–“Patton (1970): 27:32 – 30:21 (reincarnation scene)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ER08F9rGo

I make no claims to reincarnation, but I fought in the Great Poetry War Against T.S. Eliot (and his kind). I remember the smoke and gunfire, the cries of the wounded, the changing battle lines.

In the end we won. We carried the banner from Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, the Black Mountain Poets, the Beats, the New York School and Deep Imagists to victory.

It was decisive.

Now it appears Poetry lost. And I miss T.S. Eliot.

Trust but verify 😉

I’ve noticed that side-bars and “related stories” boxes often throw in old posts.
Sometimes they are new to me, and sometimes they give background insight into the current article, but sometimes they are just click-bait.

Mark Judge isn’t ready to admit that after Peggy Lee, it’s all kind of an anticlimax.

We are twenty years into the 21st century and if one believes the Test of Time, I’d say the results are in: “The Waste Land” is the greatest English poem of the 20th C. I’d love to give that laurel to William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens or Allen Ginsberg, but it just ain’t so.

“The Waste Land” was new — it contained allusions to sixty or so authors and books including Shakespeare, the Greeks, the Bible, the Hindu “Upanishads” and the Buddhist “Fire Sermon” sutra. “The Waste Land” was a global, historical poem in several dozen voices. It was a cry of the heart following the horrors of World War I — a period of great disillusionment and dislocation not unlike our current time.

Eliot was quite a brainy fellow. He studied philosophy and Sanskrit at Harvard before chucking it all for literature. As much as it pains my egalitarian heart, he wasn’t writing for everyone. There’s no getting around the intellectual challenge of “The Waste Land.”

Nonetheless, there is plenty of supplementary materials for understanding TWL. One can sink into that poem and those materials and come to one’s own understanding — which will evolve over time. And the language is often gorgeous.

A great clue I encountered was Eliot’s original title, which was underwhelming:

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He Do the Police in Different Voices
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Which is a reference to a Dickens story in which one character is recommended for reading the newspaper because “He Do the Police in Different Voices.”

Never forget when reading TWL: it is a multiplicity speaking, not one voice.

Happy “The Waste Land” Centennial!

PA+Cat, Philip Sells: Reporting for duty!

Here’s my sorta book report on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” from my cultural adventure this past weekend:

Poem with Eliot’s original annotations in html.
https://wasteland.windingway.org/

If you can believe it, “The Waste Land” appeared complete with line numbers and full-on notes by Eliot himself when it was first published almost exactly a century ago. No poems are initially published that way.

“The Waste Land” was immediately understood as a breakthrough blockbuster poem. As poet and scholar, Kenneth Rexroth put it:
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You have to been there to know the impact of “The Waste Land”. It wasn’t something in an English course. It was something in that very month’s issue of “The Dial”: unprepared for, unexpected, overwhelming…

–Kenneth Rexroth, “American Poetry in the Twentieth Century”
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For an audio reading I first turned to Eliot. The best (with modern tech clean-up, I believe) is here:

–“TS Eliot :: The Waste Land”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rpFBSO65P4

However, the definitive reading IMO, and judging by web re-usage, is that of dear Alec Guinness. Absolutely gorgeous and with this poem, you need all the encouragement you can get.

–“The Waste Land (TS Eliot) read by Alec Guinness”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hcj4G45F9pw

The actor who took George Smiley from John Le Carre, took “The Waste Land” from T.S. Eliot.

The best, straight-ahead academic lecture IMO on the poem:

–“Nick Mount on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JO8rEIddgrI

You’re more than welcome– I’m just glad Neo tolerates us bookish types.

And now you also know where the term “inauguration” entered politics.

I was a little lazy about getting today’s flags put up. Today was Herman Melville’s birthday, for example, so I was supposed to have the flag of the city of Albany out. That one is one of my personal favorites on account of the aesthetics.

FWIW, about two hours ago, I got one of the local mayor’s blast phone calls (I think the guy is addicted to this method of contacting the citizenry; the previous mayor used it only to notify people about snow emergencies and parking bans)– this time about monkeypox. It was by far the longest phone message he’s ever delivered– about 3 minutes. It was downright creepy listening to him describe the symptoms of the disease in detail as well as the groups most likely to be affected and the handful of places where limited amounts of vaccine are available.

Why didn’t I just hang up? For the same reason people can’t avoid watching a train wreck– a kind of incredulity that this type of city-sponsored PSA is actually coming over the local phone system.

Incidentally, San Francisco refused to cancel or postpone its annual leather fest (or whatever it’s called) lest the usual suspects be deprived of their kinky orgies. Its slogan: “Leather Binds Us.” You may or may not want to click on the link: https://leatherpridefest.com/