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

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Back up! Back up! Back up!

Have you looked in the underworld for the files?

Nine

[gwynnega]

Sorry your computer is eating itself!

As for Keats: "This Living Hand"!!! Also, his letters are very wonderful.

[kraada.livejournal.com]

Well, on the plus side, if you need a new computer, there are sexy new MacBooks . . .

(They're the new PowerBook line. On Intel processors. Running 4.5x faster than the prior generation. Also with bigger hard drives. *drool*)

[erzebet.livejournal.com]

Can't help you with the Keats. La Belle is the only thing of his I can handle, for reasons you've already stated. :)

Here's a distraction. My mother was/is literally obsessed with Rod McKuen. Um. So, she bought my daughter every book of his ever published, I think, and I've been reading a few of them here and there. Who is this guy anyway?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Here, have angry Keats poem version /I forget/, which I've been working on, on and off, since 1985.

Dead, John Keats? In filthy Roman room.
Your glib sad shade may gibber at the Styx.
You coughed your guts up. Dead, at twenty six.
Your wasted body rots in pagan tomb.
Verse, John Keats? You rarely spoke of doom,
Used your descriptions and stylistic tricks
To clutch a moment when some happy mix
Holds you forever safe and warm, a womb.
But have the peace you sought, rest whole and blessed.
The sparks you struck are true, some of your rhyme
Returns to mind and will not be suppressed,
Comes on and back like waves, becomes sublime.
When all is weighed and said, you did your best
To praise a world that would not give you time.

And you have read Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, haven't you?

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

What's your hardware spec?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I don't like Keats half as well as I do Shelley, but I do like him. For one thing, he has this unbelievable ability to get away with melodrama without it actually being humorously overblown: say what you like about 'The Eve of St. Agnes', or 'Isabella', they aren't farcical, and they very easily could have been. And as papersky says so eloquently, he comes back on you and recurs unexpectedly when you hadn't been thinking of him.

But really, I think I like him mostly for his influence on his contemporaries and on later poets. Shelley, now, Shelley can make me cry.

[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.

[grailquestion.livejournal.com]

Okay, we differ in our opinions on Keats, I can survive that.

But...Arnold???