Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

always considered difficult by opponents of it. The Waste Land is more connotative than a Simon
Armitage poem, for instance, that is why The Waste Land is seen as difficult.
His response to it is:
I am not sure how this writer can draw a sharp distinction between connotation and denotation in any
speech, let alone poetry. Connoting and denoting are simultaneous processes.
Semantically and cognitively, connoting and denoting may be simultaneous processes but their creative usage in
poetry necessarily modifies to some extent the balance Szirtes observes. If this were not the case then literary
criticism would not be as problematic as it is.
Besides, most readers would, I’m sure, agree that The Waste Land is more connotative than an Armitage poem. This
is not to say that Armitage’s poems do not connote; the difference is in the extent that they do when compared with
The Waste Land.
William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights
3 February 2009
Looking at the barrage of overrated and over-produced contemporary films, it is easy to forget that film once aspired
to be an art form. One such film is William Wyler’s 1939 underrated version of Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering
Heights, which is for me the best film adaptation of that novel. Whilst the film deals with only the first 16 chapters of
the novel’s 34, it compensates by capturing perfectly the emotional essence of the book, which for me resides in the
relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff. When read in light of having seen this film, the rest of the novel’s 18
chapters seem almost like an afterthought or padding.
Wyler’s use of camera, lighting and mise-en-scene take much from the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s,
which is to be expected since many of this school’s filmmakers and technicians had, by the early 1930s, relocated to
Hollywood and become part of mainstream film production there. This expressionist style is well suited to the film,
as it provides a visual equivalent to the novel’s gothic atmosphere.
The film quite deservedly won an Academy Award for Best Original Score, by Alfred Newman. Indeed, it is difficult to
separate film and score, so entwined and essential are they, that they become almost dyadic. To listen to Newman’s
score alone is a deeply emotional experience.
However, Wuthering Heights did not win the Academy Award for Best Picture, which went to the unfortunately titled,
Gone With the Wind. In my view, this was an oversight because Wuthering Heights is the far superior film. One cannot
help but suspect that Gone with the Wind won because it was an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which
dealt with a “big” subject. However, for me, the really timeless and universal themes are dealt with in Wuthering
Heights.
Carrier of the Seed Available as a Free Ebook
5 August 2009
My poem Carrier of the Seed is now out as a free ebook with Blazevox. You can download it at:
http://www.blazevox.org/ebook.htm
What the critics have said about it:
Jake Berry:
‘Excellent, mythopoeic, my kind of stuff’.
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