Skip to main content
The long Jubilee weekend is almost over. I didn’t go to London to see the queen floating down the Thames on her royal barge. I watched the rain pour all day and listened to the radio. No champagne, no sponge cake. Most of my friends are passionately anti-monarchy and so the hubbub has largely been afar and mostly consisting of my theft of the JCR’s Commemorative Times for a souvenir. I’ve not been converted to republicanism but I do wonder what royalists mean when they congratulate the Queen for doing such a good job, for ‘doing what only she can do best’ (without any clear indication of what that is). At any rate, the pageantry has been magnificent. And I am counting the Daily Mail’s offer of free Jubilee tea-towels after mailing in three tokens.

This afternoon I begin a two-week language portfolio exam which will count for next year’s finals. In the meantime, I’m trying to keep my brain limber and supple and quiet. So I’ve been reading Susan Sontag’s latest volume of journals, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, which I bought weeks ago but has been lost in the tumult of the term. The journals of writers and thinkers reveal a wealth of fragmentary ideas and unexpected anxieties. Sontag’s journals are like scrapbooks of thoughts, film tickets, and books glossed by casual throwaway lines – behind those lines are lived experiences. She hints at plots (matricide, dialogue between Orpheus and Eurydice), and makes lists of ‘Regenerative Experiences’:

Plunge into the sea
The sun
An old city
Silence
Snow-fall
Animals

Or creates her aphoristic judgments, my favourite so far being ‘Style: the manner in which things appear to us as designed for pleasure.’

I suppose I will have to set her aside until the end of June, along with the wonderful letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and the mystery-dramas on Radio 4 extra.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The School of Hard Knocks

It is my current hope to go to graduate school for English literature next year: a certain school in a certain place, both a goal and an insurmountable challenge. Having been out of college for a year already, and having graduated as a music major, I am rusty. Trying to compensate, I googled “books every english major has read” but have had a difficult time finding a list that suggests what every (generalized) English major should have read by the time of (undergraduate) graduation. As a person who attended a high school whose meager syllabus prescribed the study of one novel, one play and four poems a year, and who could only scrape enough college literature credits for a minor, I feel woefully behind. Most American kids got a head start in AP English (seriously – who are those freaks who read Ulysses in high school?). American high schools may have their weaknesses, but a strong and ambitious push to read literature consistently is not one of them. There are gaps, and I fear that wh...
8 comments
Read more

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 .
6 comments
Read more

Once on this island

Island literature is so wonderfully stagey. Like the murder in the English village, the island is a self-contained playground for certain fantasies to run wild, and for certain conceits to be explored. I wonder who first discovered the island as the fertile ground to explore themes of civilization and degeneration? For characters to perform as a microcosm (a word I learned when reading Lord of the Flies ) for society. I traced my way to The Island of Dr. Moreau backwards: from LOST , to Bioy Casares’ Invention of Morel , to a lecture on mad doctors and vivisection (from which I learned the term apophane , or, cutting the vocal chords of an animal so that the vivisector will not be bothered by the sounds of pain by the subject under the knife), to a Penguin Classic picked up in George’s best used bookstore. It was an unnerving and unsafe read: chanting beast-people and scientists with questionable ethics are the only companions this narrator can expect to have on a mysterious island af...
6 comments
Read more