TRUE DETECTIVE 2 WAS A MASTERWORK

I will not go into the roll call of A-list names who wrote, directed, and acted in, True Detective Season 2, except to say that the 8-part film noir cop drama set in the 21st century recently aired to mainly hostile, at times hectoring reviews. These can be divided into two categories - those that pined for the brilliant Season 1, and those that found Season 2 poor in its own right. We can dispense with the first easily - you cannot claim Lear is not Hamlet and act all sad. This is a new work. Move on.

The second complaint was nuanced, but mainly revolved around the themes and structure of the new season - that it lacked drama, interesting character dynamics, that the dialogue was artificial, stilted and sometimes absurd, and that the finale lacked punch. The kindest words suggested it was High Camp - so bad it was good, a romping mess.

I beg to disagree. This season was a complete dramatic work of Intertextual accomplishment - a very mature Tradition and the Individual Talent moment. The youngish author (we know his name), who is a student of literature, did his genre homework. TD2 had all the bent cops, twisted hookers, tortured mobsters, hauntingly wasted lives, fatal desires, and double-crosses of the best hardboiled shows, pulp novels, and movies of yore. It also traded in the occult and anti-natalist subtexts of Season 1, for an Oedipal (Greek drama/Freud) skeleton. This entire season was in fact an expose of what a jouissance of classic and genre tropes unleashed would achieve - an experiment of deadly abandon.

As such, it was deliciously literary, post-modern, and artificial, a daring remake of Touch of Evil not in style but in theatrical panache and verve - the most complex genre exploration of the effects of sexual crime and suffering on humans seeking fathers and children in an American mystery story since perhaps Chinatown (another touchstone). Allusive to the max, often witty when most contrived, TD2 never claimed to be real. Instead it offered the textual and cinematic pleasures of a fully contrived experiment - a theatre of tough guy alienation, with Brecht's wall torn down and sold for parts, after Mac the Knife was invited in.

I revelled in its glee, its bravura tics, and perhaps most of all its oddly controlled weirdness. A dignity and pathos bathed its five central characters in an eerie neon glow, and its OTT villains ran a mad gamut of creeps and cretins. Fathers never leave us, as a poet once wrote.

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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