If I read a newspaper from 1942 which says “’plane Crash in Laytown” chances are there was a plane crash in Laytown. I have no reason to doubt it. I know ‘planes crash, and they are dangerous both for their crews and the people on the ground. I know there is a Laytown (I’ve been there but even so, I can look it up on a map) and I suspect that there was a man called Sam Farrell and he died. I could import all the paraphernalia of the “Critical Literacy” I’m supposed to inflict on my students but the fact remains I have no reason to doubt that at 6.45 or thereabouts on Wednesday July 1st 1942 a ‘plane crashed in Laytown.
(And I did just check that July 1st was a wednesday in 1942
When I read..
Then the countess, beloved of God, accompanied by two soldiers, as it is said, mounting her horse naked, loosed her hair from its bands, so veiling the whole of her body, and thus passing through the market place she was seen by nobody (a nemine visa) except for her very white legs.
I immediately doubt the story.
But I do so because there was no academic discipline of history writing in the Middle Ages, and the chroniclers tend to record both what we might consider fact, and what we might think of as pure fantasy. By the time Lawman is translating Wace who was translating Geofrey the line between Romance and Chronicle is almost impossible to draw. But before we dismiss them as childish, there’s two things to keep in mind.
1) The writers lived in a world where miracles and wonders were everyday events. Miracles were the outward, public proof of an invisible reality. When Saint Augustine argues with the British Bishops over Easter, he proves his argument is better than theirs by performing a miracle. And when they refuse to change their practice, they are struck down as a sign of divine displeasure. Part of learning to be Christian and literate involved learning to “read” the world as a manifestation of divine love. To see through or beyond. One of the educational uses for Anglo-Saxon riddles. If you live in such a world, it’s difficult to switch off and say ”could never happen”.
2) Elvis isn’t dead. Lennon was assassinated by the CIA. The Twin Towers was a FBI plot. Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Christopher Marlowe wrote Shakespeare’s plays. You’ve only got to scan the internet to see that a willingness to believe in the totally improbable is not confined to people living before 1499.
However, that doesn’t explain why this story. The idea, delivered ex cathedra at the book launch by someone I’d never met before, was that this is a folk tale tacked on to an historical personage. That doesn’t work because there’s no independent evidence for the folk tale, nor does it explain why that tale and this character? And the idea that it was a pagan ritual being performed by one of the country’s most visible women almost five hundred years after the conversion, seems equally unbelievable.
Roger of Wendover probably believed the story as he wrote it down. But I doubt he checked his sources. How or why it was initially generated remains an unknowable but entertaining question.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Import and export
When I started "blogging",(it still sounds like something you'd do in a swamp) "Lady Godiva and Me' was in limbo, doing the now it's accepted now it's not, now we don't know who is going to publish it if it's going to be published quickstep and I was using a blog to keep notes for what is still work in progress.
As it was getting silly trying to decide what belongs where I have closed down the other one and imported it. But I've left the Lady G header up as sooner or later, like any good Viking, I'll swing back to Anglo-Saxon England where parts of ye new project is situated anyway.
As it was getting silly trying to decide what belongs where I have closed down the other one and imported it. But I've left the Lady G header up as sooner or later, like any good Viking, I'll swing back to Anglo-Saxon England where parts of ye new project is situated anyway.
Porphyria’s Lover
I’ve been mired trying to respond to the ugsomest article about teaching poetry in the Senior school classroom I have read in a long time. It’s left me feeling like I need to scrub the inside of my head to get rid of the stench. So, I ask Mr. Liam O’Flynn if he wouldn’t mind playing, (stopping everything to enjoy The Golden Ring (twice)) before following it with Liz Carroll and John Doyle and consider Mr. Robert Browning. In a roundabout way because it's related with what I'm working on. (Not round the Wrekin as such as back to Dublin first.)
Iser on Joyce, discussing the use of Headlines in Aeolus: when the headline matches what follows, the reader experiences a sense of banality. When it doesn’t, the reader feels it could if only they thought about it enough and it’s this which involves the reader. What Iser also identifies in Joyce is surplus: an excess of detail that no one reading will ever wrestle into coherence but which gives the impression that if only you were to try hard enough you could . (It’s similar to Shakespeare’s habitual removal or multiplication of explanations from his source to his play). Because you can’t reduce the writing to a straight simple explanation, it haunts. And gets re read.
Which brings us to Porphyria’s Lover. On the semantic level, you have a string of words that are fairly self-explanatory. It’s a wild night, the narrator is alone. Porphyria enters, sits beside the narrator. N kills her and God doesn’t say anything.
But that semantic reading leaves so much unexplained. It proffers coherence, but it manages to avoid providing enough information for a final definitive reading that might exclude other possibilities. The pome almost insists the reader imagine what’s going on, but at the same time refuses to provide enough information. Which is why it doesn’t exhaust re-readings. (I'm talking about the poem as if it were a recalcitrant witness. Hurm)
Eg: there is no evidence that the narrator is male. There’s a whole set of cultural assumptions that it’s a “he”, but nothing in the poem itself excludes the possibility of the narrator being female. Read it that way, as what Eagelton calls the story of “a lesbian relationship gone horribly awry” and Porphyria’s hesitation takes on a new meaning.
Porphyria itself is a disease.
Readings that try to control the poem by shutting it down fail, not because they are “wrong” but because they cannot exclude other possibilities. There’s enough evidence to support them, but not enough to exclude alternatives. Ryals summarises the poem thus: The lovers of different social class, the girl forced against her will to marry someone of higher financial and social status, her feelings of guilt, her slipping away from her engagement party to the boy’s cottage during a storm, her giving herself to him sexually. It’s neat, but by pulling in the intertextuality of early nineteenth century fiction he creates what is essentially a parallel poem to the one on the page.
It’s not possible to argue that: she too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,/To set its struggling passion free/ From pride, and vainer ties dissever,/ And give herself to me for ever cannot mean she has been forced against her will to marry, nor it possible to claim it could only mean that.
Other parts of the Ryals reading are more tenuous. If “That moment she was mine, mine, fair,/ Perfectly pure and good:“ means she gives herself to him sexually it raises interesting questions about the meaning of “pure and good’. But you could read it that way. It’s not impossible.
The other factor which undermines the possibility of a finite reading is that this is first person narration. The Browning genius is to create a speaker who comes off the page and lodges in your head in such a way that you’re never quite sure of it. He offers no clue as to how the speaker should be read. And while it’s clear the narrator might not fit most people’s definitions of sanity, there’s a horrible logic to his words.
And to stop before this gets too long….that famous final line; And yet God has not said a word! is such a good trick. How do you read it? Regret, surprise, defiance, anger? To see if you got it right, you have to go back and reread the poem. Every time.
(If I have to do any more ugsome reading I may just take my Ipod, fall into “Childe Roland” and disappear forever.)
Iser on Joyce, discussing the use of Headlines in Aeolus: when the headline matches what follows, the reader experiences a sense of banality. When it doesn’t, the reader feels it could if only they thought about it enough and it’s this which involves the reader. What Iser also identifies in Joyce is surplus: an excess of detail that no one reading will ever wrestle into coherence but which gives the impression that if only you were to try hard enough you could . (It’s similar to Shakespeare’s habitual removal or multiplication of explanations from his source to his play). Because you can’t reduce the writing to a straight simple explanation, it haunts. And gets re read.
Which brings us to Porphyria’s Lover. On the semantic level, you have a string of words that are fairly self-explanatory. It’s a wild night, the narrator is alone. Porphyria enters, sits beside the narrator. N kills her and God doesn’t say anything.
But that semantic reading leaves so much unexplained. It proffers coherence, but it manages to avoid providing enough information for a final definitive reading that might exclude other possibilities. The pome almost insists the reader imagine what’s going on, but at the same time refuses to provide enough information. Which is why it doesn’t exhaust re-readings. (I'm talking about the poem as if it were a recalcitrant witness. Hurm)
Eg: there is no evidence that the narrator is male. There’s a whole set of cultural assumptions that it’s a “he”, but nothing in the poem itself excludes the possibility of the narrator being female. Read it that way, as what Eagelton calls the story of “a lesbian relationship gone horribly awry” and Porphyria’s hesitation takes on a new meaning.
Porphyria itself is a disease.
Readings that try to control the poem by shutting it down fail, not because they are “wrong” but because they cannot exclude other possibilities. There’s enough evidence to support them, but not enough to exclude alternatives. Ryals summarises the poem thus: The lovers of different social class, the girl forced against her will to marry someone of higher financial and social status, her feelings of guilt, her slipping away from her engagement party to the boy’s cottage during a storm, her giving herself to him sexually. It’s neat, but by pulling in the intertextuality of early nineteenth century fiction he creates what is essentially a parallel poem to the one on the page.
It’s not possible to argue that: she too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,/To set its struggling passion free/ From pride, and vainer ties dissever,/ And give herself to me for ever cannot mean she has been forced against her will to marry, nor it possible to claim it could only mean that.
Other parts of the Ryals reading are more tenuous. If “That moment she was mine, mine, fair,/ Perfectly pure and good:“ means she gives herself to him sexually it raises interesting questions about the meaning of “pure and good’. But you could read it that way. It’s not impossible.
The other factor which undermines the possibility of a finite reading is that this is first person narration. The Browning genius is to create a speaker who comes off the page and lodges in your head in such a way that you’re never quite sure of it. He offers no clue as to how the speaker should be read. And while it’s clear the narrator might not fit most people’s definitions of sanity, there’s a horrible logic to his words.
And to stop before this gets too long….that famous final line; And yet God has not said a word! is such a good trick. How do you read it? Regret, surprise, defiance, anger? To see if you got it right, you have to go back and reread the poem. Every time.
(If I have to do any more ugsome reading I may just take my Ipod, fall into “Childe Roland” and disappear forever.)
Monday, April 6, 2009
The Great Hunger
No, not something Freudian, Kavanagh’s poem which I have been rereading. Digression first and second.
If I ask the musicians I know who they listen to or admire, they recommend performers and performances. If I ask them who they think is the greatest exponent of their instrument, chances are they will give me a list. It’s a recognized part of the learning process.
Ask people involved in poetry the same question and a lot of them start hedging their bets. (I don’t mean the bizarre “I only write poetry, I don’t read it” crowd. I mean those well-read practitioners.) You want to know their idea of “Major poems”, well, first define major? “Great poets”? Define great. And so on and so froth. Yes, we know literary values are contingent. Thank you. But if you can’t admit to your enthusiasms and hang your hat somewhere, then something is amiss.
So ”The Great Hunger” has to be “One of the Twentieth Century’s Major Poems”.
I have met Maguires. They were the self-contained characters who sat in the corner of rooms. The guy who came into the bar and drank three pints, never four, never spoke to anyone other than a few words and a nod. There but distant. And I knew the married versions, those men and women who had traded isolation for the possibility of “Living alone in half as much space” (Ralph Mactell’s line that). Silent men home from work, hiding down the garden shed. Bedrooms glimpsed in friends’ houses where there were two single beds in the parents’ room. The sense, even as a child, that some strange negotiations must have gone on for the engendering of children.
So why isn’t it touted as such?
Is it that you have to read it several times to notice how good the imagery is?
Is it that it is so uncomfortable to read? Kavanagh focuses squarely on his main character and traces his inexorable slide towards age and loneliness. The unrelenting misery of that life is unnerving as we watch it get wasted by forces beyond its control. The contrast between the cycle of growth in the farm and the frustrations of Maguire’s sterility never let you slide into the comfort of abstractions. Reading the Waste Land there is the release of feeling you’re not really sure what you’re reading but it sounds good. The Great Hunger is inescapably about a human being and his life. And I think that’s what makes it grand. And maybe because Kavanagh was accessing his own fears and couldn’t get the distance on it for flippancy it has a clout that his other attempts at long poems lack. The verse flies like a tattered sack on a bit of rusty barbed wire.
And you can’t help but think: “there but for the grace of God…”.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
LAYTOWN ‘PLANE CRASH.(1942)
If we’re going to get Middling back can we also have ugsome?
I could do wonders with ugsome. “This article on English education is so ugsome I can’t even begin to write a response to it…..”
Middling. Well, yes, Midlands, Mercia. I wonder if I could solve the nationality problem by saying I’m a Mercian?
But back to the newspaper from 1942. How wonderfully naive they were in those bygone days, believing readers wanted factual news with a minimum of clutter. They obviously thought that not only could readers decide for themselves if something was terrible or horrific, but they also seemed to think that nouns could move around without several adjectives in attendance and verbs could do their work without adverbial crutches. How quaint.
Here’s the headlines from the five cuttings:
GALWAYMAN INJURED IN ‘PLANE CRASH
INQUEST ON PILOT.
ARMY ‘PLANE CRASH: TRAGEDY AT LAYTOWN.
LAYTOWN ‘PLANE CRASH.
‘PLANE CRASH AT LAYTOWN: ONE KILLED; TWO INJURED.
Only one "tragedy" in five. I like the way the Connacht Tribune highlights the injury of a man from Galway and leaves the actual fatality of the Dubliner, Sam Farell (77) out of the headlines. Please note every use of ‘plane marked by the apostrophe of omission.
I once heard an editor defend his journalists (when someone had the gall to point out that if you're going to slag the English teaching profession as semi-literate you might want to make sure your article was grammaticaly accurate) by saying that you don't care if the doctor can't write a grammatical sentence so why should you care if the journalist can't.
Obviously not an attitude that was popular in 1942.
And none of your TV witness: Ooh it was sooo terrible, it was just like, you know, like shocking, as if, and I just couldn’t like believe my eyes…(But I got it on my mobile phone and do you want to buy the footage). Or the dreaded TV reporter chosen obviously for his or her looks; Bob, I just can’t begin to describe the scene here.. (It’s your job you pillock! If you can’t describe it then go home and let the company find someone who is articulate and can…)
Here’s my grandfather, at seventy:
“Sam Farrell had just entered the caravan when I saw the ‘plane falling and I gave a shout and jumped back. I saw the ‘plane hit the caravan and split it in two, after which flames broke out. My son, Joseph, came along and with other men helped to pull out the occupants of the plane”.
I can hear the measured enunciation, the pauses, the slighty awkward syntax..and for some reason hear him spit at the end of it. But if I were wearing my hat I’d tip it to him. Let the words do the work. Like Humpty, you can always pay them extra on Saturday if they break into a sweat.
I could do wonders with ugsome. “This article on English education is so ugsome I can’t even begin to write a response to it…..”
Middling. Well, yes, Midlands, Mercia. I wonder if I could solve the nationality problem by saying I’m a Mercian?
But back to the newspaper from 1942. How wonderfully naive they were in those bygone days, believing readers wanted factual news with a minimum of clutter. They obviously thought that not only could readers decide for themselves if something was terrible or horrific, but they also seemed to think that nouns could move around without several adjectives in attendance and verbs could do their work without adverbial crutches. How quaint.
Here’s the headlines from the five cuttings:
GALWAYMAN INJURED IN ‘PLANE CRASH
INQUEST ON PILOT.
ARMY ‘PLANE CRASH: TRAGEDY AT LAYTOWN.
LAYTOWN ‘PLANE CRASH.
‘PLANE CRASH AT LAYTOWN: ONE KILLED; TWO INJURED.
Only one "tragedy" in five. I like the way the Connacht Tribune highlights the injury of a man from Galway and leaves the actual fatality of the Dubliner, Sam Farell (77) out of the headlines. Please note every use of ‘plane marked by the apostrophe of omission.
I once heard an editor defend his journalists (when someone had the gall to point out that if you're going to slag the English teaching profession as semi-literate you might want to make sure your article was grammaticaly accurate) by saying that you don't care if the doctor can't write a grammatical sentence so why should you care if the journalist can't.
Obviously not an attitude that was popular in 1942.
And none of your TV witness: Ooh it was sooo terrible, it was just like, you know, like shocking, as if, and I just couldn’t like believe my eyes…(But I got it on my mobile phone and do you want to buy the footage). Or the dreaded TV reporter chosen obviously for his or her looks; Bob, I just can’t begin to describe the scene here.. (It’s your job you pillock! If you can’t describe it then go home and let the company find someone who is articulate and can…)
Here’s my grandfather, at seventy:
“Sam Farrell had just entered the caravan when I saw the ‘plane falling and I gave a shout and jumped back. I saw the ‘plane hit the caravan and split it in two, after which flames broke out. My son, Joseph, came along and with other men helped to pull out the occupants of the plane”.
I can hear the measured enunciation, the pauses, the slighty awkward syntax..and for some reason hear him spit at the end of it. But if I were wearing my hat I’d tip it to him. Let the words do the work. Like Humpty, you can always pay them extra on Saturday if they break into a sweat.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Middling #1
Grandmothers play a major role in Lady G and Me. After all, Godgifu was the grandmother of the last queen of Anglo-Saxon England and her grandsons played a major though negative role in William’s victory.
I never knew either of my grandfathers which might explain their absence. Or the fact that retired men tended to die off leaving their wives to rule the family. I always had the feeling my world was matriarchal. The Irish grandfather died long before I was born. There isn’t even a picture of him. The English one I did meet when I was very little. I watched England win the world cup with him which dates that memory. .... but my memories of him are of a distant, austere presence in the spooky London house they lived in, an impression which isn’t offset by his photographs.
Oddly enough I have records of their voices, which means more to me than their photographs or lack of them. Mr. Guilar was interviewed by a local paper as a witness to a plane crash in Laytown in July 1942. In passing, I learn that he had been doing labouring work that day (he was 70), helping a “life long” friend (who was 77) put up his traveling show. In the different paper clippings I have there is some understandable confusion as Mr. Guilar Senior was William, and he calls his eldest son Joseph, who then turns up in several other papers as “William Guilar’ who ‘heroically” dragged the crew from the burning plane. These heroics Number Two. There’s nothing special in what he says, except for one thing. The plane was “middling high”.
Grandfather White, for reasons un remembered by his daughters, took part in a dialect archive recording. I first heard him on a crackling 78, telling stories in broad Sussex and reading “A Three Part Song” by Mussa’ Rudyard Kipling. Today I have him on a cd and haven't cleaned the file. It wouldn't sound right without the hiss and pop. It gets a walk on part in the prologue to Lady G.
But he tells his story about the local fire brigade, in the days when they had to send a runner out to find everyone and then get the horse from the pub, which links the two testimonies. When the plane crashed in Bettystown its petrol tanks exploded "and the plane and the caravans at the show were reduced to ashes despite the efforts of the L.S.F who played a hose on the blaze."
But then he says ”law a mussy me, he were right middling upset…”
The word brings the two men together. I like that word. Middling. I want to bring it back. My dad’s reply to “how are you?” was either “still pulling the devil by the tail” or “mixed to middling, like belly bacon”. It sits neatly between high and low, tall and short, good and bad. Somewhere in the middle, which isn’t a bad place to be if you know what you’re doing. Extremism is fashionable, and it's easy to strike an attitude, but there's something solid about "middling"; reliable, like the seventy year old man who turns out to help you set up your travelling show because he's your friend and has been for long time.
I never knew either of my grandfathers which might explain their absence. Or the fact that retired men tended to die off leaving their wives to rule the family. I always had the feeling my world was matriarchal. The Irish grandfather died long before I was born. There isn’t even a picture of him. The English one I did meet when I was very little. I watched England win the world cup with him which dates that memory. .... but my memories of him are of a distant, austere presence in the spooky London house they lived in, an impression which isn’t offset by his photographs.
Oddly enough I have records of their voices, which means more to me than their photographs or lack of them. Mr. Guilar was interviewed by a local paper as a witness to a plane crash in Laytown in July 1942. In passing, I learn that he had been doing labouring work that day (he was 70), helping a “life long” friend (who was 77) put up his traveling show. In the different paper clippings I have there is some understandable confusion as Mr. Guilar Senior was William, and he calls his eldest son Joseph, who then turns up in several other papers as “William Guilar’ who ‘heroically” dragged the crew from the burning plane. These heroics Number Two. There’s nothing special in what he says, except for one thing. The plane was “middling high”.
Grandfather White, for reasons un remembered by his daughters, took part in a dialect archive recording. I first heard him on a crackling 78, telling stories in broad Sussex and reading “A Three Part Song” by Mussa’ Rudyard Kipling. Today I have him on a cd and haven't cleaned the file. It wouldn't sound right without the hiss and pop. It gets a walk on part in the prologue to Lady G.
But he tells his story about the local fire brigade, in the days when they had to send a runner out to find everyone and then get the horse from the pub, which links the two testimonies. When the plane crashed in Bettystown its petrol tanks exploded "and the plane and the caravans at the show were reduced to ashes despite the efforts of the L.S.F who played a hose on the blaze."
But then he says ”law a mussy me, he were right middling upset…”
The word brings the two men together. I like that word. Middling. I want to bring it back. My dad’s reply to “how are you?” was either “still pulling the devil by the tail” or “mixed to middling, like belly bacon”. It sits neatly between high and low, tall and short, good and bad. Somewhere in the middle, which isn’t a bad place to be if you know what you’re doing. Extremism is fashionable, and it's easy to strike an attitude, but there's something solid about "middling"; reliable, like the seventy year old man who turns out to help you set up your travelling show because he's your friend and has been for long time.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
The SHOp arrived with “These Heroics #2´in it.
It’s a very solid, well-presented journal with lots of good things in it.
So the year has started well, poems in the The SHOp and The Stinging Fly. Small victories, but it’s always so much better when the poems appear in journals I know I’m going to read from cover to cover.
Which does raise the question: why are Irish journals so good compared to Australian ones. I don’t mean, why do they occasionally publish what I write,which could be sued against them, when Australian ones never do, but why are Irish ones so full of good things.
Since I am a guest here, I should probably not follow that idea.
Instead, let us consider the fifty word Bio. I always read “notes on contributors”. Often to find if poet x does have a colelction I can track down. Sometimes, I find my name there and wonder who he is. The guy who sent the poem to The SHOp still believed Heaventree were going to publish Lady G, which we know didn’t happen and the nice people with great taste at Nine Arches did.
Does anybody ever feel comfortable with the request for the brief Bio? The subtext is: describe yourself in fifty words and make sure you remember to plug the latest collection.
I used to go for windswept and interesting:
Liam Guilar is the only poetry writing lute playing white water kayaking medievalist to have been smuggled over the Kazak border and then arrested and given twenty four hours to leave Samarkand.
But most people don’t know what a Samarkand is…
These days I wonder if I should go for blunt:
Liam Guilar lives in Australia. Or tries to. Some days he doesn’t do it very well. His last collection of poems was Lady Godiva and Me. Please go to this web site and order your copy, now.
Or honest.
Liam Guilar is an anagram. A three toed Nergle from the planet Zipthith. Exiled for incompetence, he does a very bad job as an undercover agent, studying the ritual behaviors of humanoids. His latest collection of poems, Lady Godiva and Me, (go to this website now and buy several copies) contains coded revelations about the mystery of the universe. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn how to teleport.
So the year has started well, poems in the The SHOp and The Stinging Fly. Small victories, but it’s always so much better when the poems appear in journals I know I’m going to read from cover to cover.
Which does raise the question: why are Irish journals so good compared to Australian ones. I don’t mean, why do they occasionally publish what I write,which could be sued against them, when Australian ones never do, but why are Irish ones so full of good things.
Since I am a guest here, I should probably not follow that idea.
Instead, let us consider the fifty word Bio. I always read “notes on contributors”. Often to find if poet x does have a colelction I can track down. Sometimes, I find my name there and wonder who he is. The guy who sent the poem to The SHOp still believed Heaventree were going to publish Lady G, which we know didn’t happen and the nice people with great taste at Nine Arches did.
Does anybody ever feel comfortable with the request for the brief Bio? The subtext is: describe yourself in fifty words and make sure you remember to plug the latest collection.
I used to go for windswept and interesting:
Liam Guilar is the only poetry writing lute playing white water kayaking medievalist to have been smuggled over the Kazak border and then arrested and given twenty four hours to leave Samarkand.
But most people don’t know what a Samarkand is…
These days I wonder if I should go for blunt:
Liam Guilar lives in Australia. Or tries to. Some days he doesn’t do it very well. His last collection of poems was Lady Godiva and Me. Please go to this web site and order your copy, now.
Or honest.
Liam Guilar is an anagram. A three toed Nergle from the planet Zipthith. Exiled for incompetence, he does a very bad job as an undercover agent, studying the ritual behaviors of humanoids. His latest collection of poems, Lady Godiva and Me, (go to this website now and buy several copies) contains coded revelations about the mystery of the universe. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn how to teleport.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)