I didn't sleep very well last night - I have a racking cough keeping me awake. So - sometime in the early hours of dawn I composed in my head a brilliant post, a post that would wrap up all the things I wanted to do when I set out with this blog in one elegant, witty piece.
Then I fell asleep. I've rewritten it below - it isn't as good as the original would have been though.
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Fred First reminds us that America is not Abu Ghraib. He has a slightly more pessimistic take, wondering if the America of his cub scout days has not become an imaginary place - let us hope for all our sakes that he is wrong.
In many important ways, America the Beautiful is becoming an imaginary place, morphing beyond recognition from the indivisible republic our forefathers fervently imagined so long ago.
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This wonderful phrase isn't mine I'm afraid, but comes via the Editorial to the latest issue of Poetry Review (published by the Poetry Society). The writer Iain Sinclair appeared on the Radio 4 programme Today to discuss the work of J H Prynne [poem here] and Philip Larkin.
Sinclair... questioned whether such comparisons - Larkin v Prynne - served any purpose beyond a journalistic desire to polarise every issue into a two-party fight. He said "you might as well compare nougat to electricity". The phrase is a good one; neither is fairly judged on the other's terms. Poetry can be very simple, very direct, and memorably rhetorical; it can also be properly difficult, in the senses of complex, intricate, uncoercive, abundant. To pretend it has to be one or the other is to fall into the increasingly unproductive adversarial approach of journalism, with its need for swift reductive judgements and the macho frisson of combat and domination. Poetry, above all the arts, should be
beyond that.
Hear hear - but why limit it to poetry? Why can't we have more journalistic recognition of complexity?
(Originally posted on Panchromatica Too)
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I have two blogs - the one you are reading and this one. I'm not sure it is a good idea - it just doubles the opportunities for procrastination - but there you go! Following Rebecca Blood's advice, I'm looking at them again - forgetting what triggered the original decision to write and looking at what I have actually written.
So - this blog will concentrate - as the header says - on people and places. Political stuff will probably continue to apppear but writing on music and art will move across to Panchromatica Too which I want to develop into a blog dealing with wider cultural issues - like Brian Micklethwait, culture will mean what I say it means!
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Modesty shouldn't allow me to quote this but then...
You are a GRAMMAR GOD!
If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!
How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
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Skimming thorugh the stats I noticed a visit via this post on Crooked Timber.
It triggered a memory of another headline allegedly from the Guardian:-
"Queen in brawl at Palace"
Before anyone thinks I'm trying to create another Royal Rumour, let me hastily say it related I think to a footballer called Gerry Queen and a match at Crystal Palace.
Can anyone confirm the headline?
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Fred First at Fragments ~ from Floyd has an interesting post on the topic of where we come from (no not the gooseberry bush!) . The exercise he suggests would be a great way to begin work with a community group looking at sense of place and local distinctiveness. Try it - I will be posting my own effort soon.
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This is from the discussion forum on RedPaper. You will have to register to read the context, but it seemed such a good demonstration of the value of the arts to all of us, not jus the critics and others who make a living from it, that I asked the writer for his permission to post it here.
I can recite many poems by various poets off the top of my head. I have sonnet 18 by Shakespeare crammed away somewhere between my ears. I used to work in a bikini store down in the Keys (I loved that job). The manager was moving away and was training me for the position. she used to have to bring her 3 year old daughter, Savannah, in with her sometimes as she couldn't afford a baby sitter and her husband worked long hours out on the fishing boats. One day we had little business and I was entertaining the little girl while her mother did the books. I decided to start reciting Shakespeare to her...."Hey Savannah.."
"yes?"
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
::giggle:: "yes."
"Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. "I was in awe that this three year old had actually sat wide eyed and listened to me recite the whole poem. I was expecting to maybe get through three lines.
when I was done she ran over to her mother, threw her hands in the air like she was making a big circle and said "Mommy mommy, sometimes the sun comes out... and ... and... its big and pretty."I recited some of my poetry to Savannah too, three lines in she was back to drawing on the back of the counter with a crayon.
Kurt Erhard Berger
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