Fucksticks!

      The recently-mentioned lass that spoke all-too-kindly of the N-S-G Doctor is a mere 19 (nine-teen). Suddenly, not only has some of the lustre of her response slid away, but so too has come with it the sense of "oh, no, this is so, so wrong, so very, very wrong." Worse (but not badly, in itself), I ran into a woman I've not seen since high school, and, idiot that I am, I pointed out that the last time I'd seen said woman, said lass was a mere SIX years old. Oh, lord. Time is an ironic bitch, isn't she? I'd relay more of the embarrassing tales here, save that I'm now tired and contemplating a retreat into a spider-hole. I'm too old for this shit.... *rolls eyes* Free me from this concatenation of irony! Nineteen. Kill me now... Oh, so very, very wrong....

      On the flip side, was rereading Frank Kermode on John Donne tonight, and thinking that my own imagined design for the "Donne class" in an Introduction to Poetry class increasingly spot on: that he is both the exception and the rule to a lot of the principles of poetry and poetic thought, and that he has to be contextualised in that regard. I'd, in such a situation, want to put Donne by himself, in a class after the Elizabethan masters (Spenser and Shakespeare, though I'd have set aside a seperate session for Sidney and Astrophil and Stella and the sonnet-cycle). Woj, if ye read this, can we do a class just on Donne? Or two? Or.... No, I'll stop there. Kermode on Donne, though, is quite good, and every time I read Kermode I wonder why more contemporary lit crits can't be as good as he is, or even pale shadows in that regard.

      John Donne would certainly not have cared much for my writing in this post, but he most certainly would have appreciated the contrasts, and the lascivious factor. Were oh were I as witty as JD.

      Okay, I'm done now. Not Donne, but.... Yeah, I know. Bogger if. ;-)