I heard the wings beat on the streets tonight

[sovay]

I went to Porter Square Books and bought the recent Penguin collection of Arthur Machen, The White People and Other Weird Stories. I drank herbal chai and read two stories out of S.T. Joshi's American Supernatural Tales (2013), which is for the record a beautifully designed hardcover. Tim Kendall's Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (2013) is the first such I've seen that includes female poets: Charlotte Mew, Mary Borden, Margaret Postgate Cole, May Wedderburn Cannan. I had heard of none of them beyond Mew and I wonder how many more I don't know about.

I walked home with my book when I ran out of chai. I met derspatchel for dinner at Hana Sushi and ate slightly more fish than I was expecting. (No regrets. More sushi should include both spicy salmon and chopped apple.) I want to watch Mark Gatiss' The Tractate Middoth (2013), but I can't find it anywhere online.

Frances Hardinge writes what she calls "Lovecraftian culinary fiction" (I thought it was more like ecology by Mervyn Peake). Daniel José Older writes about Lovecraft.

I want to know why I become ambitious only when I am too stupid to get anything done.

Comments

[rosefox]

I want to know why I become ambitious only when I am too stupid to get anything done.

Fear of success?

[sovay]

Fear of success?

I don't think so; I would like very much to be successful. I am tired of existing in a very small circle. It's more that it seems profoundly useless for me to think of complex writing projects when I'm not even getting enough sleep to feel that I'm doing my actual, paying job effectively. (I need a better actual, paying job while we're at it, but that's another conversation.)

[rosefox]

Wanting to be successful and fearing success aren't incompatible. I'm just wondering how much of that sense of uselessness comes from Tiny Wittgenstein, who risks getting tinier every time you accomplish something and may be fighting back against that.

Of course, I might just be projecting!

[alankria.livejournal.com]

...I was never told at school, at my all-girls school, that women wrote WW1 poetry too.

[sovay]

...I was never told at school, at my all-girls school, that women wrote WW1 poetry too.

I didn't think of war poets when I thought of Charlotte Mew. And yet she wrote poems like "The Cenotaph" and "May, 1915." There's nothing else to call that. Mary Borden was a nurse with the French Red Cross—excuse me, I mean she established and ran her own hospital on the Belgian front and then moved to follow the worst of the fighting, so that in 1916 she was running a hospital on the Somme. She wrote "At the Somme" there, as well as a semi-memoir called The Forbidden Zone that she couldn't publish until 1929 for censorship. (She also served in World War II.) Margaret Postgate Cole was a political activist—socialist, feminist—who wrote novels with her husband and taught Classics on her own. "The Falling Leaves" seems to be her most famous poem, but I was very struck by "Afterwards." May Wedderburn Cannan worked for the Red Cross and the War Office and lost her fiancé not in the fighting, but in the flu pandemic; she wrote "Lamplight." If you were a poet and lived through those times, I don't think you could not write about it. But women writing about war, of course, must be different.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

A good haul of books. I missed The Tractate Middoth too, which really annoyed me.

Thanks for the link to the Hardinge! It looks great. I'll read that later.

[sovay]

I missed The Tractate Middoth too, which really annoyed me.

Link if you find it! I'm relying on you, finder of The Cicerones.

Thanks for the link to the Hardinge! It looks great. I'll read that later.

Enjoy! I don't think she writes very much short fiction. We were actually in the same issue of Alchemy in 2006, which didn't quite register until I was reading Fly by Night (2005) a few years ago.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

I'll let you know if I find it!

(ETA: I did!)

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Tim Kendall's Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (2013) is the first such I've seen that includes female poets...

I'd never encountered poetry by women on that war before, and now I feel slightly ashamed for never having noticed that lack, because of course women would have written about it, and some of them would have been poets.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's only when you're exhausted that your time isn't spoken for? And therefore your brain can do its free-ranging, inspiration-gathering thing?

I am approaching too-stupid right now, and--did you know that if you're very exhausted, apparently you stop seeing things in a continuous fashion and instead see them strobe-light style? And that's what happens when monks and warriors meditate on a waterfall, waiting to see it stop (or so I'm told by some source which, why am I sure it's authoritative??)--which is A Thing. They do see it stop, because in their exhaustion, they stop integrating the images, and they become strobelike. Stills of the waterfall.

Which I mention because that was how I got this post. Empty cup of chai. Oh, and before that, a cluster of female poets. And fish--but not with the poets or in the chai. Though the salmon was spicy, but perhaps not Lovecraftianly culinary?

[sovay]

(ETA: I did!)

You rock!

[sovay]

I'd never encountered poetry by women on that war before, and now I feel slightly ashamed for never having noticed that lack, because of course women would have written about it, and some of them would have been poets.

It's a very strange absence. I think some of it must come from the assumption that "war poet" is synonymous with "poet who was a soldier," like so many of the generation of World War I, but that automatically writes out all experiences of combat that were not directly, officially military (tell that to all the ambulance drivers) and the effects of living through a war as a civilian, which is not the same thing as being unaffected by a war. And then you cut that with straightforward sexism—it's not a woman's place to write about war—and I'm not surprised that I'd never seen any female war poets anthologized before, I'm just sorry. It would have been useful.

[sovay]

Maybe it's only when you're exhausted that your time isn't spoken for? And therefore your brain can do its free-ranging, inspiration-gathering thing?

I worry it's more like becoming loopy from lack of sleep, but maybe they're the same thing by different names. I am just feeling very ground down and very out of physical and mental resources at the minute, which is a bad way to head into a major convention.

Empty cup of chai. Oh, and before that, a cluster of female poets. And fish--but not with the poets or in the chai. Though the salmon was spicy, but perhaps not Lovecraftianly culinary?

This is almost a poem. You should make it one.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

This is almost a poem. You should make it one.

I should--a poem that also has rosewood writing desks, and live scorpions, in it.