Song of a Reformed Headhunter

HS made me a copy of the revised text of the Distinguished Guest Lecture delivered at the Larkin Society AGM on 13 June 2009. In the lecture, Marion Shaw discussed Larkin's ambivalence towards Tennyson, how he at once excoriated the Laureate's silliness and envied the poet's, and his period's, "range, the colour, the self-confidence of it all" ( Required Writing , p. 182). Using Bloomian theory in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), a book Shaw describes as "slightly mad," she reads three poems by Larkin as  "corrections" of his poetic predecessor. "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" directly quotes "sweet girl-graduate" from Tennyson's The Princess . The "heavy-headed rose/ Beneath a trellis" also works within a field of Tennysonian reference, in particular that of his early English Idylls, perhaps "The Gardener's Daughter." The narrator of Tennyson's poem is a portrait painter...

Today my reading group met for the last time to read the last four chapters of The Odyssey , in E. V. Rieu's prose translation. HS, who also led us to read The Iliad last year, gave us our further reading after a most satisfying session. One handout collects the scholia written in the margins of the manuscripts. In Book 1, someone wrote, "They say in the myth that Poseidon went to the Ethiopians at a certain season and was honored by them. But in the allegory, Poseidon is a term for water. Since water, that is, the ocean, circles the whole earth, and because the Nile at a certain season waters the land of the Ethiopians and makes the trees grow, on this account they say Poseidon, or water, is honored by them as the cause of many good things for them. Book 9: Homer . . . seems to have been the first to devise fearful pleasantries, as in the passage describing that most unpleasant personage the Cyclops: "Noman will I eat last, but the rest before him"--that "gues...

Last night I made another stab at reducing the pile of unread magazines and journals, and read TLS July 11 2008. from Peter Brook's review of Michael Murphy's Proust and America : But Murphy subtly and convincingly argues that Proust's sense of the "metaphorics of retrospection" has an Emersonian cast: the "looping-the-loop" by which we return to our earlier selves, and which opens on to Marcel's eventual discovery that the writer's task is that of translator--of life, of nature--recalls Emerson's sense of nature as a place of signsm a place engaged in a perpetual writing. Proustian metaphor espouses the famous Emersonian credo that words are signs of natural facts, and natural facts are signs of spiritual facts. * If "love" in Proust is self-torturingm riven with jealousy, doubt and a masochistic need to witness the beloved's infidelity, this is part and parcel of the detective work that characterizes his novel, as it does Poe...

from Matthew Reynolds's review of Tate Britain's Millais exhibition: This discomfiting fascination with the relationship between human bodies and what they are in - both clothes and setting - is one of Millais's distinctive qualities. Through all the variation in style and genre which this exhibition amply documents, he remains absorbed by the idea that a setting can become a kind of vesture, the vesture project an image, and the image tally uneasily with the human being to whom it is attached. No character has been more comprehensively sunk into a natural setting than Ophelia, and yet the effect of ths is the opposite, it seems to me, of that suggested in the exhibition's detailed and generally perceptive catalogue: "the depicted cycles of growth, maturation and display doubly absorb Ophelia into a natural process, and render her insignificant". Of course the silvery embroidery of her dress mingles with the stream and connects with the sprays of white dog ros...