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Knit your fragile veins to the wrists of your friends
I have successfully accomplished curbside pickup of an order from Porter Square Books: I now own Edith Maud Eaton/Sui Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), which I am looking forward to reading as soon as it has sat out in the sun for a day, as well as Kit Wright's Ode to Didcot Power Station (2014). My mother swung by with red bean buns and my niece; I got a masked hug from the latter and a meow from Lucy, her new plushie Siamese. I was finally able to give my mother her present of Charlotte Armstrong's The Chocolate Cobweb (1948). Have a couple of links.
1. You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack is one of the webcomics I forget about for months on end and then catch up on suddenly. I feel a number of people may find the review dice relatable, although the theory problem was the one that made me crack up.
2. I discovered Yiddish Wit while trying to figure out what a tallit katan is actually called in Yiddish. Answer: arbe-kanfes. Also a site that illustrates Yiddish aphorisms, curses etc. with Victorian clip art macros is a major time sink. This one is very possibly my favorite contrafactual. I had never actually heard this definition of a shlimazl before.
3. A friend who is not on DW linked me to George Orwell on Rudyard Kipling. He's arguing with T.S. Eliot and I am fascinated that his political criticism of Kipling is a normal mix of fair, nope, and dude, check thyself and his literary criticism of Kipling is from Mars. I don't think it played to his strengths. Unkindly, I want to track down his own few published poems and see if they meet his standards for good poetry—which he takes for granted is an objective reality, although he does not define it except by passing reference to Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins; Hopkins is fair game, but criticizing an English poet for not being Shakespeare ranks among the tactical nukes of literary dick moves—or if he would have dismissed his own work as condescendingly as he does Kipling's as "good bad poetry," by which he seems to mean poetry which a person of taste is allowed to admit to enjoying only if they have first disclaimed it for all to hear as vulgar trash. (Eric, your Eton is showing.) Look, I know it didn't spring full-blown from the head of Tumblr, but I want to dropkick this attitude into the sun just as wholeheartedly when I encounter it in 1941 as in 2020. I fully believe Orwell was embarrassed by his affection for the Barrack-Room Ballads, but that's no excuse for assuming his feelings were universally shared by "every enlightened person . . . thinking and decent people . . . the intellectual." He faults Eliot for not making more of Kipling's trashiness as though it were disingenuity on the editor's part as opposed to maybe, just maybe Eliot didn't think that technically-aesthetically Kipling sucked that much. tl;dr I can't believe the state of the properly woke reaction to a problematic fave hasn't altered in eight decades and I have no idea what in the hell Orwell actually thought poetry was.
1. You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack is one of the webcomics I forget about for months on end and then catch up on suddenly. I feel a number of people may find the review dice relatable, although the theory problem was the one that made me crack up.
2. I discovered Yiddish Wit while trying to figure out what a tallit katan is actually called in Yiddish. Answer: arbe-kanfes. Also a site that illustrates Yiddish aphorisms, curses etc. with Victorian clip art macros is a major time sink. This one is very possibly my favorite contrafactual. I had never actually heard this definition of a shlimazl before.
3. A friend who is not on DW linked me to George Orwell on Rudyard Kipling. He's arguing with T.S. Eliot and I am fascinated that his political criticism of Kipling is a normal mix of fair, nope, and dude, check thyself and his literary criticism of Kipling is from Mars. I don't think it played to his strengths. Unkindly, I want to track down his own few published poems and see if they meet his standards for good poetry—which he takes for granted is an objective reality, although he does not define it except by passing reference to Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins; Hopkins is fair game, but criticizing an English poet for not being Shakespeare ranks among the tactical nukes of literary dick moves—or if he would have dismissed his own work as condescendingly as he does Kipling's as "good bad poetry," by which he seems to mean poetry which a person of taste is allowed to admit to enjoying only if they have first disclaimed it for all to hear as vulgar trash. (Eric, your Eton is showing.) Look, I know it didn't spring full-blown from the head of Tumblr, but I want to dropkick this attitude into the sun just as wholeheartedly when I encounter it in 1941 as in 2020. I fully believe Orwell was embarrassed by his affection for the Barrack-Room Ballads, but that's no excuse for assuming his feelings were universally shared by "every enlightened person . . . thinking and decent people . . . the intellectual." He faults Eliot for not making more of Kipling's trashiness as though it were disingenuity on the editor's part as opposed to maybe, just maybe Eliot didn't think that technically-aesthetically Kipling sucked that much. tl;dr I can't believe the state of the properly woke reaction to a problematic fave hasn't altered in eight decades and I have no idea what in the hell Orwell actually thought poetry was.
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As I finally managed to articulate elsenet, I have no problem with reactions like "I understand this art is technically well-done, but it doesn't do anything for me" or "I understand this art is technically well-done, but my knowledge of the artist removes it from the category of things I might enjoy" or even "I have no idea what anyone sees in this art, but I accept that people who aren't me see something." I have a ton of difficulty with "Everyone who doesn't agree with me that this art sucks either doesn't know any better or is lying," especially when the person making this statement does not actually bother to explain what sucks about it. The closest Orwell comes is his objection to eye dialect (a fair point in that it is often employed in classist and racist ways and I personally find it difficult to read) and his claim that Kipling is memorable because he is sententious (slightly marred by grafting his exhibit-A couplet onto the end of a different verse from the same poem). Phrases like "his snack-bar wisdom and his gift for packing much cheap picturesqueness into a few words" are terrific zingers and I want examples. What is cheaply picturesque about "palm and pine"? It's basic metonymy, nice alliteration, not quite assonance: a sort of ecological slant rhyme. I'd like to write phrases that snap into place that cleanly.
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