Jacena i Nuinda

Guilty pleasures vs. books that would be if I didn't I hate them too much

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 19:51:46 GMT

I really need a snappier title.

My guilty pleasure author is Simon R. Green. He has an urban fantasy series (10 books right now), a secondary world fantasy series (10 books if you count the ones that are all connected), a science fiction series (10 books), the Secret Histories series (4 books so far, which does the "hidden all-powerful but highly dysfunctional family protecting the world from evil" shtick while parodying James Bond), and a couple books that don't fit in anywhere else (like the novelization of the movie Robin Hood that he was tapped to write). Ideas come a mile a minute. Infodumps are everywhere. People randomly fall in love, and there is at least one heroic sacrifice per book. The style doesn't vary depending on genre; it's half gore, half one-liners, layered with mawkish sentimentality and psychotic killers. Trying to take Simon R' Green's writing seriously, for me, is like trying to take the claims of potato chips to be a health food seriously. And I get the impression that he knows this, and is having a hell of a lot of fun. I read him when my brain wants a vacation because I know they're silly, and to get a good feeling for what he's like, look at the second cut with spoilers for the latest Secret Histories novel.

But a lot of other "fun" books, I've read, particularly urban fantasy, try to be dark and brooding- it doesn't help that a lot of them are getting some of their DNA from noir mystery, except that there's no sign the authors have ever read Chandler- and in doing so, they become worse than silly: they become laughable.

Spoilers for Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series and Seanan McGuire's October Daye series.

1) First of all, idiot plots. Okay, so you're locked in a building with a steadily increasing number of murders and thus steadily diminishing number of suspects, and yet you literally cannot solve the mystery until you are down to two people? When the character is touted as being an awesome detective, for decades? When I spotted the killer's identity on page 50? Wow.

Also, you never ask to see their employment dossiers? Okay!

Also, instead of being careful after being wounded once, you keep doing things that tear your wounds further open, which means you fall unconscious at least three times.

Also, your reaction to every single emotional upset is to cry. Along with the reaction of every other character in the book.

Also, someone tells you they've got to convey important information to you, right now, but you'd rather go to sleep instead because of aforementioned stupid wound-tearing actions. And then of course you wake up and they're murdered.

(This was all in one book).

When I am tons smarter than your awesome detective heroine who is supposedly a) an expert in her job and b) skilled and experienced because of decades living between the human and the fae worlds, then it is time to introduce your book to the wall.

2) Stupid villains. Butcher has far too many people who want to torture his hero instead of just killing him. Sure, I could buy some of them being like that. But not all of them. Also, when they do decide to kill him, they always approach slowly. No.

3) Villain monologues. October Daye only "solves" her mysteries because the villains tell her every single detail at the end of the stories. Yes, coincidence and insane villains totally contribute to my taking your book seriously.

4) Stupid gender attitudes. Harry Dresden likes to brag about how hard and cold he is, but he goes berserk when a woman is harmed, can be seduced by female vampires who he knows are trying to control his mind, and notices the breasts of every single woman over puberty. He also knows this is a problem, but excuses it with "chivalry." After twelve books in which he's faced female as well as male villains at all sorts of levels, this becomes less a character trait and more of a meta "this is what I want to do, and doesn't it make the character awesome???" trait that would shame a teenage Mary Sue writer high on sugar. At least most teenage Mary Sue writers are not publishing twelve books full of their stuff.

By the way, according to October Daye, the best time to have sex is after you've just lost a ton of blood, and the best person to have it with is your sleazy ex who abused you in the past but who you still believe loves you anyway and has done weird things that ought to make you suspect him in the past few days. I can't imagine why her method isn't more popular.

5) Characters never having to pay for their mistakes. The mistake Seanan McGuire chooses to have her heroine brood on is a death, which does, in fact, happen as a direct result of the heroine's actions. Okay! But she broods on the death because she "failed to be a hero" for the dead girl, when the girl died because the heroine couldn't bring herself to stop or harm someone who had just confessed to murder and torture. Because, you see, she loves him. The heroine's complicity in the girl's death in this fashion is never mentioned.

Same thing with Harry Dresden. Have a fallen angel in your head that could corrupt your soul and that got there because of your own carelessness? Well, see, what happens is that you worry endlessly about it, and then she turns out to be good after all because you had one pompous conversation with her about free will and she sacrifices herself for you. Burn your hand with a blast of uncontrolled fire? Don't worry, it turns out that it's going to grow back, based on a fortuitous discovery in the next novel! Be prepared to sacrifice yourself for your child? Well, you know, you don't have to, because you can force the mother of the child to sacrifice herself instead.

Gaaaaah.

*For example, in the first 100 pages of From Hell With Love- the titles of this series parody James Bond novels, so The Man With the Golden Gun becomes The Man with the Golden Torc, etc.- there have been: the slaughter of two armies, the destruction of a supposedly invulnerable hotel, the destruction of a supposedly invulnerable dragon, villains with the names of Doctor Delirium and the Immortals, a conversation with a woman called the Waking Beauty who can never sleep because she traded her dreams to the elves for immortality, two violent murders, a riot, an argument that nearly resulted in people killing each other, a visit to a forest full of murderous beasts and talking squirrels, biker witches, a description of a house guarded by steampunk airships and winged unicorns, and weapons with names like the Gemini Replicator. Simon R. Green never met an idea he didn't like.

Sorry for causing such worry!

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:05:47 GMT

I only now realized how long it's been since I updated on either JF or IJ. A number of circumstances combined to make that true, but once I found my way back onto the Internet, I should have started updating again. I'll try to update at least once a week from now on.

Mostly, a combination of things:

1) I started a new job in a place where the only Internet access I had was through work, and that usually for an hour or so a day, so I was usually using it for research. I did finally manage to get Internet access at home last week.
2) I've been working pretty hard to finish my Ph.D. dissertation, and though it's still not done, I'm less frantic about it than I was.
3) I turned off the comments I was receiving on JF and IJ just to reduce the amount of e-mail I'd have to check when I did get a chance. That's back on now that I'll be able to more regularly participate again. (This is the part I'm sorriest about. I didn't know that people were worried and now that I check...*wince*)
4) I've been getting sick every week for the past month. I'm not sure if it's mono (which I've supposedly already had) or just a susceptibility to sinus infections and other germs combined with a major lack of sleep. That's decreased my energy and my ability to keep up with anything but work.

Sorry, again, for worrying anyone.

Wow, Anthony Trollope actually made me snicker.

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:34:40 GMT

Considering how hard I found it to get through most of The Eustace Diamonds, that's saying something.

"There is no vulgar error so vulgar,—that is to say, common or erroneous, as that by which men have been taught to say that mercenary tendencies are bad. A desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilization comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combined with honesty and they cannot take you astray." This the future Chancellor of the Exchequer said with much of that air and tone of wisdom which a Chancellor of the Exchequer ought to possess.

-From Can You Forgive Her?.

Ouch

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:22:41 GMT

We just had to take our dog to the vet. Something bit him, and given the lack of non-ferocious dogs in the neighborhood (seriously, the only dog that might have done anything like it is a bulldog that lives almost a mile away), it was probably a coyote. He's very lucky he managed to get away.

He'll be all right, but he's a thirteen-year-old dog, very small, and it was hard on him.

What could actually make the LJ elections funny

Tue, 27 May 2008 18:13:04 GMT

-If someone conducted a poll of how many people changed their votes to ones against the people Aja recommended after reading her post.
-If people who are fans, but not fans in the way Aja defines it*, had their own candidates and a hope of winning.
-If more people remembered that not even Brad has been able to make the advisory board do squat.

Do you have more suggestions to make the elections funny? Share them here!

*Once again, "media fandom" rules all; people who are SFF fans, attend conventions, and run committees are not good enough to be "part of the Livejournal incarnation of fandom." You have to write fanfic, draw fanart, or vid, donchaknow. Those are the Holy Trinity.

Hee.

Thu, 22 May 2008 19:10:41 GMT

One of the wankers from the recent SPN wank who wanted to explain to us how misogyny does not really matter cannot log into her Facebook.

It's wrong of me to feel schadenfreude about this, isn't it.

Yay!

Mon, 19 May 2008 15:04:02 GMT

Incarnation is finished, at 119,200 words.

I ended up more satisfied with it than I thought I would at first. In the middle, the plot went all bendy, and I had to chase the characters around to figure out what they were doing. This is definitely the section in need of the heaviest revision.

But I managed to find an ending that suited the characters without resorting to the violence that seemed inevitable for a little while- fitting, since Incarnation is largely about politics, diplomacy, individual choice and sacrifice, fudging "inviolable" standards, and other means of avoiding war. It's set among a nation of religious dissidents who left their native country, went into uninhabited country, and used magic to make themselves native to that country instead of invading someone else, and who have very strict prescriptions against killing one another. Anything is better than war and its consequences, murder and torture and the waste of life and land. I've always been interested in writing a novel like this, since so many fantasies do assume that war is necessary, even if sadly so, and the characters tend not to make more than token gestures toward preventing it.

I like it.

Goddamn it, I knew I should have banned him.

Fri, 16 May 2008 14:02:45 GMT

"Him" being millennium_king, who's made several trollish comments about race and gender on my IJ, and now is in an argument about the same issues on a post months old over there. It's the usual stupid "White privilege doesn't exist, you're the one being racist and sexist by talking about race and gender issues" shit.

*goes to ban_set*

Today is a day full of fail!

Wed, 14 May 2008 16:07:56 GMT

bunny thinks she's cool for getting all srs bzns on someone mocking the Twilight books without having read them.

Her "explanation" a few comments down isn't much good, either.

(As it turns out, I have (accidentally, as part of a larger series of files) downloaded copies of the Twilight books. I wonder if I should actually read them.)

t_boy fails for not understanding how someone can get aroused from watching two guys together: "I mean, it's not exactly something you watch to get aroused for, the way guys look at lesbians porning out."

And psychofangirl just posted a wank to F_W (deleted) that included the wanker's home address.

Yay?

The Politics of Attitude

Mon, 05 May 2008 00:17:38 GMT

This is a problem I try to address in all my writing, but often have little success with. I think it's one of those ideas that are inherently difficult to do well.

Briefly, what fascinates me most about a secondary world in fantasy or SF is the attitudes its characters have toward life. Is it a comic view? A tragic one? What is most important in the economic system: profit, lives, reputation, or something else? What are the relations between the sexes in the societies presented, sure, but even more improtantly, what kind of emotional postures do the sexes take toward each other? (Fantasies that don't think about this end up with the unconscious "women are less important than men" cliché; fantasies that do think about it, but simplistically, end up with the "women are revered because they're closer to nature, duh!" attitude). What are the historical events that ally countries or pit them against one another, but also, what are the reputations and residue those historical events have left behind in the minds of the people living now?

I want the characters to think like people of their culture would think, their thoughts rising naturally out of the emotions and unacknowledged prejudices and social forces driving them.

But this? Extremely hard to get into print. Try to do it and all sorts of unsavory things can happen. You can smash all characters flat into either acceptance of the dominant attitude or one-dimensional opposition of it; look at Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, where you're capitalist if you're Good, and socialist if you're Evil.

You can allow your own real-world attitudes to influence what happens in the story, to its detriment. Anne McCaffrey retconned her own canon to take gay characters out, even though she'd set it up that way and an accepting attitude toward homosexuality made more sense in the context of the world (characters being overwhelmed by passion when their dragons mated and supposedly grabbing the other rider to have unthinking sex immediately; now McCaffrey claims that the dragonriders' girlfriends or wives always step in). Some of the criticism I've read of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, absolutely baffled by the ending of the novel, points out that the ending makes sense if you look at Eliot's attitude toward the autobiographical elements in the book, but it's absolutely wrong for the characters involved.

You can try your very hardest to incorporate attitudes into the book and still wind up with a tangled mess. Most of George Meredith's novels are like that. He does his very best to, say, reconcile idealism and realism, but he ends up with characters that don't act "realistically" enough for many readers and also aren't good enough to seem like people from a romance. Some retellings of fairy tales fall flat for the same reason; the author is trying to reconcile the dream logic of a distinctly non-modern story with modern moral ideas, and the whole thing explodes.

So the problem becomes how to do this and have it work, and, even more, have it be part of the story, rather than something tacked on.

I don't know how yet.

Book review post for April (part 1)

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 02:05:37 GMT

Haven’t done one of these in a long time, so I’ve got a lot of novels to cover; I’ll do another post sometime soon.

George Meredith, One of Our Conquerors

Where do you start with this one?

Okay. The basic story: Victor Radnor is a successful businessman whose main activity, when he’s not brokering deals, arranging musical gatherings, and being proud of his daughter, is waiting for his wife to die. He married Mrs. Burman, about twenty years his senior, to get hold of her money. Then he fell in love with her young companion, Nataly, and they eloped together. Of course, the little problem of Victor’s first marriage means that they’re living together without benefit of holy matrimony. Their daughter, Nesta, has no idea she’s illegitimate—but every time Victor tries to set up their household in a socially acceptable neighborhood, the rumors find them, and Nataly is tormented by them. Now he’s built a new house, Lakelands, and Nataly is horribly worried the same thing will happen all over again, just as Nesta is being courted. Victor remains confident that Mrs. Burman will die any moment now and set them all free.

The style of this novel is tortured, possibly on purpose; Meredith wrote it when he was in his sixties and had just achieved popular success after thirty years’ hard labor as a writer and editor, and he badly wanted to say, “Take that!” to the critics who had always complained about the way he wrote. So the first sentence of the novel, describing Victor slipping on an orange peel, goes: “A gentleman, noteworthy for a lively countenance and a waistcoat to match it, crossing London Bridge at noon on a gusty April day, was almost magically detached from his conflict with the gale by some sly strip of slipperiness, abounding in that conduit of the markets, which had more or less adroitly performed the trick upon preceding passengers, and now laid this one flat amid the shuffle of feet, peaceful for the moment as the uncomplaining who have gone to Sabrina beneath the tides.” Nesta, whose nickname is Fredi, appears this way: “Upon the opening of the door, there was a cascade of muslin downstairs. His darling Fredi stood out of it, a dramatic Undine.” And so on.

Meredith is also both allusive and elusive. Most of the really important scenes take place off-stage. Blink and you’ll miss a reference to a character’s emotions or hidden problems, or possibly mistake the real thing for a metaphor. Because a large part of the novel shares Victor’s perspective on the other characters, it took me a while to realize exactly what sort of pain Nataly’s silence concealed. Meredith’s major theme is how marriages (and courtships) fall apart, because he believed men and women were both so deformed by the inequality of the sexes that they could not recognize or understand each other. And that’s what’s happening here. Do not read One of Our Conquerors for happy fun times.

I would say it’s a good novel and worth the work. But I have read fourteen Meredith novels. I am biased.

Justine Larbalestier, Magic or Madness

Reason Cansino, at fifteen years old, has spent most of her life on the run around Australia with her mother, fleeing from her evil witch of a grandmother, Esmeralda. But now her mother has gone mad, and Reason is committed to Esmeralda’s care. She quickly starts discovering that the magic her mother described as “light and mirrors” is slightly more than that.

One thing that impressed me about this book was the sense of darkness in it. Reason’s perspective is, in a way, innocent, since she’s grown up out of cities and away from most popular culture, and she’s a bit scornful of people who can’t look at a wall and immediately count how many stones it contains, or recite the Fibonacci sequence in their heads. But there are unsettling clues that keep showing up just at the moment where you think Reason’s following a false trail. The truth about the other characters is not identical with what Reason thinks, but neither is it identical with the thoughts of the two more “experienced” teenage narrators in the book, Esmeralda’s next-door-neighbor Tom and the New York runaway J.T. Magic isn’t an escape into a land full of unicorns. There are multiple prices to be paid for it. And the ending is a cliffhanger that probably wouldn’t work for everyone, but which immediately made me want to read on.

There were other things I enjoyed, too: Reason being into mathematics, and the fact that she isn’t completely white (her father was an Aborigine).

However, I also felt like there was a lot missing from the story. There’s an antagonist who’s obviously terrible, but the truth about him remains shadowy enough to dilute the fear, even when we’re in the head of J.T., who knows the most. Reason is a transparent narrator, perhaps because she’s written in first person; Tom and J.T. seem to hold back on things they really have no reason not to think about for the sake of maintaining the book’s mystery. This eventually drove me nuts. And it’s a trick that I usually like and respect when other narratives use it.

I also found it hard, at some points, to care about what happened to Reason. She’s competent and wise and street-smart, but then she gets manipulated endlessly by the people around her. And there are several long stretches of the story where the reader has knowledge Reason doesn’t, thanks to the other narrators, so it’s a process of waiting for her to catch up. That, in turn, lessens the force of her epiphanies on the reader when they do come. I really think this is a book that would have benefited from being written in just one viewpoint.

Elizabeth Bear, Dust

Set on a crippled colony ship, the Jacob’s Ladder, rotating around two stars about to explode, Dust has an awful lot of the medieval romance about it. There are literal knights (post-humans, some with wings), angels (the remnants of a superintelligent AI that broke up at some point in the distant past), courts, and peasants (people without the genetic and nanotechnological benefits the post-humans possess). The story begins with the capture of a knight named Perceval by Ariane, who virtually controls the court of Rule; Ariane cut off Perceval’s wings after she surrendered. Rien, a servant girl in Rule, is assigned to take care of Perceval until the moment Ariane is ready to consume her memories and her nanotechnology. Perceval reveals that she and Rien are half-sisters. Rien frees her, and they set off on a quest across the world.

I will say that the world is extremely cool. I don’t think it’s truly a successful attempt to blend SF and fantasy, but if you really like medieval romance, stories about generational ships, or both, Dust is worth your time. There are also a few engaging minor characters—Gavin, the blowtorch that has formed itself into the shape of a basilisk, is one—and some of the meetings between estranged characters trying to figure out how to fit into one another’s lives have a realistic awkwardness.

But from my viewpoint, Dust took three of the things I found irritating in Bear’s other novels and mixed them with two new irritating things that left me unsure why I kept reading. The first three irritations are the lack of emotional connection with the characters and everybody turning out to be related to everybody from Blood and Iron, and the convoluted, hard-to-follow politics from Carnival. The fourth is what I find to be an extremely problematic handling of sexual orientation. I literally cannot say more about that without getting into spoilers that will destroy the end of the book for you.

The fifth is a sense of randomness about some of the revelations included. At one point Rien encounters what’s apparently a revered artifact of the ship’s earlier culture. She draws her breath in awe, the scene ends, and when we return to Rien’s viewpoint, she has abandoned all thought of that artifact. The only other references to it are in a few chapter epigraphs. Its significance is never explained. Maybe it’ll be explained in the next few books of the trilogy. At the moment, it’s just a random shard of glass in the book’s stainless steel world.

If the book sounds interesting, you might want to read it. I’m completely the wrong audience for it.

Tanith Lee, A Heroine of the World

What a weird book.

No, seriously, what a weird book. This book is about Aradia, the daughter of a kingdom defeated in war. When the conquering enemy overruns her city, she’s taken as a concubine by the general who moves into her aunt’s house, and from there carried off to his northern country. Along the way, there is rape, death, pregnancy, forced marriage, constant danger, truly creepy sexual harassment, true love, and beautiful description.

I think it’s the last combined with everything else in the novel that led to the overwhelming feeling of oddness as I was reading it. A Heroine of the World is about what probably would happen to a young woman—when the story starts, Aradia is 13—caught up in war and conquest in a fantasy world where women have neither social status or something else like magic to even the scales with men. Aradia is not a trained warrior; she’s extremely naïve in the political realities of the world; she’s religious in the absolute worst way; she has recognizable trauma and depression, to the point that reading some of her sections made me want to curl up and die. So she’s a pawn for most of the narrative. She takes some actions, one at least that changes the whole course of the story, but they’re always small and don’t do much good in the short term, or sometimes in the long term either. Most of the men she meets try to victimize her. Lee is more brutal toward her heroine than Martin is toward his. If A Song of Ice and Fire makes you want to start looking for a razor blade and a nice warm bath, avoid A Heroine of the World at all costs.

But along the way, Lee is describing everything beautifully, especially the estate Aradia’s first husband owns. She actually managed to make me interested in the clothes and the makeup the female characters wear; I literally cannot remember the last time a book did that. So the horror is tucked inside glittering sentences, which don’t really muffle it but make it possible to go on reading.

This book is weird.

Hee. Sometimes I love nineteenth-century reviews

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:14:27 GMT

They say scathing things in such an uptight manner.

This is from a review by J. W. Marston, in 1862, of Meredith's "Modern Love" (his long poem on the failure of a marriage, based on his own desertion by his wife):

"We are not sure that, after great labour, we have arrived at Mr Meredith’s drift; but we are quite sure that, if we have, we do not care for it…We have already intimated that ‘Modern Love’ contains passages of true beauty and feeling; but they are like the casual glimpses of a fair landscape in some noxious clime, where the mists only break to gather in again more densely. Besides, the best gifts of expression would be wasted on a theme so morbid as the present."

Because sometimes things bother me more the more I think about them.

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 02:25:39 GMT

Okay. So I'm familiar with A Door Into Ocean and the Holdfast series by Suzy McKee Charnas, but are there any other books- preferably SF or fantasy, but I'm so irritated at this point that I'll happily take a look at mystery, mainstream, or maybe romance, too- someone could recommend me where a woman actually has sex with a woman?

Not has sex with a man.
Not has sex with a hermaphrodite (because it is so totally better to have sex with someone with a cock than with just those female body parts, and we all know cocks have their own sort of inherent attractiveness, even for someone who prefers women!)
Not falls in love with and pines after the unattainable straight or asexual woman.

(Those last two may or may not have happened in the same book). *explodes*

Anyone?

Goddamnit

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:51:44 GMT

Goddamn it, why is a FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR defending theferret?

(In case you're not sure whom I mean, matociquala is the LJ name of Elizabeth Bear, who has written several feminist SF books, including the gender-reversed Carnival, about gay male ambassadors to a planet ruled by women).

And it's the same "But it was consensual! And anyway, people hug at other cons, so no one has the right to object to someone asking to grope you!" line of bullshit as appeared in other LJ's.

That makes me feel unclean.

Oh, of course, he's not a misogynist, he's my friend!

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 01:28:49 GMT

He just forgot that people outside his little group of breast-gropers aren't as enlightened as he is!

I keep having this feeling of vague dislike whenever I read a comment by queencallipygos. Well, now I'll have something solid to attach it to.

Poetry week post 6- Alfred Noyes, Sherwood

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:05:48 GMT

This is a poem I discovered by accident a few years ago when wandering around bartleby.com. I love the rhythm, once again, and the use of relatively simple words to create and sustain a mood. This poem is almost always best if read aloud.

Sherwood

Sherwood in the twilight, is Robin Hood awake?
Grey and ghostly shadows are gliding through the brake,
Shadows of the dappled deer, dreaming of the morn,
Dreaming of a shadowy man that winds a shadowy horn.

Robin Hood is here again: all his merry thieves
Hear a ghostly bugle-note shivering through the leaves,
Calling as he used to call, faint and far away,
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.

Merry, merry England has kissed the lips of June:
All the wings of fairyland were here beneath the moon,
Like a flight of rose-leaves fluttering in a mist
Of opal and ruby and pearl and amethyst.

Merry, merry England is waking as of old,
With eyes of blither hazel and hair of brighter gold:
For Robin Hood is here again beneath the bursting spray
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.

Love is in the greenwood building him a house
Of wild rose and hawthorn and honeysuckle boughs:
Love is in the greenwood, dawn is in the skies,
And Marian is waiting with a glory in her eyes.

Hark! The dazzled laverock climbs the golden steep!
Marian is waiting: is Robin Hood asleep?
Round the fairy grass-rings frolic elf and fay,
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.

Oberon, Oberon, rake away the gold,
Rake away the red leaves, roll away the mould,
Rake away the gold leaves, roll away the red,
And wake Will Scarlett from his leafy forest bed.

Friar Tuck and Little John are riding down together
With quarter-staff and drinking-can and grey goose-feather.
The dead are coming back again, the years are rolled away
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.

Softly over Sherwood the south wind blows.
All the heart of England hid in every rose
Hears across the greenwood the sunny whisper leap,
Sherwood in the red dawn, is Robin Hood asleep?

Hark, the voice of England wakes him as of old
And, shattering the silence with a cry of brighter gold
Bugles in the greenwood echo from the steep,
Sherwood in the red dawn, is Robin Hood asleep?

Where the deer are gliding down the shadowy glen
All across the glades of fern he calls his merry men--
Doublets of the Lincoln green glancing through the May
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day--

Calls them and they answer: from aisles of oak and ash
Rings the Follow! Follow! and the boughs begin to crash,
The ferns begin to flutter and the flowers begin to fly,
And through the crimson dawning the robber band goes by.

Robin! Robin! Robin! All his merry thieves
Answer as the bugle-note shivers through the leaves,
Calling as he used to call, faint and far away,
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.

Well, I ended up not teaching yesterday

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:03:34 GMT

The glorified cold got worse; I got two hours of sleep Sunday night in spite of going to bed at 10 P.M., and then I went to the doctor. She did tell me it was only a cold, but it would be in my best interests to stay home, sleep, and take NyQuil and a cough suppressant. I was able to get someone else to go to class, give back papers, and take roll; I ended up not going into work today, either.

I'm coughing up yellow stuff, which is not nice but which is better than having it bubbling in the back of my throat whenever I draw a breath (which was the major thing keeping me from sleeping Sunday night). And I'm going through so many Kleenix sneezing and coughing that it's disgusting. Going in and talking to people about papers for five hours today would probably be impossible.

I did manage to get almost twelve hours of sleep last night, after I took some NyQuil. So that's something.

Poetry week post 5- Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Triumph of Time

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:15:39 GMT

Some people think this is Swinburne's greatest poem. I'm not so sure about that, but it is one of the most beautiful- mixing deep, bitter personal sadness (it's now generally accepted that Swinburne was deeply in love with his cousin Mary Gordon, and devastated when she married someone else; he never married himself) with highly poeticized language and a sea-section that evokes the ocean only to find out that it is never going to be enough to make the speaker forget.

The Triumph of Time

Before our lives divide for ever,
While time is with us and hands are free,
(Time, swift to fasten and swift to sever
Hand from hand, as we stand by the sea)
I will say no word that a man might say
Whose whole life's love goes down in a day;
For this could never have been; and never,
Though the gods and the years relent, shall be.

Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour,
To think of things that are well outworn?
Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower,
The dream foregone and the deed forborne?
Though joy be done with and grief be vain,
Time shall not sever us wholly in twain;
Earth is not spoilt for a single shower;
But the rain has ruined the ungrown corn.

It will grow not again, this fruit of my heart,
Smitten with sunbeams, ruined with rain.
The singing seasons divide and depart,
Winter and summer depart in twain.
It will grow not again, it is ruined at root,
The bloodlike blossom, the dull red fruit;
Though the heart yet sickens, the lips yet smart,
With sullen savour of poisonous pain.

I have given no man of my fruit to eat;
I trod the grapes, I have drunken the wine.
Had you eaten and drunken and found it sweet,
This wild new growth of the corn and vine,
This wine and bread without lees or leaven,
We had grown as gods, as the gods in heaven,
Souls fair to look upon, goodly to greet,
One splendid spirit, your soul and mine.

In the change of years, in the coil of things,
In the clamour and rumour of life to be,
We, drinking love at the furthest springs,
Covered with love as a covering tree,
We had grown as gods, as the gods above,
Filled from the heart to the lips with love,
Held fast in his hands, clothed warm with his wings,
O love, my love, had you loved but me!

We had stood as the sure stars stand, and moved
As the moon moves, loving the world; and seen
Grief collapse as a thing disproved,
Death consume as a thing unclean.
Twain halves of a perfect heart, made fast
Soul to soul while the years fell past;
Had you loved me once, as you have not loved;
Had the chance been with us that has not been.

I have put my days and dreams out of mind,
Days that are over, dreams that are done.
Though we seek life through, we shall surely find
There is none of them clear to us now, not one.
But clear are these things; the grass and the sand,
Where, sure as the eyes reach, ever at hand,
With lips wide open and face burnt blind,
The strong sea-daisies feast on the sun.

The low downs lean to the sea; the stream,
One loose thin pulseless tremulous vein,
Rapid and vivid and dumb as a dream,
Works downward, sick of the sun and the rain;
No wind is rough with the rank rare flowers;
The sweet sea, mother of loves and hours,
Shudders and shines as the grey winds gleam,
Turning her smile to a fugitive pain.

Mother of loves that are swift to fade,
Mother of mutable winds and hours.
A barren mother, a mother-maid,
Cold and clean as her faint salt flowers.
I would we twain were even as she,
Lost in the night and the light of the sea,
Where faint sounds falter and wan beams wade,
Break, and are broken, and shed into showers.

The loves and hours of the life of a man,
They are swift and sad, being born of the sea.
Hours that rejoice and regret for a span,
Born with a man's breath, mortal as he;
Loves that are lost ere they come to birth,
Weeds of the wave, without fruit upon earth.
I lose what I long for, save what I can,
My love, my love, and no love for me!

It is not much that a man can save
On the sands of life, in the straits of time,
Who swims in sight of the great third wave
That never a swimmer shall cross or climb.
Some waif washed up with the strays and spars
That ebb-tide shows to the shore and the stars;
Weed from the water, grass from a grave,
A broken blossom, a ruined rhyme.

There will no man do for your sake, I think,
What I would have done for the least word said.
I had wrung life dry for your lips to drink,
Broken it up for your daily bread:
Body for body and blood for blood,
As the flow of the full sea risen to flood
That yearns and trembles before it sink,
I had given, and lain down for you, glad and dead.

Yea, hope at highest and all her fruit,
And time at fullest and all his dower,
I had given you surely, and life to boot,
Were we once made one for a single hour.
But now, you are twain, you are cloven apart,
Flesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart;
And deep in one is the bitter root,
And sweet for one is the lifelong flower.

To have died if you cared I should die for you, clung
To my life if you bade me, played my part
As it pleased you -- these were the thoughts that stung,
The dreams that smote with a keener dart
Than shafts of love or arrows of death;
These were but as fire is, dust, or breath,
Or poisonous foam on the tender tongue
Of the little snakes that eat my heart.

I wish we were dead together to-day,
Lost sight of, hidden away out of sight,
Clasped and clothed in the cloven clay,
Out of the world's way, out of the light,
Out of the ages of worldly weather,
Forgotten of all men altogether,
As the world's first dead, taken wholly away,
Made one with death, filled full of the night.

How we should slumber, how we should sleep,
Far in the dark with the dreams and the dews!
And dreaming, grow to each other, and weep,
Laugh low, live softly, murmur and muse;
Yea, and it may be, struck through by the dream,
Feel the dust quicken and quiver, and seem
Alive as of old to the lips, and leap
Spirit to spirit as lovers use.

Sick dreams and sad of a dull delight;
For what shall it profit when men are dead
To have dreamed, to have loved with the whole soul's might,
To have looked for day when the day was fled?
Let come what will, there is one thing worth,
To have had fair love in the life upon earth:
To have held love safe till the day grew night,
While skies had colour and lips were red.

Would I lose you now? would I take you then,
If I lose you now that my heart has need?
And come what may after death to men,
What thing worth this will the dead years breed?
Lose life, lose all; but at least I know,
O sweet life's love, having loved you so,
Had I reached you on earth, I should lose not again,
In death nor life, nor in dream or deed.

Yea, I know this well: were you once sealed mine,
Mine in the blood's beat, mine in the breath,
Mixed into me as honey in wine,
Not time, that sayeth and gainsayeth,
Nor all strong things had severed us then;
Not wrath of gods, nor wisdom of men,
Nor all things earthly, nor all divine,
Nor joy nor sorrow, nor life nor death.

I had grown pure as the dawn and the dew,
You had grown strong as the sun or the sea.
But none shall triumph a whole life through:
For death is one, and the fates are three.
At the door of life, by the gate of breath,
There are worse things waiting for men than death;
Death could not sever my soul and you,
As these have severed your soul from me.

You have chosen and clung to the chance they sent you,
Life sweet as perfume and pure as prayer.
But will it not one day in heaven repent you?
Will they solace you wholly, the days that were?
Will you lift up your eyes between sadness and bliss,
Meet mine, and see where the great love is,
And tremble and turn and be changed? Content you;
The gate is strait; I shall not be there.

But you, had you chosen, had you stretched hand,
Had you seen good such a thing were done,
I too might have stood with the souls that stand
In the sun's sight, clothed with the light of the sun;
But who now on earth need care how I live?
Have the high gods anything left to give,
Save dust and laurels and gold and sand?
Which gifts are goodly; but I will none.

O all fair lovers about the world,
There is none of you, none, that shall comfort me.
My thoughts are as dead things, wrecked and whirled
Round and round in a gulf of the sea;
And still, through the sound and the straining stream,
Through the coil and chafe, they gleam in a dream,
The bright fine lips so cruelly curled,
And strange swift eyes where the soul sits free.

Free, without pity, withheld from woe,
Ignorant; fair as the eyes are fair.
Would I have you change now, change at a blow,
Startled and stricken, awake and aware?
Yea, if I could, would I have you see
My very love of you filling me,
And know my soul to the quick, as I know
The likeness and look of your throat and hair?

I shall not change you. Nay, though I might,
Would I change my sweet one love with a word?
I had rather your hair should change in a night,
Clear now as the plume of a black bright bird;
Your face fail suddenly, cease, turn grey,
Die as a leaf that dies in a day.
I will keep my soul in a place out of sight,
Far off, where the pulse of it is not heard.

Far off it walks, in a bleak blown space,
Full of the sound of the sorrow of years.
I have woven a veil for the weeping face,
Whose lips have drunken the wine of tears;
I have found a way for the failing feet,
A place for slumber and sorrow to meet;
There is no rumour about the place,
Nor light, nor any that sees or hears.

I have hidden my soul out of sight, and said
"Let none take pity upon thee, none
Comfort thy crying: for lo, thou art dead,
Lie still now, safe out of sight of the sun.
Have I not built thee a grave, and wrought
Thy grave-clothes on thee of grievous thought,
With soft spun verses and tears unshed,
And sweet light visions of things undone?"

"I have given thee garments and balm and myrrh,
And gold, and beautiful burial things.
But thou, be at peace now, make no stir;
Is not thy grave as a royal king's?
Fret not thyself though the end were sore;
Sleep, be patient, vex me no more.
Sleep; what hast thou to do with her?
The eyes that weep, with the mouth that sings?"

Where the dead red leaves of the years lie rotten,
The cold old crimes and the deeds thrown by,
The misconceived and the misbegotten,
I would find a sin to do ere I die,
Sure to dissolve and destroy me all through,
That would set you higher in heaven, serve you
And leave you happy, when clean forgotten,
As a dead man out of mind, am I.

Your lithe hands draw me, your face burns through me,
I am swift to follow you, keen to see;
But love lacks might to redeem or undo me;
As I have been, I know I shall surely be;
"What should such fellows as I do?" Nay,
My part were worse if I chose to play;
For the worst is this after all; if they knew me,
Not a soul upon earth would pity me.

And I play not for pity of these; but you,
If you saw with your soul what man am I,
You would praise me at least that my soul all through
Clove to you, loathing the lives that lie;
The souls and lips that are bought and sold,
The smiles of silver and kisses of gold,
The lapdog loves that whine as they chew,
The little lovers that curse and cry.

There are fairer women, I hear; that may be;
But I, that I love you and find you fair,
Who are more than fair in my eyes if they be,
Do the high gods know or the great gods care?
Though the swords in my heart for one were seven,
Should the iron hollow of doubtful heaven,
That knows not itself whether night-time or day be,
Reverberate words and a foolish prayer?

I will go back to the great sweet mother,
Mother and lover of men, the sea.
I will go down to her, I and none other,
Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me;
Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast:
O fair white mother, in days long past
Born without sister, born without brother,
Set free my soul as thy soul is free.

O fair green-girdled mother of mine,
Sea, that art clothed with the sun and the rain,
Thy sweet hard kisses are strong like wine,
Thy large embraces are keen like pain.
Save me and hide me with all thy waves,
Find me one grave of thy thousand graves,
Those pure cold populous graves of thine
Wrought without hand in a world without stain.

I shall sleep, and move with the moving ships,
Change as the winds change, veer in the tide;
My lips will feast on the foam of thy lips,
I shall rise with thy rising, with thee subside;
Sleep, and not know if she be, if she were,
Filled full with life to the eyes and hair,
As a rose is fulfilled to the roseleaf tips
With splendid summer and perfume and pride.

This woven raiment of nights and days,
Were it once cast off and unwound from me,
Naked and glad would I walk in thy ways,
Alive and aware of thy ways and thee;
Clear of the whole world, hidden at home,
Clothed with the green and crowned with the foam,
A pulse of the life of thy straits and bays,
A vein in the heart of the streams of the sea.

Fair mother, fed with the lives of men,
Thou art subtle and cruel of heart, men say.
Thou hast taken, and shalt not render again;
Thou art full of thy dead, and cold as they.
But death is the worst that comes of thee;
Thou art fed with our dead, O mother, O sea,
But when hast thou fed on our hearts? or when,
Having given us love, hast thou taken away?

O tender-hearted, O perfect lover,
Thy lips are bitter, and sweet thine heart.
The hopes that hurt and the dreams that hover,
Shall they not vanish away and apart?
But thou, thou art sure, thou art older than earth;
Thou art strong for death and fruitful of birth;
Thy depths conceal and thy gulfs discover;
From the first thou wert; in the end thou art.

And grief shall endure not for ever, I know.
As things that are not shall these things be;
We shall live through seasons of sun and of snow,
And none be grievous as this to me.
We shall hear, as one in a trance that hears,
The sound of time, the rhyme of the years;
Wrecked hope and passionate pain will grow
As tender things of a spring-tide sea.

Sea-fruit that swings in the waves that hiss,
Drowned gold and purple and royal rings.
And all time past, was it all for this?
Times unforgotten, and treasures of things?
Swift years of liking and sweet long laughter,
That wist not well of the years thereafter
Till love woke, smitten at heart by a kiss,
With lips that trembled and trailing wings?

There lived a singer in France of old
By the tideless dolorous midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
There shone one woman, and none but she.
And finding life for her love's sake fail,
Being fain to see her, he bade set sail,
Touched land, and saw her as life grew cold,
And praised God, seeing; and so died he.

Died, praising God for his gift and grace:
For she bowed down to him weeping, and said
"Live;" and her tears were shed on his face
Or ever the life in his face was shed.
The sharp tears fell through her hair, and stung
Once, and her close lips touched him and clung
Once, and grew one with his lips for a space;
And so drew back, and the man was dead.

O brother, the gods were good to you.
Sleep, and be glad while the world endures.
Be well content as the years wear through;
Give thanks for life, and the loves and lures;
Give thanks for life, O brother, and death,
For the sweet last sound of her feet, her breath,
For gifts she gave you, gracious and few,
Tears and kisses, that lady of yours.

Rest, and be glad of the gods; but I,
How shall I praise them, or how take rest?
There is not room under all the sky
For me that know not of worst or best,
Dream or desire of the days before,
Sweet things or bitterness, any more.
Love will not come to me now though I die,
As love came close to you, breast to breast.

I shall never be friends again with roses;
I shall loathe sweet tunes, where a note grown strong
Relents and recoils, and climbs and closes,
As a wave of the sea turned back by song.
There are sounds where the soul's delight takes fire,
Face to face with its own desire;
A delight that rebels, a desire that reposes;
I shall hate sweet music my whole life long.

The pulse of war and passion of wonder,
The heavens that murmur, the sounds that shine,
The stars that sing and the loves that thunder,
The music burning at heart like wine,
An armed archangel whose hands raise up
All senses mixed in the spirit's cup
Till flesh and spirit are molten in sunder --
These things are over, and no more mine.

These were a part of the playing I heard
Once, ere my love and my heart were at strife;
Love that sings and hath wings as a bird,
Balm of the wound and heft of the knife.
Fairer than earth is the sea, and sleep
Than overwatching of eyes that weep,
Now time has done with his one sweet word,
The wine and leaven of lovely life.

I shall go my ways, tread out my measure,
Fill the days of my daily breath
With fugitive things not good to treasure,
Do as the world doth, say as it saith;
But if we had loved each other -- O sweet,
Had you felt, lying under the palms of your feet,
The heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure
To feel you tread it to dust and death --

Ah, had I not taken my life up and given
All that life gives and the years let go,
The wine and honey, the balm and leaven,
The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low?
Come life, come death, not a word be said;
Should I lose you living, and vex you dead?
I never shall tell you on earth; and in heaven,
If I cry to you then, will you hear or know?

You know what I could do without right now?

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 21:15:10 GMT

The feeling that I'm choking on liquid in the back of my throat, that's what. Stupid cold/bug/whatever.

Poetry week post 4- George Meredith, "The Lark Ascending"

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:41:23 GMT

This is one of the few poems I've ever read where I can hear the bird singing. Poems like "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To a Skylark" are more about the metaphoric images the bird brings up in the mind of the poet with its song. But Meredith was usually interested in reconciling human imagination with literal nature, and this poem is one of his more successful efforts to do that.

The Lark Ascending

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolved and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;

A press of hurried notes that run
So fleet they scarce are more than one,
Yet changeingly the trills repeat
And linger ringing while they fleet,
Sweet to the quick o' the ear, and dear
To her beyond the handmaid ear,
Who sits beside our inner springs,
Too often dry for this he brings,
Which seems the very jet of earth
At sight of sun, her music's mirth,
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardour, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day,
And drink in everything discerned
An ecstasy to music turned,
Impelled by what his happy bill
Disperses; drinking, showering still,
Unthinking save that he may give
His voice the outlet, there to live
Renewed in endless notes of glee,
So thirsty of his voice is he,
For all to hear and all to know
That he is joy, awake, aglow;
The tumult of the heart to hear
Through pureness filtered crystal-clear,
And know the pleasure sprinkled bright
By simple singing of delight;
Shrill, irreflective, unrestrained,
Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustained
Without a break, without a fall,
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical,
Perennial, quavering up the chord
Like myriad dews of sunny sward
That trembling into fulness shine,
And sparkle dropping argentine;
Such wooing as the ear receives
From zephyr caught in choric leaves
Of aspens when their chattering net
Is flushed to white with shivers wet;
And such the water-spirit's chime
On mountain heights in morning's prime,
Too freshly sweet to seem excess,
Too animate to need a stress;
But wider over many heads
The starry voice ascending spreads,
Awakening, as it waxes thin,
The best in us to him akin;
And every face to watch him raised,
Puts on the light of children praised;
So rich our human pleasure ripes
When sweetness on sincereness pipes,
Though nought be promised from the seas,
But only a soft-ruffling breeze
Sweep glittering on a still content,
Serenity in ravishment.

For singing till his heaven fills,
'Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes:
The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine,
He is, the hills, the human line,
The meadows green, the fallows brown,
The dreams of labour in the town;
He sings the sap, the quickened veins;
The wedding song of sun and rains
He is, the dance of children, thanks
Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks,
And eye of violets while they breathe;
All these the circling song will wreathe,
And you shall hear the herb and tree,
The better heart of men shall see,
Shall feel celestially, as long
As you crave nothing save the song.

Was never voice of ours could say
Our inmost in the sweetest way,
Like yonder voice aloft, and link
All hearers in the song they drink.
Our wisdom speaks from failing blood,
Our passion is too full in flood,
We want the key of his wild note
Of truthful in a tuneful throat;
The song seraphically free
Of taint of personality,
So pure that it salutes the suns
The voice of one for millions,
In whom the millions rejoice
For giving their one spirit voice.
Yet men have we, whom we revere,
Now names, and men still housing here,
Whose lives, by many a battle-dint
Defaced, and grinding wheels on flint,
Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet
For song our highest heaven to greet:
Whom heavenly singing gives us new,
Enspheres them brilliant in our blue,
From firmest base to farthest leap,
Because their love of Earth is deep,
And they are warriors in accord
With life to serve, and, pass reward,
So touching purest and so heard
In the brain's reflex of yon bird:
Wherefore their soul in me, or mine,
Through self-forgetfulness divine,
In them, that song aloft maintains,
To fill the sky and thrill the plains
With showerings drawn from human stores,
As he to silence nearer soars,
Extends the world at wings and dome,
More spacious making more our home,
Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

Poetry Week post 3- William Sharp/Fiona Macleod, The Tryst of Queen Hynde

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:47:46 GMT

This poem is by a minor late Victorian author, William Sharp, whose own poems didn't sell very well. He created a female pseudonym, Fiona Macleod, whom he successfully maintained for over ten years, whose poems were very different (drawing on Celtic myth and a Celtic "atmosphere"), and who sold very well. Other than his wife and a female cousin whom he asked to pose as Macleod a few times, not many people knew Sharp's secret; "Fiona" was a recluse in Scotland and wrote long letters to other authors, including W. B. Yeats. Sharp seems to have regarded her as a separate personality, and the strain of keeping it up may have been one reason he died young.

I like this poem because it's very sharp, uses simple words to make a great impact, and tells a legend about an adulterous queen that's, well, pretty damn different from the usual.

THE TRYST OF QUEEN HYNDE

Queen Hynde was in the rowan-wood
with scarlet fruit aflame,
Her face was as the berries were, one sun-
hot wave of shame.

With scythes of fire the August sun mowed
down vast swathes of shade:
With blazing eyes the waiting queen stared
on her steel-blue blade.

"What, thirsty hound," she muttered low,
"with thirst you flash and gleam:
Bide, bide a wee, my bonnie hound, I'll show
ye soon a stream!"

The sun had tossed against the West his
broken scythes of fire
When Lord Gillanders bowed before his
Queen and Sweet Desire.

She did not give him smile or kiss; her hand
she did not give:
"But are ye come for death," she said, " or
are ye come to live ?"

Gillanders reined and looked at her: "Hynde,
Queen and Love," he said,
"I wooed in love, I come in love, to this the
tryst we made;

"Why are your eyes so fierce and wild: why
is your face so white:
I love you with all my love," he said, "by
day and by night."

"What o' the word that's come to me, of
how my lord's to wed
The lilywhite maid o' one that has a gold
crown on his head?

"What o' the word that yesternight ye wan-
toned with my name,
And on a windy scorn let loose the blown
leaf o'my shame?"

The Lord Gillanders looked at her, and never
a word said he,
But sprang from off his great black horse
and sank upon his knee.

"This is my love," said white Queen Hynde,
"and this, and this, and this--"
Four times she stabbed him to the heart
while she his lips did kiss.

She left him in the darkling wood: and as
she rode she sang
(The little notes swirled in and out amid the
horse-hoof clang)

My love was sweet, was sweet, was sweet, but
not so sweet as now!
A deep long sleep my sweet love has beneath the rowan-bough.

They let her in, they lifted swords, his head
each one did bare:
Slowly she bowed, slowly she passed, slowly
she clomb the stair:

Her little son she lifted up, and whispered
'neath his cries --
"The old king's son, they say; mayhap; he
has Gillander's eyes."

These books sound so horrible, but the review is so funny.

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:33:31 GMT

OH JOHN RINGO NO!

aka, a review of John Ringo's SF series starting with a book called Ghosts in which there is constant rape and an unending fascination with whores and politics so far to the right that, no, they don't actually make any sense even if you are Republican.

Now I know what straight men read for porn instead of bad slash fanfic.

Poetry week 2- Hertha, Algernon Charles Swinburne

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:00:29 GMT

This, for me, is the most beautiful of Swinburne's anti-Christian/alternative religion poems. Not only the phrasing and the rhythm but the philosophy expressed (that humans are kin to animals; that nature continues existing whether you believe in it or not; that nature, the only force which is anything like what we call divine, requires no worship) thrill me. I can't say I believe in Swinburne's visions all the time, but I believe in them while I'm reading the poetry, and "Hertha" comes closest of his poems to expressing my permanent ideas.

"Hertha" by Algernon Charles Swinburne- originally published in Songs Before Sunrise, 1871.

I AM that which began;
Out of me the years roll;
Out of me God and man;
I am equal and whole;
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.

Before ever land was,
Before ever the sea,
Or soft hair of the grass,
Or fair limbs of the tree,
Or the flesh-colour'd fruit of my branches, I was, and thy soul was in
me.

First life on my sources
First drifted and swam;
Out of me are the forces
That save it or damn;
Out of me man and woman, and wild-beast and bird: before God was, I
am.

Beside or above me
Naught is there to go;
Love or unlove me,
Unknow me or know,
I am that which unloves me and loves; I am stricken, and I am the
blow.

I the mark that is miss'd
And the arrows that miss,
I the mouth that is kiss'd
And the breath in the kiss,
The search, and the sought, and the seeker, the soul and the body that
is.

I am that thing which blesses
My spirit elate;
That which caresses
With hands uncreate
My limbs unbegotten that measure the length of the measure of fate.

But what thing dost thou now,
Looking Godward, to cry,
'I am I, thou art thou,
I am low, thou art high'?
I am thou, whom thou seekest to find him; find thou but thyself, thou
art I.

I the grain and the furrow,
The plough-cloven clod
And the ploughshare drawn thorough,
The germ and the sod,
The deed and the doer, the seed and the sower, the dust which is God.

Hast thou known how I fashion'd thee,
Child, underground?
Fire that impassion'd thee,
Iron that bound,
Dim changes of water, what thing of all these hast thou known of or
found?

Canst thou say in thine heart
Thou hast seen with thine eyes
With what cunning of art
Thou wast wrought in what wise,
By what force of what stuff thou wast shapen, and shown on my breast
to the skies?

Who hath given, who hath sold it thee,
Knowledge of me?
Has the wilderness told it thee?
Hast thou learnt of the sea?
Hast thou communed in spirit with night? have the winds taken counsel
with thee?

Have I set such a star
To show light on thy brow
That thou sawest from afar
What I show to thee now?
Have ye spoken as brethren together, the sun and the mountains and
thou?

What is here, dost thou know it?
What was, hast thou known?
Prophet nor poet
Nor tripod nor throne
Nor spirit nor flesh can make answer, but only thy mother alone.

Mother, not maker,
Born, and not made;
Though her children forsake her,
Allured or afraid,
Praying prayers to the God of their fashion, she stirs not for all
that have pray'd.

A creed is a rod,
And a crown is of night;
But this thing is God,
To be man with thy might,
To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life
as the light.

I am in thee to save thee,
As my soul in thee saith;
Give thou as I gave thee,
Thy life-blood and breath,
Green leaves of thy labour, white flowers of thy thought, and red
fruit of thy death.

Be the ways of thy giving
As mine were to thee;
The free life of thy living,
Be the gift of it free;
Not as servant to lord, nor as master to slave, shalt thou give thee
to me.

O children of banishment,
Souls overcast,
Were the lights ye see vanish meant
Alway to last,
Ye would know not the sun overshining the shadows and stars overpast.

I that saw where ye trod
The dim paths of the night
Set the shadow call'd God
In your skies to give light;
But the morning of manhood is risen, and the shadowless soul is in
sight.

The tree many-rooted
That swells to the sky
With frondage red-fruited,
The life-tree am I;
In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves: ye shall live and
not die.

But the Gods of your fashion
That take and that give,
In their pity and passion
That scourge and forgive,
They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off; they shall
die and not live.

My own blood is what stanches
The wounds in my bark;
Stars caught in my branches
Make day of the dark,
And are worshipp'd as suns till the sunrise shall tread out their
fires as a spark.

Where dead ages hide under
The live roots of the tree,
In my darkness the thunder
Makes utterance of me;
In the clash of my boughs with each other ye hear the waves sound of
the sea.

That noise is of Time,
As his feathers are spread
And his feet set to climb
Through the boughs overhead,
And my foliage rings round him and rustles, and branches are bent with
his tread.

The storm-winds of ages
Blow through me and cease,
The war-wind that rages,
The spring-wind of peace,
Ere the breath of them roughen my tresses, ere one of my blossoms
increase.

All sounds of all changes,
All shadows and lights
On the world's mountain-ranges
And stream-riven heights,
Whose tongue is the wind's tongue and language of storm-clouds on
earth-shaking nights;

All forms of all faces,
All works of all hands
In unsearchable places
Of time-stricken lands,
All death and all life, and all reigns and all ruins, drop through me
as sands.

Though sore be my burden
And more than ye know,
And my growth have no guerdon
But only to grow,
Yet I fail not of growing for lightnings above me or deathworms below.

These too have their part in me,
As I too in these;
Such fire is at heart in me,
Such sap is this tree's,
Which hath in it all sounds and all secrets of infinite lands and of
seas.

In the spring-colour'd hours
When my mind was as May's
There brake forth of me flowers
By centuries of days,
Strong blossoms with perfume of manhood, shot out from my spirit as
rays.

And the sound of them springing
And smell of their shoots
Were as warmth and sweet singing
And strength to my roots;
And the lives of my children made perfect with freedom of soul were my
fruits.

I bid you but be;
I have need not of prayer;
I have need of you free
As your mouths of mine air;
That my heart may be greater within me, beholding the fruits of me
fair.

More fair than strange fruit is
Of faiths ye espouse;
In me only the root is
That blooms in your boughs;
Behold now your God that ye made you, to feed him with faith of your
vows.

In the darkening and whitening
Abysses adored,
With dayspring and lightning
For lamp and for sword,
God thunders in heaven, and his angels are red with the wrath of the
Lord.

O my sons, O too dutiful
Toward Gods not of me,
Was not I enough beautiful?
Was it hard to be free?
For behold, I am with you, am in you and of you; look forth now and
see.

Lo, wing'd with world's wonders,
With miracles shod,
With the fires of his thunders
For raiment and rod,
God trembles in heaven, and his angels are white with the terror of
God.

For his twilight is come on him,
His anguish is here;
And his spirits gaze dumb on him,
Grown gray from his fear;
And his hour taketh hold on him stricken, the last of his infinite
year.

Thought made him and breaks him,
Truth slays and forgives;
But to you, as time takes him,
This new thing it gives,
Even love, the beloved Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives.

For truth only is living,
Truth only is whole,
And the love of his giving
Man's polestar and pole;
Man, pulse of my centre, and fruit of my body, and seed of my soul.

One birth of my bosom;
One beam of mine eye;
One topmost blossom
That scales the sky;
Man, equal and one with me, man that is made of me, man that is I.

Poetry week post 1- George Meredith, Love in the Valley

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:07:56 GMT

This week I'm going to post a poem a day that I find beautiful- in the imagery, in the rhythm, and in the thoughts presented. That's a very particular category, since it cuts out poems I find cute, purely satirical poems, and poems like "The Waste Land" where I might find individual lines beautiful but do not understand what the fuck is going on,* so I don't admire them as a whole.

Today's piece of poetry is, surprise, mid-Victorian, and by George Meredith. He's known for obscurity in his poems, and "Love in the Valley" is not entirely free of that, while at the same time having some of the attributes of a traditional love poem. However, the natural images are beautiful; it's not quite a narrative but a series of images in which the relationship between the girl and the narrator, and the natural world, are both important; and the rhythm is wonderful and almost unique, since only two or three other poems in English use it from what I've read.

Love in the Valley

Under yonder beech-tree single on the green-sward,
Couched with her arms behind her golden head,
Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly,
Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.
Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her,
Press her parting lips as her waist I gather slow,
Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me:
Then would she hold me and never let me go?

Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,
Swift as the swallow along the river's light
Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets,
Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.
Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops,
Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun,
She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer,
Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!

When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror,
Tying up her laces, looping up her hair,
Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,
More love should I have, and much less care.
When her mother tends her before the lighted mirror,
Loosening her laces, combing down her curls,
Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,
I should miss but one for many boys and girls.

Heartless she is as the shadow in the meadows
Flying to the hills on a blue and breezy noon.
No, she is athirst and drinking up her wonder:
Earth to her is young as the slip of the new moon.
Deals she an unkindness, 'tis but her rapid measure,
Even as in a dance; and her smile can heal no less:
Like the swinging May-cloud that pelts the flowers with hailstones
Off a sunny border, she was made to bruise and bless.

Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.

Stepping down the hill with her fair companions,
Arm in arm, all against the raying West
Boldly she sings, to the merry tune she marches,
Brave in her shape, and sweeter unpossessed.
Sweeter, for she is what my heart first awaking
Whispered the world was; morning light is she.
Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless;
Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free.

Happy happy time, when the white star hovers
Low over dim fields fresh with bloomy dew,
Near the face of dawn, that draws athwart the darkness,
Threading it with colour, as yewberries the yew.
Thicker crowd the shades while the grave East deepens
Glowing, and with crimson a long cloud swells.
Maiden still the morn is; and strange she is, and secret;
Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells.

Sunrays, leaning on our southern hills and lighting
Wild cloud-mountains that drag the hills along,
Oft ends the day of your shifting brilliant laughter
Chill as a dull face frowning on a song.
Ay, but shows the South-West a ripple-feathered bosom
Blown to silver while the clouds are shaken and ascend
Scaling the mid-heavens as they stream, there comes a sunset
Rich, deep like love in beauty without end.

When at dawn she sighs, and like an infant to the window
Turns grave eyes craving light, released from dreams,
Beautiful she looks, like a white water-lily
Bursting out of bud in havens of the streams.
When from bed she rises clothed from neck to ankle
In her long nightgown sweet as boughs of May,
Beautiful she looks, like a tall garden lily
Pure from the night, and splendid for the day.

Mother of the dews, dark eye-lashed twilight,
Low-lidded twilight, o'er the valley's brim,
Rounding on thy breast sings the dew-delighted skylark,
Clear as though the dewdrops had their voice in him.
Hidden where the rose-flush drinks the rayless planet,
Fountain-full he pours the spraying fountain-showers.
Let me hear her laughter, I would have her ever
Cool as dew in twilight, the lark above the flowers.

All the girls are out with their baskets for the primrose;
Up lanes, woods through, they troop in joyful bands.
My sweet leads: she knows not why, but now she totters,
Eyes the bent anemones, and hangs her hands.
Such a look will tell that the violets are peeping,
Coming the rose: and unaware a cry
Springs in her bosom for odours and for colour,
Covert and the nightingale; she knows not why.

Kerchiefed head and chin she darts between her tulips,
Streaming like a willow grey in arrowy rain:
Some bend beaten cheek to gravel, and their angel
She will be; she lifts them, and on she speeds again.
Black the driving raincloud breasts the iron gateway:
She is forth to cheer a neighbour lacking mirth.
So when sky and grass met rolling dumb for thunder
Saw I once a white dove, sole light of earth.

Prim little scholars are the flowers of her garden,
Trained to stand in rows, and asking if they please.
I might love them well but for loving more the wild ones:
O my wild ones! they tell me more than these.
You, my wild one, you tell of honied field-rose,
Violet, blushing eglantine in life; and even as they,
They by the wayside are earnest of your goodness,
You are of life's, on the banks that line the way.

Peering at her chamber the white crowns the red rose,
Jasmine winds the porch with stars two and three.
Parted is the window; she sleeps; the starry jasmine
Breathes a falling breath that carries thoughts of me.
Sweeter unpossessed, have I said of her my sweetest?
Not while she sleeps: while she sleeps the jasmine breathes,
Luring her to love; she sleeps; the starry jasmine
Bears me to her pillow under white rose-wreaths.

Yellow with birdfoot-trefoil are the grass-glades;
Yellow with cinquefoil of the dew-grey leaf;
Yellow with stonecrop; the moss-mounds are yellow;
Blue-necked the wheat sways, yellowing to the sheaf:
Green-yellow bursts from the copse the laughing yaffle;
Sharp as a sickle is the edge of shade and shine:
Earth in her heart laughs looking at the heavens,
Thinking of the harvest: I look and think of mine.

This I may know: her dressing and undressing
Such a change of light shows as when the skies in sport
Shift from cloud to moonlight; or edging over thunder
Slips a ray of sun; or sweeping into port
White sails furl; or on the ocean borders
White sails lean along the waves leaping green.
Visions of her shower before me, but from eyesight
Guarded she would be like the sun were she seen.

Front door and back of the mossed old farmhouse
Open with the morn, and in a breezy link
Freshly sparkles garden to stripe-shadowed orchard,
Green across a rill where on sand the minnows wink.
Busy in the grass the early sun of summer
Swarms, and the blackbird's mellow fluting notes
Call my darling up with round and roguish challenge:
Quaintest, richest carol of all the singing throats!

Cool was the woodside; cool as her white dairy
Keeping sweet the cream-pan; and there the boys from school,
Cricketing below, rushed brown and red with sunshine;
O the dark translucence of the deep-eyed cool!
Spying from the farm, herself she fetched a pitcher
Full of milk, and tilted for each in turn the beak.
Then a little fellow, mouth up and on tiptoe,
Said, "I will kiss you": she laughed and leaned her cheek.

Doves of the fir-wood walling high our red roof
Through the long noon coo, crooning through the coo.
Loose droop the leaves, and down the sleepy roadway
Sometimes pipes a chaffinch; loose droops the blue.
Cows flap a slow tail knee-deep in the river,
Breathless, given up to sun and gnat and fly.
Nowhere is she seen; and if I see her nowhere,
Lightning may come, straight rains and tiger sky.

O the golden sheaf, the rustling treasure-armful!
O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced!
O the treasure-tresses one another over
Nodding! O the girdle slack about the waist!
Slain are the poppies that shot their random scarlet
Quick amid the wheatears: wound about the waist,
Gathered, see these brides of Earth one blush of ripeness!
O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced!

Large and smoky red the sun's cold disk drops,
Clipped by naked hills, on violet shaded snow:
Eastward large and still lights up a bower of moonrise,
Whence at her leisure steps the moon aglow.
Nightlong on black print-branches our beech-tree
Gazes in this whiteness: nightlong could I.
Here may life on death or death on life be painted.
Let me clasp her soul to know she cannot die!

Gossips count her faults; they scour a narrow chamber
Where there is no window, read not heaven or her.
"When she was a tiny," one aged woman quavers,
Plucks at my heart and leads me by the ear.
Faults she had once as she learnt to run and tumbled:
Faults of feature some see, beauty not complete.
Yet, good gossips, beauty that makes holy
Earth and air, may have faults from head to feet.

Hither she comes; she comes to me; she lingers,
Deepens her brown eyebrows, while in new surprise
High rise the lashes in wonder of a stranger;
Yet am I the light and living of her eyes.
Something friends have told her fills her heart to brimming,
Nets her in her blushes, and wounds her, and tames.—
Sure of her haven, O like a dove alighting,
Arms up, she dropped: our souls were in our names.

Soon will she lie like a white-frost sunrise.
Yellow oats and brown wheat, barley pale as rye,
Long since your sheaves have yielded to the thresher,
Felt the girdle loosened, seen the tresses fly.
Soon will she lie like a blood-red sunset.
Swift with the to-morrow, green-winged Spring!
Sing from the South-West, bring her back the truants,
Nightingale and swallow, song and dipping wing.

Soft new beech-leaves, up to beamy April
Spreading bough on bough a primrose mountain, you,
Lucid in the moon, raise lilies to the skyfields,
Youngest green transfused in silver shining through:
Fairer than the lily, than the wild white cherry:
Fair as in image my seraph love appears
Borne to me by dreams when dawn is at my eyelids:
Fair as in the flesh she swims to me on tears.

Could I find a place to be alone with heaven,
I would speak my heart out: heaven is my need.
Every woodland tree is flushing like the dog-wood,
Flashing like the whitebeam, swaying like the reed.
Flushing like the dog-wood crimson in October;
Streaming like the flag-reed South-West blown;
Flashing as in gusts the sudden-lighted white beam:
All seem to know what is for heaven alone.

*In general, Modernism and I do not get on.**
**Except for Virginia Woolf.

Well, finally.

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:15:13 GMT

I now can finally use the Internet again, after some screwup on the part of my university that meant I had none for two days. Who knows what went wrong? First they said, "The connection's fine and it isn't our fault"; then they sent a flyer around to everyone saying essentially, "Actually it was our fault, whoops! Tee-hee."

Anyway. I finally got through the last round of the papers I was grading, though I am about to be snowed under by another (and then another, since it's so near finals week now). Someone at the library in my parents' hometown has changed their book-buying habits and now actually orders some new-ish SF and F books, which means I have books to read that I don't have to pay for, and which I was iffy about buying thanks to mixed reviews (Dust by Elizabeth Bear, in particular). I got all excited when I thought the new Steven Brust was coming out next week and then I realized it's not and I need to wait several months. There are just a few more weeks of school left, and though they'll be hectic, I then have almost four solid months off.

Yay.