The City, The Country

[Corpsey]

Has anyone read The Country and The City by Raymond Williams?

Found it on a shelf, one of those thousand books I bought and never took a second look at. Wondering if it's worth a gander.

 

[version]

Has anyone read The Country and The City by Raymond Williams?

Found it on a shelf, one of those thousand books I bought and never took a second look at. Wondering if it's worth a gander.

@sus has.

 

[shakahislop]

while you might be more likely to get shot or knifed in a city crime, you're more likely to get tortured and dismembered in the basement of a nondescript country home.

the evidence against leo keeps mounting

 

[Murphy]

read it (or parts of it) at college long time ago, a tv adaptation is on YT with Williams presenting looking out over hills

 

[version]

One of the best investigations of trad phenomena is Raymond Williams' The Country and the City

The Country and the City, by Raymond Williams

Counter-Pastoral The Country and the City. by Raymond Williams. Oxford University Press. 335 pp. $9.75. Early in The Country and the City Raymond Williams quotes a couplet by George Crabbe

www.commentarymagazine.com

Defense of a “vanishing countryside”—“the open air,” “the life of the fields”—can become deeply confused with that defense of the old rural order which is in any case being expressed by the landlords, the rentiers, and their literary sympathizers. A physical hatred of the noise and rush of the city can be converted . . . to a powerful but acrid vision of the metropolis reclaimed by the swamp and the reappearance of a woodland feudal society.

As Williams explains it, since the 16th century the “social condition of poetry” had been to give a false picture of contemporary life by employing idyllic tones of the past. The newer poets, however, not only write of a perfect past which never existed, they do so with a tragic sense of loss, since they have seen the cottages and fields of their childhood destroyed by the backlash of the improving spirit. Thus the tradition of the “counter-pastoral” is created. Even when, with Wordsworth and John Clare, there comes an affirmation of a living “Humanity” existing within the landscape of loss, it is made by a turning inward into the “Eden of the heart.”

 

[sus]

It's very good

Will have to check out the YT special as a refresher

 

[sus]

Cuntry and Seedy

 

[IdleRich]

Has anyone read The Country and The City by Raymond Williams?

Found it on a shelf, one of those thousand books I bought and never took a second look at. Wondering if it's worth a gander.

I've read The City and the City by China Mieville which is better cos it has more city and less country.

 

[IdleRich]

There's probably at least one middle-aged couple into S&M or swinging or something in every suburb. Tony and Pam in their leather.

What's worse than that is that there actually isn't

 

[IdleRich]

Luka's descriptions of the countryside and country people in this thread are brilliant.

Yeah I'd agree, that along with his stuff about uber delivery riders is his best - should chuck in all that shitty poetry and concentrate on skewering whatever those things are. When he described the people waiting to be employed as though they were out of a melville novel... the choice of the word "lascars" was perfect.

 

[IdleRich]

Has anyone read The Country and The City by Raymond Williams?

Found it on a shelf, one of those thousand books I bought and never took a second look at. Wondering if it's worth a gander.

Earlier in this thread you talk about buying it

 

[version]

Chop, chop, Corpse!

 

[RWY]

Has anyone read The Country and The City by Raymond Williams?

I read it back in 2015. I really don't like Williams' overly wordy use of language (very typical of working-class intellectuals dealing with imposter syndrome) which gets in the way of his excellent analysis. I expect you would get far more out of it than I did.

 

[IdleRich]

I read it back in 2015. I really don't like Williams' overly wordy use of language (very typical of working-class intellectuals dealing with imposter syndrome) which gets in the way of his excellent analysis. I expect you would get far more out of it than I did.

backhanded compliment

 

[Corpsey]

Indubitably I may, conversant as I am with the intoxicating jouissance of opaque ratiocination

 

[IdleRich]

Indubitably I may

Definitely maybe

 

[IdleRich]

Yeah I'd agree, that along with his stuff about uber delivery riders is his best - should chuck in all that shitty poetry and concentrate on skewering whatever those things are. When he described the people waiting to be employed as though they were out of a melville novel... the choice of the word "lascars" was perfect.

Also it needs to be said that Catalog's input into this thread, his brutal destroying of people who had the misfortune to grow up somewhere not as good as where he was fortunate enough to mature, was worthy of mention.

 

[IdleRich]

I just went with my mum to this village called Shrivenham - it's where her book group meet - and it's exactly like this thread.

I'm in the deli now in fact



There is a card shop and a post office on this street, two pubs and... that's it.

 

[IdleRich]

The drive here through repetitive featureless beauty.

 

[Murphy]

hard to believe so much land, once forested, is now bare bones

add ripping out hedgerows to expand field systems, you see such all across the eastern counties eg Leicestershire