Go, go, go, said the bird
TS Eliot once wrote: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality television”. Nowhere is this more true than Uruguay. Ridiculous the waste sad time, indeed.
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Christmas Books
The Illustrious House of Ramires , by Eça de Queirós. A novel about an ineffectual nobleman writing an historical novel about his heroic ancestors. Queirós has been called the Portuguese Flaubert. Large Fees and How to Get Them : a book for the private use of physicians , by Albert V. Harmon, M.D. If you practice early 20th medicine and want large fees, this book is essential reading. If you don’t, there are still lessons in its amusing and unsentimental discussion of various topics, like in the chapter “The Bugbear of Ethics”, where Harmon advises “ethics in its place is a good thing...But there is such a thing as overdoing the ethical proposition”. Histrionics: Three Plays and Over All the Mountain Tops , by Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard once said “I despise actors, indeed I hate them, for they ally themselves at the least sign of danger with the audience and betray the author and completely identify with stupidity and feeble-mindedness. Actors are the destroyers and extermin
It was T.S. Eliot himself who couldn't bear much reality, as his timid, almost unbearable poetry makes clear. Eliot was no prophet, but only a dour and lonely pessimist with a instinct for plagerism, and a taste for sophmoric equivocation. It is amazing to me that people still think of him as a great poet. Of course he wrote before television; I doubt if he could have comprehended the paradoxes in that news story you found from Uraquay.
ReplyDeleteI'm won't go as far as you in damning Eliot without greater consideration. But I'm not going to defend him either. Both would require re-reading all his poems, and that is something I'm unwilling to do.
ReplyDeleteIn order to source that quote I did read 'Burnt Norton' again, it was worse than the only previous time I didn't enjoy reading it many years ago. I don't know what his point is, all it makes me think of is congealed grease.
Conversely (perversely?), I'm a great admirer of his criticism.
"Congealed grease" is an appropriate image to describe the feeling of sickness and constriction and the experience of slippery logic that must accompany all readers of Eliot's fakey Quartets. By the way, whatever ensued from your request to read "The Modern Epoch", which I dutifully passed along to that poem's author?
ReplyDeleteI've been planning on sending some well crafted comments on "The Modern Epoch", I just haven't had the time or the focus (there hasn't been much written here lately, either). But I plan on doing so, I was impressed by much of TME, and found certain parts of it brilliant.
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