Choirilos of Samos and other stories

One last story from Michael Schmidt's The First Poets.

In the late C5th BC, there was Choirilos of Samos who wrote, in a quick summary by me of a translation by Oliver Taplin,

There was a time a poet was someone

for who anything was still possible

but now so many have been there before

that poetry is as if spoken for

and remnants and remainders are what's left

from which to make it look it's been made new.

 

That might not be exactly what Choirilos meant but 2500 years after the fact, it's something like it. It's thus been like that for that long for poets who don't have the self-belief to think that it's them that's thought of something new to do.

 

At Anecdotal Evidence today, we find it suggested that,

 

Irony is often a means of evasion, the last resort of the cowardly and unprincipled. 

That's disappointing because it might have seemed like all we had left but,

It can also be a covert moral weapon.

So that's not so bad, then.

--

The Summer Milan Kundera Festival here got off to a good start, seeing off the brief but beautifully made Identity in not very long at all.

It's chic, it's a bit sexy and could hardly have happened without Sartre, except for the dreams. There do need to be other possible realities without falling back on dreams. It is also to be hoped that not all of Kundera is quite so rooted in elemental physical need. There might well be that but not everything has to depend on it.

Otherwise, if the library don't provide Johnson at 10 in all its utter appallingness, which he has continued to surpass on an almost daily basis since, soon I'll have read Slowness very quickly.

--

But, almost as if to join in with the publication of Sean O'Brien's Impasse, poems but not a 'sequence' on Jules Maigret, the very useful Talking Pictures channel is showing two lots of Maigret. The English 1950's Rupert Davies is a fine period thing but possibly the genuinely French and more recent Bruno Cremer is better.

He auditioned for the part in one of my very favourite films, Noce Blanche, in which he was a teacher who became ill-advisedly and tragically involved with a wayward student, so dangerously played by a young Vanessa Paradis. The deep, disturbing thoughts he had to look as if he was thinking in that set him up nicely to take up 14 years and 54 episodes of Maigret on French television like Midsomer Murders except in France, not always in quite such photogenic surroundings and with a pipe.

It was a Belgian who painted a pipe and wrote beneath it that,

Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

In France a few years later, imagery was less treacherous.