Tag Archives: The Fine Art of Implication

À propos ‘The name-dropping game’

An earlier post, The name-dropping game, was contributed by one of our well-wishers and we would like to expand upon it here:

The eminent scholar and most significant Welsh poet Professor Gwyn Thomas lectured at Bangor university when Jim Perrin, studying for a degree in English (achieving a 2:1, ref. ‘Phantom PhD?), became acquainted with him. In his book West the author wrote of having met Professor Thomas by chance at a garage and he recounted: ‘…that we talked…and no doubt brashly on my part for it was a new-found enthusiasm, and what right had I other than that of dialogue in his company? of the ninth-century poetry of the Heledd saga.  I remember with intense embarrassment how I delivered an extempore lecture some minutes in length and no doubt achingly crass and jejune [oh, how very humble, and so self-effacing!] on a particular line from the Stafell Gynddylan [Cynddylan’s Hall], one of the Heledd englynion.’ — and on, and on, and on… Continue reading

The name-dropping game

An eagle-eyed well-wisher has contacted us with the following contribution.

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”Quite often the secondary, and even the primary, purpose of the Dedication or Acknowledgments section in a book is, by dropping ‘names’, to lend a spurious authority to the work, perhaps beyond its merits. Jim Perrin is no exception to this common practice, but he takes it to a different level.

It is known that one book dedication, at least, was made by Perrin without the prior knowledge, still less the permission, of the distinguished named person* (a grave lapse in etiquette, but cunning, particularly as the permission referred to might very well not have been given); also that certain of his acknowledgments are of people not enamoured of him, who are nonetheless now permanently associated with him in print, an insidious form of irreversible literary stalking. Continue reading

Jim Perrin’s libel-less libel

When the author Jan Morris reviewed ‘West:’  in IWA’s journal, AGENDA  on 25/12/2010, she posed this question:  ‘Is it good or bad to be proprioceptive?’   We replied to this review in a post of our own:  ‘Our response to a review by Jan Morris.’  ‘The point ”proprioceptive” is most pertinent to our sister’s story. Jim Perrin has made cleverly libel-less statements in these passages. We know to whom he refers, as do others also. He knows that we know (as they say) and it is a serious matter which we will be writing about in a future post.’

This is the post:

Jim Perrin had written about our sister — with a reference to her former husband which was virtually libellous, and described, with an almost abnormally distasteful relish, injuries which he claimed she had received at his hands. He said:  ‘a previous man in her life had beaten her savagely about the head, and her corrective balance was gone.’ And on page 220, describing an accident,  he wrote:  ‘she had fallen in the night at the flat where she was staying, had cracked her lumbar vertebra.’ He could not have known this — there was no medical  examination.  (See Jac’s accident to read his description of another accident which befell her.)

Continue reading