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We spent the rest of the day reading old magazines in dungarees
Of course we are supposed to get a thunderstorm today, and of course we are supposed to get it during the exact block of the afternoon I am supposed to be traveling to/at a potluck at the house of people I have never met before. Of course I have also slept badly and mostly want to spend the day on a couch with a cat. I will bring one of my new books and an umbrella along with the lemon cake I baked last night. I was not designed by nature for parties.
1. I am generally thrilled by this review of Gemma Files' Invocabulary (2018) because I love her poetry, but it doesn't hurt that it makes me feel like some kind of muse.
2. An unpleasant but useful read: Myke Cole, "The Sparta Fetish Is a Cultural Cancer." I did not actually know how far the fantasia had extended among the current crop of Nazis. I have negative affinity for Frank Miller's 300 in any of its forms, but "The Oracles" has always been one of my favorite poems by A.E. Housman, so it feels a little personal.
3. Not recent, but I kept forgetting to link it in the overheated chaos of July: Siobhan Carroll, "For He Can Creep."
I am hoping to catch up on some of the movies I intended to review for July, even if I have to do some of them from memory. I just want August to be less exhausted.
1. I am generally thrilled by this review of Gemma Files' Invocabulary (2018) because I love her poetry, but it doesn't hurt that it makes me feel like some kind of muse.
2. An unpleasant but useful read: Myke Cole, "The Sparta Fetish Is a Cultural Cancer." I did not actually know how far the fantasia had extended among the current crop of Nazis. I have negative affinity for Frank Miller's 300 in any of its forms, but "The Oracles" has always been one of my favorite poems by A.E. Housman, so it feels a little personal.
3. Not recent, but I kept forgetting to link it in the overheated chaos of July: Siobhan Carroll, "For He Can Creep."
I am hoping to catch up on some of the movies I intended to review for July, even if I have to do some of them from memory. I just want August to be less exhausted.
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Which you are.
precisely because the narrator answered the door once, more and more packages filled with unknown gods keep coming and coming
That happened to me once with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Luckily my housemate eventually answered the door in my place, and in her black bathrobe. “Is... is this a convent?” they asked her, in a worried tone, and never returned.
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Thank you.
Luckily my housemate eventually answered the door in my place, and in her black bathrobe. “Is... is this a convent?” they asked her, in a worried tone, and never returned.
That's awesome.
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Thank you; that is useful to me.
(It came out in 2018, but I read it last month after a facebook page posted that photo of a cop with a Molon Labe tattoo arresting a Jewish protester.)
That, too: I have seen other photos of law enforcement with similar tattoos, but not that one.
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The Village Voice review of 300 remains my favourite: https://www.villagevoice.com/2007/02/27/man-on-man-action/
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I remember this review!
"No one knows who spoke it, but historians agree that this holy text was silly and repetitive and devoted by and large to what they now term 'the totally butch awesomeness' of Spartan deed."
A worthy favorite.
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I love the entire last verse; it's the point, but it wouldn't work as well without the rest of the poem leading up to it, whatever the rest of the poem is like. "The King with half the East at heel" is mythology and then the last line is plainspoken and beautiful at once. I also like, unironically, "'Tis true there's better boose than brine, but he that drowns must drink it."
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Do you know this- by Hugh Kingsmill? Housman himself admired it...
What - still alive at twenty-two,
A clean, upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat is hard to slit,
Slit your girl's, and swing for it.
Like enough you won't be glad,
When they come to hang you, lad:
But bacon's not the only thing
That's cured by hanging from a string.
So, when the spilt ink of the night
Spreads o'er the blotting-pad of light,
Lads whose job is still to do
Shall whet their knives, and think of you
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It's alliterated to hell and gone (the Anglo-Saxon side of his language, not the Greco-Roman), but that doesn't mean I don't like it!
Do you know this- by Hugh Kingsmill? Housman himself admired it...
I have! It is only fair, considering the things Housman did to Aeschylus.
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I knew that μολὼν λαβέ was associated with contemporary American gun nuts and increasingly with the alt-right. Not most of the rest of it and I am not pleased.
Kieron Gillen's Three is a good corrective to Miller's 300, if you'd like one...
I don't see how it can hurt, under the circumstances. I'll look for it.
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I was a little uncertain about it when it started, but ended up really impressed. It reminded me favorably of Angela Carter.
Of course, I also have a special place in my heart for Smart's verse about Jeoffry, and I named the (terrifyingly intelligent) cat who adopted me in grad school after it.
Good cat!
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I have been fortunate enough to live with two different families of door-opening cats. So, who needs doors that shut?