Useless drivel

Vandals have tagged a library in Oakland with "I wish I were a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas" and attributed it to J. Alfred Prufrock. They're damn right. Yes, they could have attributed it to the poet who wrote it, T.S. Eliot, but still, if they have had a bit of literary criticism they would indeed attribute it to J. Alfred Prufrock. He is after all the narrator of the poem. L'auteur est mort. Remember. And intentional fallacy and all that (which is ironic: it is coined by the New Criticism of which Eliot was a member, if only he knew what is happening now ... I wonder what he'd say.): 'According to New Criticism, a poem does not belong to its author, but rather "it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it."' So this article is just crap . I don't see it as a mistake. Anyway. It is a brilliant poem . - Update: it took them a few months, ...

Sieff . En het is heiligschennis dit te doen, maar ik vind dit ook nog altijd een mooie foto . Gewoon door de kleuren, de desolaatheid en eigenlijk misschien gewoon het contrast tussen het heldere in de hemel, en het donkere op de grond.

This is poetry. Philip Larkin. Anekdote: hij is dood op mijn verjaardag. Ik bedoel, letterlijk de dag dat ik geboren ben. Stopping the diary Was a stun to memory, Was a blank starting, One no longer cicatrized By such words, such actions As bleakened waking. l wanted them over. Hurried to burial And looked back on Like the wars and winters Missing behind the Windows of an opaque childhood. And the empty pages? Should they ever be filled Let it be with observed Celestial recurrences, The day the flowers come. And when the birds go. -- Not me.