identifies that Borges 'signs off on his own omniscience' all the time, and it puts her right off him. I see that too - but it makes me wonder -- if in so doing he is asking us a question, to find the thing/s that help us bear this or avoid these idealistic possible paths for ourselves, even if we don't do this consciously, surely we have this response as we read, most of us, maybe not the odd monster, but maybe even they might ask this as they read, it could help. But I am unlearned on Borges, maybe I have more to learn, I have Williamson's biography now. Anyway, this thought is one that helps me. The stories are beautiful in a way, especially the wonderful 'The South'. They can be terrible too. That's obvious.

The Forest of Hours by Kerstin Ekman translated by Anna Paterson

I've found this a beautiful and moving book. It seems so true in its fantasy -- a troll from the middle ages, from a northern forest, begins to encounter humans. We follow his long life, his encounters, his way of living and his experiments with it, his powers and lack of them, his learning of language and poetry, alchemy, medicine, of others - human and animal. The natural world so vivid so often. A different perspective. Quite beautiful. I hope to read many more of Kerstin Ekman's books.

edit 8/9/15 - I should add that if it was beautiful it was also as it was beautifully translated by Anna Paterson.

September articles

- Commentary - the moral urgency of Anna Karenina

I was reading What is art? earlier - his dislike of much of his contemporary art, which he fits to his own theory (interesting given how this article concludes), it made me think that maybe Tolstoy had limitations and that it may be that through those limitations that he achieves what he achieves, his own grammar, moral grammar as defining of what it encounters. It's strange and in some ways I find him contradictory, often.

But then reading this article in a way I was thinking of Anna and Vronsky especially as limited in some way. In the past I have thought of them as healing something in each other, a perfect fit for something in each of them, and this essay made me think that again. But in a fuller way - I thought of this thing that needed healing in them maybe being the product of their relationships (she to Karenin, and her Oblonsky family -- he to his family, his mother -- and to the stories they tell themselves about the hurts in these relationships, the ways the relationships do not give them all they wish (the stories they tell themselves fits with this essay)...in a way they are seeking healing, and similar to the essay what they don't do is take time to understand it of themselves and take responsibility to heal this thing in other ways, instead the power of their attraction seems to offer this healing, this thing, this filling in of something missing. This fits for his interpretation of self deception - Anna's need to blame Karenin and not accept his offer, she tells the story of it being his fault, her idea is he should not leave her wanting something else. For me it also suggests understanding of her motives less as sin, as a choice or as a negative, but more as a less strong or misunderstood positive, a misinterpretation of life and of love and an equation of what is needed with the need, the thing lacked...and as so often with how this book can be looked at is suggestive of the need for compassion, for ourselves, Anna and Vronksy for themselves and so then for others. I like his take on Karenin, but he also still has his limits. I also wonder if Karenin's offer just was not said in the right way to Anna, it feels like part of her feels not respected and engaged by him and that part of her is angry...and again that comes after feeling the opposite of compassion. The way to do this thing this essay has Levin doing is to recognise such possibilities and needs and desires in ourselves and recognise the whole of others...non recognition of that whole seems to abound in characters for themselves and also what they see in others. And also the society which does not allow for fallibility in these matters.
(posted also elsewhere)

There's a circle - society encourages Anna say not to develop this ability to see in herself contradiction and to work it through, to allow herself to voice all aspects of herself -- leads her to seek exactly that which is not allowed -- leads society to judge her and ostracise her -- makes her less able to forgive, them, Karenin, even Vronksy in the end, and of course also herself. The institutions of society encourage bad thinking/feeling/understanding.

- huff post religion - why does god turn to poetry
- the guardian - if you say being gay is not African you don't know your history
- the guardian - george monbiot, The City's stranglehold makes B>ritain look like an oh-so-civilised mafia state
- NY Times - Simon Critchley 'there is no theory of everything' - also remembers his teacher Frank Cioffi
- Guardian - James Shapiro article on Shakespeare and the plague, 1606

The Perfect Stranger by P. J. Kavanagh

I'd forgotten I hadn't said anything about this book.

I was curious to read it having read an article (somewhere in the links above i think) that wrote of it as helpful for the article's author in seeing others too may drift after university, struggle to find meaning.

P. J. Kavanagh is a poet and writer. The book charts his early life and experiences, school, family (less so), first work experiences, time drifting (yet not wholly unsuccessfully) in Paris before National Service and subsequent service in the Korean war (which he volunteered for). In this last some sense of something he searched for or was missing, perhaps there at times (as missing) in the other episodes too. A very memorable episode when out on patrol prior to a large offensive in Korea. All of which then led him to study at Oxford as a former serviceman, to study English, which as I remember it, was study and was further experience as a student that started to change him - before the eponymous heroine was met, and clearly for him opened the world up in a way, new possibility. We follow their relationship and travels. I don't want to say to much of that lest it spoils.

An interesting book to read. I may have got more from it twenty years ago. Still it could inspire in some ways. He seems very honest, and that as ever, can expose. I did wish he'd said more of Sally, it's so clear how much he loved her, but I wanted to hear more of and from her. Perhaps some aspects needed to be protected and the book is framed as the change she made to him. In a way his approach is speaking as a poet, but I found that self conscious at times, whereas at others he was not and it carried me. I shall have to read some of his poetry now.

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot

I quite liked some of this, McAvitty stands out, there were a couple of others, but I'd have to go and get the book to remind myself. I'm not inclined to do so as one thing that did stand out was some casual racism in the poems at times. One reason I will not be buying it for young relatives. I'm curious how this was treated in the musical.

I much preferred Christopher Isherwood's People One Ought to Know which I came across accidentally a few years ago and which I look forward to sharing with young relatives.

Lao Tzu's Taoteching by Lao Tzu translated by Red Pine

The review that can be written is not the review.

I enjoyed this translation though with an interesting yet concise introduction, it was interesting to hear of new (relatively) discoveries of ancient texts. And for me also to learn of the significance of the moon to this way was helpful. Red Pine also includes selected morsels from centuries of commentaries to accompany each verse (and I have to confess I have not read all of these yet). I enjoyed this a lot and it has led me to start The book of Chuang Tzu.

Protagoras by Plato translated by Benjamin Jowett

Despite my love for Ancient History I am woefully badly read of their literatures and philosophies. My collected Plato has sat on the shelf for the most part for a long time. For some reason I picked (hefted) it up after reading Lao Tzu and for no apparent reason this was the dialogue I began. I knew it's name but little else.

What an experience to read this though. At the end I felt dizzy and somewhat nauseous maybe - it hurt. I'm not sure I'd entirely followed it as Socrates shows what he shows - partly this is as I was not sure I followed the logical argument that linked logic to emotions, partly it was as I was not sure what I mean by those emotions is quite the same as Socrates. So, I shall have to go back to it to work harder. But the effect was there, generally I did seem to follow it. I can see how Socrates must have crossed people and possibly in part why what happened to him happened. I felt for Protagoras as Socrates asks his final question and he can only answer that perhaps Socrates can answer it himself as his (Protagoras') original statement is contradicted by his own responses to Socrates' questions. If I felt wrung out by the process I can only imagine how Protagoras felt, and then we have Socrates who at that point would be happy to go on to speak of virtue further.

I mentioned how I felt at the end to an acquaintance who told me he felt the same and that Nietzsche felt similarly at the end of reading this, i'm sure there are others. I'm not sure what that means but this argument was very powerful. Yet the dialogue was full of humanity too -- though his argument may have been ruthless Socrates showed care and respect for Protagoras and care for his own friend who wants to study with Protagoras. I was struck how as Protagoras made his own statements Socrates at one point questioned himself, said he was unsure he could counter as it were, perhaps a moment not unlike my own in encountering his thought, though boy does he recover his ground.

I loved his aside about politicians - how speaking to them was like speaking to a book. He said they were like brazen pots. Nothing has changed then. Though I wonder if media training has made them even more so. In so many ways this read in such a contemporary way.

In CBT a lot is made of use of Socratic questioning. I have always doubted this in some ways as what can it be to question like this if we are not Socrates himself. It is Socratic type questioning -- but how may people can think like him, have this clarity that he had here. Reading this has only confirmed me in that feeling. Part of me wonders if in some way he directed the argument onto ground he was sure of - he effectively stopped Protagoras arguing in his own way and demanded short answers. This is something I need to think and learn a lot more about.

Another friend told me that Socrates may have dictated these dialogues to Plato - in a way they have some of that flavour. I don't know - I thought I knew that he was against such things being written down, which led me to my own thoughts on that and how maybe he recognised how vital it is words ad beliefs are tied to the experience of being with the person that speaks them, and how dangerous it may be to separate them from that person. But that may be me, again I need to learn more. I'm trying to catch up a bit with reading primary material, so I hope to read more Plato, must do so, I'm just beginning I hope.

Finally it was interesting to read this a day after I finished the Taoteching. Of course they are near neighbours chronologically. This dialogue of course examines what virtue is (Socrates asks Protagoras what he will teach his friend if he becomes a student) and I think moved towards an idea that knowledge is what may allow virtue. The 'te' in the Taoteching refers to virtue -- so it was interesting to read these two coincidentally together. It's a week or two since I did so and much has happened since; but the impression I had was that Lao Tzu would be much more sceptical of knowledge, that he may point back to the Tao, the darkness all may come from (and the more than everything that I cannot label) and the limits of knowledge. Again I need to reread and learn more. I'm thinking aloud really and just need to have read more. (Or do I need to engage the brain and feeling more, maybe meditate, I don't know, maybe I am right at my limit and maybe it's better for me not to push that too far and make rash statements - I may have said more when it was fresher, I need to read partly to refresh.)

Interesting to read your reactions and emotions on reading Plato. Perhaps there is a poem in there somewhere.

>117 tonikat: Wow. All I feel when I read Plato is anger. Great review!

Just catching up and enjoying your varied reading and reactions to it. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats was a favorite of my parents and I have several editions of it that were theirs but haven't read in it for decades. So I probably missed the "casual racism" then and it would undoubtedly annoy me now.

118 - nice idea Bas, I hadn't felt it myself, we'll see.

119 - thanks Florence, care to say more about Plato and anger for you? I've read more Heidegger who I think thought all went wrong from Plato on?

120, Rebecca - there may have been more but what stands out is his descriptions of siamese cats and the way they are presented, equality for siamese cats! But no the words used say so much, maybe not just about TSE but of his times.

Well, I get angry at Plato's dishonesty. I have read a bit about him and people who know a lot more about him than I do say that he didn't have all the answers, many dialogues end without answering the main questions he asked. I'm sure that's true but that's not the impression I get. I see someone who already has the answers pretending to look for them, and using dishonest methods to convince us, such as fake dialogs and logic based on false premises. Part of my anger is this reputation that he has and that made me approach him with very high expectations. Plus, I disagree with many of his opinions, but even when I agree, it annoys me to see him defend them with such poor arguments.

aha, thanks for explaining Florence - this was the first one I ever completed. It's interesting how some of what you said chimed with my own reaction, for example when I said I wondered if he directed the conversation to ground he knew. Regarding reputation you may enjoy reading Heidegger rail against the wrong turn in understanding Being made since Plato, you probably know this (Heidegger of course not entirely unproblematic himself).

T. E. Lawrence (writing as Shaw) in his introduction to his translation of The Odyssey commented about it and how its central family were really the only characters fully drawn then said - "It is sorrowful to believe that these were really Homer's heroes and exemplars." I often think of this when I think of the ancients; what you said of poor arguments reminded me of it. I also think of it when I think of contemporary times, sometimes.

I didn't mention in my comments - but I did very much enjoy during the dialogue their discussion of an ancient poem and Socrates' analysis of it, and appreciation of it, that seemed very contemporary, very human.

I think I read Protagoras, but I'm not entirely sure. I borrowed a book from the library that had three dialogues, and I was so annoyed I didn't read them all. I should try Protagoras again, maybe. Next time I feel like shouting at a book ;-)

I like that idea of shouting at books, maybe this is why they demand silence in libraries.

Yay Happy Birthday to LibraryThing.

Seeing it is LTs 10th birthday I just counted up my reading since I joined in March 07. I make it 198 books -- that is rough, I'm sure some haven't been counted somehow and it's likely the unfinisheds and yet to finish outnumber them. Not bad, a paltry few by the standards of those that notch 50, 75 or 100 per year, but it has been a very good experience that is getting richer all the time - and to have shared a reading journal like this has been most enjoyable, thx to LT and to all who have commented that are about and those that aren't here these days (and those that have read yet have not commented (yet)). As we all know it is an art to find our own way with wha we say -- I think I have made many comments as to such -- and I know I can get it wrong, and especially in wrestling with stuff get too caught up with it, but it is so worth doing, and especially for those moments of clarity that I've gained from it, and maybe from having worked to greater general clarity as I've gone and in expressing how I feel about what I've read (he says looking back at this sentence). I'm sure many would agree and say more for what these threads do.

Cheerleading done with.



What is Art? by L. Tolstoy

A serious question and a serious book, well written but clear. He says near the end I think that he worked on it for fifteen years, began writing several times and had to abandon and restart. He is of course who he is, the writer of wonderful works of art. He wrote it after his own reexamination of himself and his conclusions are intimately linked to that and his views on religion.

So what does he say? Well, he reviews theories of art in the eighteenth and nineteenth century that tended to link it to views of beauty - this includes the (to me, very interesting) German Romantics through to Hegel, before disagreeing with them all. Here I wonder at how he may link to/have influenced Joseph Campbell whom I began to read this year. Tolstoy concludes art is not about beauty but is instead about the transmission of feeling. He considers what is important for this, for example the role of sincerity. He considers what makes what he calls counterfeit art and how he sees it as inauthentic and he bemoans the (wo)man hours devoted to its production. He identifies that the highest art tends to express the religious feeling of the time and that this is the brotherhood (now also sisterhood!) of man (and woman now, though not said by him), Christianity as he sees it.

It's a beautiful theory. But what consequences - he gives examples of counterfeit art. To be fair he includes the bulk of his own work - citing only two short stories that he feels pass muster ('God sees the Truth but waits' and 'The prisoner of the Caucasus') - so there go War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Others dismissed - it's a long list, but top of it seems to be Wagner, also Liszt, he dismisses the usually critically beloved late Beethoven, lots of Bach tooQ! On painting just about all art seems to be counterfeit, he doesn't mention Leonardo or Michelangelo but argues that the view of art that developed since the renaissance has been wrong (and too linked to the Church). In literature he's vehement against Baudelaire and Verlaine; but also Oscar Wilde. He is against art linked to beauty and insists on its link to this moral outlook of his own. (he seems to hate Nietzsche -- and his reasons are most interesting, preferring the brotherhood of man to the ubermensch.)

I see great strength to his view at its weaker end to link art to the transmission of feeling makes a lot of sense to me about how I see art, how I came to my own writing; even at its stronger sense I see the power in seeing art as an expression of the highest spiritual feelings. However it is clear this then becomes a matter of subjectivity that he does not address - I cannot agree with dismissing so much art, (though I love he has given this perspective) of possibly other varieties and purposes (whatever I think of those) on the basis of such subjective judgement. I may want to have such judgements but not insist on them for all. It may also disrespect what is valid creativity by not recognising it as such. It may be even that by his own criteria that I may not agree with his view of what is properly religious and what passes muster by them. He does not address the subjectivity of his own view.

This seems to chime with some of my current thoughts on Tolstoy - I think i wrote above that I had a sense of him as possibly limited and here we see him as deliberately limited by his own very rigorous artistic and religious judgements. (yet of course he argues that in so doing the world may then truly open up -- and I can understand that.) He makes such judgements to the extent he may dismiss his own very great work. Of course he may do that - he may even be right in some sense. But it speaks to me of his own contradictions and possibly his own fight to quell them. However, and maybe I should hesitate to say this generally, but I wonder for myself if instead of denying and repressing contradiction it is best to accept and in so doing I may move forwards -- acceptance of my own contradictions may prevent them becoming truly problematic or 'sinful'? (wish I had known this sooner.) In that I now wonder if he was rejecting such in other artists, their own different attempt to face such -- and maybe later generations beginning to embrace such subjectivity. I also had a sense he may increasingly have been in a lonely place - and I want to read more of this and of the contemporary reaction to these views of his, e.g. from some of those criticised. His tendency to be late to performances seemed relevant.

This may all make him sound quite conservative and yet his view of religion is radical - as you probably know he rejects all organised religion (and this in part is why he rejects so much past art as it is linked to supporting such). He also dismisses the art of the upper classes as perverted and ways of avoiding realising their own position or else ways of ensuring it is maintained. He's a radical democrat in art - for equality for all and against genre and schools of art in favour of more spontaneity and freedom of expression, not rules as to what is presentable. Again this is very attractive to me...though it may be there can be democracy in some of these forms, I wonder, it may provide pathways for some that otherwise may struggle to make the type of leap Tolstoy can.

I've said a lot more than I planned to - I hoped to react, say how I felt, and not try to systematically present his thoughts as a system or summarise him. I feel I am failing and in so doing hitting fewer nails on the head lucidly than going round the houses. He was invigorating to read. I want to read those German Romantics. I don't altogether agree with him and yet I also do -- I just want to be less exclusionary. In some ways he reminded me of Marx, this was a sort of argument of alienation from what is most important to us, and from ourselves. He also dares to have a view of what true science may be.

His judgements of counterfeit art are fascinating and in many ways true. But I don't ever want to dismiss as much as he does. And in this it gave an unexpected outcome to me as another window on his thinking and his rigour - this speaks of his own very highly developed decision making and assessment which was part of how he got to his novels, a large part I am sure, every writer knows how important decision making is.

I'm not sure of adding this last comment - but I think he's also prompted me to think about sin, I'd like to learn more of this (theoretically). He made me think of a sort of teleology of sin, whereby in light of such a label (of whatever) what leads up to it may be judged -- and again I wondered if communication of feeling and understanding of feeling and acceptance may help more than simple application of the label and judgement and rejection. And this is also something I want to think more about with Tolstoy himself, as he seems to be trying to be rid of some things. It also makes me think about viewing art he may see as counterfeit in this way, by viewing and accepting and having a dialogue with it then the artist and/or myself or other viewers/listeners I speak with may mov forward, especially if we introduce Tolstoy's perspective as part of that.

Then I read this -- http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/16/susan-sontag-against-interpretation-cont...

which seems to fit (at least I read the Sontag quotes there, I dropped their interpretation/commentary after the ridiculous comment of how she was the only person to match Nietzsche).

It follows on from the above -- it made me think -- Tolstoy believes art is transmission of feeling, the highest art is the transmission of religious feeling. But he argues counterfeit art is not doing this and so rejects it -- and here we have it, he is therefore not open to the feelings it may give. Now his argument for how society is not turning to true religion is a good one, I like that. But I am less sure of judging all that art in just this way -- maybe it is transmitting that kind of feeling, just not in a way he could feel (so maybe that is lesser art, but maybe not so to the people that can hear that?). So, he seems very good at seeing what Sontag suggests, a clarity of what is...but in so doing he is interpreting and limiting things that are just not his taste at best and apparently against his world view at worst. So, he clarifies and yet also may hide what that art is doing at the same time. Fascinating. (and most challenging to him...and possibly to me too in my own way...maybe religious feeling is not just about what he feels it is...now that may be dangerous, but may it also have positives)

Once again though I may start to go round in circles about him, for all that they feel a bit clearer. I have two biographies of him, must get at them too. I'd like to be a Tolstoy completist.

...but I think he's also prompted me to think about sin, I'd like to learn more of this (theoretically)

Hee hee.

Very interesting thoughts! I have been meaning to read Tolstoy's book for a while, I think it's on my iPad already. And Sontag's book seems interesting too, although I was a bit put off by the grandiose praise in the article...

I do believe there is something transcendent in art which connects it to religion.

I came up with a lot think about from your Tolstoy review. I hadn't heard of this book. What an interesting window. And maybe he was pressing the boundaries, and so his rejection was intended as an effort to push his readers farther than where he went... or maybe not...

:) a bit of lightness much needed Zeno

Thanks Florence, I think so too - with Tolstoy the point is that it comes from the artist transmitting their religious feeling. He dismisses Hegelian thoughts I think. I've also read a bit of Tarkovsky's book Sculpting in Time which has been wonderful so far, awesome in fact. I have Marina Tsvetaeva's Art in the light of conscience to read too. A very Russian theme. I was glad to learn more about Susan Sontag's book - I'm beginning to think about lining up more English (maybe French too mais en Anglais) who I might read in English on art. I have E. M. Forster's book on novels but never enjoyed it much. Also some T S Eliot.

Dan, you ma also be interested in his translation of the gospels The Gospel in Brief, in fact it's a bit more than just that, he leaves out the miracles as i remember to give a very humanistic translation. Wittgenstein went shopping for a book when he was in the Austrian army in WWI, I've read a story somewhere that this was the only book left in the shop he went into, he carried it with him through his service, and I think it was very important to him. Tolstoy also wrote a book that explained his own view of religion more clearly My Religion. The former two works are often bundled with his A Confession. I'm not sure it is possible to go much farther than he went, but he is definitely hoping to inspire.

Stuff for me to keep in mind. I'm not up for it now, but if I do approach the NT (and I hope I will) then this might be a nice complement to that reading.

The Thin Red Line d. Terrence Malick

What to say? (I plan to log out a copy of Against Interpretation later.) I had an urge to watch this again, glad I did. I read recently Roger Ebert (whose judgement I like) didn't like it so much, only wrote of it once. Yet I find it a wonderful film. Perhaps I was prompted to watch it again as yesterday I stumbled across a facebook group about a petition for release of an extended cut. That I would like to see. Though clearly the director feels he has it saying what he felt a need to say/show, maybe more would confuse.

Sometimes I wonder if it offends purists with so much voiceover, speaking thoughts. I wonder if that directs a linearity, directs us too much -- is it literally telling as well as showing? Harsh of me? - at times I have needed telling and this did. I'm not sure how much I mind that, if at all. (speaks someone who didn't mind the first cut of Bladerunner either, as it gave it some tone of noir or pulp or something.)

I think I may be about to fall into interpretation, so let me try to describe. It's curious I speak of linearity when often I think people find a clear narrative missing. I always loved the way he depicts the storming the machine gun posts, the confusion, they're about to withdraw? Loved is a word I should be careful to use of such things.

I've seen it a number of times now. The first time was in a brand new cinema I had almost to myself for a matinee, an experience I remember very well. There are lots of experiences in this film, reactions to situations, world views affecting such and being affected and I feel it is very clear about that and in showing lostness and clarity. A thoughtful film from, of, and to the heart and soul.

It also has a wonderful soundtrack.

Witt's journey has poetic awareness, after reading Tolstoy this is a sharing of religious or I'd prefer here spiritual feeling. His journey is beyond that, it is art, but Witt isn't an artist here, he's doing, it's ethics, and myth.

I want to reread Tarkovsky on mise en scene (I found him brilliant on that) and then think about it for this film -- in fact I just have reread a section on that -- and again I don't want to interpret and maybe I don't have the film making skills and knowledge to know, but it is interesting to think of this film as a dialogue with this idea. (Tarkovsky's idea, basically, I think, is that mise en scene should not be repeatable, but should be in a way organic and developing out of the personality of the characters and their psychological state, not a convention.) The scene of Witt and Welsh in the ruined house and empty birdcage comes to mind, I can't make my mind up about it, is the birdcage too much, did it just emerge? Probably Mr. Malick is way ahead of me here. The film also seems to me to contrast a kind of poetic wandering of attention with linear goals and actions, asks questions about the latter....of what happens when we disconnect from the poetic to do stuff . . . oh not just the 'poetic' but from the soul perhaps and fellow feeling . . . how what we do then may increasingly lose connection to what is, as it is based on an idea, how we then reconnect to the poetic and the consequences.

I don't know, maybe this is also all just me and my lens on things. Such an interesting film. I want to work back through my Malick collection, if only to feed my own thoughts of how this may relate to his others, do they have less voiceover later? I woke up feeling strangely clear about experience and experiencers and tried to write this because of that feeling and because this film helped me when it was released - hearing and seeing these experiences of life and war, and especially Witt's and Welsh's. I haven't really expressed that clarity I had, also hope not too much interpretation, but then, stuff rules.

Edit - I just reread Ebert on the film - he criticises it as he feels the characters are not developed, that in a way they speak from the mind of the director, that their own may not be so reflective or poetic (I'm unsure of that and dislike it a bit). I see a point, conventionally -- but I disagree, we see great diversity of actions and reactions. But the film is a poem, it's right it speaks from the director, and this sense of one voice in many seems entirely appropriate for the theme, of unity amidst diversity, contradictions, enmity and how we lose track of that. it occurred to me the film is brave as it assumes we're in touch with the linear demands and shows the poetic, whilst many films do the reverse, show the linear, narrative and assume we sense the poetic which is touched on, nodded to, now dwelt on within the film.

just catching up with all your interesting thoughts. I've read a lot by Tolstoy so I was especially fascinated by your review of What Is Art?. When I read a collection of stories by him I was really put off by his religious focus in some of them.

>134 tonikat: I love that movie very much. I was one of the few in the theater when I saw it who did. I also read the book a couple of years and found it the same sort of experience, although it took me a couple of tries to really get into it.

I haven't read many of his short stories rebecca -- I have the collection walk in the light and that does seem to have a Christian emphasis, I think I got it as Wittgenstein loved his later stories. It has the two that Tolstoy felt still counted as art in what is art?. In a way I am open to these stories, in others I am unsure, cautious somehow. I liked the story 'walk in the light' itself. I liked the novel Resurrection very much, though again his style was constrained somehow by his later beliefs, it's wonderful though.

Hi ursula - it is a film to love. I have the book but haven't read it yet partly as i think another precedes it (From here to eternity?) and partly as I don't expect it will have the same flavour as the film, excellent as it may be. I think I once saw a previous film of the book and would like to see that again too sometime.

Shakespeare's Sonnets, Arden (Arden's third series) edited by Katherine Duncan Jones

Well, what can I say? First I want to limit what I can say, or try to, or should try to. So much has been said on these, some contradictory, yet perhaps in some way perhaps all has a point. What I say is just where I'm coming from, and going to, I'll be thinking on these sonnets as long as I can.

Where am I coming from with them? I never thought I'd be able to read them. Ten or twelve years ago I subscribed to a mailing list that sent me one a day -- I joined not at the start, inexplicably some were missed, it all stopped before the end. That was my first go, led me to try and put it right and buy the book. But yes somehow they seemed beyond me and I'd had no real context/idea to really click with them, or faith in myself and my lucidity. Partly my own block after school on reading Shakespeare on the strength that whatever I ever think of him there'll always be some footnote I've not taken note of, puts me off often.

But then late last November I had the chance to read them with a group including some poets I think highly of. An internet group read. Starting at the start helped. Also not reading one a day but reading them in groups helped - gave me a real sense of process in them (by the end I tended to read twenty and next time got back ten and do another twenty, the dark lady sonnets I read as a whole, though it took me most of the year to get to do so uninterrupted a second time). It's some time now since I was reading them, but that process in the Sonnets seems to be one of messages to a young man to turn outwards and seek love (1-17, as is well known), then to start to fall for said young man (or at least face up to it), then (and sorry to be vague I should have written this down to remember at the time the themes and journeys I saw) but to-ings and fro-ings with this, possibility of being shunned if this love became too obvious (it's not clear how much this is all one way at all, and in his head), the rival poet, then perhaps his own unfaithfulness, crises and the end (in sonnet 126), before the final group of dark lady sonnets addressed to said dark lady and not the young man any more at all (possibility it is he that is the friend that is in a further triangle with the dark lady). And finally the separate poem A Lover's Complaint from a woman over the man that done her wrong.

It is clear the poems address a man's love for a young man (1-126). Yet within that they also address love, itself. And this seems to me to be triangulated somehow by the Dark Lady sonnets (love for a woman that is not classically seen as lovely but darkly coloured and "therefore my Mistress' eyes are raven black") and by the experience of the woman in a lover's complaint. (edit - it's like he's trying to pin down love, perhaps?) In all this led me to find them as a whole as radical. To have been written and published when they were - I wonder how much this explains why we don't know so much of them at all, a love that very recently too dare not speak its name - but love that cycles trough a love process with its unconventional love objects in the sonnets -- to give a clear message that love is not defined by the aesthetic and ethical rules of the day...in fact rules that persist in so many ways still. Wow.

It hardly seems to matter if this was a really linked to a real person, or more than one and a composite...it still speaks. I was intrigued by the discovery of the portrait of a young Southampton that had always been taken as a portrait of a woman, but Pembroke others (and so many others in the theories of others) too may be relevant. But, how much do I need to know. Even whether it is real at all, who knows, or a thought experiment exploration of love.

I began wondering if they were a way of writing in to poetry, at the end such a thought is superfluous. This writer is a master (maybe a master mistress) of his own process - that stuck out a mile - able to recall and capture the nuances of such a journey, and able to face them, write them, explore...and the wit. Yes poems they are and yet often argumentative, anyone coaching a poet may wish to encourage past such argument, but it's fine here in the bigger picture. No one, increasingly not myself, lets me get away with such argument in poems. But it does call at times. And I think his approach helps create the space, as he does in plays, to frame the most poetic passages. And aren't we all always at differing depths of the poetic, and especially in love, that is a poetry in itself and may be part of what gives this sequence it's power. Is love also in part an argument with ourselves?

I read an introduction by Auden (need to reread this). I am reading Martin Seymour Smith's introduction and some other writing on them - I agree very much with his comment that in some way we all see our own experience of love in them, having seen Tarkovsky's film 'The Mirror' recently I see them holding up a mirror to our own experiences of love (may be why the homoerotic aspect can be so hard to read), it's part of why I say there is some truth in all readings.

We follow the process of this love that starts seemingly not there then fallen into, unclear how out there it is, though a sense around the century mark that he may have betrayed it and of course how such love was ultimately hopeless then (and for so long even here, and even now in so many places)...before it ends, and he ends it with the unusual imperfect sonnet, not a sonnet at all, missing its final two lines, the rest made up of rhyming couplets the usual ending of each sonnet -- for me it is him saying this is the end the end the end the end the end the end...and then no final couplet, as these couplets throughout have linked on to another, but there will be no more link now.

Then the dark lady sonnets, another unconventional love (to say the least) -- possible misogyny yes, which I don't like (and need to think more about), possible sadomasochism (though I sensed that less with my recent read back through these last sonnets, will look out for it again)...even that usual Shakespearean device of mistaken identity, much more. And having read the previous 126 suddenly we are in a place where he seems to be striking chords and counterpoints, it reminds me of something musical, a kind of freedom that can riff on the notes already hit, I don't know much of musical terms but kind of musical breakdown (for some reason I am thinking of Bowie's (?) guitar on the song Andy Warhol, or maybe Bach - preludes & fugues).

I'm not getting specific enough - to write of these sonnets takes close commentary through the whole lot. I have tried reading some. I will complete Don Paterson's recent take (that has upset some I think). I have not enjoyed what have read of Stephen Booth, he may give a good academic background and info on words, but his grasp of the poetry hasn't really moved me (and what he said of sonnet 24 for example just didn't do it for me) -- here Paterson's approach has strengths though it has upset many, it makes sense to me as a poet, can understand wanting to do this, loose as I find it at times. I'm enjoying Seymour Smith. I will try Helen Vendler. But all to help me work out my own feelings. Countless others too.

So much can be said of the arrangement, the numerical importances, what is said at 18 is said at 18, the importance of the number 28, of grand climacterics etc. But when I first read them and again this time sonnet 76 stood out to me, it is a poem of love at the very heart of the sonnets. I've said elsewhere that if there was one I'd wish I had written, it is this. I love the sestet especially, it's probably my favourite. I'm losing my way now, there may be endless cogent things to say, maybe it'll be an ongoing conversation in my posts, but love is how to sign off, and this is still there at the heart, no matter where the sonnets go, or how I may:

" 76

Why is my verse so barren of new pride?
So far from variation or quicke change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keepe invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Shewing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O know sweet love I alwaies write of you,
And you and love are still my argument:
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending againe what is already spent:
For as the Sun is daily new and old
So is my love still telling what is told."

- William Shakespeare

- A Lover's Complaint - at first I read this and wondered (with many) if it was by the bard, rereading I didn't have that feeling, it sounded more like him and also strikes notes against the sonnets, perhaps it feels like it could be not as finished, and perhaps also as it is not in sonnet form it jars (not wholly sure for myself why that may be, though such a coda was used for other sonnet sequences). I think martin seymour smith argues for it, (and for it as by WS) I haven't got that far with his intro yet, must get my head down.

(edited again for some typos and to make sense clearer on occasion 6/10/15)

I enjoyed reading your thoughts on those fabulous sonnets. More to come from you I hope.

Interesting thoughts! You make me feel like maybe trying to read the sonnets one of these days.

Thanks Bas - they are fabulous, I have hardly touched the surface. Did you mean more comments on them or in general? I wanted to write something that summed my feelings, but just had to start making an attempt, I'm a long way from summing my feelings...or from finding out all I want to about them.

Florence - thanks, I heartily recommend them. What I may not have conveyed is how they convey the atmosphere of the twists and turns of being in love, the whole process, springy optimism and bliss, jealousies, rivalry, bitterness and here ending, it is so rich throughout. I can't help think it must have been written as/whilst a process like that was experienced, otherwise his memory for a felt process of being in love is utterly beyond me to think how that could be recalled and reported as it is. It doesn't matter so much to me so much how far such a love may have matched what is reported, it'd be nice to know, but not necessary.

Sorry, I have started to gush I could talk and talk about them. In a way I wish I had here whilst I read them, though I was contributing elsewhere. I also wish I had written notes as I read them, maybe I will reread and do so.

Sometimes as I recall, the poems are also about poetry. I got a bit further with Martin Seymour-Smith's introduction - very interesting to read his argument of the rival poet being George Chapman, and also how he points to mutual admiration and not sarcasm. Seymour Smith's words often seem wise, I find it inexplicable why he was not referenced or mentioned at all by Katherine Duncan Jones. He has also cited a lot of very interesting scholarship on the sonnets.

I'm wondering if talk of the Sonnets, their history and especially over the way their clear reference to a young man has been treated over the years, I'm wondering if their are still people this causes difficulty for, or difficulty in this being discussed? Having read of the Pope's meeting with Kim Davis this occurred to me. The Sonnets very clearly point to how unlimited love is, it seems to me. There are limits I feel should be respected, but not where harm is not done to another, between consenting adults, for me. It also seems to me that Shakespeare has shown a very full understanding and experience of love, tracking it down, railing against what it may do to us too. (I do wonder about the possibility the sonnets and complaint are like a triangulation of love, from three apexes, but then at other times I think no, there are many apexes, interesting as these three may be.) It's not clear what he discusses goes beyond friendship and stronger feelings on his part, or the part of the voice of the sonnets. I often think that his facility with language may come from not being bound by grammatical rules and perhaps that is linked to being able to challenge such social rules - and i think flexibility with this is something that is a good thing, within certain limits. I feel partly the Sonnets and complaint also show how such rules may in fact be abused in their practice and may hide non love in what is conventionally acceptable. But it hadn't occurred to me that others may find talk of this controversial, so to say that that was not my intent.

Maybe that drifted from being a book based question, it wasn't meant as a troll in any way.

Just ordered Robert Nye's novel Mrs Shakespeare.

I was thinking about Tolstoy and how he decried so much culture as not art - how this may link to Adorno and the idea of the culture industry. It's so clearly there in Tolstoy, he criticises the process of manufacture and wasted man hours on counterfeit art. I haven't read much Adorno, I want to, and now want to get hold of some copies to check his references.

'The sonnets very clearly point to how unlimited love is...'

A very generous and enlightened sentiment, it seems to me. I like that thought, Tony.

With regards to culture and art, you also have Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (I think Benjamin and Adorno knew each other).

I also often find it interesting to think of things from the point of view of Dubord's Society of the Spectacle, where everything is geared to keep the populace in a state of unawareness of reality - TV, curated political debates of the day where all sides of the debate are carefully managed, the constant launch of the next big technological must have (iPads, 3d TV etc) keep us supine and satisfied with life on a low, uninspiring level.

It seems to me that in the UK the emergence of Corbyn is a worrying trend just because he is prepared to frame things outside of this curated discussion.

Thanks Zeno.

I had a reactionary thought - that they (the Sonnets) show the outcome of such love and then may therefore be a warning. But no I don't think it can hold, as they are too in love with love, it is real, which is why everyone reads so much of themselves into them (and why so many hetero people over centuries have been so offended they may be about same sex love). I mentioned also above how love shouldn't harm anyone, but of course there is harm here in a way, by the end, but then that also makes me wonder if it is love by then, and so in tracing how love can take such paths it invites me to refresh it and keep it real.

I do have some Walter Benjamin, not sure I have entered it all into my library, I tend not to do that now until I read things. I am getting used to his tone, I'm not sure it is for me entirely. I read or heard the piece on libraries before, I enjoy it and yet I am not sure I enjoy his style, so far. I started reading the work of art...I think I was supposed to read it at uni, may have, I am not sure, or if I did that I read it all as again I'm not sure I liked his style and much preferred the introduction to America by design which got my attention about that time (and also Kuhn) -- I'm sure this is all my fault and I need to read more to know better what it is I feel reading him.

I totally agree about that idea of how the fora of debate is curated, or seems to be. It is a dangerous idea. I am not sure how wholly true it is -- how much intent or decision there is always there to limit discussion -- I think some of it is a function of unintended consequences, everyone entered into the culture in certain ways is in some degree indoctrinated to it and so those limits don't need to be consciously made all the time (sometimes I am sure they are), it's just they enforce themselves. And I totally take your point about Mr Corbyn - I think for him it works both ways (people react consciously against him and unconsciously), as he is challenging the established order, which explains to me why even bbc journalists treat him as they do (and with them I often wonder what salary they command and so what their position is on so much of the current order). I do think though that the right definitely seems to have learned the points made by the left and to have reacted to them, to have adapted (and that they do not explain this -- if you watch a 'debate' between a person of the right and a person of he left on television, have you ever noticed how the person of the left's stance is so often to rail against injustices and what is obvious to them and the person of the right usually sits quietly, sometimes almost smirking, giving an aura of knowing better and yet they never really explain what they think (let alone address the concerns of the other person), often they even bait the person of the left -- I find this really scary and I do wonder how deliberate this is (sorry using right and left very broadly) -- it can give a message of emotional solidity to the person of the right and knowing better, whilst the protestor looks like a protestor, which may be best avoided for the eyes of many). I hope the left may adapt too...on that note you may like the article I am about to add below on the demise of Marxism Today, that predicted much of how culture has changed, before its demise.

Edit (for typos above) and - I have quite enjoyed seeing Blairite advisors have to take the role of dissenter and how angry they have been at this - Corbyn was not afforded such platforms and if he had come over as they did the'd no doubt have hammered him -- but enjoyed is not correct, we need to move beyond this. Sorry I am moving beyond books again and it's best if I don't get too political.

October's media medicine

- Irish Times - Review of Quentin Skinner's 'Forensic Shakespeare'
- The Guardian - article about the ex magazine Marxism Today
- Irish Times - poem by Theo Dorgan 'Harvest Moon' (for Seamus Heaney)
- Etonians and political leadership in the UK
- Guardian poem of the week - The Hinds by Kathleen Jamie
- Guardian obituary - Brian Friel
- TLS review of James Shapiro's '1599: a year in the life of William Shakespeare'
- Svetlana Alexievich edited preface to My Story by Andrei Sannikov
- guardian article on Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales
- Strictly Come Dancing, Jay and Aliona's Pulp Fiction dance at c 1h53...wow...and then watch the audience reaction...and then the judges'...Bruno 'you just out-danced Travolta, best dance EVER' and then Craig's too.
- Guardian article on Jay Kennedy's findings of a code to Plato that indicates h really was a Pythagorean speechless
- Guardian Review by Melvyn Bragg of Jonathan Bate's unauthorised life of Ted Hughes
- Sean O'Brien on Auden, the northern pennines & his own collaboration with composer Agustin Fernandez
- why the world does not exist - review of Markus gabriel book
- enjoyed this - Jamie Woon on Later, 'Sharpness' - you tube

Interesting Guardian article, Tony.

Coincidentally I was watching a David Icke video on YouTube where he essentially says, Corbyn excepted, all parties in UK politics are represented within a spectrum represented by the size of of a postage stamp.

David Icke, am cautious of agreeing with him, but he has a point. Just added another Guardian article about Etonians and political leadership in the UK.

edit -- the quote by a present Etonian is frightening and reflects badly on them I think. He made that mistake, said what he thought, he'll learn the ways of power.

I read Martin Seymour-Smith's introduction to his Heinemann edition of the Sonnets. I agree with a lot he says. He makes a good argument for George Chapman being the rival poet.

he's good also about sexuality - and the point I have not made of course is that this seems to be a heterosexual man falling for the young man. that in itself is interesting. On top of that the Sonnets begin with a call for the young man to step outside of love of himself and into the love of another, Seymour-Smith identifies this as narcissism, he then notes that the Sonnets are then aware of this charge for themselves -- he makes a dated point that a same sex relationship may be vulnerable to such a charge. I don't think I'd say that, but in a context of non acceptance then maybe there is something. Tat passage chimed with me of the Sonnets self awareness -- sometimes I even think he speak to the young man so well as he knows him so well, as he knows himself, as was, I often wondered if the young man could be himself, at least in part, as poets so often do.

Mrs Shakespeare: The Complete Works by Robert Nye

I found writing about Shakespeare's Sonnets that what I wrote probably suffered due to leaving it so long before considering I had completed - I always try to write about how I feel abut what I read. That usually needs to be fresh, when it has me energised, though it may also benefit from cooking (some things leave lasting energy), so, a balance. That writing about feeling also gets complicated when there is a lot to say about them, and when things get complex - I think that needs careful development and whilst maybe not a full summary then a better step-by-step to how I came to feel as I did, and so maybe written less spontaneously, or posted less so. In the end with the Sonnets I just had to do it, a bit like writing an essay, get something down, maybe if that happens in future I'll wait and rewrite. I tend to treat my threads like a rough journal, but that may frustrate.

Anyway - I read this very quickly this week and want to try to capture it now. Someone suggested to me there was some cross dressing theme in it - there was, but much more slight than they'd suggested. The story builds towards a reveal but along other lines (leading to disappointment for me, as I wondered if someone else had wondered about Shakespeare on those lines). We follow Mrs Shakespeare on her first and only visit to London to see Mr Shakespeare on the eve of his 30th birthday - she is reminiscing her own journal after his death - they walk from the south bank of the Thames near London Bridge to his rooms. We have Mr Shakespeare's wife's observations of him, sharp and not all to the good, a down to earth woman. It's an interesting synthesis from what we know, documentary and from the man's works and also a creation. It comes back to the Sonnets and an explanation for which bed he left her in his will. It offers us his relationships, interpretations of these -- and of their relationship to writings, especially to the Sonnets. It's keen to offer a view of sexual relationships - in a way this is the reveal, and that it is so central, the big pay off to the book I felt a bit deflated by that and dissatisfied -- although it may be possible to read this as a celebration of the love presented. It is obviously written by someone steeped in Shakespeare, it is full of small observations that resonate with what I know of him, so undoubtedly there may be many more I did not recognise. It's making a case for the Sonnets being written early, or well in progress then. Also for plays being in gestation then -- and that is something that interests me, an idea of lots of ideas stewing that later get worked out, I am unsure of that idea. Why? Because back to my idea of feeling and I have a feeling that the feelings need to be followed when they are had, that otherwise they may be lost and never developed (developing ten years later an idea that was alive at the time here?). Maybe it is more complex than that and maybe a (harder) working writer (than me) may have them in development like that -- but then what of newer ideas later? Ah well, it's pointless, I'm arguing at a fiction, as so much writing on Shakespeare is.

It draws an interesting figure who remains enigmatic even as he is presented - and an interesting somehow real picture of him amongst real people, people who don't really understand him yet do. And offers a view of him pre London etc.

Overall I enjoyed it, a quick read. Somehow I feel frustrated by it - but that may be due to frustration always about how little we know -- to some extent am I mortified somehow that someone has given me this image of him, would I prefer just my own sense of him?

Sometimes I have wondered if how little we know was deliberate choice by a very clever/wise person, who allowed himself privacy whilst achieving so much. On recent reading of the Sonnets, that some argue were suppressed, I have wondered that soon after their publication his career drew to a close, and that leads me to wonder if they hurt his career or made it hard for him to work. We'll probably never know, must celebrate what we have.

Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel

Brian Friel died a few days ago. A friend of mine suggested he may see him as a finer writer than Seamus Heaney. Quite something to say. I don't like to compare writers or measure them like that, maybe it's inevitable, not to mention at such times of strong feeling, so always wish to do so with provisions of the reality of others always beyond any words.

I have heard of many of his plays. I didn't think I had seen any, though having read this one it seems strangely familiar in some ways, especially the scene of the group gathered and the Chaplain's uniform and hat. But then the tone of the play brings back a foggy sense of reminiscence, yes as the subject but this resonated for me with my own senses of some times past.

It's a lovely play. Set in a small Irish cottage we follow five sisters - Chris, Maggie, Agnes, Rosie and Kate struggling to survive in changing times. Their brother Jack, a missionary priest has been sent home from Uganda, they believe with Malaria, but our understanding of this develops with the play. They also live with Chris's son, Michael, born "out of wedlock" and whose adult self is the narrator.

Act one is set in late Summer 1936, act two just three weeks later. We have a sense of a summer in those times that reminded me a bit of the sense of summer in The Garden of the Finzi-Contini's - a book I have not finished but a film that left a big impression on me - the similarity in a way is on how the memory is fixed in a way, and felt back to. If wholly different in setting and events.

The sisters live in the (fictional) village of Ballymeg, where I understand most of Mr Friel's plays were set. So where is Lughnasa I hear you say, Uganda? No, it is not a place at all but a time, the name for the harvest time of year from pagan times. We do have a sense of older pagan rites and of human desires and needs beneath the exterior allowed by development (and yes we have dancing! I danced for the first time for years in the summer and remembered how powerful it is) both in Ireland and also in Uganda with Father Jack. We also have a sense of the family as a unit, that holds things together and allows for survival; but at the same time it is the lines that this creates that may sow the seeds for tension and dissolution. The characters were well drawn, on my one reading I only struggled to get Maggie a little, it would be easier to see than to have to imagine them all, she stood out to me a little less, though central -- and in her relationship to Michael memorable if problematic.

I won't explain all that happens. We also meet Michael's father, Gerry. We're following a turning point, yet its a turning upon turnings. There are strong images also throughout, so I hope very much to see it one day. The final image as I suggest above seemed familiar and so I wonder if I have seen it. Certainly the sense that goes with it of reminiscence had a strong familiarity, again though it may be wholly different to my actual experience, it seems, as I think is also suggested in the text, to go beyond words. I imagine I like the touch of how Michael decorates his kites very much, as a reminder that this is true to in how the characters are drawn perhaps (in his story)-- and so surprisingly back to my earlier point about the reality of others beyond description, but here this time in this text.

I'm really glad I have read it. I am sorry it is at such time of loss. I hope to see and read more of his work and learn more of the man. It has a gentleness and openness that has appealed to me.

>151 tonikat: I have read Translations by Brian Friel which I can thoroughly recommend.

>146 tonikat: That looks like an excellent book on Shakespeare. I read Othello two years ago with a group and it would be a good followup.

A Kathleen Jamie poem is always appreciated, as was the analysis. Too bad the "tremendous energy" that inspired it didn't have the looked for result, but the spirit still stands.

Thanks Bas, I've heard of that one too - I'm going to plan more reading from him. Translations set in the same village in a different time and before the name was spelled different I think.

>153 SassyLassy: yes it does look like a good book. Another for the great tbr list. Not to mention the man himself.

I'm very glad to see Kathleen Jamie has a new book out so soon after the last. That tremendous energy - I like it, I saw Irvine Welch speak this year who also spoke of this. In a way I am not nationalistic at all, more internationalistic, but can understand the feeling and how invigorating it may be to gain control.

I'm glad to hear someone else looks at those links. I'm wondering whether to continue them next year, I've pared them back a bit.

Thinking about Tolstoy on art. If art is the expression of feeling, at its highest of religious or maybe spiritual feeling, then the most helpful way for me to react is also to talk about feelings. Yet this itself is so hard, potentially so messy, so vulnerable making, so mired in so many human minefields, but I have to try. And always fail...and any feeling of success in itself also a failure...remain open beyond any defining and nailing of it to the failure of such...I may need to be silent more...it's doable, it is undoable, it is not the doing at all, but the being, sincere, in touch with self and others, others and self, knowing what you mean but open to other possibilities...for me always rejecting the reification of the answers I tend to be drawn to, the whole is always more. Occasionally meet a moment and then move on, may be lost the next.

I wasn't thinking about it just then but I also read Susan Sontag's essay 'Against Interpretation' which is of course on similar ground to the above. I learned from it. But in a way by the end I was thinking of it also as maybe a message to herself to always see beyond interpretation, another call to the thing in itself that quite a number of people have expressed a need for. Another thing always just out of reach, approximated to.

I guess there is the thing in itself and then my reaction to it -- and writing of both those things is another approximation, often to approximation, and also sometimes may riff on it to something (new? no never new), that'd be nice, jammin'.

edit -- in a way she argues the work of art as a thing in itself, interesting to think about just that, as so often it starts to seem to seem like less than the thing in itself, but it is a thing in itself itself.

Hi Tony, belatedly I am catching up with your thread — too long neglected. So much to comment on, but I'll restrain myself!

In >107 tonikat: above you mentioned Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred J. Prufrock," which reminded me of an imaginative retelling I read earlier this year in the form of a short story by Steven Millhauser in his The Barnum Museum: Stories. This particular story was called "Klassic Komix #1", and it presents a surreal panel-by-panel prose retelling of Eliot's poem as a comic book. The genius of the poem — and this story — is that almost every reading conjures slightly different interpretations. You might find it interesting.

Regarding Plato, it is interesting that you started with Protagoras. I think one's impression of Plato is definitely colored by where one begins with him. My first readings were the short dialogues revolving around the end of Socrates' life, which left a vivid impression on my young mind. If you had read the Phaedo first, you might have a different impression.

Your comments about Tolstoy's What is Art? are very interesting. I must get that book and read it.

You make me want to reread Shakespeare's sonnets. I have a new vision of poetry that would make this very interesting indeed! Must talk to you about that . . .

Great reading here, if only for the Shakespeare sonnets. And, since you write so well, a pleasure to read.

Many thanks >156 Poquette: and thank you for your interesting messages :)

I read your comments on Steven Milhauser on your thread, you made him seem quite tempting. Coincidentally, elsewhere this week I saw this posted - Julian Peters comics - a version of the love song.

I'll bow to your Plato comments - I have so much to learn. Did you see the link above that decoded him as real a Pythagorean? I'd love to learn ancient greek, but stumble at languages in a serious way - and no time :( I didn't take badly to him, he's powerful reading though, i want to read more. Maybe I'll start as you suggest and am interested in the death of Socrates.

Tolstoy on art is a very interesting read - I think it also chimes with Joseph Campbell on what myth is doing.

and thank you Edwin >157 edwinbcn: - I'm glad you found it so and you brought a smile to my face when I read your comment. The sonnets, just wonderful and ongoing.

Interesting thread. Nice to see Malik getting some attention.

November media

Toby Jones interview, The Guardian I especially like his quote from Peter Brook (edited to the right Peter, i keep making that mistake, made it for years)

edit -- and thank you >159 March-Hare: -- yes I'm a big Malick fan

I've not been posting this month, and wow, now December:

Obituary, Christopher Middleton
Paris review, the art of fiction 1 - interview with E. M. Forster Lovely interview - love two bits of advice to critics. reading now also sobering, Maurice clearly not mentioned at all, my goodness.
Guardian interview with Anna Karina
Siri Hustvedt, Lithub 'Knausgaard writes like a woman'
TLS poem of the week, Ingeborg Bachmann 'Paris'

Life of Pi d. Ang Lee

I read this in my first year on LT and by my standards was quite harsh. I've just seen this film (or almost all of it), my reaction to the book has possibly put me off it. But I'm very glad to have seen it tonight and will re-watch it I think. It's directed by Ang Lee, whom I like very much for his humanity and belief in the world I think. Something about the book annoyed me, the floating island perhaps felt a stretch to me, or was for me at that time. But seeing it somehow helped me go with how i felt about it. I also think that the 'realistic' story at the end perhaps left me dismissing the wonder that had gone before, which I like to think is not me, whilst really it should not, and the wonder has come back to me a bit. I also remember not liking some of the style later in the book especially. But I am really curious as to what I may think now, I may have to reread. A story more than one way - I wonder if I may find a poetic and a prosaic now. Whilst was left frustrated previously I feel kind of satisfied today - and also am satisfied with my take on the island, whilst previously despite it I felt it was a diversion. The film is beautiful in look but also spirit.

Made in U.S.A. d. Jean-Luc Godard

I just watched this and it makes me want to write about it.

An incredibly rich film. Anna Karina dons the trench coat this time, I saw connections with Alphaville. Again moments of poetry. People say the narrative is fractured, in fact I think that's part of the narrative and says so much itself - the narrative was still there -- it was this fracturing and suggestion of experience beyond simply following story that gave it some richenss to me, and the juxtapositions of image, words, soundtrack...it jars me into thinking and feeling, engages me.

People (seem to me, and in what many say to me, to) often criticise Godard as overly intellectual - but I feel this totally misunderstands him, its not that he is overly intellectual, and I don't deny he is intellectual, but that the key to understanding him is emotional it seems to me and in understanding humanness. I think he has immense faith in his viewers to understand, if we listen with heart and mind. His apparent intellectualism is a dead end if just followed on its own terms, it is that that jars us into engaging more fully -- surely this is so?

There are hints here of a treasure to be found -- it seems touched on and then disappears, elusive, true, defined yet undefined, could watch it again and sense it differently. it maintains a tone of thriller yet at the same time subverts it - he jars us off well worn narrative tracks or roads...and we end with our protagonists on a motorway yet free, beyond trying to say what it means. Oh yes on the way we seem to have had politics but we also have politics put in its place and language and its limits considered.

It's poetry - lyrical, fluent yet playful in form, free flowing jazz. And on music a lovely a capella cameo from Marianne Faithful.

He respects us to follow and feel - and we can if we respect him and can step into this not our expectations. I feel.

Enjoyed reading your thoughts on Jean-Luc Godard

Thanks Barry. I was really glad to watch that and connect to it.

I've not been able to read much for various reasons, nothing finished since late October. And I'd been going so well. I have noticed its freed a tiny bit of writing up. But hope to get back in the swing soon.

Casablanca d. Michael Curtiz

I saw Casablanca tonight with some friends - a film I never expected to see with such sad redolence in this world of refugees. I'm so impressed how it seems they struck the motherlode, there is gold running in every direction within it...the space of the cafe allows such rich allusion and reflection, meeting place for sexes, classes, nations, ideologies, the needy and the predators, good and evil, it's all brewing. I wondered what it would be like to rewrite it and place it in Turkey now, just over from Lesbos...but then I thought that Syria and Turkey deserve more than a rewrite, maybe something in the spirit of this though...it seemed to me that yes there was propaganda to it, a reasoning for the USA to enter the fray, but it goes way past that...Rick has lost hope, is walking the ways of cynicism, loses faith, faces a choice, between good and evil, and he makes it, he walks like the west out of the dark ages as a knight, he still knows the ways of the world but he has bought into something more and sacrificed that world logic for that more...and it seems to me we need to get in touch with that more now, why we should walk the highest path and help others to see that choice, that they may make it, that anything else is less than we all deserve.

edit I want to be careful of talks on knights when i mention the middle east I meant he exemplified chivalry...and I think that example ma be good beyond the case of the west.

edit - also any rewrite would have to address the national stereotyping and orientalism in the original.

>165 tonikat: Interesting comments about Casablanca, probably my favorite movie.

Midnight in Paris d. Woody Allen
Ma Nuit Chez Maud d. Eric Rohmer

I watched Midnight in Paris last night, a beautiful, charming film, had not seen it, Allen on form, lovely. I especially like its renditions of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, of Hemingway and Adrien Brody enjoying himself it seemed as Dali. Gentle and lovely.

Then I got half way through Ma Nuit Chez Maud again and just finished it this morning, perfect for the Christmas season - I followed it better, leaving behind an idea of my own about Pascal to stick to its frame, a beautiful film that works in so many directions. I started watching the six moral tales this year after seeing the comedies and proverbs, and their switch in emphasis, C&P female in focus and 6MT male, was hard and didn't wholly click for me, but after a pause I'm more for trying them again, instead of fighting them (though I loved la Collectioneuse I got stuck watching Claire's knee, who'd have thought, blokey fetishism, yuck - well I say that but never got as far as the focus on said knee, I just wasn't enjoying it as I usually do). Thinking about it now it may be not just the switch of focus I see, but also wonder if there is a judgement about the moral tales, of the errors these blokes are making, that may be part of what I find harder about them - whilst the C&P do trace the mistakes its women make in love, I wonder if there is more forgiveness about that, maybe the work of an older wiser man (and this is relative of course, the 6MT are also beautiful and have a gentleness, a gentle knowingness, maybe he only refined later - also 'moraliste' doesn't directly translate as 'moral', in french it is more about thinking and feeling, process perhaps, it is not that that I get this sense of judgement from, but the films, or nearer to judgement in Rohmer's world maybe). I also want to read more of Rohmer, his films are such a delight. In between these all I loved the Marquise of O, what a film. Lovely films about love, the heart, gentle whilst at the same time able to explore its greatest storms and confusion. How I managed never to see him until the last five years I have no idea...and yet watching la collectioneuse and Maud, they have a slight familiarity, I wonder if I half saw them as a child. But don't sometimes the very best things have that - the pop tune that seems strangely familiar the first time you hear it...I used to think this then challenged the idea saying to myself I must have already heard it in the background say in a shop or something...but I think I'll go back to thinking something like it was always there, it's just it has just been found, condensed and released and shown to me for what it was now, right now, again, for the first time.

Midnight in Paris was fun. I saw it long ago and still think about it. I haven't heard of Ma Nuit Chez Maud or Rohmer

(lots of terms & acronyms I couldn't figure out - the six moral tales? the comedies and proverbs? C&P? 6Mt? la Collectioneuse?...

Oh!....six moral tales = 6MT, comedies and proverbs = C&P...ok, going back to read again...OK, it all makes a bit more sense now. Iffy brain in action over here.)

I'm a Rohmer fanperson now, heartily recommend his films. I do have a bit of nonsense in my heart, but at it's best it also makes perfect sense even as it makes none at all.

Another Rohmer fan person here. His films stand up to repeated viewings, I have enjoyed them over the last 40 years.

I've no real excuse Bas, I should have been watching them since the 80's. I hope to watch them much more. I've ordered a book of his writings.

Looking back over my reading I see I've not written about several books - mostly poetry.

I think there are several reasons for this - I hoped to write about Michael Donaghy on completing his collected, which I have no done.

I then find if I don't write in a certain time on poetry that I go cold, need to reread the whole book it feels to get back where I was with them. This may not be entirely true, but also a reluctance to go back over those particular journeys sometimes.

Then also I am a beginner at writing about poetry - and find myself with strong reactions and also emerging as a poet for reasons of respect to others and to myself feel a need to be cautious and careful in what I say.

Maybe this is solved if I restrict myself to my feelings, keep that clear. And remember respect for the writers.

I'm also struck, given the first few posts of my 2016 thread, where I try to fathom some reading goals for myself, how I go hot for authors, feel I could read and read them and then go cold, move on. Time and again I move away from authors, their voices and find them hard to go back to. Partly it is also a product of many others to listen to, wanting to do that. Partly I wonder if I drop boundary too much too quickly and then have to reconstruct it to them. It makes me feel I hear them well, yet at same time it isn't such deep reading. Partly my trying to decide who I do want to read more of and focus on is addressing this - there are people I want to go back to and yet don't seem to find the time or space to do so - not sure if that means anything in particular, possibly partly it is an avoidance...possibly of he reality of what the author in place of my idea of them. I'm unhappy I don't have more reading experiences in my past, and yet maybe forms of such issues also got in the way then too. But definitely sometimes just a need to hear other voices, tunes, versions of it all. I also now start lot of reading I don't complete which I never did before, get a sample of all sorts. Maybe after eight years of threads, listening to my own reactions and sketches of things it makes sense to ask myself such questions, and my reading has generally increased in this time in volume and range (despite less time for it), my writing moved in some ways, and the same can go for film and to an extent theatre for me...maybe this is a bringing it all back home to sort a bit...what I want to do most is find what touches my heart the most, yet that itself is such a hard question and perhaps, like a Rohmer protagonist, that is what I will find the best reasons to avoid.

In a way I have no idea. Yet at the same time I'm faced by the insistent claims of the media and critics as to what must have the best claim on my heart, not to mention that of others here and that I meet elsewhere. So many directions to choose, so many ways of getting things right, no quite right, partly right, wrong, a bit wrong, interestingly wrong. I read James Monaco write of the New Wave that intellectuals usually choose to make no choice and I may be fighting here to see what choices I really have. Do i want to choose them? Or reject them and choose something else.

I've also been thinking about form. In a way my writing has moved towards it at least I started to write metre and most successfully in sonnet form, whilst I began in a way as rejecting of it.

I had a thought today of how form may give a lie. Sometimes people look for the right form for a poem say. But I had a sense earlier of how maybe any form may hide incompleteness, int the face of it all....those that seem most perfect may lack the aspects of themselves we do not see...no view complete but that beyond us. And a sense of how dare we and how dare we judge forms. Not just in poetry but in other ways too. A meaninglessness to it all.

Maybe I am adrift between Christmas and New Year.

I've always since I was writing liked openness in forms, open to their own imperfection and not limiting. Maybe that's my answer, open to provisionality. Of course in poetry people seek to find just the right words, so a tension. Not exactly all all over the place, it just feels like it. Oh and just want a kind of honesty in the form and content reflecting the experience. And maybe I should stop and just engage with others doing all this.

edit - I may be wrong to say 'gives a lie' -- the lie may be in how we may take it, if we read a form as perfect, unless we read that as a pointer to necessary imperfection and limits, maybe. maybe just take each poetic form just for what it is - i think that helped me with the sonnet. Maybe also for the form of a book, always incomplete - interesting to think about the need to build more provisionality and irony in.

It's not so easy to review poetry. I enjoyed your thoughts on reviewing and writing.

Thanks Dan, I agree - I'd like to try to give my reactions though, but even they are not easy to get clear, and away from the experience.

I think i can see what you meant by your comment on your thread about the most important post of your year, that made a lot of sense to me.

Just going round in some circles of my own.

To tidy up this thread a little before letting it sleep, some comments on things uncommented on so far, most poetry volumes completed. But not complete thoughts by any means.

I'll try to say something about Michael Donaghy when i get back to finishing his collected, some prose of his and about him. He's a wonderful poet, sometimes I fear how sharp he is, but reading him isn't really like that.



Stay, illusion by Lucie Brock-Broido

I should have written about this months ago. I want to do so in the right way, I know others have read this and I exchanged messages on Suzanne's thread early this year. I didn't agree with her, but wanted to try to show why in the right way, not based on any claim to know better. But after leaving it so long I thought I should reread. I took it off the shelf a few weeks ago to try and read the first poem and I had exactly the sort of reaction I think Suzanne had (edit - in part) -- I had no idea what was going on and saw little point really. And yet, I've read it today just now, in the middle of a holiday, after a walk, drinking some wine and thought I had better try that poem again and hey presto, loved it -- felt it, not in a linear prose journey way but as language and richness, almost with a sleepy sense of heaviness and in the bet sort of touch with myself I can muster these days - and a quality I was missing a few weeks ago (that scares me) - it almost seems this difference is a bit like seeing figure or ground, different ways of seeing or feeling.

There were poems that were clearer in a linear or story way, I remember one standing out - checking up now 'Of Tookie Williams' I think (haven't reread it) - of an execution. I think there were others. I'm remembering more as I type though, of needing to catch some wave in her breath of poetry and when I did finding that beautiful -- some of this though as on Suzanne's thread -- may be partly my invention or misunderstanding, but it was worth my struggling to, such literal misunderstanding may go with poetry, but I enjoy her words and the images they bring, the feeling. It feels a bit sad I may struggle to have an interaction where this opens to me, but that is not an unusual experience i think with such experience. and not all such experiences maybe work for our own such experiences, we have those that are right for us. It also leads me to wonder, about writing that may need such feeling to get it...and am I even right to be making this claim, I don;t know, maybe it only needs to be read for what it is. I just have a nagging question, did Shakespeare ever need this -- maybe he just managed ti be direct out of his depths and dwelling. I like her - I've typed myself into really wanting to reread her (and read her further) - but it is easier for me to feel like that when on holiday. This may all just be my own idiosyncracy.

40 Sonnets by Don Paterson

I enjoyed this collection - I've enjoyed a couple of hs other collections and also quite enjoyed his commentary on Shakespeare's sonnets - although it is controversial in it's approach I think, and it did frustrate me in some ways. But he clearly enjoys the sonnet form and these were readable and enjoyable. One for funeral - 'Funeral Prayer' - I feel may be much anthologised, I found it wonderful.

Paterson was also playful as to the form of the sonnet - which was refreshing, as a would be sonneteer.

The Bonniest Companie by Kathleen Jamie

I love Kathleen Jamie's writing and enjoyed this very much. She wrote these poems through 2014, so we see a context of much that was happening in Scotland at that time with the referendum. As I was soon after interrupted in my reading I haven;t really gone back over it and must, I just know I feel I trust her poetry and how the world opens in it and reminds me that it may.

The Iron Man by Ted Hughes

A children's fable in a sequence of tories of this iron man. I've thought for many years that I'd never read this - remembered the girls in my primary class passing it between them and that I never got to read it after one of them loved it. I read it wit this in mind - and then I got to the final page and realised I have read this before. i think they leant me it one afternoon in class and I read it then (had to they took it back that afternoon never to be seen again), suddenly I was back there again in the late 70's, it brought a lot back. Memory is strange. Mine is.

It's a nice story - really works with its ending.

Sentenced to Life by Clive James

This is the first volume of James' poetry that I've read. I've read some of his poems here and there before - coming late to him. Last year I also enjoyed his Poetry Notebook.

I know little of him beyond his television work, which whilst charming I suppose I found frustrating that it did not develop somehow. I had no idea then he was a poet. Clearly with much to teach to me too - of poetry and technique, of poets, of thinkers and of life. I enjoy his work and wish him well. He's clearly had challenges, he speaks of his faults, also his health. These poems written under the shadow of bad health, the future unclear (or sometimes it seems clear it would not be there, happily not so (I hope)).

Many poems of great beauty - he turns some wonderful lines and poems. At times I thought of the famous late interview with Dennis Potter before he died - the sense of a man connecting to the most important things in life. Regret yes, but much must have been well done to be where he is, and also true in the lessons he has learned. I must reread it. It makes me want to wish him well and let him know many must feel with him.

the stats, the stats, always the stats

Authors read:

Male 21 (!)
Female 5

Novels - 4
Poetry - 14
Philosophy - 6 (quite a liberal interpretation)
self help - 1
mythology / ancient history - 1
Drama - 1

time period writing is from:
Ancient - 2
C17th - 1
C18th - 1
C19th - 1
C20th - 12
C21st - 10
(rough)

Author nationality:
Ancient Chinese - 1
Ancient Greek - 1
British - 13
Australian - 1
Russian - 2
USA - 7
Irish - 1(?)
Swedish - 1
French - 1
(very rough - no checking on dual nationalities and the ancients maybe better to say Athenian for example).

Format:
physical book - 12
Kindle - 16
ibook - 1

rereads - 1

films - 100
film in an actual cinema - 19 (quick count and assuming I recorded them all)
tv series - 8

main disappointment is the balance of male to female writers - but then also just need to go where i need to go with them, but something to try even harder with.

My 2016 thread is here

edit -

average number of years from publication, approx = 226
hi = c2515 (taoteching)
lo = 0 (5 of them)

>176 tonikat: interesting that you revisited Brock-Broido and interesting response. Sometimes a negative review gets us thinking, no?

Oh yes, definitely Dan -- I think I am saying it is a dialogue I have to have with myself sometimes. I think I may now reread it fully and see how I feel. There are many poets I don't get at all or only really connect to certain poems, in fact I think that is quite normal. But I like to leave it open that it may be me, trust that there is something more.

edited for redundancy.

Again that is my dialogue with me. Important to question myself. I can only say what I find and how my process works - for others their outcome may be quite right for them. I over read and find too much in things all the time. But discovering poetry and the feeling of it is such a great, wonderful mysterious thing - we can all only hope to find it for ourselves, our poetry, no one can claim to know it or to know the way to it really, only hopefully feel it and in feeling it show it that may resonate in others. So I am hoping i have not sounded critical, especially of Suzanne, whose reviews and comments I enjoy very much.

edit - We all know poetry - even me, that has been my discovery, from a place where poetry was what I did not know. It is also a discovery to remember how to remember it in everyone else and respect that, and that poetry has so many forms, more than I may number, would want to. I can be clumsy in respect of others and in remembering not to impose my own and way to my own on everyone else - that is a key I need to keep finding.

Stay, illusion - a title from Shakespeare, Hamlet. Whilst apparently wanting illusion also aware that it is - a harsh reality (I may also think of Whitman's eidolons). As I remember it there is also harsh reality in this book of poetry - beauty yes and poetic sense, but of difficult things in fact perhaps examining that poetic sense of difficult things too. I am going to reread it, hopefully today.

I had aimed not to prefigure what I say in a quick exchange with another, not to do that at all, but that discussion really was part of what led me to read this to start with. However I cannot speak for anyone else, would not wish to, and I may be missing their point - everyone has every right to dislike whatever reading they make, obviously. What I think I am arguing with is really my own resonance with what was said -- and yes that may miss some of what others said. And I do have a tension in reading this, as suggested above, where I fear I could read this and miss, or dismiss or not feel it - but my missing is my missing, not what others may have seen and not liked.

At the end of the first poem, 'Infinite riches in the smallest room', are these two lines (which I don't think LT will let me format as in the text):

"On the road, blue thistles, barely
Visible by night, and, by these, you may yet find you way home."

So, I think an acknowledgement of difficulty in the journey, but that the way home may be found, with difficulty...perhaps to those infinite riches.

edited to clarify my own labyrinths.