craner
Beast of Burden
You can claim him for the cause if you want Hands, I won't hold it against you.
In Parenthesis and David Jones
- Thread starter WashYourHands
- Start date
You can claim him for the cause if you want Hands, I won't hold it against you.
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
Not claiming him for any daft separatist “cause”, simply correcting your peculiarities. If he’d been Brummie with a Welsh mum writing about Mercian mythology, you’d be all over it
Jones explicitly (and mistakenly) connected blood to ancestry in his intro, he read mein kampf with a mix of fascination and horror, so probably cancelable by today’s moods
what I gleam is a wandering, busy mind, observing the similarities and differences of Londoners and Taffs, stuck in a pressure cooker together, trying to make sense of the insane - where else could myth find a more welcoming cohort?
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
craner
Beast of Burden
I'm not sure about the leading question, but as a book about the First World War I do think it's one of the best. I see it alongside Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War, another relatively neglected masterpiece. For me, two of the central texts of arguably the most important single event of the twentieth century.
jenks
thread death
Great to see Blunden mentioned - often neglected or disparaged as hopelessly out of step Georgian swept away by the tide of modernism. one of the few good things that happened in my English lesson as a kid was an ancient teacher who taught a load of Blunden's poetry to us - Blunden had been in correspondence with him for many years. The poor old teacher was still mourning his death in the early 80s (i think Blunden died in the mid 70s) I know Luka's eminence grise, Robert Macfarlane, is a fan of his work.
woops
is not like other people
are you sure that's not his carte blanche
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Love the harsh, spiky dissonance in sentences like this, perfectly suits the subject matter
"Peg sprawled tentacles, with drunken stakes thrust up rigid from the pocked earth...
.. corkscrew-picket-iron half submerged, as dark excalibur, by perverse incantation twisted."
And at times he definitely reminds me of Pound a lot, especially in bits like that big speech by Dai Greatcoat in chapter 4. I mean Pound had a very harsh style in stuff like the Seafarer and Canto 1, with all the Anglo Saxon alliteration and that, not exactly lyrical or pretty, but magnificent.
"Peg sprawled tentacles, with drunken stakes thrust up rigid from the pocked earth...
.. corkscrew-picket-iron half submerged, as dark excalibur, by perverse incantation twisted."
And at times he definitely reminds me of Pound a lot, especially in bits like that big speech by Dai Greatcoat in chapter 4. I mean Pound had a very harsh style in stuff like the Seafarer and Canto 1, with all the Anglo Saxon alliteration and that, not exactly lyrical or pretty, but magnificent.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Might as well post this again since I went to the trouble of typing it out on the other thread. Absolutely love it.
"Appear more Lazarus figures, where water gleamed between dilapidated breastworks, blue slime coated, ladling with wooden ladels; rising, bending, at their trench-dredging. They speak low. Cold gurgling followed their labours. They lift things, and a bundle-thing out; its shapelessness sags.
From this muck-raking are singular stenches, long decay leavened; compounding this clay, with that more precious, patient of baptism; chemical-corrupted once-bodies. They've served him barbarously - poor Johnny - you wouldn't desire him, you wouldn't know him for any other. Not you who knew him by fire-light, nor any of you cold-earth watchers, now searchers under the flares.
Each night freshly degraded like traitor-corpse, where his heavies flog and violate; each day unfathoms yesterday unkindness; dung-making Holy Ghost temples.
They bright-whiten all this sepulchre with powdered chloride of lime. It's a perfectly sanitary war."
"Appear more Lazarus figures, where water gleamed between dilapidated breastworks, blue slime coated, ladling with wooden ladels; rising, bending, at their trench-dredging. They speak low. Cold gurgling followed their labours. They lift things, and a bundle-thing out; its shapelessness sags.
From this muck-raking are singular stenches, long decay leavened; compounding this clay, with that more precious, patient of baptism; chemical-corrupted once-bodies. They've served him barbarously - poor Johnny - you wouldn't desire him, you wouldn't know him for any other. Not you who knew him by fire-light, nor any of you cold-earth watchers, now searchers under the flares.
Each night freshly degraded like traitor-corpse, where his heavies flog and violate; each day unfathoms yesterday unkindness; dung-making Holy Ghost temples.
They bright-whiten all this sepulchre with powdered chloride of lime. It's a perfectly sanitary war."
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Well I dunno, I said a few other things on the other thread too but I've only just started reading him myself. I also went to the trouble of typing some bits out, have you read them?
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
He's on about the trenches and that, isnt it obvious? Don't feel like you have to like him though.
luka
Well-known member
its way too hard for you.