A Shelf of One's Own

Music do I hear? Ha, ha! Keep time: how sour sweet music is When time is broke and no proportion kept! - Richard II

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o the puddin'-race! Aboon them a' ye tak your place, Painch, tripe, or thairm: Weel are ye worthy o' a grace As lang's my arm. Robert Burns' Address to the Haggis

'Harriet has made a contrapuntal composition, so intricate she is unable to play it. What can be played sounds post Schoenberg, but that may be due to her faulty command of what Allen would call traditional skills.’ - Robert Lowell on his daughter to Peter & Eleanor Taylor

Blessing for someone using the Bodleian libraries: May everything you want be there in the right order.

Space seems to be either tamer or more inoffensive than time: we're forever meeting people who have watches, very seldom people who have compasses. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces

Theseus: Say, what abridgement have you for this evening? What masque? what music? How shall we beguile The lazy time, if not with some delight? Midsummer Night's Dream V:i

One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow... From Wallace Stevens' The Snow Man

‘I have a vague theory that one learns most – I have learned most from having someone suddenly make fun of something one has taken seriously up until then.’ Elizabeth Bishop to Anne Stevenson

'To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow a trace, a mark, or a few signs.’ - George Perec, Species of Spaces

Over Christmas my dad said he’d noticed that nothing had been happening on this blog, and it’s true. Moreover, it’s probably going to get – in a way – worse, as I prepare for my final examinations in May. My good angel says keeping a blog – writing for its own sake – would be a welcome alternative to weekly work, but the truth is that the quality would be very low and uninspired. I predict as the next two terms wear on that my trips outside the garret (I’m living once more in my happy attic room overlooking Holywell Street) will be less and less and that my excursions into books not necessary to my passing Finals will be similarly restricted. I’d still like to keep this moving, however, if only as a record to myself of what I’m reading. So, in that spirit I’d like to post a quotation every day – long or short – from something I’ve read during the day. I’m going to try to avoid the purely inspirational and vary it from day to day and present amusing things from the newspaper, from poe...