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Öther Larkinisms
from: Björn Borg smackball_adonis@hotmail.com
Date: Tuesday, December 28, 1999 6:30 p.m.
[Poster's note: Bläh bläh bläh bläh bläh.]
FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "Often she nauseated herself by sending her mind into the sky, past the bloated nursery-toys of the middle-air, ever upwards into the infinite limey blue."
FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "When she walked the streets Mary often looked up at the spangled canyons and saw with a sense of glazed exclusion the people up there behind the high windows, all intent about the sky's business."
FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "did you see the way that woman looked up from her evening paper and towards the stained window with a ragged gasp".
FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "For several days now a tunnel of piercing blue had been visible here and there in the lumpy grey canopy of the sky. It changed its position from time to time, widened invitingly and then narrowed out, went away entirely for a whole afternoon, until one morning it replaced the sky itself with a spotless dome of pure ringing distance."
FROM *HIGH WINDOWS* BY PHILIP LARKIN: "Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: the sun-comprehending glass, and beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless."
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FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "On her bad looks Trudy blamed all her bad luck. Mary used to watch her staring out of the bedroom window, at nothing at all, with her stretched, smarting face."
FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "What she saw wasn't much, just Jamie, naked under his trenchcoat, smoking an early cigarette and staring at the completely grey, the emphatically neutral wash of the window-pane, his face quite numb with remorse."
FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "Jamie would stand seriously in front of the window for long stretches now, holding a drink and a cigarette, while behind him Carlos beat the floor with his palms and Lily and Mary gazed at the walls or at their men."
FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "Mary was having a good session of making Jamie feel bad by sitting on the sofa and staring palely out of the window, careful not to blink. Repeatedly she hugged her bathrobe to her as if she was cold."
FROM *MR BLEANEY* BY PHILIP LARKIN: "But if he stood and watched the frigid wind tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed telling himself that this was home, and grinned, and shivered".
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FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "Slowly criss-crossed by parkies and prams under the blank sheet of the sky, the green stretch turned milky and alkaline, like a lake, in the neutral afternoon."
FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "But at the pall of the day when the light was used up the families always went home together, usually in pairs, the big holding hands with the small, and the old, too, edging along behind."
FROM *TO THE SEA* BY PHILIP LARKIN: "Like breathed-on glass the sunlight has turned milky. If the worst of flawless weather is our falling short, it may be that through habit these do best, coming to water clumsily undressed yearly; teaching their children by a sort of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought."
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FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "From upstairs came the melancholy sound of Paris's clarinet."
FROM *FOR SIDNEY BECHET* BY PHILIP LARKIN: "That note you hold, narrowing and rising, shakes like New Orleans reflected on the water...On me your voice falls as they say love should, like an enormous yes."
FROM *ALL WHAT JAZZ* BY PHILIP LARKIN: "Bechet, the New Orleans veteran who died in Paris on his sixty-second birthday, had led a lonely life as a jobbing clarinet and soprano sax player until he emigrated to France and became a national idol during the fifties."
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FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "He thinks you're God until he's three. Then he thinks he wants to climb into the sack with you until he's twelve. Then he thinks you're a scumbag until he's twenty. Then he goes queer or whatever and feels guilty about you until he's sixty and as old and fucked up as you are."
FROM *THIS BE THE VERSE* BY PHILIP LARKIN: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad...But they were fucked up in their turn".
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FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "She looked as if she were reassembling the bits of her that the previous day had dispersed---that disappointing and unworthy day, which just hadn't been good enough for Augusta."
FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "She felt she was streaming, she felt she was undoing everywhere."
FROM *THE OLD FOOLS* BY PHILIP LARKIN: "At death, you break up: the bits that were you start speeding away from each other for ever with no one to see."
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FROM *OTHER PEOPLE*: "She felt that books were about the ideal world, where nothing was ideal but everything had ideality and the chance of moral spaciousness. And it wasn't so. She ran her eyes along the shelves with mordant pride. Books weren't special. Books were just like everything else."
FROM *A STUDY OF READING HABITS* BY PHILIP LARKIN: "Don't read much now: the dude who lets the girl down before the hero arrives, the chap who's yellow and keeps the store, seem far too familiar. Get stewed: books are a load of crap."
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Okay. Here's the big one. *Other People* is partially derived from a Larkin poem called *Long Last*. *Long Last* is about a dotard with a dead sister named Amy. Larkin's character is afflicted with senile dementia instead of the amnesia that afflicts Amis's character. The door that Amy Hide goes thru is taken straight from the poem. Larkin's Amy (the dead younger sister) is one of the people who is "hidden away" by the door. And that's why Mary Lamb's previous incarnation is named "Amy Hide".
*LONG LAST*
Suddenly, not long before
Her eighty-first birthday,
The younger sister died.
Next morning, the elder lay
Asking the open door
Why it was light outside,
Since nobody had put on
The kettle, or raked the ashes,
Or come to help her find
The dark way through her dress.
This went on till nearly one.
Later, she hid behind
The gas stove. 'Amy's gone,
Isn't she,' they remember her saying,
And 'No' when the married niece
Told her the van was coming.
Her neck was leaf-brown.
She left cake on the mantelpiece.
This long last childhood
Nothing provides for.
What can it do each day
But hunt that imminent door
Through which all that understood
Has hidden away?
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