I Am Five Fairies.

I spent the last week helping put on this awesome thing. Next year, you should definitely come. We had good music and good readings. In the evening devoted to A Midsummer Night's Dream I was five fairies -- the unnamed one from II.i, and the four (yes, in the same scene) that Titania tells to pamper Bottom in III.i. It was also a real privilege to hear the music of both the Collège that hosted the event, and that of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Bassano, who treated us denizens of the savage Vendée to their own lovely music and more interesting information on the possible identity of the "Dark Lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets.

I also got to hear Bach's Suite No.3 in C Major played on a viola. It was beautifully and I cannot describe it.

I am still beavering away on Hugo's L'Homme Qui Rit, which is awesome. As in, unexpectedly and somewhat unprecedentedly epic in the sense of "vast and sweeping." His style is amazing -- in a way, it seems to prefigure Faulkner in his long sweeps of gorgeous rhetoric, of "telling" rather than "showing" with reckless abandon, upon which the kibosh is then put with a single, brief sentence -- often only two words long. The characters have the kind of figured, semi-divine strength I expect (and find) in something like the Gormenghast trilogy, but which are here rendered as street people and secret histories in the singularly muddled late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England. (And yes, it is hilarious to read English words in French, as they suddenly appear like Vikings in Versailles.)

Also, have you read my poem yet? If you haven't, I wish you would -- I think it's pretty good, and it was very, very kind of the good editors and editrices to accept and publish it so handsomely. 

I'm knitting a sock right now, and it's completely addictive.

Forthcoming:  Probably a post on re-reading The Filth by Grant Morrison et al. over the course of two nights.

Poem! (et cetera)

So, the good people at Eternal Haunted Summer have published my poem, "Clotho's Favor." You should definitely go and read it, which you can do here.

Also, there's some messed up things going on with history repeating itself. Like this story from the Wall Street Journal. Debtors' prison? Seriously, America? For one thing, it's pretty pointless; for another, the Founding Fathers were ag'in 'em. I'll find some citations for that, but it's one of the major issues that made people not want to stay in England. So it seems bizarre to trot that old nag out now, of all times. It's pretty weird.

In other news, I'm reading L'Homme Qui Rit by Victor Hugo. I'm reading it for entirely the wrong reasons, but that's okay:  It's still very good. I'm also going to be reviewing another collection of poetry for The Fortnightly Review (new edition), but shhh! Trade secret!

Anyway, I'll have more to say about things later.

Review-kus and some other poetry stuff.

I've done a lot of reading lately, so I will discuss the things I've read by making up some haikus about them. Here they are.

Les Anges Deçus by Catherine Locandro
A book read in French
With unnamed cities sweating --
Tenseness washed by rain.

The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie
This book is too cool
For this form -- more to come soon.
Blood, mud and swords win.

Pavel Florensky:  A Quiet Genius by Avril Pyman
Science and belief
Mingled in this great, brave man,
Undaunted by frost.

Rose Demonics:  Poems, 1936-1963 by Elliot Coleman
Contemporary
Of Eliot, Pound, et. al.,
Coleman's verse is strong.

The Tain, trans. Ciaran Carson
Carson's translation
Has more plot than Kinsella's;
Less mythic strangeness. 

Two other books were also read during my school's half-term break; these are reviewed at greater length here. Thank you, The Fortnightly Review (New Edition) for giving me the privilege of writing for you.

Also, please bear in mind, ladies and gentle-bugs, that my poem "Clotho's Favor" will be appearing in the Spring Equinox issue of Eternal Haunted Summer. Please go and marvel at the fine writing available there. Other stories and poems are in the submissions pipeline and will hopefully be appearing various other places shortly. (I hope.)