Review: Oasis' Dig Out Your Soul

Oasis, meanwhile, have returned with their 7th studio album, entitled Dig Out Your Soul. Oasis have an unparalleled postmodern career: their entire output is a pastiche of Beatles-era rock, and every song and album of theirs has been weaker than the one before - as such, they enact, titanically, a myth of nostalgic regression - their final act will no doubt be to play, in utero, a McCartney-Lennon song. That being said, this myth of eternal failure (married to a myth of near-heroic invulnerability) renders Oasis criticism-proof. Like the flip side of an Oxbridge toff like London mayor Boris Johnson, whose buffoon-status cannot be ruffled because it already is, Oasis employ their proud working-class work ethos to justify their stolid, journeyman approach to touring and record production. Sod's Law seems to be their invisible hand. Anyway, this new album is not as "bad" as many critics claim. It is certainly a crowd-pleaser (and how else does one measure popular music than by its popularity?). There is not a shred of new thinking here. Thinking doesn't even enter in. But the Oasis swagger, that ineffable ability to be cool, is present. And, there are few outright clunkers. Yes, there are more sitars than any man or woman needs, and more Revolver-era stuff than - well, ditto. It's an Oasis album, dude. Get over it. Three and half specs.

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IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

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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"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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