A Couple Of Things

 Talking about waste lands, I was looking at the original draft of Eliot's poem. It's full of junk that Ezra Pound told him to cut- and Eliot- in awe of Pound (il miglior fabbro)- did as he was told. Among the dead wood was a lengthy piece of puerile misogyny in heroic couplets. "Look" said Pound,"If you're going to parody Pope you've got to be at least as good as Pope- and you're not." Poor Eliot. But Pound was right. Had the original draft been published as it stood it would have landed with a wet squelchy thud- and not the clean, sharp, cracking report that blew the Georgians away...

I dreamed I was visiting a church. It was a modern church with concrete pillars. Also very small. "I'm going down to the crypt" I said. "We've got to save electricity," they said, "so don't put the lights on"- but I knew there were graves down there so bobbins to that! What I found was a huge, domed space, full of light. And there were people- lots of them- including my mother, who walked past without recognising me. "This is amazing," I said to whoever my companions were, "You could perform plays down here, you could have orchestral concerts..."