We spent the rest of the day reading old magazines in dungarees

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[sovay]

"The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair" is just such a great line- so perfectly placed- that it lifts an otherwise rather shrill poem out of self parody into greatness.

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."

[poliphilo]

The boose line represents the side of Housman it's so easy to parody.

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

[sovay]

The boose line represents the side of Housman it's so easy to parody.

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.