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Pricking on the Plain
I've been ludicrously busy the last couple of weeks, and have missed writing up several things I ordinarily would at least have mentioned. Here's a hurried rescue dig from the upper strata of my memory.
a) A week or so ago I found myself at a small local station in Clifton at around 9.45pm. Apparently, if I'd looked up (and there'd been no street lights) I might have caught a rare glimpse of the aurora borealis. However, my attention was caught instead by a row of around forty young men, clearly drunk, and dressed identically in shirts and ties, kneeling on the platform edge with their heads overhanging the track in a shoulder-to-shoulder row. Other drunk young men on the bridge overhead were enjoining them loudly to "Kneel!", but I could see no reason for their compliance, especially with the 9.51 due at any moment. It was bizarre rather than threatening, but I was relieved (if only for the driver's sake) that they stood up before the train actually got there, and even more so when they didn't board it. Instead, as we pulled away in the direction of Montpelier, they formed a guard of honour, hands clasped solemnly at their waists, so that looking out of the window I could see nothing but shirt'n'tie-shirt'n'tie-shirt'n'tie-shirt'n'tie until we ran out of platform.
Apparently it was some kind of initiation ceremony for rugby players.
b) A few days ago my latest ABBA piece appeared, a meditation on the proposition that Atropos too is a weaver. That phrase has been hanging round my head for years now, to the extent that I sometimes think it's a quotation, but I'm pretty sure it's my own.
c) I received my contributor copy of The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Childrens Literature. It's a snip at £97. All right, it's actually ridiculously overpriced - but it is a good volume, leaving my own contribution aside. If you want to read that - "The 'Grand Tour' as Transformative Experience in Children’s Novels about the Roman Invasion" - you can do so for free, should the fit seize you. (While fetching that link just now, I realised that this version is missing the illustration from Fletcher and Kipling's school history of England, showing ‘The Landing of the Romans’. That's a shame as it's well worth seeing for its evocation of the Kent seaside around AD 43.)
f) I watched Janina Ramirez's programme on The Faerie Queene with some trepidation, but was reassured: it was well judged, I think, considering it had only 30 minutes to play with and had to be pitched for an audience who would probably not have read (or perhaps even heard of) the poem. And we did get quite a few extracts read aloud, which is never less than a pleasure.
It's strange, though, how often people who don't like The Faerie Queene find it impossible to concede that other people might actually love it. Are they worried that they're missing something? Typical is this review from The New Statesmen by Rachel Cooke:
Well, Ramirez made it clear elsewhere in the programme that she'd first read it as an undergraduate, so an eighteen-year-old teenager, not a fourteen-year-old one - but why would even that be so very odd? I read it at 18 myself, and fell in love with it so deep that I wrote my PhD on it. Nothing can be to everyone's taste, of course, but if you have an ear for (and interest in) language, how can you not at least concede The Faerie Queene its own beauty, even if you're out of sympathy with it? "Absolutely heaving with elves" is the kind of sneer-as-substitute-for-criticism that Edmund Wilson practised on Tolkien (who was no great Spenser fan, by the way, though Lewis was). Oddly enough I've never heard it used to put down A Midsummer Night's Dream - though it would be equally true of that play.
Meanwhile, veteran sneerer A. N. Wilson's Return to Larkinland was less satisfactory. Despite having a whole hour to play with, this programme on Larkin's life and writing left out entire swathes (not just fractions of a swathe) of relevant material, including the very existence of any woman in his life other than Monica Jones (whom Wilson knew). Larkin's seven-year relationship with my aunt, including a two-year engagement, was not apparently worth mentioning - but there was plenty of room for extensive quotation from the semi-erotic schoolgirl fiction he produced at that time, and even - insult to injury - for a recitation of the damning assessment of The Faerie Queene with which he defaced a copy in the college library... as an undergraduate:
Well, Homer nods.
a) A week or so ago I found myself at a small local station in Clifton at around 9.45pm. Apparently, if I'd looked up (and there'd been no street lights) I might have caught a rare glimpse of the aurora borealis. However, my attention was caught instead by a row of around forty young men, clearly drunk, and dressed identically in shirts and ties, kneeling on the platform edge with their heads overhanging the track in a shoulder-to-shoulder row. Other drunk young men on the bridge overhead were enjoining them loudly to "Kneel!", but I could see no reason for their compliance, especially with the 9.51 due at any moment. It was bizarre rather than threatening, but I was relieved (if only for the driver's sake) that they stood up before the train actually got there, and even more so when they didn't board it. Instead, as we pulled away in the direction of Montpelier, they formed a guard of honour, hands clasped solemnly at their waists, so that looking out of the window I could see nothing but shirt'n'tie-shirt'n'tie-shirt'n'tie-shirt'n'tie until we ran out of platform.
Apparently it was some kind of initiation ceremony for rugby players.
b) A few days ago my latest ABBA piece appeared, a meditation on the proposition that Atropos too is a weaver. That phrase has been hanging round my head for years now, to the extent that I sometimes think it's a quotation, but I'm pretty sure it's my own.
c) I received my contributor copy of The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Childrens Literature. It's a snip at £97. All right, it's actually ridiculously overpriced - but it is a good volume, leaving my own contribution aside. If you want to read that - "The 'Grand Tour' as Transformative Experience in Children’s Novels about the Roman Invasion" - you can do so for free, should the fit seize you. (While fetching that link just now, I realised that this version is missing the illustration from Fletcher and Kipling's school history of England, showing ‘The Landing of the Romans’. That's a shame as it's well worth seeing for its evocation of the Kent seaside around AD 43.)
f) I watched Janina Ramirez's programme on The Faerie Queene with some trepidation, but was reassured: it was well judged, I think, considering it had only 30 minutes to play with and had to be pitched for an audience who would probably not have read (or perhaps even heard of) the poem. And we did get quite a few extracts read aloud, which is never less than a pleasure.
It's strange, though, how often people who don't like The Faerie Queene find it impossible to concede that other people might actually love it. Are they worried that they're missing something? Typical is this review from The New Statesmen by Rachel Cooke:
The series opened with Dr Janina Ramirez on The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, which she claimed to have loved ever since she first read it as a teenager (crikey, some teenager). I, for one, don’t think Dr Ramirez – the only non-celebrity to get a gig presenting an episode of this series – will have convinced too many Spenser virgins to try his allegorical epic, which is some 35,000 lines long and absolutely heaving with elves. There was something just a little unconvincing about her proclamations of its beauty, her insistence that what Spenser called its “darke conceit” had captured her imagination right from the off.
Well, Ramirez made it clear elsewhere in the programme that she'd first read it as an undergraduate, so an eighteen-year-old teenager, not a fourteen-year-old one - but why would even that be so very odd? I read it at 18 myself, and fell in love with it so deep that I wrote my PhD on it. Nothing can be to everyone's taste, of course, but if you have an ear for (and interest in) language, how can you not at least concede The Faerie Queene its own beauty, even if you're out of sympathy with it? "Absolutely heaving with elves" is the kind of sneer-as-substitute-for-criticism that Edmund Wilson practised on Tolkien (who was no great Spenser fan, by the way, though Lewis was). Oddly enough I've never heard it used to put down A Midsummer Night's Dream - though it would be equally true of that play.
Meanwhile, veteran sneerer A. N. Wilson's Return to Larkinland was less satisfactory. Despite having a whole hour to play with, this programme on Larkin's life and writing left out entire swathes (not just fractions of a swathe) of relevant material, including the very existence of any woman in his life other than Monica Jones (whom Wilson knew). Larkin's seven-year relationship with my aunt, including a two-year engagement, was not apparently worth mentioning - but there was plenty of room for extensive quotation from the semi-erotic schoolgirl fiction he produced at that time, and even - insult to injury - for a recitation of the damning assessment of The Faerie Queene with which he defaced a copy in the college library... as an undergraduate:
First I thought Troilus and Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I thought Beowulf was. Then I thought Paradise Lost was. Now I know that The Faerie Queene is the dullest thing out. Blast it.
Well, Homer nods.
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*yoink*
Thank you!
I hate when people who don't enjoy something find it impossible to believe that other people genuinely do. What's the alternative, they're faking it for the prestige?
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I've honestly met more people who pretend not to like things for the coolness factor than the other way round.
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(Besides, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is surely the most boring poem ever.)
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I disagree. I read Book 1 the summer I was 16, between Lower and Upper Sixth.
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The New York Times Book Review seems lately to have established a regular feature: worthies outbidding each other on what great works they're not taken in by. It's all very depressing in.
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Not being in any way an expert on The Faerie Queene, I had not realized that this was a common reaction to it. How odd, though. I sadly did not read it as a teenager and in fact have only read Books I and III, while studying for the Literature GRE, but it was one of the best things I read while studying for the Literature GRE, and I forced my family to name our pet rabbit Una because of it (apparently, for years my father had thought I named her Oona after Charlie Chaplin's wife, but no).
I suppose my own vote for most boring poem in English, as long as people are sharing, is Absalom and Achitophel, but I think this is based on my own personal allergy to heroic couplets.
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DWJ note: it's well worth reading Book V of FQ for Hexwood-comprehension purposes, if nothing else.
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Really I'm only commenting not mainly to annoy you with what we already guessed about hat check gal (& Al) but, butt: what am I to give a ten-year-old to read (translated into, or written) in French, now that she is seriously into this activity and no stopping in sight?? I just gave her her first ever diary (with only a short Mollberg Speech) and (pink, for she loves it) fountain pen but keep getting this heartleaping rejoicement from seeing both working instantly. She is long through with H.P., currently skimming through 'the classics' of her bad-side-of-town/river suburb Library stock (last was Robinson Crusoé) and I'd like to be able to come up with all those wonderful things you happen to know; I don't! It's only for x-mas and later on (Anne Frank and Nin's girl diaries seem a bit heavy at the moment but I'll give her those later) so plenty of time still and I may post on it on my own site, too;)
Also; I eagerly await my box of commata; yummy!
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---L.