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Post by Dark Cloud on Mar 3, 2012 18:35:20 GMT -6
chiefly British : affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.
Fussell supposes that poetry continues to be important, just not so much. His first wife said she caught him with a male student. He doesn't seem to realize that his poetic fixations - as with Wilfred Owen - are uncomfortable, and there is a nagging supposition that he's trying to gently suggest that male bondings in the First WW serve as justification for his own in the Second.
At no point does he seem to entertain the issue of the creepiness, illegality, and terror to the victim that these poets who wrote about boys/lads far younger probably instigated. He just ignores that aspect, which is like an admirer of Allan Ginsberg ignoring the accounted pedophilia.
He also devotes a lot of time to In Parentheses, a book of one poem by Blunden, that he calls a masterpiece and a work of genius without actually saying why he thinks that way or, rather, he doesn't seem to evidence it sufficiently to the claim, although that might be outside the point of his book.
I don't know what is true or not about him, but he avoids those aspects to his subjects of discussion - which are indeed a relevant issue in the study of the times - with choice of language and style and you don't realize he never actually addressed them till after you're finished, and it seems a cop out.
That said, I think his work is brilliant and insightful and, as a wounded, bemedalled combat officer and vet, he knows of what he speaks. And he is a terrific writer.
We have half price charge for Enlightenment this month at Dark Endeavors. We'll bill you as is normal.
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Post by quincannon on Mar 3, 2012 18:35:35 GMT -6
DC: I have always thought that the works of Scott, Dumas, and Cooper, with just a touch of Byron, had more influence than Authur and Roland on the mid to late 19th Century warrior, but your point is well taken.
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Post by benteen on Mar 3, 2012 18:47:54 GMT -6
DC/Colonel
Dont leave out Barbara Tuchman.
Be Well Dan
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Post by montrose on Mar 3, 2012 18:51:47 GMT -6
Prof Fussell was a teacher where I went to college. He was the faculty advisor to my then girlfriend, and I talked to him several times. He knew I was in ROTC and ANG and we talked some Army stuff. I do not know him well. He was a very popular instructor, and I couldn't get into his class.
I was unaware of his military writings til long after. I wish now I had talked to him more, but at that age I didn't know any better.
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Post by markland on Mar 3, 2012 20:29:54 GMT -6
chiefly British : affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint. Fussell supposes that poetry continues to be important, just not so much. His first wife said she caught him with a male student. He doesn't seem to realize that his poetic fixations - as with Wilfred Owen - are uncomfortable, and there is a nagging supposition that he's trying to gently suggest that male bondings in the First WW serve as justification for his own in the Second. At no point does he seem to entertain the issue of the creepiness, illegality, and terror to the victim that these poets who wrote about boys/lads far younger probably instigated. He just ignores that aspect, which is like an admirer of Allan Ginsberg ignoring the accounted pedophilia. He also devotes a lot of time to In Parentheses, a book of one poem by Blunden, that he calls a masterpiece and a work of genius without actually saying why he thinks that way or, rather, he doesn't seem to evidence it sufficiently to the claim, although that might be outside the point of his book. I don't know what is true or not about him, but he avoids those aspects to his subjects of discussion - which are indeed a relevant issue in the study of the times - with choice of language and style and you don't realize he never actually addressed them till after you're finished, and it seems a cop out. That said, I think his work is brilliant and insightful and, as a wounded, bemedalled combat officer and vet, he knows of what he speaks. And he is a terrific writer. We have half price charge for Enlightenment this month at Dark Endeavors. We'll bill you as is normal. DC, what consenting ADULTS do in the supposed privacy of their bedrooms is really none of our concern. Billy
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Post by Dark Cloud on Mar 4, 2012 9:42:08 GMT -6
Markland,
How nice, but not relevant to the subject. Again, you seem to glance at posts, see key words, make erroneous assumptions, and post in reply to stuff not said.
Montrose,
Fussell didn't write GWAMM till mid seventies, and I read he hated his Army experiences so much he didn't talk about them till later in life starting with that book. So you probably got as much out of him as he'd share. He's still kicking, and he answers letters, I'm told.
QC,
Scott, Dumas, and Cooper were derivative of the older tales about Arthur and Roland insofar as quest and heroes, but the actuality was that Roland and Arthur were 'taught' in schools into my generation and provided a common frame of reference that is now utterly gone. Mallory and the Song of Roland were rolled out with regularity. People quoted Byron and Shelley and Shakespeare and Grey and all the poets.
Fads, so called, lasted decades and returned again and again. Pilgrim's Progress was a cliche a century before WWI yet was referenced with regularity. Utterly forgotten best selling authors like William Morris were really important in the mental lives of people back then, and we don't get what they reference or talk about because not only are they not read anymore, nobody has heard of them. People exchanged letters in parody of exchanges between characters in books, for example, that a reader today might take as actual. It's not, and utterly bogus conclusions might be drawn by the unwary.
Benteen,
Tuchman was a historian born after the times in question, so I don't get the reference. I think her a great writer, but she's not applicable to the issue here.
Anyway, has anyone as yet actually read The Great War and Modern Memory? No?
Sigh.........you really should.
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Post by fred on Mar 4, 2012 10:49:12 GMT -6
Anyway, has anyone as yet actually read The Great War and Modern Memory? No? No... but I ordered it this morning. Amazon has it in paperback for less than $9. You can bet your sweet petunias it will be tops on my list, displacing several others, including the Kessler diaries; Iron Kingdom, the DePuy biography, Lansdale's, In the Midst of Wars, Arthur Keostler's, The Thirteenth Tribe, and David Clay Large's, Berlin. Anyone wanna attend a seminar on investing for retirement I'm putting on tomorrow evening in the Pleasantville library? I should retire! As for The Song of Roland, Arthur, Scott, Dumas, Cooper, Swift, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, et al... read... so many long years ago. High school and some college-- the benefits of liberal arts-- though I was not an English major, as can be seen by my awful syntax. In June, I attend my 50th college re-union-- 50th!-- so one can only imagine how much has been forgotten. So little time! Best wishes, Fred.
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Post by Dark Cloud on Mar 4, 2012 11:27:38 GMT -6
Just remember it's a book about British poetry in the main, and how it applied to the Great War and how it was used to remember it. It's not a 'war' book, per se, and what wars it references are not really like LBH's.
Also, the very first sentence is wrong. But that aside.....
But I can remember reading his bit about Vita Lampada, a terrible boy's poem by Newbolt, a friend of General Haig, and reading the second verse.
The sand of the desert (grass of the prairie) is sodden red, -- Red with the wreck of a square (troop) that broke; -- The Gatling's jammed (north, somewhere)and the Colonel dead, And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The river of death has brimmed his banks, And England's (Canada's) far, and Honour a name, But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks: 'Play up! play up! and play the game!'
........and thinking, with a few alterations (in parentheses): Cooke's last thoughts. Although, the poem was written well after Custer's fight. And I thought: gee, if that occurred to me right off, I can easily understand how people utilize literary templates to describe their own experiences and others.
Of course, we all know we do that to greater and lesser extent (people forget how Doonesbury's first bit was the lead character talking to himself as a movie director explaining motivation to an actor, or as a voice over given drama to the ordinary), but Fussell's contention is that this has always happened and it affects how history is written and memory recalled. I certainly think it true of the LBH, and that the Last Stand and other contentions are literary touches, not historical or factual ones. Because things were phrased the way they were by the FIRST accounts, we take them in over literal sense when they might (and I think 'are') just how people in a certain time and space had been taught to think and, most important, recall.
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Post by quincannon on Mar 4, 2012 11:48:52 GMT -6
Fred: I am shocked, shocked I say to see you admit to reading Dumas and Bacon, you going to Georgetown and knowing full well that these works were prominent on the Librorum Prohibitorum.
I was once told by a nun in sixth grade that I was going straight to hell for reading the Classic Comic Book edition of Three Musketeers, and it made me wonder. Later when I saw the movie with Gene Kelly and Van Heflin, I fully understood when Lana Turner appeared on screen.
As far as I know Dumas and Bacon are still there along with John Stuart Mill and a whole host of luminaries
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Post by fred on Mar 4, 2012 13:16:36 GMT -6
Dark Cloud,
I know... and I am a real cretin when it comes to poetry. Your recommendation, however, is all I need. I am not smart enough to either write poetry, or fully understand it. I do like a lot of it, however, and have some favorites with both Kipling and Poe. Plus, Rupert Brooke's sonnet, has always been in my mind, especially when you consider the aftermath: “If I should die, think only this of me/ That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.”
Queenie,
Remember, Georgetown is Jesuit and even 50 to 54 years ago, these guys were ahead of the curve. Besides, my high school-- Chaminade-- may be as good a school-- private or otherwise-- as there is in New York. It is also Catholic, run by the Marianists, the same guys who run the University of Dayton. I had a very enlightened, fore-thinking mother, who sent me to schools in "her image." She was rather proud of her number one brat. Of course that wooden cooking spoon had my initials on it; you could see the crack right down the middle.
Best wishes, Fred.
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Post by wild on Mar 4, 2012 15:35:44 GMT -6
The worst book I'v ever read is Hawking's A Short History of Time.
I'm a sucker for recommendations. A renowned journalist was telling of her student days studying English at Trinity Collage and how having neglected her studies feared she would fail her finals.A friend told her that if she read Jude the Obscure everything would be fine.The journalist went on to rave about the book. So down with me to our local book shop to buy a copy. Reading that book was like wading through mental glue so turgid, dark and depressing it was. And I went and ordered it, yes on his Dark Eminence's recommendation The Great War and Modern Memory And now he tells us it is a book not of war not even of poetry but on the role of poetry in war folklore.
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Post by fred on Mar 4, 2012 16:16:06 GMT -6
Wild, I would not worry about it... and for the price, you certainly cannot go wrong. The key to me, however, is the following: His points about entering the mental world of a historic era is important... If this book does as DC has said-- and we have no reason to doubt him-- then it will be well worth the small expense... and then some. This is an issue I have pushed since my first days on these boards and it is something I emphasize greatly in the book I am hoping to have published soon. Besides, to me it is the essence of all literature... and really, of history. Best wishes, Fred.
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Post by El Crab on Mar 4, 2012 17:08:37 GMT -6
I lied to DC. I had intended to read The Great War and Modern Memory next, as I had promised to him. But Larry McMurtry's book scouting/selling memoir "Books" got in the way. And now I find myself in the middle of "Like Lions They Fought", since I've yet to read a book on the Zulu War cover to cover.
Then it'll be "On Killing", I think. I have some questions about the effects of combat and I figure that book might help. Plus, now I know it's the book that I briefly glanced at long ago in a Barnes & Noble in Beaverton, OR. I still recall the part I skimmed, about bayonet charges and the relative bloodless results. Something about the desire to avoid stabbing another human or being stabbed causes one side to eventually falter, usually before contact is made.
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Post by El Crab on Mar 4, 2012 17:10:36 GMT -6
Oh, and Dark Cloud, can you please recommend one of the many books I'm selling in another thread? I got lots of good stuff recently and figured I'd have my fellow forum members salivating over them, but alas.
I could use the Dark Cloud Bump.
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Post by wild on Mar 4, 2012 17:27:03 GMT -6
Fred I suppose I can put off Midwayand give it a shot. Regards
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