Ophelia's Nun

FinsburyParkCarrots

Let me offer some tips for "Peter's Walk".

One might find temporal displacement, say, in a story that works like this.

(A) Peter miserably peering from inside police cell bars;

(B)Peter conversing with an aggressive officer; Peter reflecting on the events that had led up to his arrest.

(C)The day's events, beginning innocuously enough with an account of him waking, dressing and breakfasting, then his eventful walk around his city, through to his arrest.

(D)Then you're back in the cell again and you trace perhaps how he is released with a warning.

So, the order goes: (A)=2, (B)=3, (C)=1, (D)=4.

Or one might even work like this:

(A)Peter walks home from the police cells after being released with a warning.

(B) He remembers a few moments ago peering miserably from his cell bars and conversing with an aggressive officer.

(C) He remembers his own reflection there and then of the day's events from waking onwards.

(D)The day's events, his day's eventful walk in the city and the arrest.

(E)Following (A), Peter stops in his walk home and pauses in reflection, noticing the scene around him.

(F)He remembers his release and ponders on the implications of his day.

So, the order here goes (A)= 5; (B)=3; (C)=1; (D)=2; (E)=6; (F)=4.

exhale

Originally posted by ISN
I'm upset atm....there's no talking to me......I have issues with expectations and disappointments.....you can't cheer me up....I worked on that piece very hard.....and it brought me back to Madrid for an hour or so.....I feel like someone came and shat on it

hmmmmmm

I could sware I´ve heard about a similar situation some time ago...

aw sorry, go on Prof. Fins

FinsburyParkCarrots

Originally posted by exhale
hmmmmmm

I could swear I´ve heard about a similar situation some time ago...

aw sorry, go on Prof. Fins

Thanks exhale. But let's all be kind now. If anybody's got a gripe with another, to PMs with it. BBS Guidelines. This is the luuuuurrrve thread. Plus only Finsbury should have the honour of getting his own thread locked.

FinsburyParkCarrots

He shovels through the day reciting scores
of lottery results from months gone by;
He dreams he opens up his van's back doors
and wads of banknotes fall out endlessly;
He pokes your arm and shouts into your ear,
"You see that bloke there? Him? Right - now - don't stare -
He's plenty money. Loaded, dontcha fear!
I'm tellin' ya! The bloke's a millionaire!"

He'll ask you what you're studying right now.
"That's good, that's good, but after you've done that,
after all that learnin' stuff, then, how
Much d'ya think you'll earn, then? I mean, what
sort of job d'ya think that you can get?
No one just studies for the sake of it....."

FinsburyParkCarrots

"I Got Row 104, Seat 17!"
"Ticketfokker sucks, dah fokkin' fokks!"
"The closest to dah stage I've ever been!"
"They're sellin' stuff on e-bay! Eddie's locks!"

Crash bang wallop
Crash bang wallop
Crash bang wallop
Crash bang wallop
Crash bang wallop

Now it's Jan the first, year 'seven-TAY:
Jimi played "Machine Gun" live today!

even flow?

Classic. I was going to comment to the tune that Ophelia should have a story about the board problem and you have already got there and left. Swift and intelligent.

ruby

Mr Finsbury has elevated the cheesy grin to new heights. Thank you, Mr Finsbury, for helping me to laugh

FinsburyParkCarrots

“Kurtz, of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is a modern-day Achilleus, highlighting conflicting notions of heroism. Once a paragon of materialist enterprise, honour and glory, he comes to despise the internal competitiveness and values of his society. He operates as a renegade, outside the mores and imperatives of his peers. He perceives himself a heroic demigod of the mythic sort: he indulges single-mindedly his wrathful vision of self-definition, in the dark heart of overseas conflict. In the midst of bloodshed by his own hand, paradoxically he broods on the horror and tragic futility of conflict and plunder. His anger has horrific consequences but constitutes tragic heroism. ”

The above statement, which I have devised myself, implies a discrepancy between the mythic conceit of heroism represented in Homer (see below) and the imperialistic ideals of “Western” colonial-expansionist heroism prevalent both when the Iliad (c.725 BCE) was received by c.5th BCE Athenians and when Heart of Darkness was read in the imperial context of 1899. The radical representations of Achilleus and Kurtz as single-minded, heroic figures who firstly dismiss the materialistic Western values they are thought to represent and secondly embrace propensities of otherness - non-human (in being godlike) and ‘barbaric’ – will be studied comparatively in this essay, with references to the texts’ receptions.
Citing Emerson’s statement “The hero is he who is immovably centred”, C. Kerényi (1959) describes the heroes of Greek myth as “marked by their substantiality, by a remarkable solidity, which they share with the divine figures”(2): A hero in this sense transcends mortal values and conventions, even when the result of an unshakable vision or emotion is tragic and horrific. I shall argue below how Achilleus and Kurtz accord to this radical heroic model. Achilleus is the son of Thetis, a goddess. He is the (almost) invulnerable agathos of the Trojan Wars’ first nine years; his obdurate refusal to defer to Agamemnon’s aristocratic claim of superior timé, and his withdrawal from a trade war in the Troad on the grounds that “A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much” (Il.9.320) suggests his self-realization as a heroic demigod superior to the internal competitiveness and materialist mores of an aristocratic Achaian society. His anger causes legions of soldiers to become carrion-fodder; his excessive pride is tragic hubris; yet his single-mindedness is superhuman and heroic. Achilleus foreshadows Kurtz, a “universal genius” (244) who tires both of the internal competitiveness of his trading company and his spurious distinction as their prime source of ivory: He single-mindedly pursues a vision to institute himself as a mythic hero among the Congolese tribespeople he savagely suppresses: he is largely responsible for the horror he abhors. Mythic heroism encompasses a notion of Otherness that interrogates Western constructions of heroic identity: to be heroic in the tragic, mythic sense is to be barbaric: to be a materialist plunderer turned-‘god’ is to represent fears concerning degeneration from within the Western psyche in the dark heart of conflict.

Interestingly, when Classical Athens was involved in a colonial war with Persia, contemporary historians were keen to rid history of its mythical associations (cf. Overing 1997: 2). Mythic heroes, who disdained the codes of materialistic honour that were demonstrated in Homer’s account of Achaian society (and carried forward into colonial-expansionist fifth-century Athens), were ignored in Classical commentaries whilst a martial prototype such as Agamemnon – even without documentary proof of his existence – was, because of his suitability to Classical values, reappraised as ‘historical’. Thucydides (Supplementary Texts, 13ii: 38-40) lauds the Mycenaean basileus Agamemnon as probably “the most powerful of the rulers of his day” who represented values of kratos (power) and timé (honour acquired via recognized wealth) shared by later Greeks. Yet there is no reference in his text of Achilleus, whose fateful anger is proclaimed in the opening line of the Iliad as the poem’s central narrative theme. The silence in Thucydides’s discourse perhaps ‘speaks’ of a latent anxiety in Athenian society: the possibility that Homer’s Achilleus represents a regressive, degenerative tendency in all civilizers when out abroad suppressing ‘savagery’, to indulge their pre-Western propensities and embrace a barbaric will to quasi-divine power, fashioning themselves as gods above the prerogatives of war and material enterprise.
Edward Said (1978) suggests, “A fifth-century Athenian was very likely to feel himself to be nonbarbarian as much as he positively felt himself to be Athenian” (54). Herodotus (in Supplementary Texts 7i, 1992: 8) sought to naturalize a cultural distinction between his society and the ‘barbarian’ Persian Empire of Xerxes. Although the Trojan Wars were concerned with trade rather than establishing Western colonies (as in the case of the later, Persian Wars), Herodotus argued that the ‘right’ of Greece to suppress Eastern barbarism originated in the perceived difference in values between Achaians and Trojans during the Trojan War as described by Homer: he writes that although the Achaian forefathers of his people heroically fought to defend their material honour against the Trojan captors of Helen and all her possessions, the non-Europeans in contrast did not share such all-important commodity values and “took the seizure of women lightly enough”. Herodotus’s Greek colonialists of the Persian Wars are pragmatic whereas non-Greeks are “religious to excess” (cf. Herodotus, trans. Rawlinson [1858] 1996: 132), in that they are prone to forming hero-cults abundantly and enacting strange, bloody rites and imprecations against their Western foes (133). Yet in Herodotus’s refusal to observe Homer’s descriptions of similarities between Achaian and Trojan lifestyles, dwellings and religious/burial customs (cf. Il. 6. 237ff; 24. 692ff), a contemporary Athenian anxiety emerges, that prefigures imperial fears of degeneration in Conrad’s era: that the Western civilizer and his Oriental counterpart are historically similar rather than different in their mores and “rites”, sacred or profane.

FinsburyParkCarrots

In Iliad 1.275, Nestor addresses Achilleus as a “great man” (agathos), one whose prowess in accumulating the spoils and therefore time of his army, during the invasive, raiding campaign in Troy, wins him distinction as a warrior of remarkable prominence. However, when Agamemnon argues his right to compensate for the loss of his ‘prize’ Chryseis via claiming, on the grounds of his superior timé, Achilleus’s concubine Briseis, Achilleus responds, directly confronting the value systems of his society by refuting the dominant notion that the means of wealth should be maintained by the richest rather than those whose heroic, godlike endeavours in the face of danger have secured it in the first place (“And now my prize you threaten in person to strip away from me, / for whom I laboured much”, 1. 161-2). He shows heroic resolve, however hubristic or vainglorious, by announcing his withdrawal from a war that profits him not (“I am minded no longer/ To stay here dishonoured and pile up your wealth and your luxury”, 1.170-1). The consequence of his stubbornness is the hurling down to Hades of legions of Achaian souls (1.3-4), including his beloved Patroklos (Bk.16). By comparison with the Achaian army, the colonial-expansionist trading ‘Company’ of Heart of Darkness is described as an exploitative profit-making venture, effectively raiding material booty from the Congo but disguising its intentions behind the Orientalist ideology of being an ‘emissary of light … “weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways”’ (149). Kurtz has established himself as a “remarkable person” insofar as, from his trading post “in the true ivory-country” (159), he has been heroic among his rival agents in boosting the spoils and self-esteem of the Company. He has sent his superiors “as much ivory as all the others put together.” However, Kurtz, a “universal genius” (244) who is expected to “go far, very far … in the Administration before long” (160), in time sends back not ivory but invoices. He, like Achilleus, has grown impatient with the “little peddling notions” of a society that values the status of the affluent ‘owners’ of the means of production and wealth over those who labour to attain it (227). He is solely intent to safeguard his prime interests, “‘my ivory, my station, my river, my_____’” (206) rather than the honour of his disputed leaders. Kurtz rejects late-imperial notions of civilizing heroism by adopting a non-Western approach to heroic self-fashioning: he gets the peoples of the forest “to follow him” as a deity (218).
Kurtz, the author of a report into “Suppression of Savage Customs” becomes, on contact with the “grove of death” the embodiment of “alienist” fears of degeneration. He partakes in “unspeakable rites” with the Congolese tribespeople who worship him as a hero-figure or god. He single-mindedly and hubristically explores, to tragic effect for him and his tribespeople, “some lightless region of subtle horrors”; he decapitates “the natives” and decorates his Station with their impaled heads on stakes (220-1). Such a realization would have compromised supporters of Gobineau’s racist-imperial rhetoric of difference between Western “man” and non-Western “brute creation” ([1856] 1999: 266). Similarly, Achilleus’s resistance to social convention, by grieving beyond the customary period for Patroklos’s murder and by defiling the body of the killer Hektor (cf. 24.15, 17-8), surely would have made those who sought to naturalize binaries between the rational light of the Euro-Greek and the crazed darkness of the “Asiatic” uncomfortable, especially when such attitudes and actions came from the son of a god, the subject of a traditional hero-cult at the source of Greek civilization.
In spite of their propensity to “unspeakable” acts, both Achilleus (Il.9. 308ff.) and Kurtz expound on the poetics of the pity and horror of conflict and plunder. Kurtz’s death-cry “The horror! The horror!” (Conrad: 239), echoes Achilleus’s sympathy with Priam on the “evil” of conflict and conquest (Il. 24. 518): both figures tamely accept their deaths but refuse to integrate themselves into their societies by praising the codes of conflict and conquest. It is fascinating that one reviewer of Heart of Darkness in 1899 silenced this suggestion of the horror and futility of conflict for profit, with the assertion “It cannot be supposed that Mr Conrad makes attack upon colonization, expansion, even upon Imperialism” (in ed. Walder, 2001: 299).
In conclusion, Kurtz, like Achilleus represents a godlike agathos radically proclaiming superiority to a internally competitive society basing social order on acquisition of spoil in trading wars. Achilleus would have been received as problematic for fifth century Athenian readers who constructed Western identity around the example that his adversary Agamemnon represented: he seems to endorse a sort of heroism that is pre-Western, thus compromising the idea of a historical distinction between Western and Eastern identity (hero/villain) going back to the Trojan Wars. Achilleus’s dark-hearted wrath, violation of his dead enemies and refusal to value materialist prerogatives resembled characteristics that were attributed to the Orient but in Greek tradition famed as heroically single-minded. It was easiest not to mention Achilleus in commentaries suggesting historical precedents for a civilizing mission against “Asiatics”. Yet Achilleus’s radical spectre returns like a repressed memory of a pre-Westernized heroic identity, to haunt Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the form of Kurtz. Kurtz constitutes what Edward Said (1978:8) calls “a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections” destabilizing the colonial-expansionist constructions of Western late-imperial heroic identity, from within. He and Achilleus represent taboo figures of heroic worship in periods of colonial-expansionist reception; in the wilderness of conflict each chooses his own nightmares and tragic, heroic fate in spite of prevailing ideas of civilization precariously enforced in the heart of conflict’s darkness.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary sources
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990.
Homer (trans. Lattimore, Richmond), The Iliad, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1951.
_____________________________ The Odyssey, New York: Harper and Row 1967.
Jones, Peter, Homer’s Odyssey: A Commentary Based on the English Translation of Richmond Lattimore, Bristol: Bristol Classical Press 1988.
Open University, A295 Homer: Poetry and Society – Supplementary Texts, Milton Keynes: Open University 1992.
Willcock, Malcolm, A Companion to the Iliad Based on the Translation By Richmond Lattimore, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1976.

Secondary sources
Aeschylus (trans. Vellacott, Philip) The Oresteian Trilogy, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1956.
Brannigan, John, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1998.
ed. Childs, Peter, Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature – A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1999.
Cox, G.B., Joseph Conrad: The Modern Imagination, London: Dent 1974.
Cuddon, J.A., The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory – Third Edition, Harmondworth: Penguin 1991.
ed. Emlyn-Jones, Chris et al., Homer – Readings and Images, London: Duckworth/ Open University 1993.
Gobineau, Count J.A. [1856], “Influence of Christianity upon Intellectual and Moral Diversity of Races”, in Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook, edited and introduced by Harlow, Barbara and Carter, Mia 1999: 263-7.
Herodotus (trans. [1858] Rawlinson, George), Histories, Ware: Wordsworth 1996.
Jackson, Guida M., Traditional Epics, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994.
Kerényi, C., The Heroes of the Greeks, Thames and Hudson 1959.
ed. Miles, Geoffrey, Classical Mythology in English Literature – A Critical Anthology, London/ New York: Routledge 1999.
Open University, A295: Homer Poetry and Society Learning Guides 1-3; audiocassettes 4-5; videocassette 2, Truth, Imagination and Value 02.56.50-3.56.27, 1992.
_______________ AA316 The Nineteenth Century Novel – Identities, audiocassette 2, 2001.
Overing, Joanna (1997), “The Role of Myth: An Anthropological Perspective”, in Myths &Nationhood, eds. Hosking, Geoffrey and Schöpflin, George, London: Hurst and Company 1997, pp. 1-18.
ed. Regan, Stephen, AA316 The Nineteenth-Century Novel – A Critical Reader, London/ New York: Routledge/ Open University 2001.
Said, Edward W., Orientalism – With a new Afterword, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1990.
______________ Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage 1994.
ed. Tallack, Douglas, Literary Theory at Work: Three Texts, London: Batsford 1987.
ed. Walder, Dennis, The Nineteenth-Century Novel – Identities, London/ New York: Routledge/ Open University 2001.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Thought that people interested in Homer or Conrad might appreciate that old essay of mine.

ISN

On http://www.bbc.co.uk they'll have Homer's Odyssey on Saturday and Sunday.....anyone anywhere can listen if their connection can handle it.....if you check the link there's lots of background etc....I might tune in, because I've never read any Homer.....thanks for that Finsbury - now I'll read it.....:)

FinsburyParkCarrots

Originally posted by ISN
On http://www.bbc.co.uk they'll have Homer's Odyssey on Saturday and Sunday.....anyone anywhere can listen if their connection can handle it.....if you check the link there's lots of background etc....I might tune in, because I've never read any Homer.....thanks for that Finsbury - now I'll read it.....:)

Yes, I'm looking forward to that too! It's also available on CD and cassette, so I read.

My first "Penny's Dilemma" is a skit on the episode in Book Nineteen of the poem where Odysseus, disguised as a beggar is secretly returned to his court in Ithaca after twenty years away fighting wars and making love to goddesses; he is seated before his unsuspecting wife Penelope and he beholds her beauty while only just, in spite of his emotion, avoiding giving away who he is. Penelope has over a hundred suitors chasing after her. (They turn up in the palace every night and drink Odysseus's wine and eat his best livestock: Odysseus must surprise and outwit them by cunning to regain his wife and kingdom.)
I thought it might be fun to consider if Penelope DID recognise Odysseus in disguise and if she actually WAS having affairs with some of the suitors! Thus, she'd have a dilemma on seeing her husband returned!

FinsburyParkCarrots

In fact, here's something I've written about the passage from Homer:

Odyssey 19.100-122

This suspenseful and dramatically ironic passage exemplifies The Odyssey’s divergences from oral-compositional, folk- narrative conventions, in providing a psychologically “realist”, almost novelistic characterization of the protagonist Odysseus via tensions, ambiguities and silences in his first spoken dialogue to Penelope in twenty years (he struggling all the while to maintain his beggar’s guise). Odysseus’s (standard folk-narrative) beggar trick, and his strategies of visual and verbal dissemblance are imperative for him to intercept by stealth his court of numerically superior interlopers and spies, yet his fabled metis, and plans of ambush, are compromised when he is faced tantalizingly with the objective of all his trials and endeavours, Penelope (who entertains him at her megaron hearthside, in characteristic accordance with the divine mandates of xenia, and in hope of news of “Odysseus”[cf.17.507-540]). Odysseus’s dialogue is fraught with his near-irrepressibility of a sorrowful desire for Penelope (116-8). Through an involuntary self-disclosure, Odysseus perilously risks detection and a similar fate to his symbolic “double”, the murdered Agamemnon (cf.1.32-43). We wonder, in suspense: Will Odysseus regain his self-control?
Penelope’s formulaic interrogation of Odysseus (104-5) diverges from the normal protocols of xenia (cf.14.185-190), and what Milman Parry (see Purkis, 1993: 28-30) considered the formulaic pattering of the Odyssey’s oral composition, given the specific, dramatic irony of her appellation “Stranger”, which is not lost on her addressee. The effect of Penelope’s speech is registered in Odysseus’s inability to respond to her directly and immediately with one of his extemporised lying tales (cf. 14.192ff.). Implicitly, Odysseus’s realisation of the monumentality of the moment overwhelms his fabled and ready powers of erudition and verbal dexterity, thus ironically giving the lie, intentionally or no, to his oral-compositional, formulaic epithet “resourceful” (105). Yet Odysseus’s return address to Penelope, ostensibly characterised by the idiom of the suppliant guest and social inferior, is, nonetheless, characteristically ingenious in that it provides an ironic subtext that we could feasibly interpret as suggesting that he wishes subtly to dissuade Penelope from marrying one of the suitors (cf.18.251-280). For example, note his statement that Penelope’s fame goes up to heaven (108). This is perhaps not just a subtle admission of tender pathos and adoration by the disguised Odysseus but is, rather, an equivocal utterance with more profound socio-gender implications. Since Odysseus has already lauded himself as renowned by the gods (9.20), he infers perhaps that Penelope’s kleos and perceived identity are necessarily contingent on her gender construction as the wife of the god-famed king. His simile- the paradigm of a contiguity between pious rule and corporeal fecundity- may seem at first to be a standard platitude of guest-speak, yet it seems hyperbolical and even implicitly satirical, given his somewhat over-protracted litany of examples of earthly bounty (111-4). This hyperbole implies the ironic statement that the ideal Ithaka is a state of visibly Odyssean rule; the present Ithaka is a fabled waste land, nearly exhausted by the parasitical suitors. Odysseus warns Penelope on the most subliminal level (a level she might determine, being characteristically circumspect, even if she does not recognise her husband?) that she risks an ignominious legacy by marrying into indolence.
At line 115, Odysseus’s linguistic train hits an emotional volta: Odysseus seems perilously close to an involuntarily admission of his identity: he seems unable and unwilling to lie to an intimate. Yet Odysseus, true to his cunning form, is careful not to betray himself when he remembers to refer to his palace as “the house of somebody else” (118), a line that nonetheless communicates Odysseus’s dismay at seeming a “Stranger” in his own household. Also, although Odysseus’s “grief” might seem part of his beggar’s speech, the term truly voices its speaker’s painful yearning for Penelope. However, in the lines 121-2, Odysseus regains his self-characterization, by attributing his passion to a vagrant’s proverbial drunkenness (cf. 14.462-7). Note Odysseus’s re-assertion of linguistic self- confidence, via his metaphor of the beggar, habitually swimming in tears, his brain “drowned in liquor”(122).

ISN

before I read the above, Finsbury, I'd like to point you to a book you might find interesting (a series).....we all know that Iain M Banks likes to write about tragic heroes on the fringes of society in his Culture series....your essay brought to mind a particular book: Consider Phlebas.....in this book, we have a renegade also....someone who won't conform to the prevailing mores....he separates himself from the mainstream society as an heroic figure of tragic proportions, and becomes a hired gun so to speak.....but the interesting side-shoot of this is when he is stranded on a planet (man-made) where someone who is almost a parody of himself lords it over his subjects in his tiny dominion.....and literally gorges himself on them.....I think Banks must have introduced this sub-plot to emphasize the protagonist's otherness.....a larger than life version of where his modern-day barbaric abstentions from the mores of society can lead.....to demi-deity and the inversion of civilization.....something to think about

FinsburyParkCarrots

Originally posted by ISN
before I read the above, Finsbury, I'd like to point you to a book you might find interesting (a series).....we all know that Iain M Banks likes to write about tragic heroes on the fringes of society in his Culture series....your essay brought to mind a particular book: Consider Phlebas.....in this book, we have a renegade also....someone who won't conform to the prevailing mores....he separates himself from the mainstream society as an heroic figure of tragic proportions, and becomes a hired gun so to speak.....but the interesting side-shoot of this is when he is stranded on a planet (man-made) where someone who is almost a parody of himself lords it over his subjects in his tiny dominion.....and literally gorges himself on them.....I think Banks must have introduced this sub-plot to emphasize the protagonists' otherness.....a larger than life version of where his modern-day barbaric abstentions from the mores of society can lead.....to demi-deity and the inversion of civilization.....something to think about

I'll go and check this out, sharpish. Thanks, ISN.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Where my Dad comes from,
the otters are ten feet long,
The whales spout jets
out of their blowholes
to say they're at the bay,
Grainuaile's ghost
does the nightly rounds
by the castle walls,
Your Guinness glass
sticks to the counter,
if a bit splashes out (it's that strong),
orchids and rhodedendrons
grow on the roadside,
and mountain hedge berries
swell in red, until they're bigger
than the view of distant mountains
in quartzy blue:

and you'd hear all this in his voice,
feel all this when you shake his hand,
know all this when you lift the shovel he's used
to clear the stream to let the moorhens swim freely.
Where my Dad takes you,
golden horses come in and win at a longshot,
People make handwriting in letters
that weave a text of home and love,
Tea tastes like tea,
Columbo will always be on the TV
saying "And just one more thing...",
The van might need hoovering out,
and 25 watt bulbs will go
around an outdoor Christmas tree.

A pipe will be be smoking
Condor Long Cut, the brown packet,
Glasses will have a wing stuck to the lens
with sellotape,
A false tooth will be left to relax in an ashtray,
Big toes will be sticking out of green socks,
and a big happy smile will be infectious.
Infectious like good infection...
like trees getting the blossom
up and down your street.

And really, he's pushing eighty
But he's one mighty,
mighty,
mighty,
mighty
fella.

And alluvvvim.

ISN

Mr Fins-bubble.....that is extraordinarily well-written.....what can I say....it's brilliant.....I'm looking forward to the bbc production.....I hope my modem can handle it.....I fondly remember 'to the lighthouse', which was a motif in the film 'in the cut'.....and also have fond memories of 'my brilliant career' by miles franklin.....I was hooked on radio four when I lived in London, and would religiously listen to Gardener's Questions and John Peel's show every weekend.....I'm going to try to listen to something to see if I can get 'reception'....after I've listened to the Odyssey, then I'll re-read your Penelope essay......(have you read Herodotus?)

FinsburyParkCarrots

Originally posted by ISN
have you read Herodotus?)

I've read chunks of Rawlinson's translation of the Histories but not the whole thing from start to finish. That's on my list of Things To Do Before I Snuff It.



Night.

ISN

I love the smell of Condor.....and my (adoptive) Dad was the biggest Colombo fan in the wrold.....we're from a Monaghan (dairy) farm.....they all lived into their nineties.....my Dad died jus short of eighty....the farm is still there in Carrickmacross....I love your poem......it brings me back to me ole man.....and me Uncle Jack

olderman

I cannot believe what I am reading here.. this has got to be the most remarkable and intelligent forum on any band's forum.. it is especially interesting to me (once a young boy who managed a degree in English) for the writings in this thread make me realise how much I did not capture.. sure, I read it all, but I did not soak it up. I did not have the passion, only the interest.. that is my experience.. however, i was exposed to great literature through those studies and I have always desired to dive back in.. and i will.. thanks to fins and all pj poets for bringing back my passion for poetry and literature.. you guys are truly exceptional!

I did what I had to do
and if there was a reason
the reason was you..

nonetheless, i promise to write my peter's walk excersise/short story and i promise to remove the block and write another somethin or other sonnet about the sweetness i have recently experienced..

people get ready!!!