Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Overnight flotation


The tumblrist at ciné, struggling mightily to master undergraduate ditziness after a too-lengthy simmer in the Humanism of Louis Malle, has presented a group portrait under the title, Ballcolony. Not that one's vote counts for very much here, but I'd say, he's ready for Oxford. That, however, may be news over there.


Nor, thank heaven, has this witty hornpipe sally of his broken our stride in Eliot:

The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.

    Weialala leia
    Wallala leialala

I want friends to know, this kind of blindingly immaculate jest is still being offered, long after some've given it up for what Mr Eliot, on Hamlet, referred to so pithily as the business world.


Sweeter than breakfast;
fundamental.












T.S. Eliot
Selected Essays
  1917 - 1932
  Hamlet
  1921
Harcourt Brace, 1932©

T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land
1922
  III The Fire Sermon
      ll 273 - 278
op. cit.

Henry Purcell
Who can from joy refrain?
  Overture
Robert King, director
The King's Consort
op. cit.





2 comments:

  1. Not even a sly pun in response? The poor lad has been rendered almost non-communicative. Too much beachtime methinks. Perhaps a return to England's green & pleasant land will restore his mental fight.

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  2. Worse and more of it, mon vieux, he credited your "wave" to me, at his own domicile. But we know such people, among whom it would be impossible to accord him rank, on grounds of distressingly restless genius, who are simply too busy to leave their own laboratory, to find out what has become of an experiment with which they're already bored. Still, you seem to prick his hide well enough - and who knows, to what extractive advantage to us all?

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