J. H. Prynne

[woops]

what the fuck is that title & cover design it's disgusting

 

[luka]

i dont mind it tbh

 

[Benny Bunter]

I've also been using "close reading" techniques on To Pollen, but that takes a lot longer than computational analysis ( "distant reading") - I haven't got past the first page, there is much to process - disease, Catholic schools of thought (?), the physics of sound, probability...

I want to read this one but every time I open the page and look at it, I have to turn away after a few seconds. It's not much fun to read. I admire your approach to it though.

Weirdly there is at least one of the poems (or verses?) towards the end that is more or less straightforward English - "we see shots of a father racked in misery and bearing like a gift his crushed and bloodied son, a bare infant."

So there's the Iraq war reference then, I guess.

 

[luka]

recieved wisdom is that its 'about' iraq i think... as far as i can remember anyway

 

[Benny Bunter]

Whatever it's "about" the whole thing gives off bad vibes

 

[luka]

i quite like it but as i was saying the other day science sam reckons the whole middle prynne period is bad vibes to the point it made him physically ill reading it all. again recoeved wisdom seems to be he was in a very bad place for many years and the poetry is horrible and violent

 

[Benny Bunter]

Maybe it is a bit of received wisdom colouring my response to it,but there's also something about those big square breezeblocks of text.

 

[luka]

Maybe it is a bit of received wisdom colouring my response to it,but there's also something about those big square breezeblocks of text.

its certainly not very welcoming and hospitable

 

[woops]

Happily he's now chilled out enough to publish some Snooty Tipoffs

 

[william_kent]

Weirdly there is at least one of the poems (or verses?) towards the end that is more or less straightforward English - "we see shots of a father racked in misery and bearing like a gift his crushed and bloodied son, a bare infant."

The good thing about To Pollen is that it is available as a free pdf which means I can sneak read it in the office, although my boss did spot the "word cloud" I generated from it, and remarked that it was "pretty"



I'm still stuck at the first couple of pages, it is some of the most impenetrable text that I have encountered, perhaps only rivalled by a Christine Brooke-Rose novel I once tried to read..

The first poem is pretty bleak with all the hospital imagery, and when I looked up "cell tropic" and saw that the majority of results were about HIV it did nothing to cheer me up

 

[woops]

The good thing about To Pollen is that it is available as a free pdf which means I can sneak read it in the office, although my boss did spot the "word cloud" I generated from it, and remarked that it was "pretty"

View attachment 10601

I'm still stuck at the first couple of pages, it is some of the most impenetrable text that I have encountered, perhaps only rivalled by a Christine Brooke-Rose novel I once tried to read..

The first poem is pretty bleak with all the hospital imagery, and when I looked up "cell tropic" and saw that the majority of results were about HIV it did nothing to cheer me up

i've got some christine brooke-rose here i'll have to give it another go.

 

[william_kent]

Happily he's now chilled out enough to publish some Snooty Tipoffs

The title and cover suggest whimsy along the lines of "Ripping Yarns meets Wind in The Willows" - soon to be a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber?

let's hope not...

 

[luka]

all the new stuff is whimsical/goon show.

the first stanza(?) of pollen is worth comparing/contrasting to the first chunk of kazoo i reckon.

 

[william_kent]

all the new stuff is whimsical/goon show.

the first stanza(?) of pollen is worth comparing/contrasting to the first chunk of kazoo i reckon.

I haven't got a copy of Kazoo Dreamboats, but I'll bear that in mind

I'm forming an opinion that the first page of Pollen is about a trip to the dentist, possibly for some root canal work, but also about the nature of speech and formation of words...

I'll probably change my mind later

 

[luka]

oh, the chinese one doesnt have it? is that right?

 

[luka]

I'm forming an opinion that the first page of Pollen is about a trip to the dentist

It hurt so much. As to
submit engraver likeness mirror from terror alto style
lifted at furnish to a stroke. Is any more likely
footed along notable cliff sounds, edging close as
passive, as link project. To groan at once in point
sill factorise, in flash worsen blanket at a neck

 

[william_kent]

oh, the chinese one doesnt have it? is that right?

no, it stops at 2004

 

[Benny Bunter]

i quite like it but as i was saying the other day science sam reckons the whole middle prynne period is bad vibes to the point it made him physically ill reading it all. again recoeved wisdom seems to be he was in a very bad place for many years and the poetry is horrible and violent

Just read Refuse Collection, the one before To Pollen, which is a lot easier to read in terms of straightforward English and is a lot shorter, but is incredibly violent, full of death and rape and mutilation, the horrors of war. Powerful stuff.

 

[Benny Bunter]

this is what i was saying. trying to solve a puzzle without a solution turns us into Kabbalists.

I think reading Prynne turns us into translators of our own language.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I studied translation a few years ago and there are so many parallels with reading Prynne - working with the dictionary, making concordance lists, finding definitions and equivalents (and teasing out he nuanced differences between them), root metaphors, ways of restating grammatical structures etc.

I should look back over my old notes from the translation course I did, I really think a lot of the techniques translators use are more or less the same as getting into this stuff. To do translation well you need a high level of technical skill, but it's also an art.