The Passionate Poet

This is Byron writing about his life of intense and never-ending poetic passion:

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?

By this rationale, we should be able to recognise the most passionate of persons by their state of disrepair. And, while we're quoting Byron, here he is describing John Keats:

Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation - he is always frigging his imagination. - I don't mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam of vision produced by raw pork and opium. 

I've just worked out what I'm having for lunch.

Bring on the bacon!

To Gruel

Listening to a snatch of the cricket commentary last night, I was informed that the contest in Melbourne was gruelling. I confess that from my snowbound Cumbrian igloo I couldn't quite see how sunny Australia managed to gruel, but gruel it did.

Gruel is one of those odd words, like ailing, that exists only as a participle. This should be not be so. Too few conversations go:

Bill: How was the atmosphere at the party last night?
Ben: Oh it gruelled.
Bill: Really? Did it gruel an awful lot?
Ben: More than I can say, old boy, more than I can say.

Why is so much gruelling when so little gruels, and how does this all relate to broth?

When gruel began its career as an English word, back in the fourteenth century it was content to simply mean flour. From there it began to mean soup made with flour, which was probably a lot tastier than it sounds. Here's a 1688 definition:

Grewel, is a kind of Broth made only of Water, Grotes brused and Currans, some add Mace, sweet Herbs, Butter and Eggs and Sugar

Delicious. If the contest in Melbourne was so well spiced and so eggy, I am sure that the cricket would be wonderful. But this is not so, for gruel came to be part of a phrase, a phrase that can be best illustrated by this little snippet from the eleventh canto of Lord Byron's Don Juan. Juan has just been attacked by highwaymen on the way to London. He whips out a pistol and shoots the brigand and...

...Juan, who saw the moon's late minion bleed
As if his veins would pour out his existence,
Stood calling out for bandages and lint,
And wish'd he had been less hasty with his flint...


But ere they could perform this pious duty,
The dying man cried, "Hold! I've got my gruel!
Oh for a glass of max! We've miss'd our booty;
Let me die where I am!" And as the fuel
Of life shrunk in his heart, and thick and sooty
The drops fell from his death-wound, and he drew ill
His breath, -- he from his swelling throat untied
A kerchief, crying, "Give Sal that!" -- and died.

To get your gruel is to get your just deserts, to take what's coming to you or, like a feral gardener, to make your bed and lie in it. And from this sense of gruel as a punishment, came the modern sense of a gruelling contest. Though I still can't see how Melbourne in December can gruel that much.

Ricky Ponting asking for more referrals

Hangover Square

I am as hungover as an avenue of willow trees. So all you're getting today are three descriptions of wages of gin. This from Lucky Jim:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by the secret police. He felt bad.

This from the Second Canto of Don Juan by Byron:

Few things surpass old wine; and they may preach

Who please - the more because they preach in vain -
Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda-water the day after.

(Although it wasn't old wine that did for me, but a pantagruelian dry martini that ambushed me at midnight near Hyde Park Corner.) And here is the original screenplay of Withnail & I.

WITHNAIL emits an accelerating groan. Something to do with a headache. He looks across. Eyes like a pair of decayed clams.

WITHNAIL: Where's the whisky?

MARWOOD: What for?

WITHNAIL: I got a bastard behind the eyes. I can't take aspirins without a drink...

The bottle is discovered. The cork popped. And back to MARWOOD.
Where's the aspirins?

MARWOOD: Probably in the bathroom.

WITHNAIL: You mean we've come out here in the middle of fucking nowhere without aspirins?

This appears to be the case. WITHNAIL is becoming emotional.

MARWOOD: Where are we?

WITHNAIL: How should I know where we are? I feel like a pig shat in my head.

And for those of you who are fond of Withnail, here is a piece of trivia that not even Paul McGann knew until I told him in a moment of drunken sincerity. The character referred to as Marwood in the script is never named in the film, hence the title. However, when I finally saw Withnail & I in a cinema I noticed the name written on the envelope containing the telegram. You can't see it on a television because (like an unfinished whodunit or invader of Iraq) it doesn't have the resolution. So Marwood is named, and the film's title must and shall be changed.

From Hell's black heart I curse thee