1) Epic poetry presupposes a professional tradition.
2) 'They put him on the carved bed, and stood singers beside him,' [the same word is used for professional poets]...
3) Everyone can wail in every family, but not everyone can make and sing the dirge.
I will have such difficulty in becoming English again.- TE Lawrence, letter to his mother, 29/08/1909
Extraordinary interview with Erica Jong in last Saturday`s Times. According to Jong a lot of the 'bad boy' writers who gave her books bad reviews had more than literary criteria on their minds. "I was too zaftig [curvy] to get a good review. Look at all the women who are praised. They`re either very, very skinny or very, very fat. Some of them are hunchback, and some of them enormously fat" - offensive remark about Hilary Mantel omitted [LOLZ] - "Not one of them is a woman you would want to f***."
Some years ago I gave Jong`s Sappho`s Leap a very bad review in the TLS. At the time I thought I did this because it was a very bad book. Now I know differently.
Glad she cleared all that up.- Harry Sidebottom, on Facebook
There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.- Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
The position of Oxford poetry professor... comes with a miserable £6,901. [Ruth] Padel would have done better to get a job flipping burgers at McDonald's.- Giles Coren, Anger Management for Beginners
