Misi ergo ad eos nuncios dicens: opus grande ego facio et non possum discendere; cur cessare oportet opus, si desistero et discendero ad vos. - Nehemiah 6:3

That’s (in Latin) the epigraph of Geoffrey Hill’s The Triumph of Love, about which possibly more soon. I started a project - a PhD thesis, no less - on Hill that I didn’t finish, for reasons I imagine I understand better now than I did at the time; thinking of it as an “opus grande” probably didn’t help.

My eye was drawn to this headline in today’s Grauniad: Britain needs anger management. Not to calm the fury, but to gather its force. In order to effect, apparently, constitutional reform. Well, that would be something to warm up with, I suppose.

Do go and listen to Evan’s selection of “anti-dysphoric” BM. As it happens, I agree: there can be a euphoric anger, a joyous collective raging: as Evan says, “all feeling like Satanic hawks carrying toxic bone spears forged from a lost past when we knew how to be together and fight for something we loved enough to mourn its loss with yells and noise and rasps, not the soft mewing whimper of the retreat to the darkened room”. Which sounds a bit Fight Club, a bit Iron John, not to mention a bit middle-class-football-hooligan. But it pinpoints something about the pleasures of that particular variety of headbanging atavism, and should certainly be retained as a data point in our ongoing investigation of the genre…