Jimmy Dean Has Died

Sad news. The singer, actor and pitchman Jimmy Dean has died. He touched my childhood in two ways, though I never knew his name, or connected the dots to the two pop phenomena he was involved with. He sang the song "Big Bad John" which I recall playing non-stop on the car radio when my family drove down route 66, from Montreal to California, in 1974. That was the summer when Mama Cass died.

A few years before, he had starred in Diamonds Are Forever (1971), which, perhaps oddly, my mother took me to as a six-year-old. It was my first film, and I loved it. It made a huge impact on the rest of my life I confess, and I particularly enjoyed the utterly-weird (and Pinteresque) aphorism-quipping queer hitmen Mr Wint and Mr Kidd - "if God had wanted man to fly he would have given him wings" -the brutal fight in the lift (I have never looked at a fire extinguisher the same way since), the cremation scene, and Jimmy Dean as the mysterious Hughes-like millionaire Willard Whyte, who gets to say the immortal lines: "Baja! I haven't got anything in Baja!" - the accent is priceless. Cue the trip to the oil-platform-cum-doomsday-weapon-platform run by Blofeld - befiore BP became the villain of choice.

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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. What do I mean by smart?

"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...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise

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

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