Okay, calmed down enough to faff about:

This is not the first time baby tortoises have been very cute. But it is a very excellent instance.

---L.

We interrupt our regularly schedule piffle for a momentary howl.

In RoboHelp HTML, if you de-italicize text in an <i> tag, the result is <i style="font-style: normal;">.

o_O

WHY, ADOBE, WHY???

---L.

And, indeed, there should be nothing to regret for drawing Thor riding a cat. (via)

The cat, OTOH, might regret quite a bit.

... nibble on they tiny feet

---L.

Cycling back to England: A Historical Poem, a quarter of the way in, I've finally given up. Ord had great facility with smooth stanzas that slide down easily, but he had not yet learned that compression rather than expansion strengthens the impact, nor how to use figurative language to heighten rather than simply ornament. Worse than either of those, however, is that the poem does not in fact narrate events in the popular history of England, but rather assumes knowledge and instead refers to them while rendering the poet's very Romantic-era responses to the events. And since Ord is very much a young man, said responses aren't all that interesting.

Also, I've no clue where Ord got the idea that Thor was a Celtic, as opposed to Saxon, god. Nor that the British Celts had no history or even knew what warfare was before Julius Caesar's invasion -- I can only assume he slept through the relevant sections of De Bello Gallico in school.

I have higher hopes for Warner's Albion's England, an Elizabethan poetic history. It's a thoroughly euhemeristic history, in the early parts, but skimming ahead I see some tasty legendary piffle to come.

OTOH, I did (finally) read all the way through The Seasons. Not only did James Thomson teach three generations of readers how to see nature, but his flowing blank verse is a marked contrast to, say, the couplets of Pope with its artfully pointed structures and, for ex, the modern blank verse of A.E. Robinson in its studiously conversational blandness. But an even greater contrast is with Ord, who may have publicly adored Spencer's parts and pilfered his stanza, but Thomson learned real versecraft from the master -- his lines are lush, paying attention to the vowels more closely than anyone I've read but Spencer himself and maybe Keats.

The result is a delight to read -- very much not at all bad poetry. His diction is very much of his time, but what he made of it works quite well. Thomson is at his best when he describes personal experiences of the natural world around him, in Britain, and weakest when he flits across the globe on wings of imagination. As such, I like "Spring" the best of the four, as it stays closest to home. But they're all good and worth the time reading.

---L.

A couple in Alaska find a Japanese kid's football* that had been lost in last year's tsunami, and return it too him. Two weeks later, they find and return a second one. (via)

I've been rather digging the music for concentrating to linked in this MiFi thread. The stuff in the main post has more space drone than I usually want (I'm more of a Groove Salad kind of guy), but it turns out to work well as stated. And some of the other stuff in comments is excellent as well.

This great horned owl is not impressed by your photography skills.


* Or as we quaint Americans like to call it, a soccer ball.

---L.

Random observations:

Just how lonely are the clouds in the Lake District, anyway? And do they wander about? Given the climate, I would think they'd be many and close together, and travel the wind's straight path.

(Yes, yes, I know: in context Wordsworth's saying he was apart from others the way a high cloud is apart from the earth, with an emotional distance. But he's the one who chose to use ambiguous syntax and break the line where he did, creating the easy alternate reading.)

Meanwhile, in the Department of Feeling Uncultured, I hadn't realized that Laurence Alma-Tadema was a woman. Her name was originally Laurense, which is apparently the female form of Laurens, the Dutch Laurence.

(Memo to self: just because I am a male Laurence, doesn't mean it's always a male name.)

If you're in a meeting that includes people of a certain generation, and someone says "Anybody?" and gets no response, the odds are, someone will finally say, "Bueller?"

(My cultural literacy: let me show you how dated it is.)

---L.

Arrived this weekend: a contributor's copy of the current Mythic Delirium containing my bilingual English + Japanese poem about this desert, and fairy tales, and stories, and seasons. Plus of course a whole issue of really nifty stuff by a lot of good poets, many of whom have LJs but most I don't know off the top of my head, aside from sovay and rose_lemberg. You don't have to take just my word for it that it's good, either.

I will say, though, I'm impressed this issue not just with the selection but the arrangement -- time_shark is a canny editor indeed. If I had to chose a single favorite, I think it's "Under the Ashpodel" by Erik Amundsen.

And while I'm on the shameless self-promotion track, a roundup of my week of posts, from last month, on translating Japanese poetry.

And to make up for that, a signal boost: stillnotbored's April first line contest is on.

Bonus linky: a blog devoted to long-distance love poems. (I'd REALLY like to know where this was when I was in grad school. "Waiting for the WWW to be invented" is not a valid answer.)

---L.

Something that got cut in the final round from the new hundred poems project. Not because it's not good, but because I already had Hero and Leander and Orchestra and didn't have "The Fairies Farewell."

Ovid's Banquest of Sense* (text starts here) by George Chapman is a very odd duck. It is, essentially an Elizabethan Ovid/Julia the Elder Historical RPF in verse. What's odder than all that, however, is that is both highly sensuous, dealing with a seduction organized by treating each of the canonical five senses in turn, and strongly metaphysical, with passages that but for the meter could almost have been written by Donne. It is also highly erotic, though the story breaks off before the seduction is consummated (darn it).

All of which ought to clearly make it an Ovidian erotic narrative. But it does not fit well among others of the genre, most notably because it's Ovidian by being about Ovid rather than imitating him. It is also strikingly more original than most, Hero and Leander being its best rival in that regard.

I do wish it were better known.


* Don't be put off by the title -- in modern idiom, it would be "banquet of the senses." The Elizabethan orthography of the only text I can find online is, however, understandably rebarbative.

---L.

Yanno, I had a nifty post lined up, but this photo made my day, and is therefore much more important to share.

All thanks should be directed at janni.

---L.

So during last weekend's camping trip, after dinner* we were singing annoying songs at each other, as one does. And someone succeeded at annoying all too well. I STILL haven't gotten "On the Good Ship Lollypop" out of my head.

By way of attempted distractions, various short movies:

Lotte Time Lapse: from newborn to twelve years old in under three minutes using weekly video snippets instead of stills, which as many have noted adds an interesting animated quality to the progression. (via)

An asteroid flyby.

Shakespeare sonnets as pretty good modern pop songs played on period instruments, with streaming examples. (via)


* Feel free to imagine this was around a campfire, the usual setting for this sort of thing. However, comma, we've heavy restrictions on open fires these days -- instead, it was over Uno, which is almost the same thing only with fewer marshmellows.

---L.

While spending the weekend camping in the Chiricahua Mountains, the oldest and largest prickly pear in our yard bloomed:



Also, it broke 100°F -- the second earliest it has done so on record. Welcome to late spring.

By way of Not Thinking about all that, some links that recently came to my attention:

This year's Lyttle Lytton Contest winners.

The Genji reading companion, including chapter commentaries and comparisons of the Seidensticker & Tyler translations against each other and the original. The project seems to have stalled after 12 chapters, alas, but until then there's good and useful stuff in there.

Sonnet to a Clam by one John Godfrey Saxe.

---L.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's a WWI German soldier wearing a nightshirt, standing in front of a latrine, with a cat on his helmet. (via)

Lolcat caption is left as an exercise for reader.

---L.