Yes, blogging really has not been a priority lately. Priority? Natch, not even a passing interest. Even this entry, I confess, is rooted more in sating concern than in writing for any sort of intellectual or communicative purpose. So very little seems to generate anything more than a shrugging response from me that maintaining even a kind of facile pose of interest borders on pointlessness. I hardly care that in that last sentence I mixed enough metaphors to warrant puréeing just for consistency. I'm developing the same passion for writing that one assumes Julia Child had for bioethics and the history of cardboard. Well, writing and just about everything else. Is it possible to raise being blas&ecute; to an art form? Methinks I am a prophet uninspir'd.... (Call it seeing through a glass, Gauntly.)
Anyway, a few brief notes on things. There's a piece from the Aussie paper The Age to which I'd turn your attention, because it makes an argument I'd make if I didn't feel I'd already made it over and over again; give it a gander. Also, I understand there's a massive project to render the classics of the ages through contemporary eyes, a project I'd think more of it did not decide to Atwoodize Homer. (That sound you're hearing in the background is the Not-So-Good Doctor stabbing himself repeatedly in the brain with a corkscrew.) Check out the Grope and Flail's review of the preliminary editions here while I lament the predictability of it all (and collect the bloody remnants of my mind from my keyboard and attempt to stuff them back inside my cranium).
There's also a very funny review of the HBO series Weeds on the CBC's website that's worth a read, particularly for its hilarious opening paragraph. Weeds, for those of you that have not seen it yet, is one of the better shows on the air right now, thanks to solid writing and more especially the wonderful Mary-Louise Parker, one of the best actresses working in the States right now. Sexy, charming, and gifted with some of the most expressive eyes in Hollywood, she's one of the few actresses who can mingle daftness with caginess in perfect proportion, which makes her perfectly unpredictable, distinctly mannered without being manneristic. She also has a slightly flaky air about her that makes her endearing-- in part, I confess, because she reminds me of the kinds of quirky femininity for which I've all-too-many times been, and remain, a sucker, damn it. (Yeah, I know, I know, that's why I'm always getting myself in trouble.... Insert shrugging, grumbling and eye-rolling here.) Anyway, give Weeds a viewing if you haven't yet already: it's what Desperate Housewives could be if it hadn't opted toward pretense and lurid contrivance. Oh, and if it wasn't so manifestly stupid.In other matters, last week's classes on Lycidas went as well as I could have expected, though I am going to try to steal another half-week for it. This will half-delay the planned Marvell (the Mower poems), which in turn will half-delay the beginning of Adam Bede, which I have not taught in a very long time. That I will have to reread Eliot will no doubt please Zelda, who-- by the way!-- is about, with her hubby (the Had Matter??), to celebrate her first wedding anniversary tomorrow. This blog would note that this normally means all signs of post-nuptial cuteness must cease, else incurring much-deserved mockery, so the true stuff of marriage (misery, dissatisfaction, china-hurling fury) can finally begin. But as this blog is feeling uncharacteristically generous, it'll let their terrible cuteness continue unridiculed until it becomes truly unbearable. Happy anniversary, you two, and many happy returns.
With that, I'll finally end this entry, thinking with some temptation that writing all this may mean I can go another several days without having guiltily to write anything here. Pehaps, perhaps? Perchance to dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment