Proceed to Laugh. (Candy)

Okay, this particular Blog post does not contain any uni-related philosophical musings, nor will you find yourself suffocating from over-exposure to my whinging.

I basically just HAD to come on here and share this with you all.

This week, for Creative Writing, we have been assigned to read Chapter Five: How to Read a Poem, by Terry Eagleton. I have left out the name of the book this chapter is from, basically because it hasn’t been made clear on the actual photocopy, and I can’t be bothered searching for it.

BUT ANYHOO.

This Eagleton (just realised you can’t tell whether it’s a he or a she…) would have be one of the funniest writers. I found myself laughing at all these humorous comments (mostly analogies) that just seemed to pop up out of nowhere. So it is with immense pleasure that I reproduce them here for your own enjoyment. 🙂

“We do not have to get inside their brains to be reasonably sure of this, just as I do not have to get inside your brain to know that when I see you rolling at my feet with your hair on fire emitting strange noises, you are clearly not happy.”

“Most of the time, however, we see words and elephants, not black marks and grey patches. Someone who keeps seeing grey patches where he ought to be seeing elephants should pay a visit either to his optician or his psychiatrist.”

“Or we know that she does not intend ‘let us put continents between us!’ metaphorically because she is handing us our air ticket to Sydney as she speaks.”

“Belonging to a culture means that not everything is up for grabs all of the time, as it might be for a cultureless being like God.”

“There are times when the rigorous definition of a word is just what we need (it may come in handy, for example, when we are up in court on a treason charge).”

“It may be that Shakespeare’s Cordelia reminds me of a cross-dressed version of my uncle Arthur; but I am aware that this is not the case for those readers who have not had the pleasure of meeting my uncle Arthur; and that Shakespeare, for all his prescience and preternatural insight, was unlikely to have had my uncle Arthur in mind when he wrote King Lear.”

“The stray personal associations which drift in and out of our heads when we are reading Lear are of interest to our psychotherapist, not to the literary critic. Meaning is not a matter of having pictures in your head. You can enjoy Blake or Rilke with no pictures in your head at all.”

“People do not tend to say this sort of thing [‘I am aweary, aweary / I would be that I were dead!’] when they have just been bequeathed a fine old Tudor farmhouse along with several thousand acres of fertile land.”

“Besides, poets, like goldfish, are incapable of dissembling.”

“The fact that you really have been aducted by aliens on numerous occasions does not automically make your account of it convincing.”

“They may be having a profound experience for some other reason (perhaps they are sipping vintage claret while they are reading, or thrusting red-hot needles into an effigy of Donald Trump).”

“…the speaker’s act of self-acceptance has a transfigurative effect not just upon himself but on everyone else as well. He has managed to relieve not only his own guilt but that of the whole human race, an achievement previously regarded as confined to Jesus Christ.”

“Robert Lowell’s verses are very Lowellish, while nothing is more Plath-like than a Sylvia Plath poem. Swinburne, alas, never ceases to be Swinburnian.”

I realise, in typing some of these quotes up, that some of you may find this entire post to be a ‘Had to Be There’ moment – as in, you had to be inside my brain, which yes, finds some things absolutely hilarious that any normal human being would not even flinch at.

But I just felt it was my duty to share this…I couldn’t just keep it to myself, that wouldn’t be fair to those of you who share my sense of humour. 😉

Hope you smiled…if not, it doesn’t matter, because I sure did. 😀