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larryhammerLast year, it was a scary pumpkin. This year's pumpkin said :-). We had trick-or-treaters anyway.
Recently read:
Early Auden and Later Auden, Edward Mendelson - Illuminating and compelling interpretations of the works of my favorite 20th century poet, but gah the last couple chapters are depressing. What Chester Kallman did to Auden did not scarify but ulcerated, and by the 1960s it was eating him up, leaving him a hollow man. No wonder I find little he wrote after "About the House" worth remembering.
The English and Scottish Ballads songs 1-50, James Francis Child - I'm currently reading through all the variants, at the rate of one or two ballads a day. Of the first 50, the creepiest is probably "Proud Lady Margaret," in which the title lady is scornful of a scruffy suitor who then bests her at riddling, and when she admits he's her match reveals that he's her dead brother, then says no, she can't follow him into the grave because she's too dirty, delivers a homily against pride, and finally disappears. Which almost merits a poll: which is worse, getting pregnant by your unrecognized brother or being knowingly courted by your dead brother?
Also, I can only conclude that "wee pen-knife" meant something different in northern England two centuries ago than it does in the States today.
Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures - Being selections from a 18th-century collection of classic Chinese ghost stories and other tales of the supernatural. Quoth the translator: "European students ... have worked from generation to generation in order to translate more and more accurately the thirteen classics, Confucius, Mengtsz, and the others. They did not notice that, once out of school, the Chinese did not pay more attention to their classics than we do to ours: if you see a book in their hands, it will never be the "Great Study" or the "Analects," but much more likely a novel like the "History of the Three Kingdoms," or a selection of ghost-stories." From which you can get an idea of his prosecraft and orientalizing. The ghost stories are genuinely creepy regardless. (The others, not so much.)
Yotsuba&! chapter 76, Kiyohiko Azuma - There is something astonishingly dissonant about seeing the series tag-line "Today is always the most enjoyable day" on a chapter title page of a dejected Yotsuba in pajamas. There's also something rather touching about Yotsuba spending almost an entire chapter dejected.* This is no longer the character of chapter 7, described by her father as "Nothing can get her down -- nothing."
* The voice box of her beloved beddy-tear broke, and was being held overnight by Asagi for "surgery."
---L.
Recently read:
Early Auden and Later Auden, Edward Mendelson - Illuminating and compelling interpretations of the works of my favorite 20th century poet, but gah the last couple chapters are depressing. What Chester Kallman did to Auden did not scarify but ulcerated, and by the 1960s it was eating him up, leaving him a hollow man. No wonder I find little he wrote after "About the House" worth remembering.
The English and Scottish Ballads songs 1-50, James Francis Child - I'm currently reading through all the variants, at the rate of one or two ballads a day. Of the first 50, the creepiest is probably "Proud Lady Margaret," in which the title lady is scornful of a scruffy suitor who then bests her at riddling, and when she admits he's her match reveals that he's her dead brother, then says no, she can't follow him into the grave because she's too dirty, delivers a homily against pride, and finally disappears. Which almost merits a poll: which is worse, getting pregnant by your unrecognized brother or being knowingly courted by your dead brother?
Also, I can only conclude that "wee pen-knife" meant something different in northern England two centuries ago than it does in the States today.
Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures - Being selections from a 18th-century collection of classic Chinese ghost stories and other tales of the supernatural. Quoth the translator: "European students ... have worked from generation to generation in order to translate more and more accurately the thirteen classics, Confucius, Mengtsz, and the others. They did not notice that, once out of school, the Chinese did not pay more attention to their classics than we do to ours: if you see a book in their hands, it will never be the "Great Study" or the "Analects," but much more likely a novel like the "History of the Three Kingdoms," or a selection of ghost-stories." From which you can get an idea of his prosecraft and orientalizing. The ghost stories are genuinely creepy regardless. (The others, not so much.)
Yotsuba&! chapter 76, Kiyohiko Azuma - There is something astonishingly dissonant about seeing the series tag-line "Today is always the most enjoyable day" on a chapter title page of a dejected Yotsuba in pajamas. There's also something rather touching about Yotsuba spending almost an entire chapter dejected.* This is no longer the character of chapter 7, described by her father as "Nothing can get her down -- nothing."
* The voice box of her beloved beddy-tear broke, and was being held overnight by Asagi for "surgery."
---L.