J. H. Prynne

[borzoi]

yea that's why my only posts so far are about twin peaks, pynchon, and the grateful dead. the three shining lights of american culture.

 

[version]

Borzoi is actually another from the Pynchon sub.

 

[luka]

feel like version is building numbers for a coup at this point.

 

[borzoi]

i actually have never seen you post this on the pynchon sub!! i used to lurk here for the music stuff years ago and then stumbled back on bc i started reading blissblog again. and then stumbled onto pynchon sub gossip first thing i clicked.

 

[version]

Weird. You are in the Discord though and that's how Linebaugh ended up here.

 

[version]

I enjoyed The Return overall, but there were more than a handful of bits where I was thinking "Fucking hell, Dave. Just get on with it!". Some of the stuff with Dougie had a similar effect to 'Grandpa' dropping the hammer over and over in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

 

[luka]

i thought that episode, 8, i think, was really cringey as well. when he tries to do art its just embaressing.

 

[borzoi]

people hype that episode up a little more than it deserves because its so self consciously artsy but the part that's just 10 minutes of different subatomic particles dancing while threnody for the victims of hiroshima is blaring at you at mega high volume is a very frightening and memorable experience.

 

[pattycakes_]

TP3 is Lynch jumping the shark, imo. Playing on your patience for 18 hours with little payoff. There are so many other creative ways he could have fucked with us. To give OG TP fans what they wanted would also have been a mistake, but to turn it into mush like that is just naughty.

 

[luka]

i thought that episode, 8, i think, was really cringey as well. when he tries to do art its just embaressing.

Felt different to Lynch doing things that look really silly, like the fake bird in Blue Velvet I think it is, or the ridiculous scary man behind the diner in Mullholland Drive or etc etc

 

[version]

That stuff wtith the cockney guy haggling over the single rubber glove that makes him punch like Hercules.

 

[pattycakes_]

So is the consensus that he's a verbal kubrick, this prynne fella? Knows exactly what he's saying? Every word carefully planned and placed?

 

[luka]

i don't think so actually, no. i think it's much more intutitive than that.

 

[luka]

if you read his account of writing kazoo dreamboats for instance he asys he just wrote and wrote and wrote without ever referring to what he'd already written. not looking back. full steam ahead!

there's obviously an intellectual dimension to his work but i don't think it is as deliberate and planned as kubrick (supposedly) is.

 

[woops]

there's way too much in this thread but here are my thoughts

How to read Prynne
[...]
Prynne likes ambiguity and is careful with his word choice so that nouns could also be verbs and vice versa. He also is prone to Latinity which is about constructing phrases according to Latin rather than English grammar. Great poets have been doing this for centuries- Milton was a major culprit.

yeah really interesting thanks who wrote this?
what @Linebaugh is doing early on is trying to decipher the poems as if they're written in some kind of code or foreign language, presumably out of perversity? but he's not, he's writing poems in English. look at the bit about latinity - he's not writing latin, he's using a latin structure, and I think Carlisle tried to keep his English as latin "ate" as he could too. so you're reading english in

[…] Or while at loading
to stare plan off by ripeness event be done bluntly.

i went to a grammar school lol and this makes a kind of sense is you write it as

or, while at loading, (the) event be done bluntly, to stare off (the) plan.

but my schoolboy latin is rusty of course. and i understand this is also an attempt to "translate" him.

in the intro to the Paris Review interview with Prynne, which is amazing you should all read it, he says his poems are not necessarily written with the reader in mind.

@luka has also posted some critic somewhere saying that he was annoyed that Finnegan's Wake was the "only one", ie the only book of gibberish drivel anyone cares about in academia. the same @luka pointed out somewhere critics never agree on Prynne. FW has its recognisably narrative passages but Prynne does not. so his work represents a stage further from FW in which interpretation is not only multivarious but futile maybe. just in terms of literary innovation that might be a clue on how to look at his poems, but, we might want to read them, not look at them...

psychedelics flatten everything so a chair or bit of fluff are as compelling as a painting

this is the real psychedelic!

 

[woops]

and as for the death of the author that's a massive much discussed essay with a sexy title, cos barthes is french. but actually the idea is also called the intentional fallacy and there is also an intentional fallacy fallacy. but Anthony Burgess (!) also wrote a thing about A-writers and B-writers. Where A writers do story and B writers do language. there, simple and it doesn't rule out or denigrate those poor old a-writers barthes said had died

 

[luka]

i think Limburger was right about a lot of things personally. eg word frequency is important.

 

[linebaugh]

what @Linebaugh is doing early on is trying to decipher the poems as if they're written in some kind of code or foreign language, presumably out of perversity?

Alright woops, which city? Im coming to your house

 

[linebaugh]

But really, I've caught flack from two posters now, safe to say this is a persecution.

I'm not looking at this stuff like a math problem here. Im trying to get close. Im trying to live in it, put it on like a woolly sweater. Im not satisfied with taking To Pollen out to some meadow, giving it a stern once over and then going on my merry way, excusing off the whole piece as some wacky exercise by a preternaturally sensitive madman. In fact, reading To Pollen and not taking my prescription- monitoring word frequency, translating the language and etc.- thats the perversion! We should all be gravely concerned for @woops and @pattycakes_

 

[luka]

i agree Limburger. you were right about everything. to the point i felt slightly threatened by how clever you were being