The Waste Land (1922)

[...]

I didn't know Craner played guitar.

I don't, it was a joke.

 

[luka]

i'm reading the cantos really slowly and just noticed

Palace in smoky light,
Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones,

and

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

It's good you're reading the cantos. Everyone must. Version will start soon.

 

[martin]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Man_factor

This is in Burroughs too.

And in Iain Sinclair's 'White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings' - "When two men meet a third is present, a stranger to both".

Weirdly, read The Wasteland for the first time this year, spotted that coincidence, then logged onto Woebot's Zoom book launch, and he's talking about isolation-induced hallucinations of other people.

 

[luka]

It's not the same but when I get really fucked out my head with people round the flat there comes a point where I realise they've all gone and I can't work out how long I've been by myself,as if I were with other people. having conversations or whatever. Feeling as if I was in company

 

[Corpsey]

I don't think I said a single interesting thing in this thread.

 

[luka]

you weren't on top form sadly

 

[luka]

luckily i made up for it by being sparkling

 

[Corpsey]

I suppose I was reading it "through" what other critics had said about it. Whereas Paradise Lost I didn't have a clue what he was on about a lot of the time but I was balls deep in the poetry itself rather than the footnotes.

 

[luka]

You should have done a massive load of acids and read it all in one go, posting your wonderful insights here as they occurred.

 

[version]

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

There are currently three members online, but only me and mvuent are visible.

 

[martin]

https://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/search?q=Eliot

Interesting image at the bottom of that first page of search results.

 

[luka]

 

[Corpsey]

Is that a one off quote or does it weave in four quartets throughout the story?

 

[catalog]

sounds like something you get in an aldi christmas cracker

 

[Corpsey]

If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

 

[version]

 

[DLaurent]

April is the cruelest month.

 

[Corpsey]

Last night I got stoned and started reading TWL for something to read on the loo and ended up reading the whole thing (most of it not on the loo, if that's relevant). There are bits I find a bit boring and skim but there's a fair chunk of it that I find compelling, compulsive and charged with some sort of juju power that slightly freaks me out. Like I started feeling my depression and anxiety from earlier in the year start hammering at the trapdoor of the cellar I've managed to trap them in.

Been reading quite a lot of Eliot lately, both the early jaundiced urban stuff ("Preludes") and the post conversion stuff ("Ash Wednesday", "Song of Simeon").

He's NOT BAD.

 

[Corpsey]

“This music crept by me upon the waters”
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

 

[Corpsey]

Last night I was sort of pelting through it without thinking and the rhythm of it is really powerful and mesmeric