Hope on the horizon...
In the process of going through my backfiles looking for "landscape" photographs, I came across this one. It's the view from the balcony of the flat of the parents of a friend I met there in October 2015, following the death of his father. It was 8 a.m. and I'd had a rough night following a little too much wine and spirits and a few hours of intermittent sleep on a lumpy sofabed. Looking out of the window, I saw this and grabbed my camera. Somehow it's taken me nearly five years to get around to processing it. It reminds me powerfully of a similarly hung-over dawn on the East Coast, half a century ago, when I woke up on the beach somewhere north of Great Yarmouth, having failed to make it back to the tent I was sharing with a schoolfriend in California. No, not that California: California, Norfolk, a tiny place which has more or less tumbled into the sea in the intervening five decades. Which, for Steely Dan fans, may have a certain resonance.
Anyway, here's a thing. Today I came across the abbreviation TIL in a comment on another blog, and had no idea what it meant. This Is Laughable? Totally Inconceivably Ludicrous? So I looked it up, and apparently it means "Today I Learned"... So, TIL that TIL means "today I learned". Heh... The New Thing Learned For Today file can be shut early and with an unusually reflexive thump.
Talking of Shakespeare and self-isolation (yes, we were), here's something to cheer you up. The incomparable Zach Wienersmith (whose Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoons are witty, weird, dark and, above all, dizzyingly frequent) has made available – free to download – some of his PDF books as a COVID-19 Book Pack, and I would draw your attention in particular to Shakespeare's Sonnets Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness. Which, if you know the sonnets, or have even only the vaguest acquaintance with them, is both insightful and hilarious.
Sample (Sonnet 2):
Weinersmith:
When forty winters shall besiege thy browShakespeare:
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held.
Then being asked where all they beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use
If thou couldst answer "This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse",
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.
Eyes get sunken, skin gets loose.I may have got that the wrong way round, but they're easily confused, no? You'll need a copy of the originals close at hand to fully appreciate Weinersmith's towering achievement in poetic form. Although it has to be conceded that Philip Terry's equally playful Oulipan revisions of the Sonnets may carry more intellectual weight. Perhaps even a little too much around the middle? There's always something to be said for at least appearing not to be trying too hard. And, in this context, you've got to give extra credit to the one who dedicates his volume "To the Woman whom History shall remember only as The Dork Lady".
Before you're old, man, reproduce.
These fair children of mine...
4 comments:
I made a blurb book for my wife some years ago, photographs of her in various but always pronounced stages of pregnancy. Casting about for text to accompany these fantastic (if I say so myself) photos, I stumbled over the sonnets pretty much all of which seemed -- after hacking a path through the language -- to be about the virtues of having children.
I had not known this. I had some vague notion that they were about love which, I suppose, could be inferred. But if so, Aerosmith's "Big Ten Inch" is equally about love.
amolitor,
Well, they're about a number of things: they certainly start off as a commissioned set of sonnets, encouraging some young aristo to settle down and make with the nappies, but they then become an intensely gay series of love poems, some reflexive stuff about how his poems will outlive everything (though he says so himself), and some extraordinary self-loathing over competition for the affections of the (male) aristo and the so-called Dark Lady. They are strange, and in parts some of the greatest poetry ever written.
If you have an iPad, I recommend getting the Sonnets app from Touch Press, which is worth every penny several times over.
Mike
An arresting photo, that one at the top. And obviously, more is revealed upon enlargement. A good find.
Thanks, Kent, it's nice when someone notices the photos! I was very pleased with it.
Mike
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