Thursday, July 19, 2012

Poetry porn

Well, honestly, what else would you call this line from Henry Newbolt’s “He Fell Among Thieves”?:
He felt her trembling speed and the thrash of her screw
The preceding line has “ploughing the foam”. Phwoar, etc. This is from a review in the Spectator by Juliet Townsend of The Fishing Fleet: Husband Hunting in the Raj  by Anne de Courcy which explains:
The Fishing Fleet originated in the days of the East India Company, when carefully selected potential wives would be sent out for the Company’s employees, those who failed to find a match being sent home under the rather unkind title of ‘returned empties’.
Vile. Sounds like a sheep farmer’s expression. A few pages later, Cressida Connolly reviews her godfather’ latest, Stephen Spender: New Selected Journals 1939-1995, and quotes:
To be totally honest now, I should ask whether Auden was not a bit envious of me because I had a large penis.
One looks forward to the published journals of male New Zealand poets.

Which brings us to EL James’s hypermegabestselling erotic novel 50 Shades of Grey. I haven’t read it either and nor has Paul Thomas which didn’t stop him from expressing a view about it in the Herald. Joshua Drummond skimmed it in a bookshop and expressed his view in the Waikato Times. On principle I didn’t read Paul, who would have been amusing, and skimmed Joshua, who was amusing. UK novelist Andrew O’Hagan did read the novel and this is his review. Money quote:
To say the woman in this book is submissive won’t cover it. She likes to compare herself to the heroine of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which is nice. But Tess has the whole of Victorian hypocrisy to contend with while Anastasia just has to worry – between delicious ‘humiliations’ – whether she’s got the right music on her iPod.
One unintended consequence  of the novel’s success is a surge of interest in the music of the great Tudor composer Thomas Tallis, whose magnificent 40-part motet Spem in Alium went to #7 in the UK classical chart thanks to a mention in the novel. So here are the Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips:

And here are the just as wonderful but different Winchester Cathedral Choir under David Hill:

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2 comments:

  1. PaulJuly 20, 2012 at 8:36 PM

    Your we recall that when we last lunched, discussion turned to Gavin Ewart. This post reminded me of his“The Short Blake-Style Gnomic Epigram:”

    “A voice was heard from a bottle of hock, saying:/ I am the ghost of W H Auden’s cock!”

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  2. Stephen StratfordJuly 23, 2012 at 4:33 PM

    And there's lots more of that sort of thing in the Collected Ewart. Hard to get this stuff right, I think. Look at Eliot. For a while I was caretaker of a collection of letters by James K Baxter to a woman he was trying to seduce - they are full of smutty/obscene poems which were intended to be funny but just seemed grubby. Whatever his other virtues, he lacked a talent to amuse.

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