Andrex from front to back
Thank you, thank you Andrex!
Disordered by lines of deja vu
Press the button and get turned on!
A bitch of eternity, especially
If you are a 'Good Wife'
I like fish and chips washed
Down with some beer
Autumn dreams, sparkling clear
Kissing echoes, blowing words
From a distance, past lives, long exposed,
Zoom into focus.
We have a philosopher in the class! But yes, Larkin's specific examples seem outdated, now. I suppose the modern equivalent of the perfect world / people delusion would be celebrity culture?
I think it was written in the early 60s.
What year did Larkin write this John?
The question today may be; do we even acknowledge the billboards? Are we so desensitized that they have become road clutter?
Don't we demand computer animated advertising and video boards?
Which then begs the question; where will it end when we are desensitized to those? What will be needed to grab our attention in the future?
Food for thought?
Fish and chips
washed down with
too much beer
roll of Andrex
very urgently needed
to mop up
once white underpants!
Loved Larkin's poem John thanks for putting it on.
By the way, Larkin's poem about the falseness of advertising is called 'Essential Beauty':
In frames as large as rooms that face all ways
And block the ends of streets with giant loaves,
Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise
Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon, shine
Perpetually these sharply-pictured groves
Of how life should be. High above the gutter
A silver knife sinks into golden butter,
A glass of milk stands in a meadow, and
Well-balanced families, in fine
Midsummer weather, owe their smiles, their cars,
Even their youth, to that small cube each hand
Stretches towards. These, and the deep armchairs
Aligned to cups at bedtime, radiant bars
(Gas or electric), quarter-profile cats
By slippers on warm mats,
Reflect none of the rained-on streets and squares
They dominate outdoors. Rather, they rise
Serenely to proclaim pure crust, pure foam,
Pure coldness to our live imperfect eyes
That stare beyond this world, where nothing's made
As new or washed quite clean, seeking the home
All such inhabit. There, dark raftered pubs
Are filled with white-clothed ones from tennis-clubs,
And the boy puking his heart out in the Gents
Just missed them, as the pensioner paid
A halfpenny more for Granny Graveclothes' Tea
To taste old age, and dying smokers sense
Walking towards them through some dappled park
As if on water that unfocused she
No match lit up, nor drag ever brought near,
Who now stands newly clear,
Smiling, and recognising, and going dark.
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Nicola Hulme
Tue 18th Oct 2016 09:17
You are so right. Celebrities are living adverts: "You too can have these permanent eyebrows, bloated lips, wrinkle free (expressionless) Botox foreheads." Where will it end? Maybe they will eventually melt away ?