... but only to draw your attention to my article in The Sunday Times about what really happened in 2007.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
I Break My Silence...
... but only to draw your attention to my article in The Sunday Times about what really happened in 2007.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Yeats mentions something along the same line.
ReplyDeleteTURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Interesting article, though at least the first part of it -- about great writers being men -- sounds like a straw-man argument to me: Darned easy to knock down. Look at your Booker winners and rethink the premise. The perception that only male writers could craft masterworks might have been true 40 years ago -- fomented by lots of male writers, as you've said -- but not recently.
ReplyDeleteHeartening to read. i'm glad you liked The Thin Red Line - for my money one of the definite classics of the last decade, up there with any film you could mention.
ReplyDeletei'd nominate Cormac McCarthy as a great, also; and Michael Mann in cinema.
Am reading 'The Great Fire' at present, difficult but moving. Another good writer on love is Helen Waddell in her novel 'Peter Abelard', well worth checking out, told with a similar discretion, and with a very strong but not obnoxiously so theological underpinning.
Bit surprised you could omit the epitome of greatness that is Richard Madeley.
Cormac McCarthy. Great works over four decades. The most recent as great as anything else, and, the whisperers tell me, three more novels waiting to go as and when the publishers decide to publish.
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed the piece. Great artists will struggle to co-exist in a world that also contains Blackberries and instant messaging, I would imagine.