rolling, rolling ... pause

A reason to love being an adult: beginning a holiday with lasagna, salad, and half a glass of white wine.

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This fall and winter, the sounds of a house being built across the street have filled many weekdays and most Saturdays. But not today:



This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/98517.html.

"the angelic streets"

Sifting through more papers and clippings -- an outline of my final exam for Anglo-Irish Literature with Francis X. Kinahan ("'Mkgnao'! Feeding The Kitty" -- "Q: What is the place of the household cat in Ulysses? A (condensed version): Cat functions as emblem of life, in part through the novel's web [of] associations of feline with feminine qualities"), notes made during music history with Philip Bohlman ("Schumann [Songs of Mignon] hard to perform nowadays -- 'unbelievably gorgeous, but utterly sexist'"), and Blake Bailey's 2010 NYT review of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, which begins with this:

"Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are," Jack Kerouac began a typical letter to his friend Allen Ginsberg in 1950. "God's angels are ravishing and fooling me. I saw a whore and an old man in a lunch cart, and God--their faces! I wondered what God was up to."

While looking up the digital copy of Bailey's review, I came across an exhibit of Kerouac's fantasy baseball and horse-racing habit. Golly.

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/387507.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

a note to myself during Janel Mueller's Milton class

"don't try to explain everything - just write"

And apparently I didn't plan to sleep:

-5 work
-1 write like hell
longhand
-3 [double-underlined] read

[shakes head at twenty-year-old self]

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/387767.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

portrait of the blogger as a young critic

From Mueller's comments on "The Presentation of Authorial Self in Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce" (emphasis mine):

... this paper tends toward the loose and baggy in wordy sentence construction and leisurely progression. More economy, more precision, sharper focus will put your fine insights in better stead.

[The full comment is actually very kind, and Mueller was not the first or last professor to tell me to cut the fluff. Ars longa...]

In the meantime, there is someone down the street woo-hooing. Perhaps there is sledding involved.

My neighbor had a bit of a time skidding-sliding out of their garage this morning. I am again glad that I don't have to go anywhere today.

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/388043.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.