THE JOHNS, GRAY AND BANVILLE
Nice review by Banville of the latest Gray collection, Gray's Anatomy. I vividly recall the impact of Straw Dogs . Surrendering any belief in societal progress is the ultimate acceptance of death. The Bush Administration and concurrent years with the families of my after-school kids have kept much of that mist at bay. But it is time to place Straw Dogs at the top of the re-read pile.
One quibble with Mr. Banville's review: why "incarnadine" as a verb? Although the usage is admittedly correct, it reduces the word to the pedestrian, the dyeing of the Chicago River for St. Patrick's Day, To my ear, only the adjectival form retains the wonderfully lurid overtones.
INCARNADINE. How do you match the elemental power of a word that means both flesh-colored and bloodred? I generally love all two-tone whistle words. Bosky: both wooded and secret.
This interminable Winter and now stalled Spring have left me both enervated and beset by hunger. Thus although I've eschewed red meat and pork painlessly for 25 years, I last week succumbed. Our waiter dwelt entirely too long upon the "sundering" of the leg of lamb, so I ordered an enormous pork shank. Now that was an incarnation.
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
"incarnadine" is always and only Macbeth, to me :-) I've never heard of this Gray fellow, but he sounds exactly like me. Nothing makes me more furious than Rousseau and his tribe.
ReplyDeleteI got my critique of positivism from CS Lewis, I think. The devil who narrates the Screwtape Letters boasts: "We have trained them [modern human beings] to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain -- not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."
And I in turn can hear the Screwtape Letters only as narrated by John Cleese.
ReplyDeleteWhat does happen to human behavior when the future is not promised land, but punishment? Viz today's Guardian's article on the scientific consensus that temperature will be not two degrees, but rather four degrees Celsius higher by 2100.