Tag Archives: books

What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training. I did not know a French word which might account for this kind of human interest, but I believe this word exists in Latin: it is studium, which doesn’t mean, or at least not immediately, ‘study’, but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity. It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.

The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole — and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).

Roland Barthes

I have been thinking about this again recently, in relation to various things.

You know, there’s an awful lot to be said
for this Irish traditional
folk music and folklore, because
first of all
you have to learn it
and first you must learn the Talk
and then you must learn the Grip
and after that you must learn the Truckly-How
and then
you have the whole lot
only just to keep on practising it.

Because
Séamus Ennis knows far more about this
than even the old Folk Lordy-Lordy themselves.
Because Séamus Ennis
once met a little Leprashoneen Truckly-How
at the bottom of the Garden Doth and up the Garden Path
which came up from that,
in the Limeretti-Lumeretti Hillhockers,
before the Earthian Throe,
before the Leprashonerian –
long before the Argay Foray –
and that was in the Deep Pond Doom
before the Emerald Isle was dropped . . .
in the water.

Séamus Ennis

I once heard a recording of Séamus Ennis reading this. I have it on tape somewhere. Somewhere . . .

Oh, I haven’t done a book post in forever. Caveat lector: this is not a recommendation.

To this spot he had been attached from his infancy. He had often made excursions to it when a boy, and the impressions of delight given to his mind by the homely kindness of the grey-headed peasant, to whom it was intrusted [sic], and whose fruit and cream never failed, had not been obliterated by succeeding circumstances. The green pastures along which he had so often bounded in the exultation of health, and youthful freedom — the woods under whose refreshing shade he had first indulged that pensive melancholy, which afterwards made a strong feature of his character — the wild walks of the mountains, the river, on whose waves he had floated, and the distant plains, which seemed boundless as his early hopes — were never after remembered by St Aubert but with enthusiasm and regret.

Ann Radcliffe

THREE SENTENCES. I’m not against long sentences as a general rule — I didn’t spend four years reading art theory for nothing — but this seems to be an unwieldy managing of the subject matter. I had to reread it, very carefully, in order to make any sense of it whatsoever.

My first moment of confusion: “What hasn’t been obliterated? The fruit and cream? The grey-headed peasant (to whom I would appreciate a better introduction)? Oh, the impressions of delight. I see.”

Second moment of confusion: the entirety of the third sentence. Stop it with the dashes!

Third moment of confusion: “St Aubert had been floating on the waves of the wild walks of the mountains? Ah, no, ‘the river’ is not a parenthetical.”

The quoted paragraph was on Page 2. It doesn’t get any better.

One daughter was now his only surviving child; and, while he watched the unfolding of her infant character, with anxious fondness, he endeavoured, with unremitting effort, to counteract those traits in her disposition, which might hereafter lead her from happiness.

All in all, The Mysteries Of Udolpho is full of comma abuse, turgid sentences, and confusing syntax. The characters are one-dimensional, and for some reason they keep bursting into tears; all the characterisation is conveyed by telling & not showing; and to my horror Radcliffe keeps including poems of her own composition. They might not be bad, per se — I just don’t like Victorian poetry.

All I want is for Radcliffe to get on to the silliness, sensationalism, overwraught Gothicism, & general melodrama.

Here’s the blurb, for your edification and despair.

“Emily’s face was stained with blood . . .”

Beautiful young heiress Emily St Aubert is frightened when she finds herself orphaned and in the hands of her cold and distant aunt, Madame Cheron. But her fear turns to terror when Madame Cheron agrees to marry the haughty and brooding Signor Montoni, and she finds herself trapped in castle of Udolpho, threatened by Montoni’s terrible greed and haunted by the secrets of the medieval fortress.

Will Emily find the strength to survive this place of nightmares? Or will Montoni and his wicked schemes destroy her completely?

OH I DO HOPE SO. See, it may yet get fun! But I’m still waiting for the other parent to be killed off and for Emily to get to the “place of nightmares”.

The Independent states that Udolpho is “brilliant . . . full of terror”. At the moment my only cause for concern is, “How long will my strength of mind be able to endure all these misused commas?”

Fear not, I didn’t buy the book. I borrowed it from the library. It was republished as part of Penguin’s Victorian Bestsellers series, which includes The Woman In White and The Moonstone, both of which I’m very fond. Also in the series is Paul Clifford, from whence comes that famous phrase “it was a dark and stormy night”. I’m rather wishing I’d been able to borrow Paul Clifford instead.

source unknown

It was a night of tempest with rain and wind, a great wild wind that shouted mightily near and far, filling the world with halloo; while, ever and anon, thunder crashed and lightning flamed athwart the muddy road that wound steeply up betwixt grassy banks topped by swaying trees. Broken twigs, whirling down the wind, smote me in the dark, fallen branches reached out arms that grappled me unseen, but I held on steadfastly, since every stride carried me nearer to vengeance, that vengeance for the which I prayed and lived. So with bared head lifted exulting to the tempest and grasping the stout hedge-stake that served me for staff, I climbed the long ascent of Pembury Hill.

Reaching the summit at last I must needs stay awhile to catch my breath and shelter me as well as I might ‘neath the weather bank, for upon this eminence the rain lashed and the wind smote me with a fury redoubled.

And now, as I stood amid that howling darkness, my back propped by the bank, my face lifted to the tempest, I was aware of a strange sound, very shrill and fitful, that reached me ‘twixt the booming wind-gusts, a sound that came and went, now loud and clear, anon faint and remote, and I wondered what it might be. Then the rushing dark was split asunder by a jagged lightning-flash, and I saw. Stark against the glare rose black shaft and crossbeam, wherefrom swung a creaking shape of rusty chains and iron bands that held together something shrivelled and black and wet with rain, a grisly thing that leapt on the buffeting wind, that strove and jerked as it would fain break free and hurl itself down upon me.

Now hearkening to the dismal creak of this chained thing, I fell to meditation. This awful shape (thought I) had been a man once, hale and strong — even as I, but this man had contravened the law (even as I purposed to do) and he had died a rogue’s death and so hung, rotting, in his chains, even as this my own body might do some day. And, hearkening to the shrill wail of his fetters, my flesh crept with loathing and I shivered. But the fit passed, and in my vain pride I smote my staff into the mud at my feet and vowed within myself that nought should baulk me of my just vengeance, come what might; as my father had suffered death untimely and hard, so should the enemy of my race; for the anguish he had made me endure so should he know anguish. I bethought me how long and deadly had been this feud of ours, handed down from one generation to another, a dark, blood-smirched record of bitter wrongs bitterly avenged. “To hate like a Brandon and revenge like a Conisby!” This had been a saying in our south country upon a time; and now — he was the last of his race as I was the last of mine, and I had come back out of hell that this saying might be fulfilled. Soon — ha, yes, in a few short hours the feud should be ended once and for all and the house of Conisby avenged to the uttermost. Thinking thus, I heeded no more the raving tempest around me until, roused by the plunge and rattle of the gibbet-chains, I raised my head and shaking my staff up at that black and shrivelled thing, I laughed loud and fierce, and, even as I did so, there leapt a great blaze of crackling flame and thereafter a thunder-clap that seemed to shake the very earth and smite the roaring wind to awed silence; and in this silence, I heard a whisper:

“O mercy of God!”

Jeffery Farnol

Black Bartlemy’s Treasure is the quintessential swashbuckly pirate novel. It’s got buried treasure (naturally), revenge, star-crossed lovers, shipwrecks, abductions, slave ships, dandified pirates, hook-handed pirates, gratuitous bad weather, and names like Abnegation Mings, Adam Penfeather & God-Be-Here Jenkins. There is a sequel, Martin Conisby’s Vengeance (which, on top of everything else, includes a character called Resolution Day), and a prequel, Adam Penfeather Buccaneer. I’d highly recommend Farnol if you’re at all into Georgette Heyer or Anthony Hope.

The life of a mythology derives from the vitality of its symbols as metaphors delivering, not simply the idea, but a sense of actual participation in such a realisation of transcendence, infinity and abundance, as this of which the upanishadic authors tell. Indeed, the first and most essential service of a mythology is this one, of opening the mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being. And the second service, then, is cosmological: of representing the universe and whole spectacle of nature, both as known to the mind and as beheld by the eye, as an epiphany of such kind that when lightning flashes, or a setting sun ignites the sky, or a deer is seen standing alerted, the exclamation “Ah!” may be uttered as a recognition of divinity.

This suggests that in the new mythology, which is to be of the whole human race, the old Near Eastern desacralisation of nature by way of a doctrine of the Fall will have been rejected; so that any such limiting sentiment as that expressed in 2 Kings 5:15, “there is no God in all the earth but in Israel,” will be (to use a biblical term) an abomination. The image of the universe will no longer be the old Sumero-Babylonian, locally centred, three-layed affair, of a heaven above and abyss below, with an ocean-encircled bit of earth between; nor the later, Ptolemaic one, of a mysteriously suspended globe enclosed in an orderly complex or revolving crystalline spheres; nor even the recent heliocentric image of a single planetary system at large within a galaxy of exploding stars; but (as of today, at least) an inconceivable immensity of galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and clusters of clusters (superclusters) of galaxies, speeding apart into expanding distance, with humanity as a kind of recently developed scurf on the epidermis of one of the lesser satellites of a minor star in the outer arm of an average galaxy, amidst one of the lesser clusters among the thousands, catapulting apart, which took form some fifteen billion years ago as a consequence of an inconceivable preternatural event.

Joseph Campbell

Simon Marsden

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
“Love has no ending.

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

“I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

“The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.”

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime, saying:
“O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

“In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

“In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

“Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.

“O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.

“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

“Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

“O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

“O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.”

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

W.H. Auden

My father introduced me to W.H. Auden; one of my teachers lent me a compilation of his poetry. He lent me lots of books and I took forever to return them. He passed away a few years ago and I always wanted to talk to him again one day.

He wondered when she was going to begin to talk and just what her voice would be like. It always took them some time to get started, because the cases that Fingal sent women to see Slim Callaghan about were usually peculiar cases concerned with young gentlemen who couldn’t be got rid of, who were making themselves a nuisance after they’d served their purpose and wanted to try a little blackmailing.

There flashed through his mind swift pictures of half a dozen women who had stood or sat in front of that desk and told the old, old tale:

“I thought I was fond of him. I trusted him, and now he says he wants two thousand pounds to go to South America and another five hundred to stop the man who saw us at the whatever-it-was hotel from writing an anonymous letter to my husband.”

Callaghan had heard that tale so often he thought it ought to be set to music.

Peter Cheyney

I borrowed The Urgent Hangman from Sheila (my grandmother), after mentioning to her that I was interested in reading some Raymond Chandler at some point. We couldn’t find her Chandler, so she suggested Cheyney. I think I prefer ironic noir like The Singing Detective and Malcolm Pryce, but I must find out who shot August Meraulton!

Slim Callaghan’s kind of a sexist prat. I would probably end up ending him, and not in a “it seemed as if Miss Perkins didn’t like Callaghan rather because she liked him a little bit too much” way, just in a good old-fashioned crime of irritation way. And he has a silly name.