So guess what? It snowed last night. A lot. Is still snowing and snowing. The world is white and black this morning from my study window where all I can see are some trees. Bare trunks and branches. And snow. It is so beautiful. And again: this is spring.
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Guess I'll get dressed for pictures. How do I not have any of snow? After nine years of living it? That's some denial.
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Oh it's perfect snowball snow. Thank your lucky stars you're not here, man. Because I win.
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Amy's spring MiPOesias. See for yourself.
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The best thing to do is shave him.
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I am going to bring them roses tomorrow. Usually I bring lemons. But tomorrow, roses. I'm fond of flowers too. But it occurs to me to ask: why not more about teaching it? How should I begin. Someone said once, if you don't start with image all is lost, they'll never get it. Someone else, start with language, just as when painting start with paint. Start with Hugo. Start with the dictionary. Start with bad poetry, dead kitten poetics, prose poems so-called traditional forms lineation white space and whatever you do don't let them rhyme or write about love. So I do. I start with image and everytime suffer the stiff little self-image conscious poems it produces and I think: that's what they heard? Fear? How is that even possible, it was fun. So?
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Blogger is acting shitty again. The art of losing things. Very bad for my heart.
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Read what Shelley read to work on Shelley, always that advice in the corner. But I missed it the first time having read Caleb before Cenci, didn't I, and so stuck on this passage from the Cenci preface for years knowing it's ventriloquized, his voice, not his voice, and looking for the source in Hume, in Plato. What's he getting at?
Undoubtedly no person can be truly dishonored by the act of another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she would have been wiser and better; but she would never have been a tragic character. The few whom such an exhibition would have interested could never have been sufficiently interested for a dramatic purpose, from the want of finding sympathy in their interest among the mass who surround them. It is in the restless and anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her wrongs and their revenge, -- that the dramatic character of what she did and suffered, consists. (Shelley, emphasis mine, 300)
Then in Caleb find pleasure in the sound of this--"I am unable to cope with you: what then?"--and I recognize it, a little hall of reverberating mirrors. Here I am! A discovery that maybe only I can care about, but a little piece of the conversation now in place. (Why I love this literature, the implicit dialogue, not just a little like blogging if you want to know why both are not despicable.)
...treating the public, who has a claim to all my powers and exertions, as if it were nothing, and myself, or rather an unintelligible chimera I annex to myself, as if it were entitled to my exclusive attention. I am unable to cope with you: what then? Can that circumstance dishonour me? No; I can only be dishonoured by perpetrating an unjust action. My honour is in my own keeping, beyond the reach of all mankind. Strike! I am passive. No injury that you can inflict, shall provoke me to expose you or myself to unnecessary evil. (Godwin, emphasis mine, 168)
"The fit return to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance" when Trystan was two (I told you he started reading at one, before he could use words to ask for a cup of milk, well, what did we know) was the scrolling marquis on my screen (not because I am a passivist but because I was thinking about the phrase). I found him twirling in my room reciting it over and over: the fit return to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance the fit return to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance . . .
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The Garcia girls. Home. Night ... Houses.
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