J. H. Prynne

luka

luka

Well-known member
the Marvel comics are definitely worth your time too. they start by retelling Howard's tales, then run out of material and invent increasingly absurd stories of their own
 
william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
I think we established in the Worlding thread that Howard created "lore" before Tolkien, which should mark him out as an originator, and worthy of a critical re-evaluation...
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I would probably enjoy them actually. I'm not a big fantasy person, but I used to like Slaine from 2000AD when I was a teenager (not the same thing,I know, but...)
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Benny B said:
He said he got the idea for that glacial question poem when he saw a thin patch of snow on the ground that was partially in the shadow of a building, so the sun had melted it into the perfect impression of the building on the ground.
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..which made him think about how other processes - in this case temperature - affect great change other than just time.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Woo hoo! My books arrived. Read the first two, Numbers and Die a millionaire. Is this first book his Marxist political gear? Blake reference there in that second one I see, and it looks like after spending some time on it quite a lot of sense could be made out if it I reckon. Strong start.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
version said:
Die A Millionaire

(pronounced: "diamonds in the air")

The first essential is to take knowledge
back to the springs, because despite
everything and especially the recent
events carried under that flag, there is
specific power in the idea of it

that
what is known can be used to pick up
or more usually to hold on and develop
as what for the econometrist is
"profitable speculation"-the intellect
on the trigger once more, as those
poor seventh century Irish monks (being
sentimentalists) would have believed
if they could.

If there's any need
for proof & it can be kept from
running to violence (to which ex-
tremity it should anyway perhaps
be swooping homewards) the twist-point
is "purchase"-what the mind
bites on is yours

the prime joy of
control engineering is what they please
to denote (through the quartzite window) "self-
optimizing systems", which they like
to consider as a plan for the basic
living unit. And thus "accelerating the con-
vergence of function", we come to our
maximal stance.

Imperialism was just
an old, very old name for that
idea, that what you want, you by
historic process or just readiness
to travel, also "need"-and
need is of course the sacred daughter
through which you improve, by
becoming more extensive. Competitive
expansion: if you can designate a
prime direction as Drang nach Osten
or the Western Frontier, that's to
purify the idea by recourse to History

before it happens. Envisaging the chapter-
head in the historical outline as "the
spirit (need) of the age"-its primary
greed, shielded from ignominy by the
like practice of too many others.

That
of course is not expansion but acquisition
(as to purchase the Suez Canal was merely
a blatant example): the true expansion
is probably drift, as the Scythians
being nomadic anyway for the most part
slipped sideways right across the Russian
steppes, from China by molecular friction
through to the Polish border.

Otherwise it's
purchase, of a natural course, the alteration
or storage of current like dams in the
river: what starts as irrigation ends up
selling the megawattage across the grid.

The grid is another sign, is knowledge
in applique-work actually strangled & latticed
across the land; like the intangible consumer
networks, as the market defines wants from
single reckoning into a social need, graphed
for instance as "contour tangent elimination".
And the drift of that is again to divert the
currency (as now in England

to the north-
east). As, it was actually losing its grip
on the population: real people, slipping off
the face of that lovely ground, leaving the
green and pleasant lands of Northumberland
to be near the belly & catch scraps
with the shit that we set out so grudgingly
on plates for the blind to eat in gratitude.

The grip is purchase again, and the current
chic of information theory will tell you how
many bits of that commodity it takes to
lift one foot/lb. of shit to a starving mouth,
or not starving actually, but just rather
unthinkingly hungry.

And don't let some
wise and quick-faced historical rat tell us about
the industrial north and its misery, since every
songbird since then (& with no honourable
exception for D.H. Lawrence) has carolled about
that beautiful black colour as if
this were the great rot in the heart.

It was not and is not. The twist-point
of this is again power by the grid, putting
lives into strings of consequence into
molecular chains like the pit-ponies we love
to cry over. Coal is so beautiful as I
could weep over the carbon it shines with:
what is scattered over these colliery towns
is not soot or sulphur or coal or foaming
detergent but the waste produced by
mass conversion of want (sectional) into
need (social & then total). All this by
purchase on the twist-point, the system gone
social to disguise

the greed of ambition
swimming in great seismic shocks through
the beds of our condition. All the needles are
twitching frantically across their smoky paper,
but society is "predictably" as we know "in
a state of ferment"-as if that could ever turn
to wine or raise bread, from the sad shit it
is, to that crispy crunchy loaf we shall all
eat only in heaven.

The fact is that right
from the springs this water is no longer fit
for the stones it washes: the water of life
is all in bottles & ready for invoice. To draw
from that well we must put on some
other garment. Do what one can, that's
the gas-and-water talk, which is "do
what we can" and we are the social strand
which is already past the twist point &
into the furnace. We don't burn only
because

we are invisible to each other,
our shoulders no longer so hopeless and
beautiful as they meet at the spine rising
up the dorsal rift: lovely and lonely, until
the whole spread squints into the neck, and
vanishes, into the head.

And unlike Cerberus
we all share the same head, our shoulders
are denied by the nuptial joys of television,
so that what I am is a special case of
what we want, the twist-point missed exactly
at the nation's scrawny neck.

What runs
back, or could be traced upstream by simply
denying that conspiracy of "cause", is the
question of names & the seven tribes,
which are not "predictions" and socially can
be grouped only by the thinnest of
generalising systems. As these are not
economically self-centering, they cannot be
used as designations for targets (like
the gun sight on what "we want").

And the back mutation is knowledge and
has always been so in the richest tradition
of the trust it is possible to have, to repose
in the mysteries. The perversions which
thrust it forward, as a new feed into the
same vicious grid of expanding prospects
(profits) are let through by the weakness, now,
of names.

There is no other break in the
descent, since without that it's all break
anyway. The purity is a question of
names. We are here to utter them. This is
a prayer. I have it now between my
teeth and my eyes, on my forehead. Know
the names. It is as simple as the purity
of sentiment: it is as simple
as that.
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Ooh look version has already posted it, that's handy.
 
woops

woops

is not like other people
Benny B said:
Woo hoo! My books arrived. Read the first two, Numbers and Die a millionaire. Is this first book his Marxist political gear? Blake reference there in that second one I see, and it looks like after spending some time on it quite a lot of sense could be made out if it I reckon. Strong start.
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Is Prynne a Marxist? What's the Blake reference? Have you read Prynne's Paris Review interview @william_kent ?
 
woops

woops

is not like other people
He does say "the Marxist comet burns with such lovely, flaring destruction" but it's not at all clear he's a subscriber
 
yyaldrin

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
INTERVIEWER

Was that a transformation of political opinion for you? Or a continuation?



PRYNNE

That’s a very difficult question to answer accurately. I certainly, as time went on, became much more committed ideologically to what would be *regarded as a left-wing, rather European-influenced point of view. I’m not quite sure when this transition occurred, because I don’t think I would ever have thought of myself as inclined towards Marxist opinions when I was a student. I certainly objected to Raymond Williams’s ideologies when he was my teacher. He didn’t promote them very actively, but it was clear that they were an important part of his work. It was partly because he was a stodgy performer. He didn’t have brilliance. He didn’t have wit and sharpness of mind. Stylistically, it wasn’t an attractive pursuit. But nonetheless, his opinions ought to have aroused more of an echo with me, and they didn’t. It was curious because my parents were both staunch socialists.



INTERVIEWER

And now?

PRYNNE

I would probably now describe myself as a peculiar and extraneous Marxist, in some sense of that word. Keston Sutherland, who was my student and who is now exemplary and active in our friendship as poets, is a more committed and ferociously ideological Marxist than I am. We have quite frequent exchanges, because he’s become deeply enmeshed in Hegelian interpretation and argument. I have tried to persuade him that just as I’m not really interested in the exemplary nature of authorship, and the influential nature of didactic or *instructional presence in the lives of others, so I regard the Marxist argument as a humanistic projection of political narrative. When we have these arguments, I explain to Keston that I’m probably more interested in Engels, in his dialectic of nature, than I am in Marx. He says, That’s because you’ve already claimed the benefit of what you choose not now to give credence to in the Marxian tradition, which has influenced your thought to the point where you now don’t need it. I say, That’s one way of interpreting it, but you would say that, wouldn’t you?

But, certainly, political ideas have become more influential in my thinking practise and they come into my poems quite frequently. In Brass (1971), there’s quite a lot of overt ideological vocabulary milling about, which you wouldn’t have found to that degree or of that kind in The White Stones, to that degree or of that kind. So there’s been a movement, somehow. I can’t put my finger on quite when or where or how it occurred. It may indeed have been partly in response to world events: the Vietnam affair and other serious ideological disturbances.
 
yyaldrin

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
Benny B said:
Woo hoo! My books arrived. Read the first two, Numbers and Die a millionaire. Is this first book his Marxist political gear? Blake reference there in that second one I see, and it looks like after spending some time on it quite a lot of sense could be made out if it I reckon. Strong start.
Click to expand...
which books did you get then? the big yellow one and what else?
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Tbh my eyes glaze over whenever I try to read up on Marxist theory so I don't think i'm gonna be reading the poems through that lens. Anyone can see that poem has socialist concerns though
 
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