Proposals by Hull City Council (since scrapped (the proposals, not the council) to spend £200,000 on a series of fibreglass toads to mark the 25th anniversary of the death of Philip Larkin provoked, inter alia, the following comments on the Hull Daily Mail’s website, and no I didn’t make any of these up. The Hispanic inverted question marks in the stirring poem I quote at the end here are also sic:
my flat has damp issues and plaster falling off walls .seems council have high prioritys
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“I think you've got to face up to the fact that Larkin is the most significant cultural artefact to be produced by this city”
Do you indeed?
I think not. I care not one jot for Larkin, his ponsy background, perverted lifestyle nor stupid poems and judging from this thread neither does the majority of people. You have the right to express your views but you're outvoted my old son. We do not want our money wasted on this sort of twaddle, so let's move on, case for wasting taxpayer's money dismissed. Next please.
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Glenroy - the chattering class looks after it's own. "Ordinary" people do not count, because we don't talk crap and fuss about arty farty crap, pointless poems or spend our life daydreaming in the University all day.
We're all qualified in the only University which really counts - the University of Life, but it's not recognised by the chattering class - what a surprise.
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What a waste of money. The man may have been a famous poet but having just read his offerings for the first time in my life (and I am 70) I wonder why the HCC want to spend money on him in the first place. I found his so-called poetry pretty poor, to be honest. It didn't scan, it didn't rhyme in most cases and the subject matter was boring. Oh! and it wasn't really about toads or toads revisited at all, just the misery of his life in general.
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Thanks for the Larkin poems.It just proves to me what a load of drivel he produced
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I thought I was still dreaming
Not Getting up till late
April the first already?
No - that¿s not the date!
Who spawned this crazy notion
It is a tad pole emic
And truly symptomatic of
A madness epidemic
Can this really be the way
To add to our renown
Come and pay a visit
To this toad infested town?
Will there be loads of lurking luvvies
In simpering, vacuous mind
And love sick lasses kissing them
A prince they¿ll hope to find.
Mon dieu, what if we are sued
For broken tushy pegs
By coachloads of French tourists
Biting on their toady legs?
This thing just leaves me hopping mad
Miss Piggy and Gonzo agree
I may be slimy, green and wet
But it smacks of farce to me.
Postwar British poetry
Is for the toilet wall
He¿s rated midst the best of them
Which surely says it all.
And what of Hull¿s young people
As we try to to teach respect
Who question these amphibians
Whose honour do they reflect?
It¿s Phoul Mouthed Phil, they are put there by
The public so adoring
Profanity, children, is quite OK
So long as it is boring!
{Snip}
14 comments:
I think this calls for a Crap Ode, Puthwuth
Honk honk.
It's the way you tell them.
I think the real slimy toads are the people commenting on that thread. What a bunch of mis-educated fuckwits. I especially enjoyed:
"I found his so-called poetry pretty poor, to be honest. It didn't scan, it didn't rhyme in most cases and the subject matter was boring."
It would be a different matter if they were building a 10ft statue of Katie Price, they'd swarm around that and offer their fucking children to it.
*end rant*
TOAD'S PAWN
Was wisely withdrawn
less it come to pass
that what survives of him is fiberglass.
Interviewer: How did you arrive upon the image of a toad for Philip Larkin?
Hull City Council: Sheer genius.
Presumably they also rejected Gormley's 'Tuberous Cock and Balls' proposal?
Shame - I thought the revolving restaurant at the top was a nice touch.
I meant 'lest' of course...
£200,000 does seem rather a lot for some fibreglass toads.
And as one of those correspondents pointed out, French people might sue the council having damaged their teeth trying to eat the toads' legs. That is a real danger.
Ron - Gormley's Tuberous Cock and Balls was in fact taken up by Prestatyn town council. I was at its unveiling, and the locals are very proud of it. It's not just your usual eyesore.
What happened to proposals for a statue of Larkin in the train station?
They should put one of him in the window of the library, telescope in one hand and cock in the other, there to leer at girls for ever more.
But the council do have more pressing priorities. Ok, maybe the people in that comment stream didn't express so in the most eloquent way, and no doubt some of them are rent-a-gobs who copy and paste "bring back hanging!!!!!! lol!!!!" to post in every single comment stream no matter what the story, but lots of them are the same people who saw their houses flooded, lived in cramped caravans for months and received very little financial help from their breath-takingly incompetent council who, in their wisdom, forgot to file for government help until the very last minute, then made a total gash of distributing it to those in need. That is, government money that scarcely stretched beyond the very basics. What's been lost to history regarding the floods in Hull is that many people didn't even qualify for full insurance - my parents who, god forbid, live in council housing (they don't read Larkin - you'll know them as 'scum') had to foot half the bill themselves for an entire new downstairs to their home, living in two rooms upstairs for a year. And they weren't alone.
And because of facts like this, the wounds are still raw. Really, it's both bad taste and poorly timed to announce the erection of an expensive statue, no matter who the statue is of.
They could well use that money to help the people who had their houses stripped to the bone and are still waiting for their walls to be re-plastered but don't qualify for full financial help simply because one of the household works full time. Or the people that didn't qualify for compensation who were left to find their own building company - cue them hiring one of the dodgy companies that set up in the wake of the floods who naturally did an incompetent job leaving their clients in damp houses as a result. Or the long-running saga on two of Hull's biggest council estates over the illegal, potentially lethal heating systems that they can't afford to replace themselves but the council routinely insist they can't afford to replace.
Even if it's money specifically set aside for the arts in Hull, how about throwing it at the Adelphi? Now that's an important cultural institution on a par with any in the UK. Or why not, in the spirit of Larkin, give that money to a library or school to help replenish their stock of books and computers in the wake of flood damage? Or why not just give it to the fucking football team, pay Phil Brown off.
The point is that lots of these "slimy toads" and "mis-educated fuckwits" are the same people who've seen their houses flooded, their old peoples homes desperately overcrowded (many pensioners who didn't qualify for flood damage compensation simply gave up and went into homes), their local pubs and music venues either closed or pushed to the brink of closure, their one and only art cinema shut down, local businesses in their biggest shopping centre (that would be Princes Quay, Hull-dwellers) shut down to make way for a national cinema chain, non-NHS, council-run support groups for first time mothers, drug users etc held in local health centres shut down due to 'lack of funding' all within the space of a few short years. They're fucked off with their council. In fact, the gap between the council and the people they represent has never been bigger than it it at present.
Seriously, get some context and give them a break.
I didn't go calling anyway 'scum', and don't feel any desire to defend my local authority on its handling of the flooding disaster. I also don't think arts funding should be at the expense of anyone's basic living demands. Having said all of which, the comments stream in the Hull Daily Mail (as in any newspaper) does tend to attract illiterate fuckwits, who I celebrate for their addition to the gaiety of nations.
I didn't say that basic living expenses should come before arts funding. I was merely offering credible alternative uses for that amount of money, including suggestions that factored in the possibility of it being money designated for the arts, in which case there are still plenty of more effective uses for it, uses that would benefit the community in the here and now and do a job of raising the esteem of an area gutted by lots of shit things happening in a very short space of time.
As for comment stream fuckwits, there's your irony. For all the "slimy toads" and "miseducated fuckwits" in that HDM thread, there's just as much senseless, uninformed, actually quite nasty and non-contexualised bluster in your own stream here. But if that lot are really such miseducated cultural dolts, at least they have an excuse (and that's before you factor in their dissatisfaction with an inept council known for poor money handling). Really, none of you are advertising the educated alternative as being much more attractive.
I think this comment stream is as funny as the original one in the HDM!
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