I am spending too much of my days lately in so much pain that I am randomly falling asleep from the exhaustion of it, but I am trying not to lose track of time as completely as the first half of this week. Have some things.
1. Because I have known for decades that Tanith Lee wrote two episodes of Blake's 7 (1978–81) and has a handful of radio credits besides, I must have known that her oft-reprinted vampire novelette "Nunc Dimittis" (1984) was adapted for an episode of The Hunger (1997–2000), but somehow I had missed the fact that it stars David Warner. I don't care if it's a good adaptation or not. To my absolute shock, the DVDs of the relevant season are available through my local library system. I am only trying to decide whether to wait until October to watch it.
2. I don't want to get into a fight in the letters section of the London Review of Books, but I had such an explosively inimical reaction to a portion of this review of a new biography of T.S. Eliot that I wound up reading several columns aloud to my mother in order to express my disagreements vocally, which she was patient with.
( It's worth pausing on this key question for biographers of poets: how many words can be walled off from personal biography as cases of pure sound? )
I was with the reviewer as far as tracing the prosody of Eliot's prose was concerned and then in the middle of the third paragraph I blew a gasket, because I have never formally studied Eliot beyond a high school introduction to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," but I know a lot of poets. People who play with language will play with it in their private lives as much as their professional endeavors, not as a form of keeping their hand in while resting up from their vocation, but just because their brains are tuned for it. (Spot the five-stress phrase!) It's part of communication. It entertains, it emphasizes, it may even be unconscious. I have two separate friends who tend toward fiction that could be scanned as blank verse. I am prone to patterns of allusion and assonance and incantation almost no matter what I am writing, on which I try to keep an eye in case they need breaking. It doesn't surprise me at all that Eliot had shifting registers of poetry in his letters; I might be more surprised if he did not. (Blame Christopher Marlowe.) I really stick at calling it a secular spiritual exercise. In short, I am willing to grant Eliot all sorts of inescapable importance in the history of English literature and my development as a writer personally, but when it comes to juggling tones and rhythms outside of his published verse, I do not see how he differs at all from the general run of poets. Or even people who just like words.
The reviewer writes beautifully, incidentally: I love the comparison of the two cadences. I feel it would be unnecessarily snide to go through with a pencil and commit scansion.
3. I had a pistachio éclair this evening. I do not mean that it had pistachio-flavored crème pâtissière inside. It had a pistachio-flavored icing on top and then inside, as far as I can tell, it had pistachio butter. It was fantastic. It looked like a special effect of pond slime. It could not be eaten without leaving the impression of a massacre of water lilies. I am seriously considering, as soon as the shop opens tomorrow, acquiring another.
4. A friend who is not on DW sent me an article about Howard Pyle's The Mermaid (1910). I followed the link through to a search for "mermaids" in the collections of the Delaware Art Museum and I am charmed by John Sloan's Atlantic City in Mid-Winter (1894).
5.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch took a picture of me in a self-explanatory T-shirt.
1. Because I have known for decades that Tanith Lee wrote two episodes of Blake's 7 (1978–81) and has a handful of radio credits besides, I must have known that her oft-reprinted vampire novelette "Nunc Dimittis" (1984) was adapted for an episode of The Hunger (1997–2000), but somehow I had missed the fact that it stars David Warner. I don't care if it's a good adaptation or not. To my absolute shock, the DVDs of the relevant season are available through my local library system. I am only trying to decide whether to wait until October to watch it.
2. I don't want to get into a fight in the letters section of the London Review of Books, but I had such an explosively inimical reaction to a portion of this review of a new biography of T.S. Eliot that I wound up reading several columns aloud to my mother in order to express my disagreements vocally, which she was patient with.
( It's worth pausing on this key question for biographers of poets: how many words can be walled off from personal biography as cases of pure sound? )
I was with the reviewer as far as tracing the prosody of Eliot's prose was concerned and then in the middle of the third paragraph I blew a gasket, because I have never formally studied Eliot beyond a high school introduction to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," but I know a lot of poets. People who play with language will play with it in their private lives as much as their professional endeavors, not as a form of keeping their hand in while resting up from their vocation, but just because their brains are tuned for it. (Spot the five-stress phrase!) It's part of communication. It entertains, it emphasizes, it may even be unconscious. I have two separate friends who tend toward fiction that could be scanned as blank verse. I am prone to patterns of allusion and assonance and incantation almost no matter what I am writing, on which I try to keep an eye in case they need breaking. It doesn't surprise me at all that Eliot had shifting registers of poetry in his letters; I might be more surprised if he did not. (Blame Christopher Marlowe.) I really stick at calling it a secular spiritual exercise. In short, I am willing to grant Eliot all sorts of inescapable importance in the history of English literature and my development as a writer personally, but when it comes to juggling tones and rhythms outside of his published verse, I do not see how he differs at all from the general run of poets. Or even people who just like words.
The reviewer writes beautifully, incidentally: I love the comparison of the two cadences. I feel it would be unnecessarily snide to go through with a pencil and commit scansion.
3. I had a pistachio éclair this evening. I do not mean that it had pistachio-flavored crème pâtissière inside. It had a pistachio-flavored icing on top and then inside, as far as I can tell, it had pistachio butter. It was fantastic. It looked like a special effect of pond slime. It could not be eaten without leaving the impression of a massacre of water lilies. I am seriously considering, as soon as the shop opens tomorrow, acquiring another.
4. A friend who is not on DW sent me an article about Howard Pyle's The Mermaid (1910). I followed the link through to a search for "mermaids" in the collections of the Delaware Art Museum and I am charmed by John Sloan's Atlantic City in Mid-Winter (1894).
5.
spatch took a picture of me in a self-explanatory T-shirt.
