A Pebble on the Beach

It is enjoyable for me when I find an interesting web site or you tube channel; where useful and educational content has been posted, and is freely available to help those who wish to be assisted in their learning. Ostensibly; Tim Mcgee stands in front of a camera, in a school class room type setting, and delivers a lecture to young people / students at a school or college; calling the setting for his lessons room 303. Though I am well beyond the age of an American high school student, and English, not American, and 59 years old (2023), it was still a great joy to watch and listen to Tim Mcgee giving his critique of T S Elliot’s ‘The Hollow Men.’ This poem was described by him as clip notes of T S Elliot’s ‘The Wasteland,’ which caught my eye and ear, as the poem that A Pebble on the Beach is about; ‘A Scapeshifter’ uses as its template ‘The Wasteland’ and attempts to draw attention to how good the work of T S Elliot was and is, and how timeless and importantly relevant the ‘The Wasteland’ has become, though it’s heavy going, and not an easy read. A Scapeshifter was published in 2022, in the LCB book Soul to Sun, with a video released on the 137th anniversary of Ezra Pounds birth, to contrast and celebrate ‘The Wasteland’ 100 years after its publication; as it keeps unfolding, and ‘The Hollow Men’ published in 1925, three years after ‘The Wasteland’ is part of this process. Tim Mcgee talks in his lecture about the epigraph to ‘The Hollow Men’ mentioning Kurtz, from Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’ He also calls our attention to another hollow man and flamboyant type character in epigraph, from Britain, who he introduces into his lecture as “a cat called Guy Fawkes;” who was captured and quartered, so is not to be confused with the cat Macavity, who always evaded capture. And though flamboyant; Bustopher Jones: The Cat About Town, was probably too jovial to be murderous; so the cat call falls on Growl Tiger; who did get surprised and executed by way of the plank. Metaphor is noted as the most important thing by far for a poet; in chapter 22 of Aristotle’s poetics. In A Scapeshifter another Joseph Conrad novel is mentioned in line 156; ‘Shadow Line, to contrast the line in ‘The Wasteland’ “But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling;” Joseph Conrad telling those who asked about the super natural feel of ‘Shadow Line’ that there was nothing super natural about it? Really! The super natural undercurrent in ‘Shadow Line’ is as the sibilant sounds in the words around the dry grass in The ‘Hollow Men.’ I could meander down the pathway of attempted constructive criticism here; pertaining to the content and delivery of Tim Mcgee’s work: but he’s an academic. and I’m not. And though I know ‘The Hollow Men’ and the ‘Wasteland’ I was delighted to learn about the connection to T S Elliot’s work in the lilacs of Walt Whitman, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in the ‘Death Bed Edition’ of ‘Leaves of Grass,’ which Tim Mcgee goes through poem by poem, which on the face of it seems like a Sisyphean task, but never the less; he pulls it off, so rather the than me pass comment on this seemingly excellent proponent of his literary craft, I would recommend checking out his web site and you tube channel; it is a gift to those interested in poetry. Tim Mcgee seems to know his stuff, and conveys the age old importance of poetry. In the video for A Scapeshifter the theater where the band played the ‘Soul to Sun music’ which accompanies the poem ‘A Scapeshifter was filmed at the High Peak New Mills Art Theater where the seats that the audience sit on; were a gift from Andrew Lloyd Webber, when he took them out of the Theater Royal, Drury Lane; where he put on his performances of the long running musical ‘Cats’ which was inspired by T S Elliot’s marvelous cat poetry. So the invisible animating entity; which should be inside; is missing from the hollow mannequins, sat on cats cushions where life should reside. Curiouser and curiouser! cried Alice!