Another Philip Larkin Outrage . . .

Philip Larkin

(Trying to cover his . . . ?)

Sculptor: Martin Jennings
Hull Paragon Station Concourse
December 2, 2010
Photo by Paul Harrop
Wikipedia

I finished the weekend grading of midterms and now have time for some slow 'news' . . . such as Philip Larkin saying something derogatory about Vikram Seth:

"Another load of crap from this Vikram Seth character, known to you I believe. Quite pleasant stuff, but fails to grip. Comes of being an Oriental, I suspect."

This quote comes by way of Paul Muldoon's NYT review of Larkin's Complete Poems, edited by Archie Burnett to a hefty 729 pages, most of which are a "load of crap" that Larkin wisely chose to leave unpublished in his lifetime, or so says Muldoon in "These Be the Verses" (NYT, April 19, 2012), a headline implying that Burnett has handed on Larkin's "misery to man."

But why the dissing of Seth, apparently in a letter from Larkin to Robert Conquest? What did Larkin mean? To be mean? Rather mean of him.

I went through a Seth period, even reading his novel in verse, Golden Gate, on the referral of a friend. I didn't like it at first but found it growing on me as the story soon obscured the verse to such a degree that I felt I was reading a novel rather than a poem and even came to care about the characters.

My experience of Larkin was the opposite. I first read "This Be the Verse" and loved it, but then read more Larkin and grew disenchanted, so much so that I even took that first poem as model and penned a parody: "This Be the Worse."

I did my worst . . .

Experience is the Best Teacher?

In my errant experience . . .

. . . 2008 seemed a bit long.

(Image by Mila Zinkova from Wikipedia)

In my two classes with students from the Division of International Studies at Ewha Womans University, we're doing a workshop on presentations. I've decided to give a presentation today in those two DIS classes so that the students can experience what a presentation is like. Not every presentation has to be written out in full beforehand -- shorthand notes can suffice for some material -- but I'm writing out today's presentation in full because . . . well, you'll see why:

When I was growing up, I was often told that the old are wiser because they have more experience. "Experience is the best teacher," they said. Who said? The old. And they of course knew best, for they had . . . experience. But there's something suspiciously circular about all this, wouldn't you agree? Perhaps the white-haired old gentleman who handed down that piece of folk wisdom was right. But might it not also have been a piece of self-interested wisdom, coming as it did from an old fellow. Why, it gave him an advantage. Power to veto my views. A hammer to pound sound sense into my thick head. And besides, if he were right, if he were really and truly right, if experience genuinely is the best teacher . . . why listen to him? I should listen to my own experience, right?

Better than listening to old fools, of which there are too many! The English poet Philip Larkin had them pegged when he wrote, "What do they think has happened, the old fools, / To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose / It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools, / And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember / Who called this morning?" Larkin should know. He's dead now. What could be older and wiser than that? Wisdom of the ages, you might say. Except that Larkin can't say anything anymore. And his poem grows older but no wiser. Why, then, am I listening to him, the old fool?

For that matter, why are all of you sitting there listening to me? I'm an old guy. You should be learning from your own green experience! The next time some old fellow intones, "Experience is the best teacher," just retort, "Oh really? Well, if experience is the best teacher, why are there so many old fools running around?" And there are! Surely, you've noticed. No? Then, you'll just have to trust me on this one. I know from experience! Better yet, don't listen to me. For all I know, I may be one of those old fools. I mean, if I were, I wouldn't know it, would I?

So, take the advice of an old man who's learned from hard experience. Don't believe a word I say! Get up out of your chairs! Toss those textbooks in the trash. Take the advice of the late Timothy Leary: "Turn on, tune in, drop out." You'll learn a powerful lesson that way . . . from experience, the best teacher. Granted, you might learn that dropping out was a big mistake -- that listening to Leary was the biggest mistake you ever made -- but you'll have learned this valuable lesson from experience. Believe me on that.

Yes, believe me when I advise you not to listen to old fools but to learn from your own experience, as I have learned from mine. Old fools like me merely pretend to have your interests at heart. I have learned from bitter experience that the old and experienced impose their wisdom on the young because doing so serves their own interests. Theirs -- and therefore mine -- is a self-interested wisdom, a power of veto over your views, a hammer to pound sound sense into your heads. Is experience the best teacher? If you've listened carefully to my words of wit, you know the answer: No. Experience is the worst teacher, for its lessons come too late. And I should know. I'm old and experienced. So, listen to me when I urge that you not listen to me.

It's mostly a tongue-in-cheek performance, of course, one that I hope will entertain the students even as they learn from it. I think that it might work, for the DIS students are rather advanced in their English skills.

After giving this presentation, I'll provide it on a handout, and we'll go over it in class so that they can see its tight organization despite its informal tone.

Expat Living: "Mucking up the English language"

Philip Larkin

Don't trust this guy alone

with your language!

(Image from channel4.com)

Well, that time has again come around, when what goes around comes around, namely, another of my Expat language columns packing a rounder to wallop a bounder on the chin.

I refer to the weakly double-chinned fellow above.

Ordinarily, one should not speak ill of the dead, who aren't around to talk back, but Mr. Larkin's poetry still raises a ruckus, so I'll make an exception in larrupin' Larkin's case.

Ladies and gentlemen . . . my rejoinder to the man and one of his poems:

Mucking up the English language

An assiduous reader has kindly informed me that my column on profane expressions utterly misconstrues the meaning of fuggedaboudit, which is neither profane nor derived from Norman Mailer's fugging novel, "The Naked and the Dead."

Turns out that in fuggedaboudit, the first six letters express not the past participle of Mailer's fug but a slangy pronunciation of forget and thus do not spell out the decline of Anglo-Saxon culture at all.

One might suspect slangy terms like fuggedaboudit as evidence of linguistic decline ... but forget about it. Norman Mailer is not the culprit anyway. I have uncovered a different dead white male whose canonical literary work bears responsibility for the current debasement of our language: Philip Larkin.

I know, I know. Readers will tell me that Larkin's poem "This Be the Verse" does not grease the skids of our decline but merely expresses our slippage. That argument, however, fails as fallaciously as the argument that gangsta rap merely expresses the reality of ghetto violence but does not advocate it, though everybody knows sure as shootin' that gansta rap glorifies street violence.

Indeed, the former argument fails even more egregiously, for Larkin's poem does not merely cite the "f word," it actively uses that word -- as if gangsta rappers were to fire off uzis on stage to enhance their performances.

Those who have never read Larkin's verse may imagine that I exaggerate, so allow me to quote his profane poem in full, excepting a minor bowdlerization in the offending word:

This Be the Verse

They f--- you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to but they do
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra just for you.

But they were f----- up in their turn
By fools in old style hats and coats
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself.

No kids? As if that would stop our descent when it would in fact effect our terminal decline. Well, fight fire with fire, I always say, so I have composed my own little poem of unfriendly fire aimed in Larkin's direction:

This Be the Worse

When Philip Larkin wrote, that cad,
In nineteen-seventy-f------ -two,
He fouled me with the fault he had
Of saying well what isn't true.

But he was f----- up in his turn
From closely cultivating oats
That he had wildly sown to learn
What he could then shove down our throats.

"Man hands on misery to man"?
His own sits there upon my shelf.
"Get out as early as you can"?
At least he had no kids himself.

Lest pedants once again correct me on a point that I know full well, let me admit that Larkin wrote his poem in nineteen-seventy-one, but that would destroy my rhyme scheming, and given the choice between a pedant's accuracy and saying well what isn't true, I prefer the latter. Besides, I have poetic licentiousness and can do as I will.

Licentiousness, regrettably, is not liberty, and trapped in this prison house of language, I reflect upon my own linguistic crime of passion and perceive that I stand guilty of the very thing for which I have accused Larkin. In St. Paul's apt words: "Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things."

Peccavi. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

Jeffery is a professor at Kyung Hee University and can be reached through his blog Gypsy Scholar at gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com -- Ed.

So it goes, "Mucking up the English language," and you can also read it online in the Expat Living section at the Korea Herald site . . . if you can find it there in spite of the website's bugginess.

Home is so Sad?

Home is Where I Want to Be!

"The cows are doing ok."

(Image from Wikipedia)

Yesterday, in a roundabout way, we learned from Philip Larkin that "Home is so Sad," but he was speaking of an empty home, which "stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back," whereas my family and I will be returning, in precisely one month, to a full, Ozark home for my children's first visit to the States.

Among other experiences -- such as hiking up knobs, descending into caverns, circumabulating my little town -- I want them to visit a farm or two to learn a bit about my childhood, partly spent on farms.

In that vein, I'll share an early morning email from my Uncle Cranford Hodges, providing today's farm report in real time. First, the weather:

After some cold days, it is back up near 60 [= 15.5 degrees centigrade] this morning. There is a chance of rain, which would help our ponds, but there is also a chance of stormy weather, which we always dread.

Sixty degrees fahrenheit is quite mild for early January, but it often presages stormy, even violent weather, possibly tornadoes, so I'd rather hear of temperatures around freezing, but if the winter stays mild and without storms, then February should be fine for our Ozark trip.

Next, the health report:

Everything is about the same here. Everyone seems to be on an even keel for the moment, and no colds or flu so far. I had a little time, so our woodpile has been replenished and should do us until sometime in February. My old body doesn't want to exert itself so much any more, so I try to keep about four weeks ahead.

Cranford must be near 70, for he was born a couple of years later than my father, who was 20 years older than I, and I'm 50. A youthful 50. Or maybe just immature. I hope that in about 20 years, I'll still be physically able to chop and stack firewood. Not that I want to actually be doing that, merely that I'd like to be able to.

It was hard work...

I remember woodpiles and putting up ricks of wood for winter, often having to replenish a rick midway through a cold winter. Just thinking of that, I can almost smell the freshly split pieces, which we would stack under the eastern eave of our old rock-walled house to shelter them from westwind-driven winter storms and thereby keep them dry for the woodstove. I can even now feel those cold winter mornings, with me getting out of bed to watch Grandpa Perryman take a poker and punch up the embers to get a new fire going to warm the house.

Enough nostalgia. Back to the future. Uncle Cranford reports on his old tractor, which the kids will love to see, maybe take a ride on:

I had to get some things done on my diesel tractor. New fuel line, fuel pump, filters, power steering, lube job, a new alternator, oil drips sealed, and a tank heater mounted to heat the water. It should make it a lot easier to start on cold mornings. Until now I had to put a heater blowing over the engine, and a magnetic heater to heat the oil. That took over an hour and the tank heater should do a better job.

This reminds me of the philosophical problem of identity. If you gradually replace every part of some object over a period of time, do you still have the same object that you started with? Is Uncle Cranford's tractor still the same tractor, or is its identity slowly changing? Perhaps my uncle merely thinks that his old tractor is now easier to start on cold mornings. Possibly, however, he's starting up a different tractor. I may need my cyber-buddy and maverick philosopher Bill Vallicella for insight into this one.

But that can wait, for the next detail in the farm report is always of pressing importance:

The cows are doing ok.

That's good to hear, but what about the pigs and the chickens? Don't laugh! These are important questions . . . like checking to see if one's stocks are up or down. It's serious stuff, despite the lyrics to Jollity Farm...

Uncle Cranford's work includes more than labor on his farm, for he also does some carpentry, or used to (along with some preaching), so I'm assuming that he's referring to that line of work in his allusion to "projects":

I still have a few work projects, then maybe some time off to do some things at home.

News on two of my cousins:

Matthew & James are both in their new assignments, so we keep them in our prayers.

They serve in the military, and their new assignments happen to be Iraq, which isn't as dangerous as it was for a while, but which is still no picnic, as Andrew Olmsted, who used to blog about the war there, now reminds us from the great beyond.

Spare a thought for him...

News on Kevin, the brother of Matthew and James:

Kevin is doing some job interviews, and we pray for wisdom on what he should do. All the offers so far require a relocation to another state. The slowdown in housing caused his previous employer to have a big layoff.

The slowdown that Uncle Cranford is referring to would be due to the subprime crisis, about whose effects I have previously blogged.

Finally, the signoff:

We hope this finds everyone being in good health.

Same to you and yours, Uncle Cranford. As for me, I'm feeling somewhat better than yesterday (no thanks to Mr. Larkin), though still not perfect, but well enough to face today's editing, the galley proofs of a tome on Northeast Asia and the Two Koreas: Metastability, Security, and Community, a book of articles to which I have contributed by having co-authored one article with Myongsob Kim, having translated another scholar's article from French into English, and having proofread all of the articles numerous times. I hope that I'm up to it again this cold morning. Maybe I need one of my uncle's magnetic heaters to help start up my brain...

Anyway, there it is, a report from home, which is also where I want to be...

Poetry Break: As in Breaking a Poem...

King Henry VIII School, Coventry

Where Philip Larkin attended...

(Image from Wikipedia)

I'm feeling under the weather this morning, so I'll once again take out my mood on that cad Philip Larkin, the British poet whose verse brought death into the world and all our woe, with loss of Eton, till one greater poet restore us...

(King Henry VIII School, after all, is a decline from Eton College, a fall from Catholic Medievalism to Protestant Modernism. But I'm being obscure, otiose, and arguably wrong, yet mostly just frivolous.)

Now to my point: does anyone recognize this poem by Philip Larkin?

The music in the piano stool. That vase.
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
And turn again to what it started as.

Having no heart to put aside the theft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go,
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left.

It's almost familiar, wouldn't you say? Turn it around (with original punctuation restored):

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

The poem is "Home is so Sad," which Larkin wrote in 1964. What most interests me is that this poem almost works even if the lines are posted with their sequence reversed.

I wonder why that intrigues me. Perhaps because most poems can't possibly work that way . . . and because this one works that way even though Larkin probably didn't consciously intend it to do so.

Or perhaps the reversed sequence intrigues me because there's something more mysterious than the original in these lines: "Having no heart to put aside the theft / Of anyone to please, it withers so, / As if to win them back."

Or am I the only one to sense this?

"This Be the Worse"

Philip Larkin

This Be the Man?

Photograph by Philip Sayer

Cover of Required Writing

(Image from The Philip Larkin Society)

When the British poet Philip Larkin published his unprintable poem "This Be the Verse" in the August 1971 issue of the New Humanist, he probably didn't foresee how widely, even colloquially, it would come to be quoted despite (or perhaps because of) containing one of the seven dirty words that you can never say on television.

I mean the f-word.

Pan forward to Korea, 2007. Yesterday, my daughter -- who has only recently turned eleven -- mentioned the movie Die Hard. Now, I happen to like that 1988 action film, but I was surprised that my daughter had heard of it.

"You've heard of the film?" I asked.

"I've seen it," she replied.

I looked at her. "You've seen it?"

"Yes."

"The Bruce Willis movie?" I checked.

She looked puzzled, so I asked, "Was there a lot of shooting?"

"Yes."

"Where did you see it?"

"In school. Our teacher showed it."

I sat there astounded, wondering, What could her teacher have been thinking? I then went to my wife and told her:

"Sun-Ae, you need to speak to Sa-Rah's teacher. He showed the film Die Hard to his fifth-grade class. It's a film with a lot of violence and a lot of bad language. It's completely inappropriate for children. If I recall, it was rated R, which means that you can't see it without a parent if you're under 17."

I added, "The main character, played by Bruce Willis, uses the f-word a lot."

Sun-Ae didn't specifically say that she'd speak with Sa-Rah's teacher, but she agreed with me about the film being inappropriate for children:

"A lot of Koreans have no sense of what movies children should be allowed to see. The kids probably see the same film at home on DVD."

She's right . . . which doesn't make it right.

But getting back to Larkin . . . I don't blame him for popularizing the f-word (which I admit also escapes my lips from time to time), but his poem "The Be the Verse" serves as a convenient postillion upon which to vent my paternal wrath.

This Be the Worse

When Philip Larkin wrote, that cad,
In nineteen-seventy-f*cking-two,
He fouled me with the fault he had
Of saying well what isn't true.

But he was f*cked up in his turn
From closely cultivating oats
That he had wildly sown to learn
What he could then shove down our throats.

"Man hands on misery to man"?
His own sits there upon my shelf.
"Get out as early as you can"?
At least he had no kids himself.

No kids. That's one thing in his favor . . . and (whinging aside) I also happen to like his poem. It's catchy.

Which doesn't make it right...