Ofterdingen and Kropotkin: July 2010

neumes

Ich hatte nen Netz gespannt, um die ganze Welt, damit der Rubel rollt, sach ich mal [...]

Dr Mabuse (version 12): link

cuprite

Thoughtful people have always found the cosmos to be ethically puzzling, for the fairness which seems an integral part of order is not a priority of human nature. Mountains belch and everything dies. Power belongs to the men with guns. The wicked prosper, the innocent suffer and the few pay for the crimes of the many. Epicurus observed that since evil undoubtedly exists, God cannot be both good and omnipotent, otherwise he would prevent it.

D. Coward, "To get the Beast by the tale"

zebeline

The Robert-Rhys menage was never going to be without incident, and her first diary entry, less than a month into their marriage, sets the tone:

Keidrych enjoyed is lunch; he looks very unpleasant today. Debauched, with his four-day beard, he is busy scratching behind me writing to Kilham Roberts asking if the Literary Society will grant us some money to live on …. Today Keidrych frequently found cinders or grit in his stewed apples. I told him poets must always expect pieces of chimney in their dishes, that is their fate. He laughed and said what he usually does, “You ought to be filmed.” His ears are scarlet and I hate him, he is always chewing humbugs.

[…] After divorcing Rhys in 1948, she lived in a caravan with her two children, Angharad and Prydein, first in Laugharne (where her address was “The Caravan. The Graveyard. Laugharne") […]

[T.S.] Eliot asked her to send some of her own work, and his editorship was patient, tactful, supportive and occasionally baffled, as when he responded to her variegated diction with this masterpiece of graceful understatement: “The words plimsole, cuprite, zebeline, and neumes seem to exist, but I think that bringing them all into one short poem is a mistake (letter of November 24, 1943)

P. McGuinness, "Machine-age Mabinogion", TLS, November 6 2009, pp.14-15

namely, Voltaire

He despised novels which spoke never-endingly of love, romance and adventures high and low. They were in untruth in four volumes. They peddled dangerous illusions about human nature and the real world and were products of "weak-minded authors who write unthinkingly of matters unworthy of being read by thinking persons". One of his nightmares was being forced to reread Clarissa.

D. Coward, "To get the Beast by the tale", TLS October 23 2009, p.14