self-awareness:
Oct. 25th, 2002 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iceinyourmusic(Sometimes, in my nightmares I've turned into William Allingham and don't know it.)
That is:
Went looking for the source of the "writing as cookery" quote, about Plath, and found it (of course, it's actually: - -never has poetry (except in her amazing last months) been closer to cookery): Thomas Mallon, A Book of One's Own (nice read if you have a thing about diaries). Also found this (more old, old things):
It is a joyless, mechanical creation, and some part of her knows it. Moments of true (as opposed to de rigeur and manufactured) self-awareness are rare in Plath's journals, but one of them surely occurs - in parentheses - on Saturday, July 19, 1958: "I dimly would like to write (or is it to _have_ written?) a novel, short stories, a book of poems."
I didn't remember having read that, but I must have.
And found my poor dear William Allingham.
(- When did I start reading three books at once?) And reading an old winner of the local Novel of the Year prize: it's heavy and literary, clever and poetic, but it won, oh yes, it won because writing about two men fucking each other and naming one of them after yourself is still sensational around here. He knows it: the book knows it. The book knows everything. I can't say anything to it without it having a reply waiting for me on the next page. It knows where it switches tenses and it knows it doesn't understand women, and it tells you so, and I tell you: I wouldn't trust this book as far as I could throw it.
But the reasons for winning? I'm making all this up. I haven't read any of the other novels nominated back then; I don't remember which ones they were.
-
And, if anyone needs an icon or six. Or if you just want to laugh at me for continuing to make them. That's cool too.
That is:
Went looking for the source of the "writing as cookery" quote, about Plath, and found it (of course, it's actually: - -never has poetry (except in her amazing last months) been closer to cookery): Thomas Mallon, A Book of One's Own (nice read if you have a thing about diaries). Also found this (more old, old things):
It is a joyless, mechanical creation, and some part of her knows it. Moments of true (as opposed to de rigeur and manufactured) self-awareness are rare in Plath's journals, but one of them surely occurs - in parentheses - on Saturday, July 19, 1958: "I dimly would like to write (or is it to _have_ written?) a novel, short stories, a book of poems."
I didn't remember having read that, but I must have.
And found my poor dear William Allingham.
(- When did I start reading three books at once?) And reading an old winner of the local Novel of the Year prize: it's heavy and literary, clever and poetic, but it won, oh yes, it won because writing about two men fucking each other and naming one of them after yourself is still sensational around here. He knows it: the book knows it. The book knows everything. I can't say anything to it without it having a reply waiting for me on the next page. It knows where it switches tenses and it knows it doesn't understand women, and it tells you so, and I tell you: I wouldn't trust this book as far as I could throw it.
But the reasons for winning? I'm making all this up. I haven't read any of the other novels nominated back then; I don't remember which ones they were.
-
And, if anyone needs an icon or six. Or if you just want to laugh at me for continuing to make them. That's cool too.
no subject
Date: 2002-10-25 03:32 pm (UTC)Very weird. Icon-overload? (but you must keep doing yours. the prettiness!)
no subject
Date: 2002-10-25 11:18 pm (UTC)Hmm... are your eyes twitching at all? Got any hives?
(I don't think I use more than three or four of mine, actively, because oh! the effort!)
Promise I'll stop making them, though, on the day I start feeling the need to come up with Witty Captions. :P
no subject
Date: 2002-10-25 08:18 pm (UTC)xx
no subject
Date: 2002-10-25 11:19 pm (UTC)