Facebooks - VII

The Complete Librettos of - WS Gilbert
Beau Geste - PC Wren
Engineers of the Soul - Frank Westerman
Five Go to Smuggler's Top - Enid Blyton
Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution - Simon Schama
Goldfinger - Ian Fleming
Collected Poems - WH Auden [in progress]
Ancient Egyptian Literature (3 vols.) - Miriam Lichtheim
Asterix [all] - R Goscinny & A Uderzo

Facebooks - V

Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions - Martin Amis
The Cripple of Inishmaan - Martin McDonagh
Mein Kampf - Adolf Hitler [abandoned]
'The Book of Emma' [in Small Hours] - Lachlan Mackinnon
The Psalms - 'David'
Markings - Dag Hammarskjöld (transl. WH Auden)
Rorke's Drift - James Bancroft [I think; but possibly another work.             They all look the same] / The Day of the Dead Moon - David Rattray     [audiobook]
Three Men in a Boat / on the Bummel - Jerome K Jerome
Vertigo - WG Sebald
Lost Oasis: A Desert Adventure - Robert Twigger

The word 'plash'

really pisses me off.

It's just 'splash', isn't it, with a silent S tacked on, to make it seem more onomatopoetical.

Auden, Heaney, Foulds... this is your gypsy's warning.

The justification for truth

We are free to choose our paths
but choose We must, no matter
where they lead, and the tales We
tell of the Past must be true.

- WH Auden, 'Aubade'

In defence of poetry

a Christian ought to write in prose

- WH Auden, 'Dedicatory Poem'

I, me, ouch!, mine

The I-feeling: a feeling of being-responsible-for. (It cannot accompany a verb in the passive.) I wake in the morning with a violent headache and cry Ouch! This cry is devoid of I-feeling. Then I think : - "I have a hangover"; some I-feeling accompanies this thought - the act of locating and identifying the headache is mine - but very little. Then I think: - "I drank too much last night." Now the I-feeling is much stronger...

- WH Auden, 'Dichtung und Wahrheit'

Handwriting

If indeed, as Auden claimed, a poet's own handwriting is enjoyed 'like smelling your own farts' then a brief inspection of my notebooks would suggest that I have followed through a little.

The case for/of procrastination

The longing for success, the doubt of ever being able to achieve the kinds of success which have to be earned, and the certainty of being able to have at this moment a kind which does not, play dangerously into each other's hands.

- WH Auden, The Age of Anxiety

On poetry

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such an increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.

- WH Auden

Right or wrong - and Auden could be wrong - poetry is a textbook for real life.