tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5873009918100574338.post6583985735704944670..comments2024-02-05T09:17:53.322-08:00Comments on Adrian Barlow's blog: Solomon Eagle: re-reading Defoe in the time of CoronavirusAdrian Barlowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04526714501872493961noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5873009918100574338.post-6667887606380611322020-04-16T23:23:00.592-07:002020-04-16T23:23:00.592-07:00Possibly upstairs, but I guess the rubber ink sac ...Possibly upstairs, but I guess the rubber ink sac would be in a sorry state by now.tomdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03766237341387024779noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5873009918100574338.post-77654047679533470392020-04-15T14:19:50.246-07:002020-04-15T14:19:50.246-07:00That was certainly signing off in style, Tom! Do y...That was certainly signing off in style, Tom! Do you still have your blue-ink Parker?Adrian Barlowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04526714501872493961noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5873009918100574338.post-4552679177762672262020-04-14T10:53:22.703-07:002020-04-14T10:53:22.703-07:00I've suddenly recalled after sixty years our C...I've suddenly recalled after sixty years our Chemistry teacher warning a class of twelve-year-olds that they must NEVER write Platignum when they meant Platinum. <br /><br />I couldn't get on with Osmiroid - my writing was and is left-handed scrawly - but my father gave me his Parker, with which I wrote end-of-year exams, O-level, A-level, University Scholarship exam, Tripos and then stopped. Heaven knows how many thousand words that was - not as many as Charles Hamilton, but a lot.<br /><br />In May 1969 I sat my university final exams. The last paper was called The English Moralists which meant, of course, that you could write about people like Locke, Hume, Bentham, Mill, Montaigne, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.<br /><br />I knew I wasn’t staying on at the university and that this would be my last-ever exam after a ten-year stint. Felt-tip pens were a very new thing then. I fixed matters so that my final essay was on Nietzsche. I reached the final paragraph and, putting down the blue-ink Parker fountain pen with which I’d written a decade of essays, I picked up the bright red felt-tip and wrote in large capital letters:<br /><br />ICH SAGE EUCH: MAN MUß NOCH CHAOS IN SICH HABEN, UM EINEN TANZENDEN STERN GEBÄREN ZU KÖNNEN.<br /><br />[I tell you: one must still have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.]<br /><br />Then I signed it in huge sprawling letters: Zarathustra.<br /><br />Then the exam was done and I’d left academia for ever.<br /><br />tomdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03766237341387024779noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5873009918100574338.post-77370548658033412332020-04-14T10:47:14.612-07:002020-04-14T10:47:14.612-07:00Vnuchkas Rule!
I chose the cricket bat and Bryher...Vnuchkas Rule!<br /><br />I chose the cricket bat and Bryher arranged for it to be sent to me. She also sent my brother lots of 1st editions [English] of Thomas Mann and books about Freud as well as copies of her own novels. My brother [rightly] has them now. tomdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03766237341387024779noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5873009918100574338.post-73404696727730264542020-04-10T15:44:55.391-07:002020-04-10T15:44:55.391-07:00I wonder, Hugo, whether you recall a sort of fount...I wonder, Hugo, whether you recall a sort of fountain pen hierarchy at school: Platignum at the bottom, Osmiroid considerably above, then Burnham (I had one of these - they scored well for rarity value. Parker next, with Shaeffers and Conway Stewarts so far at the top of the pecking order as to out of sight!Adrian Barlowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04526714501872493961noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5873009918100574338.post-13571893788230556412020-04-10T15:41:18.337-07:002020-04-10T15:41:18.337-07:00Tom, very good to me in touch again. I’m astonishe...Tom, very good to me in touch again. I’m astonished to hear of your family links to Bryher; and perhaps even more astonished that she gave you a Peter May signed cricket bat! Thanks very much for ‘Here’ - our granddaughter is also very skilled at 'listening to the now of now’.Adrian Barlowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04526714501872493961noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5873009918100574338.post-71312373272601337732020-03-29T03:25:23.113-07:002020-03-29T03:25:23.113-07:00Good to see the blog return. I've never read A...Good to see the blog return. I've never read Aldington's 1930 translation of The Decameron but have just ordered a copy as this seemed like a good time to start.Hilaryhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02932487641329330100noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5873009918100574338.post-33730483016727440882020-03-28T07:00:43.343-07:002020-03-28T07:00:43.343-07:00If you can cope with being in Aladdin's Cave o...If you can cope with being in Aladdin's Cave or with a threatened addiction to all things to do with pens try Cult Pens https://www.cultpens.com/HugoPhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12955438973659286212noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5873009918100574338.post-51564004175420866322020-03-28T06:10:33.338-07:002020-03-28T06:10:33.338-07:00I meant to add that she was [as of course you know...I meant to add that she was [as of course you know, but some readers may have forgotten] married to Richard Aldington.<br /><br />I was by the square with our younger grandchildren a few years ago:<br /><br /> <br />Here<br /><br />Coram's Fields children<br />scream like traffic or like gulls.<br />HD's sapphic ghost<br /><br />talks with Ezra Pound<br />over in Mecklenburgh Square.<br />The war is far off.<br /><br />Our granddaughter sits<br />listening to the now of now.<br />The world is made new.tomdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03766237341387024779noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5873009918100574338.post-40477836219285319022020-03-28T05:59:26.244-07:002020-03-28T05:59:26.244-07:00It's good to see you back - I hope there will ...It's good to see you back - I hope there will be more to read soon!<br /><br />I hope it's OK to make a knight's move and add a few memories. <br /><br />HD’s daughter by the musician Cecil Gray was looked after as a girl by my aunt Alice. My mother used to get occasional letters from HD and more from her daughter.<br /><br />It didn’t mean much to me as a child. Now I look at the list of Aldington’s friends and associates – Ezra Pound, TE Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, WB Yeats, DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, Aldous Huxley, etc – and wish I’d been old enough to ask just a few questions.<br /><br />I was at this very interesting event at Poet in the City about three years ago:<br /><br />http://www.poetinthecity.co.uk/show-event/?pc_event_id=324<br /><br />I interviewed the speakers for the Poet in the City archive.<br /><br />One of the speakers said from the stage that she had hoped to write a life of Bryher, HD's lifelong partner:<br /><br />https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryher<br /><br />No one has really done it, and it would make a fascinating story for reasons I won't go into here.<br /><br />I was talking with her afterwards and told her that we have dozens [hundreds?] of letters from Bryher, as well as many first editions of her books, that the letters are about all kinds of stuff including HD - some of them contain messages from HD in shaky writing - and that many of our own letters to Bryher are in the archive at Yale:<br /><br />http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/bryher-papers<br /><br />Her correspondents include Theodor Adorno, Conrad Aiken, Richard Aldington, George Barker, Sylvia Beach, Walter Benjamin, Yves Bonnefoy, Elizabeth Bowen, Jocelyn Brooke, Colette, Norman Douglas, HD, Lawrence Durrell, Sergei Eisenstein, Havelock Ellis, 'Tom' [TS] Eliot, Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Laurie Lee, Denise Levertov, Amy Lowell, Compton Mackenzie, Heinrich Mann, John Masefield, Somerset Maugham, Henri Michaux, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Lotte Reiniger, IA Richards, Dorothy Richardson, May Sarton, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Virgil Thomson, Alice B Toklas, JRR Tolkien, Carl van Vechten, Arthur Waley, Carl Zuckmayer and - somewhere among the many other names - me.<br /><br />It was amusing, after all the serious talk about the left bank and the avant garde and the remaking of the word and radical rewriting of gender roles et hoc genus omne, to reveal that in those boxes is the letter I wrote in 1957, thanking Bryher for her generosity in buying me a Peter May autograph cricket bat.<br /><br />I don't know what that would have meant to Ezra Pound or Gertrude Stein but it meant [means] a lot to me.<br /><br />tomdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03766237341387024779noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5873009918100574338.post-66440084215015878132020-03-28T04:23:33.723-07:002020-03-28T04:23:33.723-07:00Adrian, It is an ill wind, etcetera—and an unlooke...Adrian, It is an ill wind, etcetera—and an unlooked for bonus to have you blogging again—or I should say ‘essaying’, so as not to ‘give a blog a bad name.’ Very interesting that you should be rereading Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year. I had thought this that might be a good book to read in these (for us) unprecedented times; and when I heard Ian McEwan on the Today programme, saying that his wife was reading the book, I decided to order it. Because it seems to me – and it’s already borne by the few quotes you give – that this book (although it cannot of course protect us from the virus) could act as a kind of inoculation to the mind—a sort of catharsis, I suppose. And the fact that it’s a work of (historical) fiction does not worry me at all. I am quite sure that enough truth will come out of it—as it does of the Gordon Riots of 1780 in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge.<br /><br /><br /><br />You’ve also enthused me to start writing letters by hand again—and not in biro. Two years ago I was staying with some friends in north Cornwall, and they showed me a letter I’d written to them fifteen years previously. It was written in brown ink on cream paper (A4). I wonder that I ceased the practice, and if I can get a pen and some ink online, I’ll go back to letter writing of this kind. <br />Blogging has been back in my mind too. At the moment I have an essay to write for a course I'm doing at Madingley Hall. But as soon as I’ve finished that, I'm going to see if I can get back on the ‘blog patch’; and as there is only one topic that seems appropriate to write about, I already have a title in mind: ‘The cloud of unknowing.’<br />Thank you for putting me in this mood.<br />Peter <br />Peter Harthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16448566004422403386noreply@blogger.com