From albigensian at hotmail.com Mon Feb 25 14:04:32 2008 From: albigensian at hotmail.com (Pamela Francis) Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:04:32 -0600 Subject: [ilds] request Message-ID: Greetings, all Durrell list-serve members--just wanted to let you know that an ILDS Herald will be produced and mailed in the month of March. I also wanted to request that if you have any news, photos, or other items of interest (including Calls for Papers, notices of events, or on a more personal note, notice of Durrell-related travels, new positions, or even new marital statuses), please send them to me, Pamela Francis at albigensian at hotmail.com. Photos are especially welcome. I look forward to hearing from you! Many thanks, Pamela -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080225/bd965333/attachment.html From slighcl at wfu.edu Wed Feb 27 05:15:47 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:15:47 -0500 Subject: [ilds] cosmopolitans like EM Forster and Lawrence Durrell Message-ID: <47C56283.1020200@wfu.edu> http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2008/feb/27/rorymaclean.travelbooks *Rory reviews Seaport stories * Nicholas Woodsworth's trilogy charts the historic and cultural ties connecting the Mediterranean's great cities: Alexandria, Venice and Istanbul. The result is something to be cherished, says Rory MacLean This article was first published on Wednesday February 27 2008. It was last updated at 11:57 on February 27 2008. *The Liquid Continent: A Mediterranean Trilogy* by Nicholas Woodsworth (Volume 1: Alexandria, volume 2: Venice, volume 3: Istanbul) published by Haus Armchair Traveller, ?12.99 (per volume) Of all the world's continents only the Mediterranean is liquid, wrote Jean Cocteau. It's a refreshing thought. The Med is not an empty space. It's a continent whose citizens inhabit its coastal rim. They look inwards across the water, rather than over their shoulders towards some landlocked capital. Paris is nothing like Cairo. Rome has little in common with Rabat. Yet in their characters coastal "Marseilles is very much like Alexandria. Marseilles and Alexandria have the same way of looking at the world. Barcelona, Thessalonica, Tangier, Palermo, Beirut, Valletta ... walk down the street in any of those ports and you feel the same thing. Why is that?" So asks Nicholas Woodsworth at the start of his enchanting journey around the old seaports of the eastern Mediterranean. The son of a Canadian diplomat and former Financial Times correspondent, Woodsworth wants to understand what makes a true Mediterranean. He is curious how environment and history have conspired to instil in them "a capacity for connection, a sense of attachment and belonging, that in most places in the western world is fast unravelling". Two thousand years ago, Alexandria was one of the great trading capitals of the world. It was a mythic place divinely sanctioned, a splendid tapestry woven from the threads of a dozen cultures, the first true metropolis. As late as the 1930s, a quarter of the residents were European, including *cosmopolitans like EM Forster and Lawrence Durrell*. But on the winter day that Woodsworth arrived in town, Alexandria appeared rundown and dilapidated, its "doorways grubby and paw-marked by an unrelenting press of humanity". Its classical remains had been destroyed. Its fin-de-si?cle villas abandoned. Its new, densely-packed high-rise suburbs offered incomers little comfort or hope of improvement. In the port Woodsworth found ample evidence of the Mediterranean character yet its few remaining multicultural residents -- a Greco-Alexandrian architect, a Syrian Christian princess, a French archaeologist -- drifted towards oblivion like so many antiquities. Passenger ships no longer sail from the first "globalised" city -- at least not out of season -- so Woodsworth boards a bus to trace the Med's eastern rim. As he makes for Italy, by way of Aqaba, Damascus and Aleppo, his narrative comes to life. He meets an Iraqi Christian who is "goofy about God", a Chechen Sergeant Pepper who mimes the destruction of Grozny and two loquacious, "bubble-brained ditzes" named Cath and Viv. In Venice his vibrant and irrepressible Proven?al wife Jany joins him, and his touching enthusiasm for her, as well as her gift for communication, further energises his journey. She becomes a mirror for the Mediterranean spirit, reflecting its sensuality, spontaneity and intimate attachment to essential things: intense colours, strong flavours, landscape, family and friends. With the help of a gondola-builder and while working as a canal-boat delivery man, Woodsworth unravels the story of Venice. Then he carries on alone to Istanbul, capital of an empire which once stretched across half of Asia and Europe. He settles into a former Benedictine monastery overlooking the Golden Horn and considers the fate of that city's ethnic complexity. Years ago "a Constantinopolite could be a Greek Jew, a Syrian Christian or a Hungarian Muslim. At the same time, however, he could feel still himself thoroughly Ottoman". On the banks of the Bosphorus, Woodsworth considers the legacy of the "cosmopolitan influence that blurred origins, that made for a wider sense of identity". Beautifully packaged in three compact hardbacks, The Liquid Continent is a Mediterranean trilogy to cherish. Woodsworth is a likeable and informed narrator with a gentle manner and lively, accessible style. He embarks on no flights of fancy yet the work does not suffer for this journalistic approach, though some of his minor characters could have been more developed. His succinct overview of the cities' histories, especially that of Venice, is particularly illuminating. After reading that volume, I couldn't wait to glide again along the Grand Canal (even if the enchanting Jany has returned home to Provence). Most provoking is Woodsworth's warning against the acid of nationalism. Alexandria has abandoned its cosmopolitan heritage and turned its back on the Mediterranean to embrace Egypt and the Middle East. Equally, the Most Serene Venetian Republic is now simply part of Italy and Europe, its vibrant Asian links confined to history. Yet for Woodsworth -- an optimistic child of the New World, not blinded by cultural chauvinism -- contemporary Istanbul offers the bravest solution to the future, in a careful, respectful balancing of traditionalism, modern secularism and globalisation. In a fragmented world the Mediterranean has always been a place of contact and exchange. As a Syrian painter in a French restaurant in Damascus tells him, the old harbours on the sea have a great many lessons to teach us today. *?* Rory MacLean 's latest book Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India is published by Penguin. -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080227/fb7733ad/attachment.html From slighcl at wfu.edu Wed Feb 27 05:26:15 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:26:15 -0500 Subject: [ilds] 2.27.2008: music that stains / the silence remains Message-ID: <47C564F7.2060901@wfu.edu> Lawrence George Durrell 27 February 1912 ~ 7 November 1990 ** A PERSIAN LADY Some diplomatic mission---no such thing as 'fate' --- Brought her to the city that ripening spring. She was much pointed out---a Lady-in-Waiting--- To some Persian noble; well, and here she was Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance. By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches, By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels. He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty, The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron: The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes; How would one say 'to enflame' in her tongue, He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty? When their eyes met he felt dis-figured It would have been simple---three paces apart! Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go, The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory. Next day he deliberately left the musical city To join a boring water-party on the lake. Telling himself 'Say what you like about it, I have been spared very much in this business.' He meant, I think, that never should he now Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires, The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke, Grey temple, long slide into fat. On the other hand neither would she build him sons Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry Which was the fashion of his time and ours. She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins In a biography the year of birth and death. 1964/ 1961 ** ECHO /To Nancy And To Ping-K? for her second birthday out of Greece/ Nothing is lost, sweet self, Nothing is ever lost. The unspoken word Is not exhausted but can be heard. Music that stains The silence remains O echo is everywhere, the unbeckonable bird! 1956/ 1943 -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080227/4a622ae8/attachment.html From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net Wed Feb 27 14:47:24 2008 From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:47:24 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [ilds] Persian Ladies Message-ID: <16098500.1204152444422.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa.earthlink.net> I wonder, Charles, on this remembrance day, if you could provide a context for this poem. Perhaps you have an idea about all the unknowns: the "lady," the "he," the "I," the "it," the "city," etc. Bruce -----Original Message----- >From: slighcl >Sent: Feb 27, 2008 5:26 AM >To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca >Subject: [ilds] 2.27.2008: music that stains / the silence remains > >Lawrence George Durrell >27 February 1912 ~ 7 November 1990 > >** > >A PERSIAN LADY > >Some diplomatic mission---no such thing as 'fate' --- >Brought her to the city that ripening spring. >She was much pointed out---a Lady-in-Waiting--- >To some Persian noble; well, and here she was >Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance. >By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches, >By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels. > >He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty, >The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron: >The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes; >How would one say 'to enflame' in her tongue, >He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty? >When their eyes met he felt dis-figured >It would have been simple---three paces apart! > >Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go, >The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes >Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory. >Next day he deliberately left the musical city >To join a boring water-party on the lake. >Telling himself 'Say what you like about it, >I have been spared very much in this business.' > >He meant, I think, that never should he now >Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow >Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires, >The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke, >Grey temple, long slide into fat. > >On the other hand neither would she build him sons >Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry >Which was the fashion of his time and ours. >She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact >Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins >In a biography the year of birth and death. > >1964/ 1961 From slighcl at wfu.edu Wed Feb 27 15:51:33 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:51:33 -0500 Subject: [ilds] Persian Ladies In-Reply-To: <16098500.1204152444422.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa.earthlink.net> References: <16098500.1204152444422.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <47C5F785.6020803@wfu.edu> I wish I could do so much for you, Bruce. My intent was simply to say 'AVE' to Old D on the day of his nativity. Beyond that, I can only make associative gestures. I thought that the first poem seemed an interesting admixture of Keats (still unravish'd) and Cavafy (the affair that is recollected, not because of its consummation, but because it was exquisitely and achingly deferred). The second poem was more directly about a birthday--this one for Penelope--but also Keatsian. Mr. D--he stained the silence. Charles -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net Wed Feb 27 16:13:03 2008 From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:13:03 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [ilds] Persian Ladies Message-ID: <12060069.1204157584123.JavaMail.root@elwamui-mouette.atl.sa.earthlink.net> You're right, Charles. But I would add a remark that Michael Haag made sometime ago, that Durrell had his own personal code, and I would add that there's no point in referencing the "code unbroken" unless one wants someone to break it. I see the Dark Lady as a Justine/Eve Cohen figure. Bruce -----Original Message----- >From: slighcl >Sent: Feb 27, 2008 3:51 PM >To: Bruce Redwine , ilds at lists.uvic.ca >Subject: Re: [ilds] Persian Ladies > >I wish I could do so much for you, Bruce. My intent was simply to say >'AVE' to Old D on the day of his nativity. > >Beyond that, I can only make associative gestures. I thought that the >first poem seemed an interesting admixture of Keats (still unravish'd) >and Cavafy (the affair that is recollected, not because of its >consummation, but because it was exquisitely and achingly deferred). >The second poem was more directly about a birthday--this one for >Penelope--but also Keatsian. > >Mr. D--he stained the silence. > >Charles From slighcl at wfu.edu Wed Feb 27 17:25:56 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:25:56 -0500 Subject: [ilds] Persian Ladies In-Reply-To: <12060069.1204157584123.JavaMail.root@elwamui-mouette.atl.sa.earthlink.net> References: <12060069.1204157584123.JavaMail.root@elwamui-mouette.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <47C60DA4.5020507@wfu.edu> On 2/27/2008 7:13 PM, Bruce Redwine wrote: > You're right, Charles. But I would add a remark that Michael Haag made sometime ago, that Durrell had his own personal code, and I would add that there's no point in referencing the "code unbroken" unless one wants someone to break it. I see the Dark Lady as a Justine/Eve Cohen figure. > > > That is an interesting connection, Bruce, and the Eve Cohen hunch chimes with "the perfected darkness of her beauty." (Pretty phrase.) It also works for the early 1960s date. But I wonder about the diplomatic conceit of the poem and the renunciation of the affair--which goes unconsummated--"the collision of ripening wishes" (very fine) never to come about, never to bear the mortal fruit. > They let the seminal instant go, > The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes > Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory. > Next day he deliberately left the musical city > To join a boring water-party on the lake. > Telling himself 'Say what you like about it, > I have been spared very much in this business.' What do we make of that? Beyond biographical sleuthing--which I will leave to Michael--I will imagine this poem playing out somewhere the /Quartet'/s continuum of possibility. Perhaps this poetic aversion of crisis is David Mountolive in a situation that we do not find directly in the novels. C&c. -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080227/9de48efd/attachment.html From godshawl at email.uc.edu Wed Feb 27 17:54:36 2008 From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:54:36 -0500 Subject: [ilds] Persian Ladies In-Reply-To: <16098500.1204152444422.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa. earthlink.net> References: <16098500.1204152444422.JavaMail.root@elwamui-rubis.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <8E.21.05263.B5416C74@gwout2> A lovely poem. Perhaps the poem is self-contained, not a field of references to history, unless the history is imaged rather than lived. I'm more interested in the meaning imbedded in the poem itself. Why does the mind recoil as from a branding-iron? Bill >A PERSIAN LADY > > > >Some diplomatic mission---no such thing as 'fate' --- > >Brought her to the city that ripening spring. > >She was much pointed out---a Lady-in-Waiting--- > >To some Persian noble; well, and here she was > >Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance. > >By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches, > >By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels. > > > >He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty, > >The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron: > >The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes; > >How would one say 'to enflame' in her tongue, > >He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty? > >When their eyes met he felt dis-figured > >It would have been simple---three paces apart! > > > >Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go, > >The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes > >Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory. > >Next day he deliberately left the musical city > >To join a boring water-party on the lake. > >Telling himself 'Say what you like about it, > >I have been spared very much in this business.' > > > >He meant, I think, that never should he now > >Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow > >Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires, > >The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke, > >Grey temple, long slide into fat. > > > >On the other hand neither would she build him sons > >Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry > >Which was the fashion of his time and ours. > >She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact > >Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins > >In a biography the year of birth and death. > > > >1964/ 1961 > > >_______________________________________________ >ILDS mailing list >ILDS at lists.uvic.ca >https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds *************************************** W. L. Godshalk * Department of English * University of Cincinnati Stellar disorder * Cincinnati OH 45221-0069 * 513-281-5927 *************************************** From godshawl at email.uc.edu Wed Feb 27 18:30:20 2008 From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:30:20 -0500 Subject: [ilds] the Persian Lady In-Reply-To: <47C564F7.2060901@wfu.edu> References: <47C564F7.2060901@wfu.edu> Message-ID: <39.5E.08390.BBC16C74@gwout1> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080227/67aa43f0/attachment.html From godshawl at email.uc.edu Wed Feb 27 18:39:51 2008 From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:39:51 -0500 Subject: [ilds] syllabary and codes In-Reply-To: <39.5E.08390.BBC16C74@gwout1> References: <47C564F7.2060901@wfu.edu> <39.5E.08390.BBC16C74@gwout1> Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080227/e8dba9e6/attachment.html From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net Wed Feb 27 20:25:48 2008 From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:25:48 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [ilds] syllabary and codes Message-ID: <6739869.1204172748645.JavaMail.root@elwamui-muscovy.atl.sa.earthlink.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080227/2732633c/attachment.html From slighcl at wfu.edu Wed Feb 27 20:40:30 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:40:30 -0500 Subject: [ilds] syllabary and codes In-Reply-To: <6739869.1204172748645.JavaMail.root@elwamui-muscovy.atl.sa.earthlink.net> References: <6739869.1204172748645.JavaMail.root@elwamui-muscovy.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <47C63B3E.8020302@wfu.edu> On 2/27/2008 11:25 PM, Bruce Redwine wrote: > I also take the time of the poem as modern, roughly contemporaneous > with composition, and not one of Cavafy's historical moments, although > this too is rather vague and indefinite. > Here is the time referent for the poem, right? > On the other hand neither would she build him sons > Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry > Which was the fashion of *his time and ours*. So what sort of historical setting do we have starting from that point? C&c. -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080227/9e805ca7/attachment.html From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net Thu Feb 28 07:34:22 2008 From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:34:22 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [ilds] syllabary and codes Message-ID: <8283987.1204212862684.JavaMail.root@elwamui-royal.atl.sa.earthlink.net> All this is open to question and speculation, which is obviously the way Durrell wants it. There are no specific time references. "His time and ours" could refer to the distant past or it could refer to the High Modernism of the early 20th century, which I often think of as producing "in-bred poetry," and which could also be said of just about any literary movement. Since Durrell was always an outsider, I can see him making some snide allusion to maybe a T. S. Eliot, who indeed had a "famished" appearance, but whether this applies to his poetry is a nice point to debate. Why do I think the poem is contemporary with composition? The colloquial diction for one: "Say what you like . . . " "Three paces apart" makes me think of dueling and "laquered toes" of painted toe nails (which I think is a fairly modern habit with women but maybe not). Also the "Merry and indolent" woman reminds me of Eve/Justine, the exoticism of "saffron parasol" and "queer crocketed tent." There's a photo on Eve on Rhodes where she dresses up in Turkish garb. That fits something out of the Magic Flute. The "musical city" is Vienna, home of Freud. Was Eve taken there for treatment? "The slow disgracing of her mind" is Eve's schizophrenia, as opposed to "Nessim's madness." All very strained, to be sure, but Durrell's tight verse has to be twisted tight to get meaning out of it. Bruce -----Original Message----- >From: slighcl >Sent: Feb 27, 2008 8:40 PM >To: Bruce Redwine , ilds at lists.uvic.ca >Subject: Re: [ilds] syllabary and codes > >On 2/27/2008 11:25 PM, Bruce Redwine wrote: >> I also take the time of the poem as modern, roughly contemporaneous >> with composition, and not one of Cavafy's historical moments, although >> this too is rather vague and indefinite. >> > >Here is the time referent for the poem, right? > >> On the other hand neither would she build him sons >> Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry >> Which was the fashion of *his time and ours*. > >So what sort of historical setting do we have starting from that point? > >C&c. From slighcl at wfu.edu Thu Feb 28 09:10:47 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:10:47 -0500 Subject: [ilds] syllabary and codes In-Reply-To: <8283987.1204212862684.JavaMail.root@elwamui-royal.atl.sa.earthlink.net> References: <8283987.1204212862684.JavaMail.root@elwamui-royal.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <47C6EB17.2080403@wfu.edu> On 2/28/2008 10:34 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote: > Why do I think the poem is contemporary with composition? The colloquial diction for one: "Say what you like . . . " > Next day he deliberately left the musical city > To join a boring water-party on the lake. > Telling himself 'Say what you like about it, > I have been spared very much in this business.' I think that I prefer to allow "A Persian Lady" to be ancient or modern in its historical moment, with my reading swinging back and forth between those ambiguous points of reference, "/his time and ours/." > On the other hand neither would she build him sons > Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry > Which was the fashion of his time and ours. 'Round and round and round she goes / where she stops, nobody knows. . . .' At least I really cannot say. That first person plural really opens the poem up to fuller potentiality. As if "/his/" time was not difficult enough, then we must deal with "/ours/." Eliot is there too, Bruce, and the colloquial is a sign that he is one of the shadows behind the poem. And we should recall that Eliot used the regularly colloquial voice for figures modern /and /historical--cf. 'breezy' Tiresias, who also worked the typing pools of Georgian London, of course; but also the voice from "The Journey of the Magi" (1936): > 'A cold coming we had of it, > Just the worst time of the year[. . . .] Eliot's sort of ventriloquism sets its taproots--dry or otherwise--in the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning. I will post the poem again so that others might add their note, or just enjoy a second dip. Bill Godshalk has access to one of Durrell's unpublished limericks, "My Parsee Maiden." That limerick comes from somewhere near the same moment as "A Persian Lady." Perhaps Bill would transcribe it for our entertainment? C&c. *** > A PERSIAN LADY > > Some diplomatic mission---no such thing as 'fate' --- > Brought her to the city that ripening spring. > She was much pointed out---a Lady-in-Waiting--- > To some Persian noble; well, and here she was > Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance. > By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches, > By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels. > > He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty, > The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron: > The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes; > How would one say 'to enflame' in her tongue, > He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty? > When their eyes met he felt dis-figured > It would have been simple---three paces apart! > > Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go, > The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes > Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory. > Next day he deliberately left the musical city > To join a boring water-party on the lake. > Telling himself 'Say what you like about it, > I have been spared very much in this business.' > > He meant, I think, that never should he now > Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow > Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires, > The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke, > Grey temple, long slide into fat. > > On the other hand neither would she build him sons > Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry > Which was the fashion of his time and ours. > She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact > Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins > In a biography the year of birth and death. > > 1964/ 1961 > > ** -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080228/1171d2a3/attachment.html From godshawl at email.uc.edu Thu Feb 28 10:30:43 2008 From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:30:43 -0500 Subject: [ilds] syllabary and codes In-Reply-To: <47C6EB17.2080403@wfu.edu> References: <8283987.1204212862684.JavaMail.root@elwamui-royal.atl.sa.earthlink.net> <47C6EB17.2080403@wfu.edu> Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080228/d86cbb5f/attachment.html From slighcl at wfu.edu Thu Feb 28 11:16:28 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:16:28 -0500 Subject: [ilds] syllabary and codes In-Reply-To: References: <8283987.1204212862684.JavaMail.root@elwamui-royal.atl.sa.earthlink.net> <47C6EB17.2080403@wfu.edu> Message-ID: <47C7088C.3010006@wfu.edu> On 2/28/2008 1:30 PM, william godshalk wrote: > > But how do you construe the last two lines of the stanza? "When their > eyes met he felt dis-figured / It would have been simple---three paces > apart!" Thanks for the limerick, Bill. I just swallowed "My Parsee Maid" as a cure against being all-too-serious about "The Persian Lady." Curiouser and curiouser. . . . To your question: I /parse /that Persian as follows: these two strangers were walking about on the beach, when suddenly across the shingle their glances met and he experienced feelings of being changed forever [or an excruciating, debilitating self-consciousness]; then if ever was the moment to speak to her, to make the overture; but alas! This chap is some sort of diplomatic Andrea del Sarto, perhaps. > Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, > Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-grey > Placid and perfect with my art: the worse! > I know both what I want and what might gain, > And yet how profitless to know, to sigh > "Had I been two, another and myself, > "Our head would have o'erlooked the world!" No doubt. C&c. -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080228/e7832e89/attachment.html From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net Thu Feb 28 11:54:04 2008 From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:54:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: [ilds] Revenge and the Persian Lady Message-ID: <14229828.1204228444439.JavaMail.root@elwamui-cypress.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Charles, I'll go along with Eliot and his colloquial habits for historical incidents. But I still see the situation as essential modern, contemporary, mainly because of biographical fact. I suspect the Persian trappings are just there to throw the reader off and disguise Durrell's feelings. Which, I think, are not at all kind in 1961, as Eve Cohen makes her "long slide into fat." Durrell's a prude about describing sex, so too about nasty impulses. Couldn't the lines, "He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty, / The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron" -- couldn't they come right out of Justine and apply, vindictively, to her and Eve Cohen? And "Branding-iron!" Are we as readers being allowed a peek into Durrell's private torture chamber? And the disjunctive line, the anacoluthon, "It would have been simple---three paces apart!" What does that mean? I suggest, "It would have been simple" has the common, colloquial meaning of crime fiction, i.e., "It would have been simple" [to have hit her, stabbed her, strangled her, shot her, etc.] I.e., some act appropriate to the man's feeling that he's been "dis-figured" by her gaze. This is a dueling pair, three paces apart. Bruce -----Original Message----- >From: slighcl >Sent: Feb 28, 2008 12:10 PM >To: Bruce Redwine , ilds at lists.uvic.ca >Subject: Re: [ilds] syllabary and codes > >On 2/28/2008 10:34 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote: >> Why do I think the poem is contemporary with composition? The colloquial diction for one: "Say what you like . . . " > >> Next day he deliberately left the musical city >> To join a boring water-party on the lake. >> Telling himself 'Say what you like about it, >> I have been spared very much in this business.' > > >I think that I prefer to allow "A Persian Lady" to be ancient or modern >in its historical moment, with my reading swinging back and forth >between those ambiguous points of reference, "/his time and ours/." > >Eliot is there too, Bruce, and the colloquial is a sign that he is one >of the shadows behind the poem. > >And we should recall that Eliot used the regularly colloquial voice for >figures modern /and /historical--cf. 'breezy' Tiresias, who also worked >the typing pools of Georgian London, of course; but also the voice from >"The Journey of the Magi" (1936): > >> 'A cold coming we had of it, >> Just the worst time of the year[. . . .] > >Eliot's sort of ventriloquism sets its taproots--dry or otherwise--in >the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning. >Bill Godshalk has access to one of Durrell's unpublished limericks, "My >Parsee Maiden." That limerick comes from somewhere near the same moment >as "A Persian Lady." Perhaps Bill would transcribe it for our >entertainment? > >C&c. > >*** >> A PERSIAN LADY >> >> Some diplomatic mission---no such thing as 'fate' --- >> Brought her to the city that ripening spring. >> She was much pointed out---a Lady-in-Waiting--- >> To some Persian noble; well, and here she was >> Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance. >> By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches, >> By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels. >> >> He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty, >> The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron: >> The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes; >> How would one say 'to enflame' in her tongue, >> He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty? >> When their eyes met he felt dis-figured >> It would have been simple---three paces apart! >> >> Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go, >> The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes >> Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory. >> Next day he deliberately left the musical city >> To join a boring water-party on the lake. >> Telling himself 'Say what you like about it, >> I have been spared very much in this business.' >> >> He meant, I think, that never should he now >> Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow >> Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires, >> The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke, >> Grey temple, long slide into fat. >> >> On the other hand neither would she build him sons >> Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry >> Which was the fashion of his time and ours. >> She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact >> Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins >> In a biography the year of birth and death. >> >> 1964/ 1961 From godshawl at email.uc.edu Thu Feb 28 11:55:22 2008 From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:55:22 -0500 Subject: [ilds] syllabary and codes In-Reply-To: <47C7088C.3010006@wfu.edu> References: <8283987.1204212862684.JavaMail.root@elwamui-royal.atl.sa.earthlink.net> <47C6EB17.2080403@wfu.edu> <47C7088C.3010006@wfu.edu> Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080228/aa311288/attachment.html From odos.fanourios at gmail.com Thu Feb 28 12:51:18 2008 From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:51:18 -0700 Subject: [ilds] A Persian Lady :: Strateira In-Reply-To: <47C6EB17.2080403@wfu.edu> References: <8283987.1204212862684.JavaMail.root@elwamui-royal.atl.sa.earthlink.net> <47C6EB17.2080403@wfu.edu> Message-ID: <47C71EC6.3080908@gmail.com> There is much richness in this short verse (and I did raise a glass last night, even though there wasn't time for a posting). My hunch at a "key" to this modern poem (ahem) runs stylistically through Durrell's interests in Cavafy back to Alexander the Great's sketchy history with Stateira, wife to Darius III, captured in 333 in the Battle of Issus. Perhaps Charles can tell me if I'm going too far in my Classical hunt, but I think the stylistic elements that Durrell clearly lifted from Cavafy for other poems (I published on this recently) also appear here with an ambiguous past-present linking Big Alex to Little Larry, both standing on some beach seeing a Persian beauty. My associations for this poem run fast & furious, and very much in tandem with the publications that were likely on Durrell's mind at this time. First, Claude's novel /A Chair for the Prophet/ contains just such a woman, very much like a Justine figure, and I think that by blindly equating Justine with Eve, we're missing the point. After all, Durrell first dedicated /Justine/ "To the first Eve," and I think that figures her as one of many mentally revised and restructured creatures, highly composite in nature. This Persian Lady does have ties that should make us think of Alexandria, ranging from the "musical city" that reminds me of the closing of /Justine/ with Cavafy's "The God Abandons Antony" (with it's singing choir to which Cohen refers in the novel) and the nearby lake, as well as the beach. Alexandria seems a likely source, but the "code unbroken" seems unlike any sentiment he'd apply to Eve or even an Eve-stand-in. I should think "broken" would be enacted... After the 1950s, Eve would always be the broken figure. I'm with Charles on the Eliotic touches, and the diplomatic context strikes me as relying on some other biographical context, perhaps with Eve beside him, but looking at someone else, but even there I'd look back to Alexander as well. That's just the way the present-ness of the past can be enacted in the poem, to some degree, adapting Eliot's influence to Durrell's sympathies with Cavafy. The other gesture to historical context, as Charles has said, smacks of Cavafy to me. I think this also parallels Cavafy's tendency to overlap the past and the present, so that it's not just (as Seferis points out) a tribute for "Those Who Fought For The Achaean League" but also for those who were lost in Smyrna (as an example in Cavafy). The past and present overlap for Cavafy in his historical poems, repeatedly and forcefully, and I see that same thing in Durrell's poem here (a notion of time and tradition in allusion that I've argued, elsewhwere, Durrell uses from Cavafy to revise his own ties to Eliot). Note too the possible kinship to LD's translation of Cavafy's "The City." This is perhaps my own readerly addition to the poem, but I can't help relating "You say to yourself 'I'll be gone...'" to "telling himself 'Say what you like about it, / I have been spared very much..." We know that neither is true. The protagonist has not been spared in either scenario. My hunch, if I were to imagine a biographical origin, is Durrell reading some lovely historical poetry, very possibly Cavafy and/or some Plutarch (who pops up in LD's poetry more than once), and spotting his own lovely Persian Lady walking past with a fleeting moment catching each other's eyes, his dropping back to the book of verse or a notebook... But, I almost wonder if Durrell had wanted to create a vague sensation of Browning's ghost, without any textual echoes? Who is this woman and why do we only see her from this one, vague perspective? But most seriously, I really would look to Alexander the Great's relations with Darius' wife Stateira, whom Alexander reputedly would not even look upon because he did not want to be tempted by her beauty. I think that story holds the inspiration and very likely the reason for the Cavafy-like invocation of a dual past and present. That sterile hyphen may need to read 333-1961... Best, James slighcl wrote: > On 2/28/2008 10:34 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote: >> Why do I think the poem is contemporary with composition? The colloquial diction for one: "Say what you like . . . " > >> Next day he deliberately left the musical city >> To join a boring water-party on the lake. >> Telling himself 'Say what you like about it, >> I have been spared very much in this business.' > > > I think that I prefer to allow "A Persian Lady" to be ancient or modern > in its historical moment, with my reading swinging back and forth > between those ambiguous points of reference, "/his time and ours/." > >> On the other hand neither would she build him sons >> Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry >> Which was the fashion of his time and ours. > > 'Round and round and round she goes / where she stops, nobody knows. . > . .' At least I really cannot say. That first person plural really > opens the poem up to fuller potentiality. As if "/his/" time was not > difficult enough, then we must deal with "/ours/." > > Eliot is there too, Bruce, and the colloquial is a sign that he is one > of the shadows behind the poem. > > And we should recall that Eliot used the regularly colloquial voice for > figures modern /and /historical--cf. 'breezy' Tiresias, who also worked > the typing pools of Georgian London, of course; but also the voice from > "The Journey of the Magi" (1936): > >> 'A cold coming we had of it, >> Just the worst time of the year[. . . .] > > Eliot's sort of ventriloquism sets its taproots--dry or otherwise--in > the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning. > > I will post the poem again so that others might add their note, or just > enjoy a second dip. > > Bill Godshalk has access to one of Durrell's unpublished limericks, "My > Parsee Maiden." That limerick comes from somewhere near the same moment > as "A Persian Lady." Perhaps Bill would transcribe it for our > entertainment? > > C&c. > > *** >> A PERSIAN LADY >> >> Some diplomatic mission---no such thing as 'fate' --- >> Brought her to the city that ripening spring. >> She was much pointed out---a Lady-in-Waiting--- >> To some Persian noble; well, and here she was >> Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance. >> By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches, >> By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels. >> >> He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty, >> The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron: >> The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes; >> How would one say 'to enflame' in her tongue, >> He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty? >> When their eyes met he felt dis-figured >> It would have been simple---three paces apart! >> >> Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go, >> The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes >> Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory. >> Next day he deliberately left the musical city >> To join a boring water-party on the lake. >> Telling himself 'Say what you like about it, >> I have been spared very much in this business.' >> >> He meant, I think, that never should he now >> Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow >> Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires, >> The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke, >> Grey temple, long slide into fat. >> >> On the other hand neither would she build him sons >> Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry >> Which was the fashion of his time and ours. >> She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact >> Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins >> In a biography the year of birth and death. >> >> 1964/ 1961 >> >> ** > > > -- > ********************** > Charles L. Sligh > Department of English > Wake Forest University > slighcl at wfu.edu > ********************** > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > ILDS mailing list > ILDS at lists.uvic.ca > https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds From odos.fanourios at gmail.com Thu Feb 28 12:57:20 2008 From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:57:20 -0700 Subject: [ilds] Poem offering Message-ID: <47C72030.1030806@gmail.com> Hello all, We're far from exhausting Charles' posting, but this poem has been haunting me lately, and I thought I would offer it up as another memorial to yesterday. I've been caught on this one for a while, and it seems apt for the occasion. Best, James ---------- THE EGG 1939 Who first wrapped love in a green leaf, And spread warm wings on the egg of death, That my heart was hatched like a smooth stone, And love in a green leaf locked? Pity was naked: who dried her feathers By the ancient pillow with cold ankles? (Pity, my friend, fell in with the scorpion: Murder with his bottle took my sweet.) Who found passion without a leg, Shrieked like the canticle of a ghost? A bat spat his blood in the nursery: A vessel in darkness but without a compass. Anger first opened the book of the egg, A bible of broken boys and natural women. The choir sang like a bee in a bush, And hunger, the dog, hummed in his paws. Now time is wrapped in a green bay-leaf, And a Roman summer covers the underworld, O remember the heart hatched like cold stone, And love in a green leaf locked. 1943/1939 From godshawl at email.uc.edu Thu Feb 28 16:14:38 2008 From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:14:38 -0500 Subject: [ilds] Revenge and the Persian Lady In-Reply-To: <14229828.1204228444439.JavaMail.root@elwamui-cypress.atl.s a.earthlink.net> References: <14229828.1204228444439.JavaMail.root@elwamui-cypress.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080228/2d105541/attachment.html From godshawl at email.uc.edu Thu Feb 28 16:12:38 2008 From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:12:38 -0500 Subject: [ilds] Revenge and the Persian Lady In-Reply-To: <14229828.1204228444439.JavaMail.root@elwamui-cypress.atl.s a.earthlink.net> References: <14229828.1204228444439.JavaMail.root@elwamui-cypress.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: > > >Bruce > > >-----Original Message----- > >From: slighcl > >Sent: Feb 28, 2008 12:10 PM > >To: Bruce Redwine , ilds at lists.uvic.ca > >Subject: Re: [ilds] syllabary and codes > > > >On 2/28/2008 10:34 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote: > >> Why do I think the poem is contemporary with composition? The > colloquial diction for one: "Say what you like . . . " > > > >> Next day he deliberately left the musical city > >> To join a boring water-party on the lake. > >> Telling himself 'Say what you like about it, > >> I have been spared very much in this business.' > > > > > >I think that I prefer to allow "A Persian Lady" to be ancient or modern > >in its historical moment, with my reading swinging back and forth > >between those ambiguous points of reference, "/his time and ours/." > > > >Eliot is there too, Bruce, and the colloquial is a sign that he is one > >of the shadows behind the poem. > > > >And we should recall that Eliot used the regularly colloquial voice for > >figures modern /and /historical--cf. 'breezy' Tiresias, who also worked > >the typing pools of Georgian London, of course; but also the voice from > >"The Journey of the Magi" (1936): > > > >> 'A cold coming we had of it, > >> Just the worst time of the year[. . . .] > > > >Eliot's sort of ventriloquism sets its taproots--dry or otherwise--in > >the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning. > > >Bill Godshalk has access to one of Durrell's unpublished limericks, "My > >Parsee Maiden." That limerick comes from somewhere near the same moment > >as "A Persian Lady." Perhaps Bill would transcribe it for our > >entertainment? > > > >C&c. > > > >*** > >> A PERSIAN LADY > >> > >> Some diplomatic mission---no such thing as 'fate' --- > >> Brought her to the city that ripening spring. > >> She was much pointed out---a Lady-in-Waiting--- > >> To some Persian noble; well, and here she was > >> Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance. > >> By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches, > >> By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels. > >> > >> He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty, > >> The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron: > >> The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes; > >> How would one say 'to enflame' in her tongue, > >> He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty? > >> When their eyes met he felt dis-figured > >> It would have been simple---three paces apart! > >> > >> Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go, > >> The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes > >> Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory. > >> Next day he deliberately left the musical city > >> To join a boring water-party on the lake. > >> Telling himself 'Say what you like about it, > >> I have been spared very much in this business.' > >> > >> He meant, I think, that never should he now > >> Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow > >> Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires, > >> The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke, > >> Grey temple, long slide into fat. > >> > >> On the other hand neither would she build him sons > >> Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry > >> Which was the fashion of his time and ours. > >> She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact > >> Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins > >> In a biography the year of birth and death. > >> > >> 1964/ 1961 > > >_______________________________________________ >ILDS mailing list >ILDS at lists.uvic.ca >https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds *************************************** W. L. Godshalk * Department of English * University of Cincinnati Stellar disorder * Cincinnati OH 45221-0069 * 513-281-5927 *************************************** From godshawl at email.uc.edu Thu Feb 28 16:20:08 2008 From: godshawl at email.uc.edu (william godshalk) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:20:08 -0500 Subject: [ilds] royal beaches In-Reply-To: References: <14229828.1204228444439.JavaMail.root@elwamui-cypress.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <83.77.08390.5BF47C74@gwout1> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080228/a83464b2/attachment.html From slighcl at wfu.edu Thu Feb 28 16:24:29 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:24:29 -0500 Subject: [ilds] Revenge and the Persian Lady In-Reply-To: <14229828.1204228444439.JavaMail.root@elwamui-cypress.atl.sa.earthlink.net> References: <14229828.1204228444439.JavaMail.root@elwamui-cypress.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <47C750BD.2010608@wfu.edu> On 2/28/2008 2:54 PM, Bruce Redwine wrote: > And the disjunctive line, the anacoluthon, "It would have been simple---three paces apart!" What does that mean? I suggest, "It would have been simple" has the common, colloquial meaning of crime fiction, i.e., "It would have been simple" [to have hit her, stabbed her, strangled her, shot her, etc.] I.e., some act appropriate to the man's feeling that he's been "dis-figured" by her gaze. This is a dueling pair, three paces apart. > I will pitch in here, Bruce, despite the fact that I have not read ahead to the subsequent posts I see piled up in my inbox. You present a very strong biographical reading of "The Persian Lady," and I applaud its gusto, though I would ask, if the poem refers to Eve the Jewess, why use the Persian mask? If it refers to the consummated relationship with Eve, why imagine /not /engaging in the affair? But I suppose license can be given for that if we follow Michael's revelations about Durrell extensive use of Coptic culture as a mask for Zionist enterprises. And nothing expresses the value of something beloved like imagining what things would be like if it had not been. Your (perfected) dark reading also makes me think that you should say Durrell is imagining canceling the Eve years with this poem. Still, I will hazard to guess that Bill will respond by reading the poem as a discrete entity, a thing unto itself, well wrought or otherwise. For my own part, I hope that I am not naive to think that this poem relates a love affair missed and something more, something even sadder--a rationalization of the decision that reveals a self-swindler. Everyone can relate to self-swindling, I hope. Charles -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080228/791841d3/attachment.html From slighcl at wfu.edu Thu Feb 28 16:32:36 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:32:36 -0500 Subject: [ilds] A Persian Lady :: Strateira In-Reply-To: <47C71EC6.3080908@gmail.com> References: <8283987.1204212862684.JavaMail.root@elwamui-royal.atl.sa.earthlink.net> <47C6EB17.2080403@wfu.edu> <47C71EC6.3080908@gmail.com> Message-ID: <47C752A4.2000501@wfu.edu> On 2/28/2008 3:51 PM, James Gifford wrote: > But, I > almost wonder if Durrell had wanted to create a vague sensation of > Browning's ghost, without any textual echoes? Who is this woman and why > do we only see her from this one, vague perspective? Yes, admittedly, I was making a rather strong personal reading of Durrell's poem from the vantage of a Victorianist. But I did find fruitful returns thinking of this poem in conversation with "My Last Duchess" (it is a negative replay of that poem, though no less egocentric) and "The Statue and the Bust" (RB's great poem about an unconsummated affair between nobility). Cavafy seems most right, Jamie. Then add the Eliotic reflexes. C&c. -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** From slighcl at wfu.edu Thu Feb 28 16:39:32 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:39:32 -0500 Subject: [ilds] royal beaches In-Reply-To: <83.77.08390.5BF47C74@gwout1> References: <14229828.1204228444439.JavaMail.root@elwamui-cypress.atl.sa.earthlink.net> <83.77.08390.5BF47C74@gwout1> Message-ID: <47C75444.2010102@wfu.edu> On 2/28/2008 7:20 PM, william godshalk wrote: > s > > Montaza Palace, Alexandria > Alexandria Montazah / Beach > Egypt > > *Location > *This hotel is located inside the Palace of King Farouk, commonly > known as Montazah Palace.It is about a 10 minute drive to the town > centre.The area is one of the most affluent parts of the city and the > hotel was originally built to accommodate the kings and presidents of > all the Arab countries for the Arab Summit Meeting. Yes, pretty darn exclusive club these days. Women can swim with men in whatever dress without policing. C&c. -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080228/09e184c8/attachment.html From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net Thu Feb 28 16:50:48 2008 From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:50:48 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [ilds] Revenge and the Persian Lady Message-ID: <23309732.1204246248616.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Of course, all these meanings are possible but none are provable because that's the way Durrell constructed (and deliberately intended, I think) his poem. I don't see a way to define the poem's situation without bringing in one's one prejudices and predispositions. And mine are upfront -- I read the hints and suggestions in terms of biography. To misuse a scientific analogy, in the way Durrell misuses Einstein, I'm interested in the poem's "Dark Matter," i.e., what is not observable with the naked eye in the universe (or the literary text, as I misappropriate it) but what must exist and must or ought to be inferred. I think, when analyzing his poetry, a lot of attention should be paid to the discontinuities, the quantum jumps, the breaks in thought, the use of anacoluthon, the unanchored pronoun usage, etc. -- all that makes it so difficult to tie down and understand. Or so I think. I am not advocating Deconstruction. Bruce -----Original Message----- >From: william godshalk >Sent: Feb 28, 2008 4:14 PM >To: Bruce Redwine , ilds at lists.uvic.ca >Subject: Re: [ilds] Revenge and the Persian Lady > >Bruce writes: > > I suggest, "It wouldhave been simple" has the common, colloquial meaning of crimefiction, i.e., "It would have been simple" [to have hit her,stabbed her, strangled her, shot her, etc.] I.e., some actappropriate to the man's feeling that he's been "dis-figured"by her gaze. This is a dueling pair, three pacesapart. >But why not "it would have been simple to have moved to her side,only three paces away, and introduced myself"? This reading supposesthat "he" and the Persian lady have not met -- and never will. > >The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron: > >May this line suggest thathe recoils from being branded as hers, as her animal? Of course, thebranding is here mental. The heat image is picked up in "How wouldone say 'to enflame' in her tongue?" > >Billthe From slighcl at wfu.edu Thu Feb 28 17:34:15 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 20:34:15 -0500 Subject: [ilds] Poem offering In-Reply-To: <47C72030.1030806@gmail.com> References: <47C72030.1030806@gmail.com> Message-ID: <47C76117.6060401@wfu.edu> Jamie send in "The Egg," from which I excerpt the following sampling: > Pity was naked: who dried her feathers > By the ancient pillow with cold ankles? > (Pity, my friend, fell in with the scorpion: > Murder with his bottle took my sweet.) > > Who found passion without a leg, > Shrieked like the canticle of a ghost? > A bat spat his blood in the nursery: > A vessel in darkness but without a compass. So I will note how I find a difficulty and obscurity of a different order here in comparison with "The Persian Lady." Could someone give a brief overview for LD, Poet 1939 versus LD, Poet 1961? I am no expert I am afraid, only a reader. What style is he trafficking here in 1939 versus the later poem, &c.? "The Persian Lady" seems High Durrell, by comparison. C&c. -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** From odos.fanourios at gmail.com Thu Feb 28 17:39:13 2008 From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:39:13 -0700 Subject: [ilds] Mankiewicz on Durrell In-Reply-To: <23309732.1204246248616.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net> References: <23309732.1204246248616.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <47C76241.1050905@gmail.com> Hello all, I'm reading through a new collection of Joseph Mankiewicz interviews, and I saw these references to Durrell, which I though might interest the list, especially after the discussion of the various film versions and potential film version of Durrell works during OMG XIV in Victoria. When asked about making /Cleopatra/, Mankiewicz says it wasn't so much his disappointment with the final product as it was the lost opportunity of doing /The Alexandria Quartet/ that disappointed him, something he'd wanted to have as the culmination of his career. As he puts it: "[...] all our todays contain many yesterdays. And the most wonderful representation of this in literature is Lawrence Durrell's /The Alexandria Quartet/ ... and I bought it for the screen, and after a year of really hard work, I had a treatment. I had licked the problem of time and space continuum. When I was finished with the treatment I wrote on the frontispiece, 'I'm happy this treatment cannot be read by anyone who has not read all four volumes of /The Alexandria Quartet/.' The result of that was that no one at Fox read the treatment [...]. [Richard] Zanuck read it, he got it, and he thought it was wonderful. Then I take the treatment to Paris ... to Durrell. I buy him a bottle of cognac and I say, 'You're going to read this!' And he read right through it. [....] When Durrell finishes he says to me, 'I really never thought anybody could do this.' Here I sat with his blessings, ten thousand minutes of potential film that I know I could squeeze so it would work, six hundred double spaced pages ... and I get this phone call from Charlie Feldman. Skouras is in big trouble. They're making this film of /Cleopatra/ and everything is falling apart. He's already spent $9 million and he hasn't got anything to show for it. We need you, he tells me. And I had a decision to make. And I must tell you that I look back on my choice with great sadness ... not because I chose to do /Cleopatra/, but because by the time I was finished everything fell apart at Fox and /The Alexandria Quartet/ never made it to the screen. My one great disappointment? That's it." (199) Mankiewicz follows it up with comments on Cukor's /Justine/ and his sense of its mediocrity. That's from Jeff Laffell's interview with Mankiewicz. Andres Sarris repeats much the same sentiment much more briefly: "what galled him the most about the whole /Cleopatra/ debacle was that he lost the opportunity to do /Justine/, a Mankiewicz dream project to end Mankiewicz dream projects, a twentieth-century literary work of the first magnitude systematically embellished with all the appurtenances of ambiguity and multiplicity of viewpoint to which its ideal director had dedicated himself time and again in his films." (31) Gary Carey rounds this out at the mid-point in the time-period of the interviews, but it again corroborates the tenor of the discussion: "Mankiewicz's most ambitious, and hopefully 'definitive,' involvement with the flashback was to have been /Justine/, his adaptation of Lawrence Durrell's /The Alexandria Quartet/. He says of this unrealized project: 'It became necessary for me to withdraw from /Justine/, and I consider that the greatest disappointment of my career. [...] I was ecstatic about the film possibilities of the /Quartet/; within them lay the most difficult, but potentially the most gratifying, challenge I had ever faced as a writer-director. I had been working on it for many months (there are still, in my files, a couple of hundred pages of screenplay Fox never even requested to see) when I was approached by Spyros Skouras and my (then) agent Charles Feldman. Would I suspect my work on /Justine/ to take over a very expensive, very sick movie Fox had just closed down in London? [....] 'You see, I had solved the two major problems of incorporating all four volumes of tthe /Quartet. into one viable film structure. [....] This was my answer to Daedauls and that simple little labyrinth he whipped up for the Minotaur'" (86-7) To this, there's another quick addition that corroborates others: "'The other reader of my screenplay that I know about was Lawrence Durrell. I sat opposite him in a hotel room in Paris, keeping him from food and drink and even the toilet, until he had read it from start to finish. Larry expressed his delight; he wsa most congratulatory. I suppose, eventually, I shall have to make do with that much; not, after all, inconsiderable praise. But I do wish it had all been otherwise--and that I'd been able to finish /Justine/. I cannot help feeling that if ever I were to summon up enough talent to make a definitive film about anything, this would have been it--for me at any rate." (87) --- So, there it is. The worsening of the situation we all didn't know about. Durrell was working on the failed Cleopatra project while Mankiewicz was working on his /Quartet/ film, and when /Cleopatra/ fell apart, probably right around the time Durrell met up with Mankiewicz to read the script, he got bribed away to save /Cleopatra/ and the better film they both wanted never came to be... Having read Durrell's script for /Cleopatra/ and having seen a photo spread of the Mankiewicz short script during OMG XVI in Victoria (some may recall the discussion of the film), this seems to round out the picture. I think Durrell's /Cleopatra/ would have been exciting, and Mankiewicz's /Quartet/ would have been inspired. But, alas... There's plenty more material in this delightful collection of interviews, and the book is well worth reading on its own. Hopefully I've sent a few more readers its way: Dauth, Brian. Ed. /Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews/. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2008. Best, James From odos.fanourios at gmail.com Thu Feb 28 17:42:55 2008 From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:42:55 -0700 Subject: [ilds] Bloshteyn's new book In-Reply-To: <23309732.1204246248616.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net> References: <23309732.1204246248616.JavaMail.root@elwamui-lapwing.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <47C7631F.7060300@gmail.com> I should also add, I'm in the midst of reading Maria Bloshteyn's /The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller's Dostoevsky/, and it has an excellent discussion of Durrell, Miller, and Nin in the Villa Seurat. Very exciting work, and significantly reworked from her dissertation, if anyone read it in that form. Bloshteyn, Maria. /The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller's Dostoevsky/. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Best, James From odos.fanourios at gmail.com Thu Feb 28 20:39:30 2008 From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:39:30 -0700 Subject: [ilds] Poem offering In-Reply-To: <47C76117.6060401@wfu.edu> References: <47C72030.1030806@gmail.com> <47C76117.6060401@wfu.edu> Message-ID: <47C78C82.7050301@gmail.com> Charles, It's almost as if you ask! > What style is he trafficking here in 1939 > versus the later poem, &c.? "The Persian > Lady" seems High Durrell, by comparison. For what it's worth, "The Egg" has been haunting me largely because I've been dwelling in that early, pre-WWII Durrelliana lately, and the "imagist" recurrences strike me as the most important feature in line with the clearly developed 'technique' here -- for what it's worth, even though everything else changes, I see that technique as a constant between the poems, regardless of their period. Pity's "feathers" seem to be a commonplace across the Corfu poems, recalling the "beak and feather" of the poem "Carol of Corfu." Likewise, the "cold ankles" catch a common trope of the early works: the ankle as the image /par excellence/ of mortality, corporeality, and a premonition of death. In /Pied Piper of Lovers/, the young child Walsh first sees mortality in an ankle bone protruding from a pyre, ankles and anklets jangle around the grave of his mother and her corpse, the first moments of budding sexuality are ankle-deep in water that illuminates their ankles through the moonlight, etc... The scorpion is obscure, but again the killing bottle is a recurring image, going back to /Pied Piper of Lovers/. I read nothing but sex and death in all the images here, I'm guessing drawn in green ink. Durrell may have called his early novels "bad books," but they give a remarkably clear /precis/ of his preoccupations for the remainder of his career (and they're not half bad either). I can only envision the ghost of the second stanza you quote as coming from Hamlet, and the bat and the vessel seem to be of Corfiot derivation. A vessel in darkness on a night of death, with blood in the air and a scorpion afoot -- we only need an obol in the mouth for Charon. In other words, the images are 'thick' and recur, suggesting a quasi surrealist device that gets used somewhat self-consciously, as if revision and form take part in the "pure psychic automatism" of the surrealists. That works out for the timing as well, since Durrell had been well-engaged in the English Surrealism debates by now. Still, it's a 'heretical' notion to impose repetition, interpretability, and form onto the surrealist spontaneous manifestation of 'psychic processes,' yet that's exactly what LD does. In part, I think that's why he was so very keen on psychoanalysis at this point. As I point out in the Henry Miller - Herbert Read letters, Durrell's famous invocation of the Heraldic Universe and the destruction of time in his letters to Miller are actually in direct responses, point by point, to Read's 2nd lecture during the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, for which Durrell had a transcript (Miller quoted that Durrell letter as a response to Read). But, looking at the rest of "The Egg," I'm caught by the tension between sex and death, something that Durrell kept coming back to, albeit with changed textual manners. The green of that opening line "Who first spread love in a green leaf" recurs across these early works as well, whether it's Hamlet's greenness, the green man, or any other number of works (green ink too). > Who first wrapped love in a green leaf, > And spread warm wings on the egg of death, > That my heart was hatched like a smooth stone, > And love in a green leaf locked? Those feather come back that bring life in to the egg (which I read as none other than the author), and this warms the child who was born dead (one of LD's favourite myths about himself), bringing warmth into the heart only to make it beat with love that becomes imprisoned in that green leaf. The images are highly personal, but their recurrence suggests ongoing preoccupations, and in that case, it's back to the sex/death nexus for each image. The poem turns at the end though, with that dead heart hatched, coming forth into the world as some destroyer, and time is now locked in the same green leaf as love -- I sense we're no longer meant to mourn that imprisonment. The repetition of lines within the poem also strikes me as catching at Durrell's predicament: 1) the meaning is no longer the same by the time we repeat, 2) the surrealist and personal imagery (not a far cry from dream images) gather importance and meaning in repetition internally and across works, and 3) despite the apparent chaos and surrealist automatism, form grafts itself onto the work helplessly. In that combination, I see a rich combination. Autobiographic source materials for recurrent images across genres and several years of writing; a reconsideration of Surrealist metaphor and imagery; and a reconstruction of Surrealism that does not default on form and the conscious mind's attempts to build meaning and interpretations (in form) from the impressions gleaned from the unconscious. *That* Durrell, before WWII, although still highly akin until the 1950s, is quite intriguing. There is a distinct sense of "periods" in Durrell. The Quartet is 'high' Durrell, those early works are most overtly within a milieu, and then after the Quartet we find the 'late' Durrell. The poet of the first strikes me as a real firebrand, trying to break into something new, or if not, to at least put the broken pieces back together in a new way. The middle Durrell is clearly a craftsman. The later poet, however, seems to have stumbled and needed a different genre to really do his work... Suffice to say, the style and the 'ideology' of the poet has changed between "The Egg" and "The Persian Lady." The craft has common traits in both, and the sense of rhythm and timing is shared, but the role of image, allusion, and form strike me as having undergone substantial transformation. Does anyone have another favourite, perhaps one somewhere between these two? I'm thinking of "Blind Homer" as my own suggestion, or perhaps "On First Looking Into Loeb's Horace"... Not to steal from anyone, but what of the rhythm and sense of timing remains common here: (1) > The choir sang like a bee in a bush, > And hunger, the dog, hummed in his paws. (1939) (2) > I found your Horace with the writing in it; > Out of time and context came upon > This lover of vines and slave to quietness, > Walking like a figure of smoke here, musing > Among his high and lovely Tuscan pines. (1946) (3) > Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go, > The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes > Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory. (1961) Mark Morris, who will be teaming up with Jan Morris this summer at the Durrell School, noted in Durrell's poetry the problems of rhythm and his tendency toward plosive, stop, and occlusive consonants rather than flowing sibilants, etc... That makes it harder to set him to music, but it certainly gives his rhythm a distinct pattern -- even across the very temporally-distant examples, the flow across lines and the sense of a rhythmic build to a satisfying statement is constant (great for spoken poetry), but it must have its stops along the way... See in (1) the "bee in a bush" or "hunger, the dog, hummed"; (2) the conflict between "writing in it / Out of time" vs. "lover of vines and slave to quietness"; and (3) "code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes." Among those three phrases I number above, how many could be sung legato on a scale? I don't mean that as a musician but strictly in terms of poetry. How much of Durrell can you sing (or speak) *legato*? From the beginning to the end of his career, he favours disjunction in a rhythmic flow that builds toward a statement or climax. He's never given to slow and flowing phrases simmering through and through. He states: do two and do ten. The feather crackles and cankers call. Someone like Eliot likes the crackle, but only at the beginning and end of a phrase -- Durrell likes it in the middle. My own bad plays on words above sound horrible, but I hope they do make the point -- the ideology of the poems shift radically, as do the subjects, but that play on consonants and rhythm remains very, very much the same across his entire career. Personally, that's a technique that catches me immediately -- and as a singer, I relish those moments of excruciating tension when the song must pause for that explosion through the consonant into the vowel (I can wait as long as I want at those moments, and everyone has to wait with me, and it's all the more exciting because it's unpredictable). For instance, Durrell would never tell us: > Winter kept us warm, covering > Earth in forgetful snow, feeding > A little life with dried tubers. Although he might take a tone like Auden and tell us on "September 1, 1939": > I sit in one of the dives > On Fifty-second Street > Uncertain and afraid > As the clever hopes expire > Of a low dishonest decade: Note the need to break and pause in the breath while reading Auden versus Eliot here. I'd place Durrell firmly onside with Auden... But, this is far, far too much to write with only one lovely glass of an Okanagan wine called "Therapy." Well worth the time to find it, and I'm afraid I can't write any more -- my only justification for a second glass is finishing this and getting back to my real work for the few hours left in the evening. But don't despair, it's a full circle -- the wine grew in the same place Jay Brigham edited Durrell's Collected Poems, so there's a tenuous connection at the least. Best, Jamie slighcl wrote: > Jamie send in "The Egg," from which I excerpt the following sampling: >> Pity was naked: who dried her feathers >> By the ancient pillow with cold ankles? >> (Pity, my friend, fell in with the scorpion: >> Murder with his bottle took my sweet.) >> >> Who found passion without a leg, >> Shrieked like the canticle of a ghost? >> A bat spat his blood in the nursery: >> A vessel in darkness but without a compass. > So I will note how I find a difficulty and obscurity of a different > order here in comparison with "The Persian Lady." Could someone give a > brief overview for LD, Poet 1939 versus LD, Poet 1961? I am no expert I > am afraid, only a reader. What style is he trafficking here in 1939 > versus the later poem, &c.? "The Persian Lady" seems High Durrell, by > comparison. > > C&c. > From slighcl at wfu.edu Sun Mar 2 05:30:24 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Sun, 02 Mar 2008 08:30:24 -0500 Subject: [ilds] =?iso-8859-1?q?upmarket_works_of_literature_=28Flaubert=27?= =?iso-8859-1?q?s_Bouvard_et_P=E9cuchet=2C_Lawrence_Durrell=27s_Alexandria?= =?iso-8859-1?q?_Quartet=29?= Message-ID: <47CAABF0.4040605@wfu.edu> http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,,2261331,00.html * Colder but wiser* *Julian Barnes buries his feelings as well as his parents in Nothing to Be Frightened of, says Hilary Spurling* Hilary Spurling Sunday March 2, 2008 Observer Nothing to Be Frightened of by Julian Barnes Cape ?16.99, pp256 The soft centre of this book is a sodden leather pouf belonging to Julian Barnes's parents, who stuffed it with their love letters and left it to rot at the bottom of their garden. Barnes gave it a good kick every so often as a boy and, metaphorically speaking, he's still kicking it half a century later at the age of 62. He paints a Beckettian picture of his parents trapped by old age in their retirement bungalow, where his father, an ex-headmaster, dapper, stylish and a first-class raconteur in his prime, retreated into morose and shaky silence in self-defence against a wife who aimed to overrule, undermine and put him down in every sense. Barnes concedes that what he and his father felt for one another by this time was an admittedly tepid type of love: the two never touched, barely spoke and were apparently alone together only once on a brief car ride to the shops when Barnes Sr told his son what he thought of his first book (not all that much). Barnes's mother inspired altogether livelier feelings of rage and resentment, tinged occasionally with reluctant respect. When she entered hospital for the last time, her son's attempt to soften the blow of the consultant's verdict was forestalled by a grim salute from the far side of the ward, where his mother raised her one good arm with its thumb turned down. 'It was the most shocking thing I ever saw her do; the most admirable too, and the one occasion when she tore at my heart.' The sardonic Mrs Barnes seems to have passed on her deadpan style of delivery to her younger son, together with her love of the conversational pre-emptive strike and the ricocheting epigram. 'One of my sons writes books I can read but can't understand,' she said, disposing with a decisive left and right hook of both Julian and his elder brother (who is a philosopher), 'and the other writes books I can understand but can't read.' Sulphurous whiffs of rivalry between the brothers still drift above what appears to be a discreet stand-off. The author treats his sibling as if he wasn't there - an offstage intellectual stooge with no personality or individual existence beyond a handful of basic facts, such as his age, geographical location and the characteristically Barnesian first words of his elder child ('Bertrand Russell is a silly old man'). The philosopher responds in kind: 'I know nothing about my brother,' is his standard reply to queries from journalists in search of the novelist. The youngest in his family, nothing if not competitive, Julian who longed as a child to grow old enough to crack the whip himself has finally achieved a lonely and illusory autonomy: 'Far from having a whip to crack, I am the very tip of the whip myself ... what is cracking me is a long and inevitable plait of genetic material which can't be shrugged or fought off.' In so far as this book is a family memoir, its personnel - parents, grandparents, only brother and a handful of all but anonymous friends - are, by definition, dry and two-dimensional. Like all good novelists, Barnes believes fictional characters to be intrinsically superior - sharper, clearer and more cohesive than their counterparts, with the added advantage that all there is to know about them can be confined within the pages of a book. The residue of mystery possessed by all real as opposed to invented human beings leaves him cold. Barnes's clinical approach tends to reduce other people - the genetic material that made him - to extensions of himself, figments not much more substantial than the waterlogged scraps of torn-up correspondence leaking through the gaping seams of his parents' disintegrating pouf. Inanimate objects are more tenderly treated. Barnes writes poignantly about the clearance of his parents' bungalow, when each unwanted ornament, plant pot or set of moulded glasses made its transition from personal possession ('now, here for the last time, something that had been chosen, then lived with, wiped, dusted, polished, repaired, loved') to garbage destined for the bin liner and the skip. His mind runs on old age, mortality and extinction. Not a day passes but he thinks of death. *One of his regular ploys, when young and terrified of flying, was selecting what he calls 'crash companions', upmarket works of literature (Flaubert's Bouvard et P?cuchet, Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet), 'something I felt appropriate to have found on my corpse'. *Nothing to Be Frightened of is his own contribution to the genre, not so much a memoir, more a modern equivalent of the mixed bags compiled by antiquarians in the past, a mordant, melancholy cross between Thomas Browne's Urn Burial and John Aubrey's Brief Lives Like Browne and Aubrey, Barnes makes a hobby of visiting graves and deathbeds (once he lost his footing and found himself spreadeagled on a sort of stone chute leading from the bedroom where Montaigne may or may not have died). Like them, he collects the good and bad ends of his predecessors: Philip Larkin, who would have died gibbering with fear if not heavily sedated; Somerset Maugham, who expressed his feelings at the end by lowering his trousers and crapping behind the sofa; Maurice Ravel who lost his memory and inquired courteously, after attending the recording of one of his own works: 'Remind me of the composer's name.' This book follows Flaubert's rule of thumb for remaining as impassive as destiny itself: 'By dint of saying, "That's so, that's so" and gazing down into the black pit at one's feet, one remains calm.' Barnes is master of this kind of cool. 'I fear the catheter and the stairlift, the oozing body and the wasting brain,' he writes, elegantly sidestepping a 2,000-year tradition of perturbation and panic. Christianity in his book has dwindled to the vestigial observances (scripture lessons at school, brief, secularised church services at social functions) of the attenuated Protestantism into which he was born. All believers, including fundamentalists, Christian or otherwise, are dismissed as 'credulous knee-benders'. The pick-and-mix philosophy of contemporary religiosity provokes an asperity worthy of Barnes's formidable mother: 'The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque.' Barnes looks forward with Flaubertian impassivity to the plastic shrouds and sanitary rituals of an impersonal hospital death ('I expect my departure to have been preceded by severe pain, fear and exasperation at the imprecise or euphemistic use of language around me'). The closest he permits himself to go to the abyss is the recycling scenario observed at his brother's funeral by French writer Jules Renard, who watched a fat worm emerge briskly from the edge of the open grave: 'If a worm could strut, this one would be strutting.' -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080302/3c9da29c/attachment.html