Lucky Caedmon

Caedmon, the first poet in English whose name we know, learned the art of song in a dream. According to Bede's Historia, Caedmon was an illiterate cowherd who couldn't sing. When, during this or that merry feast, it was decided that everyone in turn would contribute a song, Caedmon would withdraw in embarrassment, maybe claiming he had to go look after the animals. One night, somebody tries to pass Caedmon the harp after dinner, and he flees to the stables. There among the ungulates he drifts off and is visited by a mysterious figure, probably God. "You must sing to me," says God. "I can't," Caedmon says, if not in these words. "That's why I'm sleeping in the stable instead of drinking mead with my friends around the fire. But God (or an angel or demon - the text is vague) keeps demanding a song. "But what should I sing?" asks Caedmon, who I imagine is desperate, cold-sweating through a nightmare. "Sing the beginning of created things," instructs the visitor. Caedmon opens his mouth and, to his amazement, gorgeous verses praising God pour forth.

Caedmon awakes as a poet...

- Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

The not-so-good old days

With the increasing informality of ritual under the reforms of Edward VI came scope for new sources of texts, especially psalms either entire or in part - though not yet the personal selection of verses which later became common (and caused the unfortunate sixteenth-century Flemish composer Laurent de Voz to be hanged for a motet containing a suggestive choice of psalm texts).

- Nicolas Robertson, sleeve notes to Sacred Choral Music by William Mundy (The Sixteen, dir. Harry Christophers

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 108

And quite a decent poem

about religion.

Books I've actually finished lately: 80

Because if you haven't read Tristram Shandy, you are not yet born.

This Week's Literary Hero

Robert Herrick.

Books I've actually finished lately: 64

Festive mondegreen

And his name shall be Khaled. (Wonderful!)

- Isaiah, 9:6

St Patrick of Armagh

- my new-found personal patron!

Facebooks - III

Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence / Anglo-English      Attitudes - Geoff Dyer [I don't remember which came first. Most              probably read concurrently]
God Is Not Great: the case against religion - Christopher Hitchens
Flashman - George MacDonald Fraser
Chinaman: the Legend of Pradeep Mathew - Shehan Karunatilaka [in      manuscript]
Apocalypse Now (Redux) script - John Milius
Histories - Herodotus [partial]
John Clare: A Biography - Jonathan Bate [unfinished]
In Ethiopia with a Mule - Dervla Murphy
Collected Poems - Zbigniew Herbert
Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie

Unfamous last words - GUEST ENTRY

Books I've actually finished lately: 41

Longlisted - without the ugly sticker - for the Man Booker Prize 2014.

Also wins the ASH Smyth Prize for most uses of 'fuccan cunt' in an historical novel. (Probably.)

This page is not in Ukrainian.

Alas.

Oscar Wilde - in context

I believe God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability. And vice versa.

Unfortunate, but true

Not being raised in the church will have an effect on your literary frames of reference.

... says History Today.

Books I've actually finished lately: 32

Cross-cut

There's a scene in the very excellent The Trip to Italy where the now-familiar Coogan-Brydon banterthon ends with "... That's the crux."

The next frame is a close-up of headstones in the foreigners' cemetery in Rome.

I'd really like to believe that this was intentional.

Not from Blackadder(?) - 1

His mother was a religiously minded Andalusian cleaning lady called Mercedes...

- Nicholas Rankin, in Literary Review

Some half-dozen gems

from (the typically-beautiful) McSweeney's Thirty-One - Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: old forms, unearthed:

parchment is replaced by pen and paper, which is replaced by predictive text on Finnish cell phones.

- Darren Franich and Graham Weatherly, 'Introduction'

MARCI: I think everyone likes the penis. Lesbians just don't like how men are attached to the penis.

- Mary Miller, 'A Dialogue Between Two Maids in the Twenty-First Century, One of Whom is Skeezy: a new whore dialogue'

SOCRATES: ... It is not always the keenest eye that is the first to see something.

- Plato, The Republic

HEMINGWAY: I've been to every place I used. I'd seen the mountains in the early morning. I'd tasted the wine.

- David Thomson, 'After Citizen Kane: a new Socratic dialogue'

the goal of Socrates is not to answer a question, but rather to reveal that the preexisting answers are incorrect or deficient.

- Eds. marginal note

the letters are minute and bristle with serifs like little hooks (inducing a half-conscious discomfort in the throat-clearing reader).

- Shelley Jackson, 'Consuetudinary of the Word Church, or The Church of The Dead Letter: a new consuetudinary'

we hope you'll enjoy this issue, and that those of you who have recently graduated, or been laid off will consider McSweeney's for your internship needs. You will be valued, if not adequately paid.

- McSweeney's (per se)

Books I've actually finished lately: 17