I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter

The wind has been howling these three days. Anna said it reminds her of change. To me it seems like madness.

The play finished last night and it has been a spectacular run. We sold all but three tickets in the week and were supported by professors, lecturers, college members, friends, strangers. I think, astoundingly, we made a profit.

I’ve been reading T.S. Eliot and I’ve concluded that April is not the cruelest month, February is. Nothing can be more dead than it is now. Where are the roots that clutch/What branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish?...

And my favorite part:

There is shadow under this red rock
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock)
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Comments

Mr Cogito said…

Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen

February 6, 2011 at 10:06 AM

Ann said…

You see, I told you you would be resounding success. Congratulations.

The trees from my window are barely moving this morning and I can hardly believe that the wind has gone. It has such an effect on us. I used to say to student teachers, "You'll have problems with the children today; it's windy" and they would look at me as if I was mad - until they got into the classroom.

February 9, 2011 at 12:52 AM

Natural Love

We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .

Attention poetry mavens: any suggestions for good contemporary poets (either in general or particular collections)? Have sudden appetite but very little idea where to start. Any advice welcome!

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Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man is nothing less than a modern masterpiece and, I have no doubt, will turn out to be one of my favorite books of 2010. The novel follows George as he struggles through a single day in 1960’s Los Angeles following the death of his lover. George wakes up, goes to the university where he teaches literature, goes to the gym, has dinner with a friend, gets drunk at a dive bar, swims in the ocean, and arrives at the end. George is “three quarters human,” a machine trying to keep himself alive until it is time not to be. Like an actor, he is absent from humanity. When he looks at his neighbors, at the suburban families, he thinks "They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flash-lamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gordon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinki...

A Shelf of One's Own

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