Robert Browning is 200

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 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.)

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. 

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

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

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”

This?

Once you’ve finished the Ring and the Book…

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?

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…

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.