Well, the Oresteia was because I had to: everything else is for pleasure. All right, I don't find Goodbye To All That exactly a pleasure, but I'd finished David Jones' In Parenthesis and this was the only other book from World War I in the apartment. My Robert Graves comfort reading is, naturally, I, Claudius.
Unable to sleep tonight, I read Angela Carter. I am dealing with an intense and hopefully soon to pass envy of her earlier novels, The Magic Toyshop and Honeybuzzard in particular. It's the tactile crowding of objects and setting along with characters who possess a three-dimensionality unassociated with the usual definition; people in her world have weight, their surroundings are cinematically realized down to rust cracks in the sink and thumbprints in the soap. It's the mundane written in such detail that it becomes fantastical. I don't know, I think, how to do that. I wish I did. Nor do I know how to practice it. I should either develop this skill promptly or get over this longing or both.
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Unable to sleep tonight, I read Angela Carter. I am dealing with an intense and hopefully soon to pass envy of her earlier novels, The Magic Toyshop and Honeybuzzard in particular. It's the tactile crowding of objects and setting along with characters who possess a three-dimensionality unassociated with the usual definition; people in her world have weight, their surroundings are cinematically realized down to rust cracks in the sink and thumbprints in the soap. It's the mundane written in such detail that it becomes fantastical. I don't know, I think, how to do that. I wish I did. Nor do I know how to practice it. I should either develop this skill promptly or get over this longing or both.