Reviews for Offbeat 5, Collecting Glances

The average rating for Offbeat 5, Collecting Glances based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-06-18 00:00:00 Ernie Caine This a frustrating, disappointing, bad book, rife with hypocrisy and incoherence, driving by one goal: to rehabilitate Larkin at all costs. And the irony is that its ostensible thesis is that we shouldn't care a fig about Larkin the man when we read his writing (excepting the letters of course, which should simply be ignored). One problem with this book is that, despite citing Barthes' 'The death of the author' and claiming to follow its dictates, Osborne repeatedly commits the cardinal error Barthes urges us to avoid: 'piercing the surface' and pinning a reading to the personality and intentions of the author ' the 'biographical fallacy.' Osborne frequently complains about other authors doing this, but then turns around and does exactly the same thing, only coming to different conclusions about what Larkin was up to. (And toward this end he employs a baffling definition of 'bowdlerize' that he takes to mean 'putting bad stuff *in*,' rather than taking it *out*.) Then there is Osborne's unfortunate practice of confusing the results of a poststructuralist reading as evidence of modernism, radicalism, etc. To find intertexuality in a text is to find what deconstruction shows is a feature of texts qua texts; it says nothing about whether the text in question is pre-modern, High Modern, postmodern, or anything else. What I find most ludicrous is Osborne's argument (one he shares with, among others, Richard Palmer and John White, editors of Larkin's *Jazz Writings*) that Larkin couldn't possibly have hated modernism (or modern jazz) because there are traces of modernism in his poems (and in the early jazz he liked); and that likewise he couldn't possibly have hated black people because look at all the lovely things he says about Louis Armstrong and Sydney Bechet. While it is true that Larkin was a jokester and ironist who loved to move around (in Andrew Motion's image) behind a mask, he repeatedly expressed his revulsion at what he took to be modernism - and modern jazz - over several decades - in reviews, essays, interviews, and private letters. And yet Osborne insists that the big reveal of the Introduction to *All What Jazz* was actually an elaborate hoax: Larkin 'lied about it' - that is, he lied about lying about liking modern jazz. Larkin's account of that duplicity (giving certain performers neutral and sometimes positive reviews only to reveal some years later in the Introduction to the collection of those reviews that he actually couldn't bear the very same performers) is perfectly plausible and coherent - he didn't want to do himself out of a job. Osborne's account on the other hand fails to explain the frequency with which Larkin made more or less the same set of complaints about modernism and modern jazz at least as early as 1963, or why he would trash modern jazz in private letters, or how he could say - as late as 1982 - of Charlie Parker and 'true jazz', 'to have it all destroyed by a paranoiac drug-addict made me furious.' The idea that Larkin actually *pretended* to hate modern jazz while secretly loving it makes no sense, but worse, as a joke it simply isn't funny - and Larkin was funny. And it ruins the effect of the Introduction, which among other things is a highly entertaining monument to pure spleen. (And this from a man who claimed - probably jokingly - not to be a satirist.) As for the racism, it is there as plain as day in the letters - and not only there: there is no shortage of condescension toward African-Americans in the published jazz criticism. That someone could wax sympathetically about abstractions ('the Negro experience') and idolize individuals (Armstrong, Bechet), while all the time loathing actual people of colour is an idea that is so foreign to Obsorne (who despite being the head of an American studies program doesn't appear to have seen *Do the right thing*) that he ties himself in knots trying to gainsay what is strikingly, painfully obvious (sadly, in this he has a lot of company in the Larkin industry). Osborne's tactics here are occasionally rather simple: downplay, discount, deny: as in, 'The worst that anyone has discovered about Larkin are some crass letters and a taste for porn. ...' Given the thoroughly racist nature of some of those 'crass letters' (Osborne conveniently omits to mention the vile home recordings), this is perversely glib - crass, even. And if Larkin's faults were indeed that trivial, one wonders why Osborne should have devoted 300 pages to rectifying them. Ultimately, there's nothing new here. Osborne isolates examples of an argument he's keen to knock down, while failing to notice that others (Edward Hirsch, Neil Covey, John McCormick, to name a few) were there before him, making more or less the same argument as he makes here: there are modernist elements in Larkin's poetry; his ironism extends to most aspects of his life, making it hard to take most of what he says at face value, etc, etc. It is perhaps the most striking example of the lengths some are willing to go to attempt to rehabilitate Larkin and to deny or negate some of the awful things he said and apparently believed. But it's too late: what's in the letters and the home recordings and the rest of it is out of the bottle. Some want to hound him out of the canon and out of the curriculum; others want to sanitise and sanctify him. The rest of us hold our noses (as Richard Rorty counselled us to do in the case of Heidegger) and continue to read him, warts, prejudices, genius and all.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-02-09 00:00:00 Bernard Quick This anthology of poems includes well known and lesser-known poets. Each of the poems included are innovative in using different word choices, rhyme patterns, shapes and other poetic devices to show something inventive. I appreciate the poets pushing the poetic art-form but the poems did not resonate with me. Most of the poems, I did not understand. The ones I did understand, I had read in other collections.