Morning Read
¶ The Decameron, IV, iv: Love via hearsay, the story of Gerbino and the Tunisian princess, who fell in love by report, as it were, never seeing one another until the moment of death (as it turned out). Being slow, it was not until today that I reflected on the trouble that handsome young men must have gotten into by reading these tales aloud in mixed company. Just imagine the reaction of a cloistered fourteen year-old girl to Gerbino’s address to his pirate crew!
It is my conviction that no mortal being who is without experience of love can ever lay claim to true excellence. And if you are in love, or have ever been in love, it will not be difficult for you to understand what it is that I desire. For I am in love, gentlemen…
¶ In the Aeneid, the Cumaean sybil tells Aeneas to fetch the golden bough if he wants to visit the Underworld on a return ticket. This quest is rather overshadowed by the big funeral for Misenus, Aeneas’s trumpeter, who got in an ill-advised pissing match — blowing, actually — with Triton. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (2003) rather useless on Misenus. Someone among Virgil’s patrons must have had a place at Misenum, the Neapolitan suburb named after the herald.
¶ C K Williams’s New Poems: shorter lines, for one thing. A reference to Iraq, in “Blackbird.”
I’d been thinking of Lincoln’s
“…You can’t fool all of the people
all of the time…,” how I once
took comfort from the hope and trust
it implied, but no longer.
Patience, my dear poet; patience.
¶ Clive James on Proust: Just a page or two, but James’s point is that Proust, “the greatest French writer,” infuses all of Cultural Amnesia.
This book you are reading now could easily have been ten times as long if it had contained nothing else but expansions on the notes I have made from reading Proust in several editions over the course of forty years.
¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Peter Rojas, of Engadget. This book has no place in such august company, but I don’t think that I could get through it otherwise. On the Simple Life:
When I decide I want to learn something about a field or an area, I just subscribe to blogs in that area, sometimes at random. For example, about a year ago I decided to learn about widgets. I literally Googled “widgets blog” and found a bunch of blogs. As I read and linked to more blogs, it became obvious what the best blogs in that field were.
I added those to my RSS feed, and deleted some of the other ones that weren’t so good. And that gave me a pretty good sense of what was going on in the widget blogosphere.
It’s a really good way to familiarize yourself with a field. Just start reading the blogs. You won’t need to really spend a lot of time sweating over what is the best, because it will become apparent in a few weeks.
Well, what are you waiting for?
¶ Jessica to Deborah, March 1995:
Enclosed: a killing article by Xopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair, at least I loved it. Did you catch the telly programme about Mother Teresa? I always thought she was just a boring old saint, hadn’t realized she’s a disgusting old fascist.
Deborah to Diana, July 1996:
Reading the obits. of Decca, the Mitford Girls are described variously, as Famous Notorious Talented Glamorous Turbulent Unpredictable Celebrated Infamous Rebellious Colourful & Idiosyncratic. So, take your choice. The D Express has a long article about us called ‘Sex and Power.” I suppose anyone who is married, & most who aren’t, have what is now called Had Sex* at some point in their lives. As for Power I don’t quite see how that comes into it. So why are we different from anyone else.
                                                           Much love, Debo
* Look at the people walking down Oxford St, all products of Having Sex.
As The Mitfords draws to a close, far from wondering what made the sisters different, I’m convinced that Zeus or someone equally Parnassian was involved in their parentage.