January 2018
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This is a guest post from Rob Grano. You are unlikely to have heard of this group, or heard this song, unless you’ve watched early episodes of the TV show Justified, in one episode of which this song was played over the closing sequence. I liked it very much, but can’t remember how I…
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When I was young–not just younger than I am now, but actually young, around twenty or so–I placed something close to a moral value on aesthetic judgment. That is, if someone had what I deemed to be incorrect aesthetic judgment, I considered it a personal defect. If not an actual sin (though I would not…
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This has got to be one of my favorites: This Is Just To Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold (1934, William Carlos Williams, 1883 – 1963) Those last three lines are exhilarating,…
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I've been having some unusually vivid dreams lately, and some of those have stayed with me longer than dreams usually do, and were more coherent than dreams usually are. One from a week or so ago can justifiably be called Kafkaesque: I was about to be executed for no reason that I knew of. I…
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On New Year's Eve we went to a party in Germany, invited by my brother who lives in the Westerwald. It's a three-hour drive each way, and we didn't intend to stay more than two or three hours at the party, so I cast about for something to break the journey, and increase the proportion…
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I finished the two remaining Charles Williams novels (see the November 26 post) a week or two ago, and I'd better say something about them while I still remember them well enough to do so. They are The Greater Trumps and Shadows of Ecstacy. The short verdict is that it was fitting that I read them last,…
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This is the first poem that came to mind when Mac brought up the idea of 52 Poems before the group. It is silly, of course. Romantic poetry always seems a little silly. Nevertheless, it is the one poem, perhaps along with "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which I have never forgotten from a poetry…
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How, how is it possible that this is the year 2018 A.D.? I have a clear memory of sitting in Mrs. Bruce's 6th grade class, which means it was 1959 or '60 and I was eleven or twelve years old, and wondering for the first time (as far as I remember) how old I would be…
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I suppose I read this poem a dozen times or so when I encountered it in one of my college textbooks. It was either second-semester English, where we used the old favorite Sound and Sense anthology, which I still have, or in a higher-level course in Victorian poetry, where we used a lime-green paperback called something like Victorian…
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I hate to admit it, but for four or five years now I've been slowly turning into one of those people who feel depressed at the approach of Christmas. Still, I usually find that I snap out of it, more or less, by the time the day itself arrives–if I don't feel so very good,…
Light On Dark Water 