LAMBEG DRUM
Hi, just woke up, phoned from several places at once, very confused about time and place. I haven't seen a single other person in months and can't make any connections with any people here of any kind. Its just like Kafkaesque nightmare, but a Kafkaesque nightmare is at least made crazily sensible by its unpattern. Paul Muldoon isnt a good writer, a man of the right place and the right time. There's not a poem by him I'd call visionary or revolutionary or interesting. Mind you I'd extend that to Heaney too. I just feel that modern people have lost the feel for literature as they've lost interest in living and suffering, eating real soil or sucking on visible not interactive grapes. All the other writers you mention of the modern era are much of a muchness. Mebdh McGuckian's not even very mad, refers to me as 'insane' probably a backhanded compliment, like saying 'interesting' or 'cool' or 'talented'.
I know too the apron, the lambeg drum, the cool ironed cloth and the wrinkled copy of Nietzsche at the wrong page which is not the eternal radiation or whatever but a description of nose picking in lower Baden at the seminary with the wrong shirt and lots of loo paper sticking out of yer bags (trousers). Of course Liberalism isn't working, just talking about imaginary fish doesnt reproduce them on the plate, just as dressing interactive Barbie dolls doesnt equate with sex or glamour, although they ask you to spend on it and you might if you had no sense and slept 2 hours a day, kept there by the Red Bull.
Your plucking at the grapes I ate years ago. What about the time in Baden Baden that Igor Stepanov started a blazing row by pulling the tail of a small dog thus activating the anger of its owner, then stepping into Turgenev's house and peeing in the lintel. (by the way his roof fell in upon him, also a sign of what he is flaccid, beneath a pale moon dreaming of astro-physics while being besmattered with warm, sulphuric rains)
Your a bookish, twerped, inconsolate and disregarding, try fattening a calf for slaughter, 'twill serve you better.
Now you know that now is now and not then.
best wishes
Hello Paul,
Yes, Yeats pitched language, especially his later language, to something hard to follow. Austin Clarke (1896-1974) was his anointed successor, and his dates show he was a generation later - poets between might have felt crushed. Patrick Kavangh (1904-67) did find a response, though, particularly in The Great Hunger (1942). I think you've recommended this to me in the past, and so you'll have your own opinions on it. It eschews Yeats's high style as much as it does his dictums, and resorts to the powers of narrative - not a Yeats forte. There's also Richard Rodgers (1909-69) from Belfast who was influenced by Hopkins , thereby substituting one rich language for another - which you might say is Yeats by association, or suggestion. MacNeice (1907-63) has been absorbed, almost, by the mainland...
Since then rich or fine writing has proved a hallmark of both Northern and Republic of Ireland writing. It's often proved more fruitful than British mainland poetry, and you'd have to agree that Northern Irish poetry has dominated much of the past 40 years. Poets like Paul Durcan (1944) and others in southern Ireland have moved another way, and the number of women poets on both sides - Medbh McGuckian (1950) and Evan Boland (1934?) for example, have been bolstered by quite a few like Vona Groarke (1964 - I reviewed her for the TLS in 1994) and Sara Berkeley (1967) once the great hope. As for Northern Irish poetry, Edna Longley commented acidly that NI poets were criticized 'for not leaving their enviable raw material raw enough', but were prone to metaphor etc. How dare they have it all? I still don't rate Paul Muldoon (1951) highly, and feel his example, more than his own poetry, might prove to have been what the excitement was all about.
As for Philosophers or philosophes being unread? I don't think this is a specifically Irish problem. In fact I think philosophy is a little more discussed in Southern Ireland campuses and after, judging by comments from Dublin friends, than it is over here.
Yes, the continental tradition is now wholly severed from Anglophone empiricism. Poets don't often go to Russell or Wittgenstein. But some go to Heidegger, and more used to go to Sartre who - like Heidegger -was influenced by Husserl. The point is that Nietzsche was writing a poetic language that anyone could find assimilable, even though they weren't trained philosophers. Even the Nazis could pervert him. They couldn't pervert Heidegger - too impenetrable - and could never have entered his world unaided. So he obliged by perverting himself.
I'm reading Isiah Berlin at the moment (The Power of Ideas), shorter essays; and proceeding to his pluralist philosophers Vico (1688-1744), Herder, and his teacher Hamann. All these philosophers pointed out incredibly early that there might be some absolute values, but each culture had different ones, different emphasizes, and Vico predicted cycles of such cultural systems, even within one particular one. Berlin with all of these three writers makes the distinction between relativism (the Marabar caves echo, 'everything exists, nothing has value', in effect) and pluralism, which does allow for differing values and a different emphasis on a kind of values menu; but not the value-free relativist position. Berlin also attacks the ideal state. For instance absolute liberty cannot co-exist (wolf eats lamb) with absolute equality. This, and the false determinism argued by Marxists, Fascists et al who still want us to struggle to the death for something they feel 'inevitable', are some of Berlin 's targets.
Another Berlin book on Philosophers of the Enlightenment - an argued anthology with commentaries and sadly out of print - superb - led me to Hume's refutation of causality. We can't be sure the sun will rise tomorrow; not absolutely. Well, you know all this. It changed philosophy and we still all proceed from Hume's breakthrough in the 1730s. Later on of course his commentaries on religion exerted a similar liberation.
I then got a lecture from Charles Lind on how Hume tackled this further, and how it now impacts on all Anglophone philosophy. Kant, basically, then went further: we are at the centre of our sense data, like a Copernican sun - Kant likened his breakthrough to putting a person's head at the centre of things. I am a sun etc. I wonder if this led us back to medieval systems and hypothetical 'forms', but apparently Kant's 'forms' are simply those articulating mental architecture. For the first time, apparently. OK, so Kant isn't guilty.
Charles's work has - you can guess this next bit - been in Artificial Intelligence, but he feels logic, which is how our home-grown philosophy has developed, is at a dead end. All this suggests a difficult PR job for philosophy. Russell eventually dismissed the later Whitehead (his own mentor, and collaborator in Principia Mathematica, 1913) in Whitehead’s Adventures in Ideas. A pity, since Whitehead, alas no stylist like Russell, was heading into more interesting territory. I’d forgotten too that Wittgenstein took so much from Lichtenstein from the later 18th century in his aphoristic late style. There's a huge a mount to learn. But it's the continental philosophers who offer most, and their contemporary language is more opaque. So much depends on a lucid, or suggestively poetic style like Nietzsche’s - or an opaque travesty like some of Heidegger’s (but he's good on applied philosophical elements like poetry).
Cheers, Simon
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Robert Jenner [mailto:robert_jenner_2005@yahoo.co.uk]
Sent: 26 March 2008 21:19
To: Simon Jenner
Subject: Re: Jenner AWOL
Hello, yes I've been active on many fronts but perhaps not on the interactive one. Criticism is quite a different form from poetry writing and maybe you carry over some of the required ideas and forms from the former. Many poets can't write disciplined critical prose but can be nevertheless interesting.
People in Ireland fail to write well because of the overwhelming influence of Yeats, the condensation, intensity, sometime savagery of his work is beyond anyone there. Its not possible in an environment where the only choice is between a TV meal or a jaunt to get a takeaway. I mean, real poetry comes from real anger, bitterness and especially disillusionment which is the key word when considering Yeats, who had such high ideas when young and then saw them ravaged by the inertia that was all around him. Luckily he spent some fruitful years in London .
He was also bright enough to come under the spell of German philosophy. Think of how many contemporary Irish writers talk about that? Maybe he was really very like Nietzsche, Hoelderlin because he was 'mad' and his madness sharpened his wits for he resided in a world of torpor and stasis. It was also good that he rejected Catholicism, because he was an Orangeman at the beginning and then an Occultist.
best wishes,
PM
I know too the apron, the lambeg drum, the cool ironed cloth and the wrinkled copy of Nietzsche at the wrong page which is not the eternal radiation or whatever but a description of nose picking in lower Baden at the seminary with the wrong shirt and lots of loo paper sticking out of yer bags (trousers). Of course Liberalism isn't working, just talking about imaginary fish doesnt reproduce them on the plate, just as dressing interactive Barbie dolls doesnt equate with sex or glamour, although they ask you to spend on it and you might if you had no sense and slept 2 hours a day, kept there by the Red Bull.
Your plucking at the grapes I ate years ago. What about the time in Baden Baden that Igor Stepanov started a blazing row by pulling the tail of a small dog thus activating the anger of its owner, then stepping into Turgenev's house and peeing in the lintel. (by the way his roof fell in upon him, also a sign of what he is flaccid, beneath a pale moon dreaming of astro-physics while being besmattered with warm, sulphuric rains)
Your a bookish, twerped, inconsolate and disregarding, try fattening a calf for slaughter, 'twill serve you better.
Now you know that now is now and not then.
best wishes
Hello Paul,
Yes, Yeats pitched language, especially his later language, to something hard to follow. Austin Clarke (1896-1974) was his anointed successor, and his dates show he was a generation later - poets between might have felt crushed. Patrick Kavangh (1904-67) did find a response, though, particularly in The Great Hunger (1942). I think you've recommended this to me in the past, and so you'll have your own opinions on it. It eschews Yeats's high style as much as it does his dictums, and resorts to the powers of narrative - not a Yeats forte. There's also Richard Rodgers (1909-69) from Belfast who was influenced by Hopkins , thereby substituting one rich language for another - which you might say is Yeats by association, or suggestion. MacNeice (1907-63) has been absorbed, almost, by the mainland...
Since then rich or fine writing has proved a hallmark of both Northern and Republic of Ireland writing. It's often proved more fruitful than British mainland poetry, and you'd have to agree that Northern Irish poetry has dominated much of the past 40 years. Poets like Paul Durcan (1944) and others in southern Ireland have moved another way, and the number of women poets on both sides - Medbh McGuckian (1950) and Evan Boland (1934?) for example, have been bolstered by quite a few like Vona Groarke (1964 - I reviewed her for the TLS in 1994) and Sara Berkeley (1967) once the great hope. As for Northern Irish poetry, Edna Longley commented acidly that NI poets were criticized 'for not leaving their enviable raw material raw enough', but were prone to metaphor etc. How dare they have it all? I still don't rate Paul Muldoon (1951) highly, and feel his example, more than his own poetry, might prove to have been what the excitement was all about.
As for Philosophers or philosophes being unread? I don't think this is a specifically Irish problem. In fact I think philosophy is a little more discussed in Southern Ireland campuses and after, judging by comments from Dublin friends, than it is over here.
Yes, the continental tradition is now wholly severed from Anglophone empiricism. Poets don't often go to Russell or Wittgenstein. But some go to Heidegger, and more used to go to Sartre who - like Heidegger -was influenced by Husserl. The point is that Nietzsche was writing a poetic language that anyone could find assimilable, even though they weren't trained philosophers. Even the Nazis could pervert him. They couldn't pervert Heidegger - too impenetrable - and could never have entered his world unaided. So he obliged by perverting himself.
I'm reading Isiah Berlin at the moment (The Power of Ideas), shorter essays; and proceeding to his pluralist philosophers Vico (1688-1744), Herder, and his teacher Hamann. All these philosophers pointed out incredibly early that there might be some absolute values, but each culture had different ones, different emphasizes, and Vico predicted cycles of such cultural systems, even within one particular one. Berlin with all of these three writers makes the distinction between relativism (the Marabar caves echo, 'everything exists, nothing has value', in effect) and pluralism, which does allow for differing values and a different emphasis on a kind of values menu; but not the value-free relativist position. Berlin also attacks the ideal state. For instance absolute liberty cannot co-exist (wolf eats lamb) with absolute equality. This, and the false determinism argued by Marxists, Fascists et al who still want us to struggle to the death for something they feel 'inevitable', are some of Berlin 's targets.
Another Berlin book on Philosophers of the Enlightenment - an argued anthology with commentaries and sadly out of print - superb - led me to Hume's refutation of causality. We can't be sure the sun will rise tomorrow; not absolutely. Well, you know all this. It changed philosophy and we still all proceed from Hume's breakthrough in the 1730s. Later on of course his commentaries on religion exerted a similar liberation.
I then got a lecture from Charles Lind on how Hume tackled this further, and how it now impacts on all Anglophone philosophy. Kant, basically, then went further: we are at the centre of our sense data, like a Copernican sun - Kant likened his breakthrough to putting a person's head at the centre of things. I am a sun etc. I wonder if this led us back to medieval systems and hypothetical 'forms', but apparently Kant's 'forms' are simply those articulating mental architecture. For the first time, apparently. OK, so Kant isn't guilty.
Charles's work has - you can guess this next bit - been in Artificial Intelligence, but he feels logic, which is how our home-grown philosophy has developed, is at a dead end. All this suggests a difficult PR job for philosophy. Russell eventually dismissed the later Whitehead (his own mentor, and collaborator in Principia Mathematica, 1913) in Whitehead’s Adventures in Ideas. A pity, since Whitehead, alas no stylist like Russell, was heading into more interesting territory. I’d forgotten too that Wittgenstein took so much from Lichtenstein from the later 18th century in his aphoristic late style. There's a huge a mount to learn. But it's the continental philosophers who offer most, and their contemporary language is more opaque. So much depends on a lucid, or suggestively poetic style like Nietzsche’s - or an opaque travesty like some of Heidegger’s (but he's good on applied philosophical elements like poetry).
Cheers, Simon
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Robert Jenner [mailto:robert_jenner_2005@yahoo.co.uk]
Sent: 26 March 2008 21:19
To: Simon Jenner
Subject: Re: Jenner AWOL
Hello, yes I've been active on many fronts but perhaps not on the interactive one. Criticism is quite a different form from poetry writing and maybe you carry over some of the required ideas and forms from the former. Many poets can't write disciplined critical prose but can be nevertheless interesting.
People in Ireland fail to write well because of the overwhelming influence of Yeats, the condensation, intensity, sometime savagery of his work is beyond anyone there. Its not possible in an environment where the only choice is between a TV meal or a jaunt to get a takeaway. I mean, real poetry comes from real anger, bitterness and especially disillusionment which is the key word when considering Yeats, who had such high ideas when young and then saw them ravaged by the inertia that was all around him. Luckily he spent some fruitful years in London .
He was also bright enough to come under the spell of German philosophy. Think of how many contemporary Irish writers talk about that? Maybe he was really very like Nietzsche, Hoelderlin because he was 'mad' and his madness sharpened his wits for he resided in a world of torpor and stasis. It was also good that he rejected Catholicism, because he was an Orangeman at the beginning and then an Occultist.
best wishes,
PM
posted by Paul Murphy at
March 27, 2008
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