Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Let's Hear it for Horace 2
Here he is, Horace Engdahl, my Jerk of the Decade. Easy on the L'Oreal, Horace, you may not think Updike, Roth, Ashbery, Dylan, Robinson etc etc are quite up to the Nobel Prize for Literature, but we don't want you look like a complete prat. No, I'm kidding, we do. And there's even a quotation from your 'collection of fragments' Meteoror - 'The poem shuns thoughts as the fencer dodges the rapier's point. The aphorism permits itself to be pierced without shedding a drop of blood.' This must be one of those very rare things that sounds better in Swedish.
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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.
Crikey and My Hat Bryan, I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of you, tho' I agree that Horace (it just had to be a name like that) is way off the mark with his thesis, easily disproved, and his rather spooky appearance (because he's worth it?) backs up his outlandish take on US literature. But on the credit side, have you not seen limp looking men like this in many Bergman mid-period movies, men that bring out the playground bully in all of us, and by the end of the piece, they turn out to be just like the rest of us, with our weaknesses hidden, and our strengths exposed?
ReplyDeleteCan I gather from this, Bryan, that Mr. Horace is not flavour of the month with you?
ReplyDeleteAlmost anything a Swede is likely to utter is best left in the decent obscurity of its native tongue.
ReplyDeleteThat quote sounds better in German, so I presume it sounds better in Swedish too. Our national newspapers used to be full of such sentences, particularly the Feuilleton and Review pages. "The unctuous thread of the melody uncurls into the sweet chiaroscuro of the Unfathomable and is captured and brought back to earth by the insistent crescendo of the second interval."
ReplyDeleteA fencer doesn't really 'dodge' a rapier: that implies he's hurling his body about, Matrix-style. He parries or blocks with his own weapon.
ReplyDeleteHe looks like Andrew Lloyd Webber's twin, the one they separated at birth and sent to Sweden.
ReplyDeleteIn defence of Horace, he has also played prominent role on editorial board of Kris magazine.. not a lad's mag or porno-lite spin-off TV show.. nor the eponymous organ / mouthpiece of Cory Aquino's daughter Kris (gameshow host and film star with controversial love of shoes).. no, we're talking about that meaty, weighty.. heavee.. Swedish academic journal 'Kris' translated (because Horatio loves a good translation n'est ce pas.. molto internazionle etc.) as Crisis. Bryan, expect that commission soonest!
ReplyDeleteI am looking forward to reading his "Essay in Nine sections" !! It sounds thrilling!
ReplyDelete... oh ... no ... the other one.
Say what you will about Horace Engdahl, but at least he isn't enough of a jerk to off-handedly insult the native tongue of 9.2 million people without any knowledge of it.
ReplyDelete