Robert Browning is 200

HAPPY BIRTHDAY B

Mon, 07 May 2012 07:27:01 -0400

200 today!

I like my writers influential

Sat, 05 May 2012 20:27:00 -0400

A strange little thing hidden on p 5 of today’s guardian’s review. The ‘Week in Books’ diary finishes with a discussion of Browning by John Dugdale.

Can’t find it online; begins by claiming Browning mostly remembered as butt of jokes. Quotes, obviously, Wilde’s “…and so is Browning” & Jane Carlyle on Sordello, and then just carries on listing jokes about Browning.

I think this claim is untrue. Get the impression this Dugdale may have read a book about B or Victorian literary reputations or something similar; perhaps he’s just unlucky and just knows too many of the particular sort of literary shit who lives off anecdotes and won’t do the reading. (John, my advice: just complete the anecdote ahead of them w/ featureless expression on face, quote a bit of the Toccata or Development, then ask them about their favourite Browning poems. Make them feel fucking ashamed for being the boring art parasites they are).

(And I mean if you are going to do the standard Browning comic anecdotes, then COME ON, NUNS FINGERING TWATS, IT’S THE BEST)

Anyhow, Dugdale seems to be on the side of the angels (the ambivalent angels of Browning) because there is a brief and vague defence that claims

the legacy of the dramatic monologue runs (via Eliot, Pound, Frost, Plath, Hughes and others) to Carol Ann Duffy in poetry, all the way to the use of personas by rappers such as Eminem and Nicki Minaj in music.

Oh god. I think he has form for this. Ok, first, I think there is a rule or something about never ever using rappers/pop music (especially Eminem) to arouse interest in classic poetry unless there is an actual rhyme-bite or like Drake has made an incontestable, precise allusion to William Drummond of Hawthornden. Everyone knows that try-hard teachers (usually lib dems iirc) will be first against the wall when the rev comes & it is all just awkward and embarrassing and really, if you want to try it, show me the genealogy, properly, because I feel like you haven’t grasped a) the history of poetry or b) the history of popular music when you’re just saying ‘singers have/use personae’.

If you want to see someone doing Browning/Rap properly, here, here it is. Neat, deceptive backhand while exiting; provocative, funny.

I’m not really convinced the Carol Ann Duffy thing is a sell either.

(^^^^^^^^litotes^^^^^^^^)

Anyway, it ends nicely, by saying Wilde liked him really and he’s a great creator of character, which is v true.

Strange piece though.

(And is that all we get?)

ok ok ok

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 05:45:37 -0400

I’ll try to isolate Mason’s readings from the krautrock accompaniment and post them over after the weekend.

Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:51:04 -0400

Not sure I know a collection that’s so weirdly formally aggressive - responding to charges of obscurity by offering clear narrative in battered doggerel & ugly shock rhymes. ‘At The Mermaid’ is a remarkable fuck-you - who ventriloquizes Shakespeare?

Browning’s Birthday – May 7th, PUT IT IN YOUR DIARIES.

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 06:06:47 -0400

Browning’s Birthday – May 7th, PUT IT IN YOUR DIARIES.:

idiot/dog asking key questions, and i bang on in the comments.

"At the very end of The Ring and the Book Browning delivers one of the most staggering mule-kicks..."

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 04:53:31 -0400

“

At the very end of The Ring and the Book Browning delivers one of the most staggering mule-kicks ever meted out by an author to his readers. Bear in mind that the poem is more than 21,000 lines of blank verse – about twice the length of Paradise Lost. It was published in four monthly instalments, each containing three books of the poem, which appeared from November 1868 to February 1869. Browning, like Melville, was asking Jonah to swallow the whale. But even Melville might have blenched at Browning’s final exordium:

So, British Public, who may like me yet,
(Marry and amen!) learn one lesson hence
Of many which whatever lives should teach:
This lesson, that our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind.

So that’s it. The British Public might reasonably ask, after 12 books and 21,000 lines of human speech, testimony and estimation, whether the message couldn’t have been delivered a little more crisply.

”

- Daniel Karlin in the LRB (It is an astonishing moment. I couldn’t quite believe it when I read it.)

Again, I’m not sure why Mason chose to read this...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 06:24:33 -0400

Again, I’m not sure why Mason chose to read this over Neu!’s Hallogallo. Maybe something to do with materiality-as-humanity, the apparent machine-groove of the motorik beat actually built on something human, a frailty/corruption under the ideal. But it’s a mystery. Maybe Mason just really fucking liked German experimental music you know?

So yeah, here’s James Mason’s reading of Andrea del...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:21:00 -0400

So yeah, here’s James Mason’s reading of Andrea del Sarto. I don’t know if he gets the Andrea del Sarto who exists in my head exactly, though much of the weakness is in there, but really he is going for something else. I suppose the clue is in the backing track, but I’m not entirely sure why he chose to read it over ‘aumgn’ by CAN – it’s maybe something to do with fracture or collage art, trying to access the radical modernist Browning that Pound wrests into being in The Cantos. Really, though, is this the best work to do that with?

It could be either a riposte or complement to Browning’s argument about Sarto – an artist who we’re meant to see as a failure when matched against Leonardo, M’angelo, Raphael: riposte, because it shows the art of the masters will be destroyed or unavailable in an age whose major works are strange mechanical-tribal fragments; a complement because the CAN of aumgn refuse technical perfection.

I’ll post the Bishop ordering his tomb tomorrow.

So here is the amazing James Mason reads Browning album that a...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:51:20 -0400

So here is the amazing James Mason reads Browning album that a friend was good enough to lend me. Only three tracks: first side is “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” and “Andrea del Sarto”, which as I am sure we all agree is the greatest poem of the Victorian period if Childe Roland isn’t; the second side is “Fra Lippo Lippi”.

The Bishop is the best of them I think – he’s just right for it. I’ll listen to Andrea more, but I don’t think the self-doubt is there exactly – tho’ the greys are hard to catch, maybe, when the poem has to be properly articulated. And the boyish world-love of Lippi isn’t quite Mason. But they’re really, really enjoyable readings – he’s such a smart reader - he clearly actually understands what he’s saying, which is not always the case with actors trained in those shakespearean impression-of-thought rhythms.

I mean basically it is James fucking Mason reading Robert Browning poems over some krautrock, and who can naysay when faced with that.

I don’t know why it doesn’t mention the krautrock thing on the cover. I’ll post an example track in a minute.

(That cover is a dark and lively illustration for “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” by Robert Pinart. Committed to stained glass now, if it’s the same man.)

see everyone is talking about him

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:21:18 -0400

see everyone is talking about him:

I take that final line + its itals + q marks as being a trapdoor or series of trapdoors that drop under us and leave us falling from the poem, then through Lear until here we are standing outside this blank enclosed artifact again, the knight trapped in “sheet of flame”, the empty journey complete. Someone has been telling us an eerie story with horrid determination, but we only know it is a story now.

Browning talk everywhere, really feel the movement growing

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 06:01:02 -0400

Browning talk everywhere, really feel the movement growing

"Hear what I never was, but might have been / I' the better world where goes tobacco-smoke!"

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 05:26:58 -0400

Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society a poem for late 90s/millenial anti-utopian impulse - the failure to do anything justified by immense ramble on grub-first-then-ethics, silliness of big reforming ideas etc etc. The apologetics of mediocrity, of decay.

Not an easy read (I am 1/2-way) but there’s always something in these big lost things of the 70s.

How It Strikes a Contemporary

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:02:24 -0400

Terrifying. Poets are spies sent out by the universe to report back to the malign force that created it.

Unacknowledged legislators can be evil, of course.

"what was called the Cord,/ Or Vigil-torture more facetiously"

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 05:02:41 -0400

This?

Once you've finished the Ring and the Book…

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:52:26 -0400

The rest looks like a trot. The Inn Album? An afternoon’s work! Fifine at the Fair? I’ll knock it off on my commute.

All English epics rewrite Paradise Lost. How does the R & the B do it?

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 07:03:04 -0400

Murdered Pompilia is a redeemed Eve. Unsexed, static, sainted.

B likes virgins, murder, stasis. Fatherless Pompilia = the feminine as uncorrupted by male plastics, her voice a liberation from syntactic fracture & bravo rhetoric - blank virginal zone/purity of style (tho’ the next section of the Ring and the Book hacks at our attempts to judge things by style - Hyacinthus fusses over his style as forensic tool; we’ve been making that same mistake throughout the poem, trying to work out what’s going on. We’ve been the judge he’s knocking out bad latin for).

B thinks redemption may lie with female god.

Ring and the Book secretly about…

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 07:02:37 -0400

The 1690s in England, not Rome.
Manipulation of monies: the broke old class engaged in fraudulent commerce with rising mercantile class.
Critical reason in the public sphere: half-rome, other half-rome and tertium quid are essays on knowledge and judgement in the polis. “there’s a new tribunal now higher than god’s – the educated man’s”
Dynastic politics: stuart absolutism and old aristocratic values – blood vengeance – trumped by rule of law. Papal ambivalence.

hahaha going to be posting a lot of James Fucking Mason reading...

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 10:37:53 -0400

hahaha going to be posting a lot of James Fucking Mason reading Browning, had no idea he did this. Andrea Del Sarto to come at some point.

Middle Class

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 06:55:23 -0400

It is then of Browning as a member of the middle class, that we can speak with the greatest historical certainty.

Chesterton again.

I’m ok with this.

Ring and the Book is in Clarissa -> Henry James line, building yourself and modelling others, construction through repetition – a cubism of motives; this is civic and bourgeois; it’s the mental-state guessing that’s amped up in a city. In the country you are staring at field most of the day & know what everyone else you know thinks, there are only five of them and they are all staring at similar fields. Italian city-state is B’s characteristic territory – it’s the space for emergence of this mind-game, aestheticises class-angst.

How does a world of Other Minds holds together? There’s the terror.

And Catholicism? What is it in his mind.

A Death in the Desert

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 06:28:25 -0400

This goes on a bit, the logic-chopping in the middle isn’t that gripping, and it sits next to & is shadowed by ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’, which is obvs the theological monologue most available to the gloomy hunched minds of our era; but it’s got some moves otherwise, the further I get from it the more I like it.

let’s say we can put aside Renan and Strauss and all the stuff this is Victorianly about; the historical reality of Jesus can be a thing for us, but it’s not really a foundation-of-society thing; ditto the truth of christianity.

The stuff that this is addressing isn’t the thing grabbing me. I more like this as a generalised Ozymandias of experience (maybe an anti-‘Memorabilia’?) - it’s a mini-epic of lost scrolls, final witnesses, sealed graves, forgotten Antiochenes; desert, cave and island.

It is the Xanthus that escaped to Rome,

Was burned, and could not write the chronicle.

Does the will might and love stuff hold together? Don’t care – it’s as sceptical about the apologetics as we are - that’s why Caliban is next door. The void is at the back of this one too.

iiuc we’re more confident now that this poem is historically fucked – John the Apostle not John the Evangelist etc; that intensifies magnetic field of poem I think – monologue seeming to defend truth/testimony burning the use of witness.

MAKING ME THINK ABOUT: ‘The Manner of Men’ by Rudyard Kipling. I don’t know why.