aamcnamara

"The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will."
--Czeslaw Milosz, "Ars Poetica"

Queens' Play, Dunnett: It took me a strangely long time to read this. Part of it is the difference in narrative styles, I think--it is definitely not structured like today's prose, even on the paragraph/interior-to-a-scene level. Finally got through it, though. I would be interested to see what the next book was like, but it doesn't look like the five-college system has it, and I'm not sure I am devoted enough to ILL it. We'll see.
Strong Poison, Sayers: I am glad I read Gaudy Night first. It means I have way more insight into both of 'em than I would have otherwise--well, okay, technically I suppose I just had to do less work for it. Next one please.
Centuries Ago and Very Fast, Ore: I got this through ILL. A friend spent part of Friday evening doing dramatic readings of the silliest lines she could find in it, so when I actually got around to reading it, I was slightly relieved to find that actually those lines mostly did make sense in context. Since I had mostly gotten it on the strength of finding the title of the book lying around in my head somewhere, I was also happy to find that it was a pretty nice read. It's about a time-travelling immortal gay Paleolithic man; it's told in slivers that mostly aren't quite short stories. It's more about queer people than the mechanics of time-travel, and it's more about mortality and the mechanics of living in a body for a very long time than any question of how or why that happens. It's also, sort of at a slant, about family.
Bells in Winter, Czeslaw Milosz: I have not, in any real sense, read this book of poetry. I can't sit down with a book of poetry like a novel, read through it running the sentences and paragraphs through my fingers like beads, and lay it aside. In many real senses I have not even read one poem in this book. But I have touched some of the beads in the necklace of Bells in Winter, and hovered over some other ones, and put it on and taken it off a couple of times.

...If you were wondering, I really like Czeslaw Milosz's poetry. It might take me a while to get through this book, but I am very much enjoying it. His poetry makes me take the long view--not to think of what my emotions are right now this instant or today, but wonder what I'll see when I look back here, decades on from now. I read his poetry, and then I walk home, and in the first dry autumn leaves I smell what I will smell in thirty years when I come back to visit Mount Holyoke, when all the slang will be impenetrable and the cultural references obscure (to me, I should add); when I will know a wildly different set of people, but maybe some of the same ones; when I will be older and stranger and more like myself.

Which is a lovely mood, but gets no homework done. (But I did wash my clothes.)