what are you reading now?
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Are you enjoying it?
I'm currently dipping in and out of a book of Orwell's essays. Always enlightening and entertaining. I love the way he could write about something like the Boy's weeklies and glean all sorts of wisdom from them.
Also got a history of painting book on the go, which is 50% pictures.
Currently carrying a book about how to write scripts around with me. As with any book I feel I SHOULD read, I can't read it. I don't necessarily want to write scripts, but I'd like to understand story structure. Sometimes I feel like I should stop reading things all the time and write something instead.
I'm currently dipping in and out of a book of Orwell's essays. Always enlightening and entertaining. I love the way he could write about something like the Boy's weeklies and glean all sorts of wisdom from them.
Also got a history of painting book on the go, which is 50% pictures.
Currently carrying a book about how to write scripts around with me. As with any book I feel I SHOULD read, I can't read it. I don't necessarily want to write scripts, but I'd like to understand story structure. Sometimes I feel like I should stop reading things all the time and write something instead.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Mostly finished Dunsany's Time and the Gods. It's kind of nonsense - actually, it's pretty much pure nonsense - but each little story is effectively a parable, with some nice messages about the futility of any search for Absolute Truth, the sorts of people who set themselves up as founts of wisdom, that kind of thing - and I'm quite enjoying the ultra-baroque prose style.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Philip Larkin is one of the best poets I've ever read and his poetry is practically the dictionary definition of short and miserable.
For example:
Mr Bleaney (1955)
Philip Larkin
‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,
Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.’
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook
Behind the door, no room for books or bags —
‘I’ll take it.’ So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try
Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits — what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why
He kept on plugging at the four aways —
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke.
But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.
For example:
Mr Bleaney (1955)
Philip Larkin
‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,
Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.’
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook
Behind the door, no room for books or bags —
‘I’ll take it.’ So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try
Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits — what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why
He kept on plugging at the four aways —
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke.
But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I've always struggled to understand poetry, to the extent that I bought that Stephen Fry book about how to understand poetry. (It is as yet unread.)
I've always responded to Larkin, for some reason. Obviously the depressive slant of it all is in keeping with my own pessimism, but it's also self-evidently elegant and beautiful, without being high-flown.
I managed to teach myself to enjoy poetry a bit more by buying an audiobook of it and listening to it spoken by actors like Anton Lesser. Lesser makes morea 'Ode to a Nightingale', for example, than I ever would have just reading it.
It's really important to recognise that poetry is a different beast to prose, that it demands to be read aloud, or heard. I think there's something musical about poetry, which perhaps explains why I feeel able to 'tap in' to it more when I'm stoned.
Other poets/poems I admire:
Elegy in a country churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org.uk/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc by Thomas Gray
Quite a few poems by Thomas Hardy (a big influence on Larkin, so no surprises there), including this:
Heredity
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance -- that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die
Some Wordsworth, including:
CONTENTS BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
"A SLUMBER DID MY SPIRIT SEAL"
A SLUMBER did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
1799.
I managed to memorise 'Ozymandias' while on holiday, though half of it has already slipped my mind.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/46565
I've always responded to Larkin, for some reason. Obviously the depressive slant of it all is in keeping with my own pessimism, but it's also self-evidently elegant and beautiful, without being high-flown.
I managed to teach myself to enjoy poetry a bit more by buying an audiobook of it and listening to it spoken by actors like Anton Lesser. Lesser makes morea 'Ode to a Nightingale', for example, than I ever would have just reading it.
It's really important to recognise that poetry is a different beast to prose, that it demands to be read aloud, or heard. I think there's something musical about poetry, which perhaps explains why I feeel able to 'tap in' to it more when I'm stoned.
Other poets/poems I admire:
Elegy in a country churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org.uk/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc by Thomas Gray
Quite a few poems by Thomas Hardy (a big influence on Larkin, so no surprises there), including this:
Heredity
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance -- that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die
Some Wordsworth, including:
CONTENTS BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
"A SLUMBER DID MY SPIRIT SEAL"
A SLUMBER did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
1799.
I managed to memorise 'Ozymandias' while on holiday, though half of it has already slipped my mind.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/46565
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I don't believe you. No-one can have that many things on the go at once and be getting anything like the most they could out of all of them.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night -
A pint of plain is your only man.
When money's tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt -
A pint of plain is your only man.
When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A pint of plain is your only man.
When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare -
A pint of plain is your only man.
In time of trouble and lousey strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life -
A pint of plain is your only man.