The party seems to be a cocktail party, but you can see that he's talking about human interaction more generally. If you want those in control of the flow of liquor to fill up your glass, are you better off drinking the whole thing and standing there with an empty glass, or better off holding onto it in the half full — half empty! — condition?
By the way, I recommend not reading past the photograph of Philip on the floor with that record he wants to play for us. There are 4 more paragraphs, and they raise a separate topic — whether Larkin was "canceled" and is supposed to stay canceled — and it's an insulting distraction from what is otherwise a delightful essay.
Here — here's Pee Wee:
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speaking from past (the statue of limitations) experience..
Just bring some coke to the party.
If you're doing coke, the hostess will be attending to your Every (EVERY!) wish, and your glass will Never go dry
Also,
If you're doing coke (and the hostess?) you probably won't need alcohol
Things Go BETTER, with Coke!
What’s with the ‘sign in if you want to watch the video’ that I started seeing at other sites about a half-year ago, and now seems to be infecting Althouse links? Before you’d just click on a video and it would play right on your browser… then came some that you had to open separately in YouTube. Now you have to identify yourself in order just to be able to watch something someone has linked. They say it’s for my security, as if I believe that…
Whiskeybum?
HOW can they protect you? if they can't sell your personal information?
JUST CONSENT.. OBEY!
Me, I'm a full glass guy. I barely drank in HS or college. I'd have one alcohol drink at a party then just plain soda the rest of the evening. Girls seeing me swill down several red Solo cups as I ate the pizza & chips would assume I was as drunk as they were and be impressed with my apparent ability to hold my liquor. Helping them go throw up later in the party was not fun while sober, not that it would have been any more fun while plastered.
i cant read the essay unforturnately. I'm big of phillip larkin's jazz writing, and I have the book he published. Of course, like many he couldn't relate to the music that emerged as he got past 30. Bepob and Miles Davis left him cold.
But he had a good essay attacking "modern art" (art in the general sense) stating it neither brought joy nor helped us endure. Of course, the real purpose of "Modern Art" was subversion of the old order, and $$.
I also picked up a volume of his letters, Goddamn it must be like 600 pages, it weighed a ton. Got it 5 for dollars but ended up donating it to the library. Hope its on someones shelf. Larkin was a smart guy and a great poet, but he lead a dull life. A librarian. Didn't even serve in WW II due to physical problems.
For some reason a lot of writers born after 1920 live incredibly boring lives. I like reading literary bios, but almost all the ones I have are for writers before born before 1920. However, I'm looking forward to a good WF Buckley Bio and one for Tom Wolfe, assuming we don't get some SJW snarky author.
Also, I cant relate to the drink problem. I never have more than two drinks per day, no matter what. And I don't care when they come.
They certainly ‘f****d him up, his mum and dad,’ as Larkin writes in his best-known poem, modestly titled “This be the Verse.” “Verse” complements the underlying currents dividing us that Scott observed in the other poem. It ends:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
and don’t have any kids yourself.
That’s practically a beam girding the Democrat Party Platform.
I like some of Larkin's stuff, and his weirdness is interesting. I didn't read to see if kiddy porn comes up in the article, I don't want to discuss that. Larkin and Kingsley Amis met as students at Oxford, and they both liked the old jazz. Amis had a funny line: no one ever wanted a drum solo. I don't know; Wipeout? Steve Gadd in Steely Dan's Aja?
What gets weird is that Larkin graduated dreaming of being a novelist, and Amis thought if anything of writing poetry. (He was something of an expert on dirty limericks, perhaps they both were, along with Robert Conquest). They both had teaching careers. Larkin became a librarian and lived through that time (basically the 60s) when so many colleges and universities boomed, or sprang up anew, with big new libraries. He became head librarian at one of those places, and eventually poet laureate or one of those distinctions. Amis of course eventually made a living as a novelist.
Supposedly the school in Lucky Jim is more like a place where Larkin taught than a place where Amis taught. The real place was sort of high school level, but the novel has something like tenure in a post-secondary place. Also supposedly: the pathetic girlfriend, dangerous in a way but ultimately seen as lonely and sad, is based on one of Larkin's odd girlfriends. The real one asked for advice on why she did so poorly at parties. Larkin advised her as if he was talking to someone on the spectrum: make some eye contact, but not too much, etc.
Amis says in his memoirs it became clear to him that Larkin had a kind of secret life, different circles of friends with no contact between them except him. This disappointed Amis. On the other hand, Amis says very few people actually stay in touch with their mothers as much as their mothers would like; Larkin wrote to his mother every week.
"I like some of Larkin's stuff, and his weirdness is interesting. I didn't read to see if kiddy porn comes up in the article, I don't want to discuss that. "
Yeah, you dont want to discuss it - that's why you brought it up. Did you know that a meme about Saul Bellow and kiddy porn exists? Strange but true.
And yes Larkin was an oddball, and so was Martin Amis and Chris Hitchens, IMO. All three were friends, and all three died from cancer caused by smoking and drinking. Which is also weird.
Larkin looks exactly like the kind of person who would write Larkin type poems and fantasize about spanking high school cheerleaders. Well, we've all been there. His life was spectacularly dull. He's the poet laureate of inconsequential moments.
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