It is very funny indeed.

@@InSearchOfAnthonyBurgess You’re providing real gems on this channel! Kudos to you!

@@Eire_Go_Deo Very kind of you to say so. Thanks for visiting In Search of Anthony Burgess!

A polymath indeed. Well said, Mr August. In old age, Burgess decided that the Japanese language was too important for him to ignore, so he started learning it, though sadly he died soon after and never had the opportunity to visit Japan.

genius mchaggis "Polymath: a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning". That sounds like a definition that does work for the career of Mr. Burgess. I can see from your other comments that you are also attacking anyone who approves of the work of Mr. Burgess. I can see that you are also a janitor. Does that provide you with plenty of time to sound like a pompous don or headmaster who has not achieved anything except the minor glory of tearing down a great writer online? I suppose you do have plenty of free time available to create your own masterpieces of literature and music (we are all waiting for your work). And now that YOU know what polymath actually means - and I never said that it was just for writing and composing - you can actually appreciate a man whose devotion to the life of the artist was successful and unsuccessful in equal measures (something any one of us who wants to create great art can only hope for). And yes, I have read bios and the autobios on A.B.

He expertly choreographs the discussion here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/bdiCe9Oompa1en0.html

Splendid, Mr Jones. Thanks for visiting In Search of Anthony Burgess.

There were indeed many flashes of brilliance.

Well said.

Doubt it. Too clever, too British, too good.

Very good point. He resented it but at the same time dined out on it.

The book impressed me far more than the movie. Maybe it's because I know enough smatterings of various languages that I got a lot of fun out of that modern argot he invented for those kids to speak.

If you haven’t read A Clockwork Orange for a while, give it another go. The incredible freshness of the language leaps off the page. Just one of those timeless masterpieces.

😀👍

He certainly would've.

He did actually do it later in life for the benefit of some of his US students. I think the film was one of Burgess’s own favourites, Metropolis.

Pleasure, and thanks for visiting In Search of Anthony Burgess.

It is so entertaining.

I always preferred the second volume. William Boyd was on to something when he said the memoirs were the best novels Burgess never wrote.

Awful books. Lies and more lies. That why he writes. Because he has no real life. A real fucking turd. Fascinating guy!

'Tuan Jim' - inspired Conradian choice of display name!

Geoffrey Grigson haha Thank you! From my absolute favorite Conrad novel.

genius mchaggis I think Burgess said he had overheard some Londoners using the term "clockwork orange" as some kind of slang term for god knows what. But his conception of the term was, in his words, "a person who has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State." Never heard his music, but I definitely agree with you that he was a thoroughly interesting individual, and I think a very good writer, sometimes even great. I can tell that he was hugely influenced by the lovely musical quality of James Joyce's sentences.

genius mchaggis I overdid things by quoting the man in his own words? That makes no sense at all. And I don't put him on a pedestal. I like his writing, period, end of story. I enjoy reading it, it's that simple. I don't know why that seems to bother you so much. lol But have a good one, just the same.

genius mchaggis English is my only language, you babbling fool. I understood everything that you said, I just don't know why the hell you're saying any of it. Big difference. Please remove "genius" from your name, because that is seeming like a HUGE misnomer right about now. And before you tell me to read some biographer, you should read some Joseph Conrad. My name might make a bit more sense to you if you did... :D

Wrong.

Eddie Jarvis Remove a thin layer deposited by elocution lessons, and pure Manchester is revealed. Hence his real accent, not the imposed one.

He's doing a Yorkshire accent. He envisaged Alex as from Yorkshire.

"Pure Manchester", good grief.

I think you're partly right. 'Luke / look' and 'Buke / book' are certainly common in Yorkshire - this was how my grandparents' generation in Hull spoke, along with 'Four' to rhyme with Flower. The 'composite' theory is ok, but also bear in mind that our perceptions are not Burgess's: his Manchester was IN Lancashire, so there's no Lancashire OR Manchester accent for Burgess. There's no special reason to expect 'his Yorkshire' to be flawless, I think he yorkshirised his Lancashire.

Thanks for visiting.

Pgrita, much obliged to you for pointing that out. Grotesquely silly error on my part. Thanks for visiting and all the best.

Geoffrey Grigson Hey no prob. As I say good on yer for posting this and other AB gems. Prompted me to check - the Worm & The Ring still never republished - only copy I found for sale £250. Ah well. One day...

Must say I paid a couple of hundred quid for my (revised, 1970) edition of WR. In Search of Anthony Burgess: Banbury (1/4)

Ah, yes, that poet-critic was famed for his barbs. For the second part of Kevin Jackson's documentary, try putting 'The Burgess Variations (2/2)' in the search field - it should come up. I, naturally, agree with you that B. is very engaging: he had much wit, learning, humanity. To me he is 'the great, proved dead', but not, it seems, so far to too many others. He is not read very much; many of his books are out of print or very difficult to find. Thanks for visiting, chadafaud, and all the best.

Paul Bunch That is a shame.

This comment hasn’t worn well (Brexit).

Definitely a resemblance, and not just physiognomically.

I don't know but I've always assumed that it is one of Burgess's compositions. And it is not half bad.

@@InSearchOfAnthonyBurgess it’s not it’s by Henry Purcell it’s from his opera King Arthur and it’s sometimes called the cold song

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/pdmgp5Rjqsy7Xas.html

@@preblaum700 Much obliged to you for pointing that out! Think I will get hold of it and have a listen. Thanks for visiting In Search of Anthony Burgess.

genius mchaggis A bit too short to be a sentence.

genius mchaggis Much appreciated :) Not much visitors, but then again, it's a long way to Tipperary ! There's much more on the website, but unfortunately most is in Dutch, except a long biography of US 1950's-1970's (forgotten) singer Sunny Gale... But well, just for the photo's it's worth a visit, at least if you like retro stuff....

genius mchaggis Nope, it's Dutch or Flemish if you prefer, then French, and my English comes on the third place...

Anthony Burgess once sued a newspaper for referring to him in print as Guy Burgess.

'Is it still in print?' A question that is asked about a large number of important Burgess novels. The neglect is indeed shameful.

Try eBay or amazon. Failing that Oxfam Lichfield.

@@kelman727 Yep, it's widely available.

+kelman727 A fair assessment.

No Enderby..?

Eddie Jarvis Nope. The first one is very good; the rest less so, and The Clockwork Testament downright offal.

You don't have a high regard for "very good" books then. Interesting to read your opinion.

Edward Jarvis My regard is for the excellent. Inside Mr Enderby is the best of the quartet, but, to me, not the peer of the books I mentioned. P.S. Never mistake opinions for facts.

Burgess's house just round the corner, eh? But where are you? Crumpsall, Callian, Etchingham, Savosa, Fallowfield, Chiswick, Moss Side, Bracciano, Adderbury, St Margarets, Aylestone?

@@InSearchOfAnthonyBurgess it's one of those places! I had no idea that Anthony Burgess had a connection with my town

@@zero15388 He moved around a helluva lot.

I think you're right about that.

'I was in Catholic Europe, despite the insistence of the Gibraltarians that they were, though mostly Genoese, really a kind of brown Englishmen. They were Catholic, when they were not Jews, and held baroque processions on feast days. The women went to Mass in mantillas. They were a kind of Iberians who feared Iberia. They preferred brown bobbies to Franco’s policía. But they were of my own kind. They made the sign of the cross and heard the bell of the Angelus. I was drawn to the women with crosses hanging from their delectable necks. The Protestant Lynne was sick and far. I was in warm garlicky unreformed Christendom. As for God, there was God towering high overhead, the mists of the Levant on his brow.'

He was not drawn to the CofE, that's for sure.

Geoffrey Grigson No. I don’t mean to imply Burgess was a closeted believer or anything. But I certainly don’t get from him the same impression that I get from Brian Moore - that of a convinced rationalist sending it all up. In his archive in the Burgess museum - I’ve been there - one of the most annotated and thumbed books I noticed was a Bible. Curiously it was the same edition we had in CofE school.

@@kelman727 I agree. I don't think there was a deathbed conversion or anything. On the other hand, he was far from being the A.C. Grayling, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins type. Very far. He spoke of evil as a 'theological substance', for instance.

I don't know much about Grigson's work either. I have come across Grigson volumes in thrift stores; the books cannot be shifted even at 50¢. They seem to be about the countryside or cooking or something like that - some of them may have been by Grigson's spawn, I do not remember. They are dreadful ordure. Where gastronomy is concerned, I can tell you that I would not wish to dine at the Grigson table if you paid me $1,000 to do so. And take it from me, you would not wish to subject yourself to any of the 'poetry' that Grigson excreted. The Burgess production from Abba Abba to which you refer is in fact a free translation of a sonnet by Giuseppe Belli. What happened is that the young Burgess was in the audience when Grigson spoke to Manchester University's literary society in '37. After Grigson's excruciatingly dull talk, which had emptied most of the room, there was tea-and-biscuits for the three or four people who remained. Burgess thought it would be a great student wheeze to wind up this bore, so he went over to Grigson and said that certain experiences such as defæcation, menstruation, masturbation and hangover had not been addressed sufficiently by poets. The outraged prude Grigson said to Burgess, 'You are a rather coarse and unattractive character,' and walked away. This gave Burgess an idea about how best to accomplish the translation of a particular Belli poem that he liked, one which is recited from 1:14 in the 'Burgess and Belli' video on this channel at kzfaq.info/get/bejne/l8B3mZB825vXnGQ.html