Good news. Bond 22 is shaping up nicely. The chief Bond girls have been announced, as has the latest villain (suitably French). Dame Judi Dench is back, too, with, of course Daniel Craig. The plot will follow on from the new-classic Casino Royale, promising some continuity in a pastiche-and-judo jumble of a series. The top Bond Girl will be Ms. Olga Kurylenko (cue From Russia With Love cliches), a model-actor, pictured, who recently appeared in actioner Hitman opposite Prison Break's favourite cornpone psycho Robert Knepper; I have yet to see her act, but she looks the part. Keeping with the tradition of locating the villain on the continent, and in Art House, they've recruited Mathieu Amalric as the baddie. Eyewear looks forward to this one's eye-opener on 7 November 2008.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
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