And her head has no room

[sovay]

In which I pay for all of yesterday's grinning. There's karmic balance; there really is. I have a migraine, but there is a greater problem: my iTunes library has eaten itself. No music. I'm not quite sure how this happened, and it puzzles me greatly, but I think my computer and I are both heading for the doctor's in the near future.*

On the bright side, the ever-impressive eredien has created livejournal icons from The Cuckoo, so that I now have a terrific icon of Psholtii looking pretty much the way I feel right now. I need a paid account just so I can support my growing icon habit.

Also, since I got into an offline argument about Keats yesterday, am I wrong? Are there reasons I should really like him? I'll give him "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," because I have a soft spot for demon lovers a mile wide, but otherwise I'm mostly left wanting to read Matthew Arnold or Swinburne or any other Romantic but Wordsworth. Distract me. Please.

*I didn't mention before that a few days ago, my mail program also cannibalized one of its own folders, and I lost pretty much all of my writing-related correspondence since 2003. This was not such a disaster, since I'm obsessive and paranoid when it comes to certain areas of my life, and so I had most of the files backed up. I don't think there's anyone's address I lost that I couldn't get back one way or another, and important things like contracts and acceptances and edits are all recorded elsewhere. But I really, really don't want my laptop to crash and take something actually vital with it, say, this lecture I'm working on for Wednesday, or all of my finalized stories since 1999, so . . .

Comments

[larryhammer]

Keats could be a bit of a blitherer, but he was an astonishingly sensual poet when he got the right subject in his teeth. It's this quality, I think, that keeps the melodrama of "The Eve of St. Agnes" from descending to futile purple. I greatly prize the so-called great odes, especially "To Autumn," more for the sound- and sensory-craft than for their content. He's the poet who taught me, even more than Spenser, that a sensually crafted line affects the sense of the verse.

When he's off, tho', his poems are, well, just overwritten. His advice (to the older Shelley no less) of loading every rift of poetry with ore is bad, and it shows in his lesser works.

---L.