Yeah, they're pretty gay

Picked up a pb copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets, which I have not read since my sophomore year in college more than half a century ago.

Read the first few this morning at Riverside Park, where I had parked under a tree to keep the car from roasting me alive.

Can't beat the elegance and facility of language of his poetry.

The end of La Peste

The ending is so rough.

Tarrou dies hard, watched over by Rieux and his mother, Rieux gets a telegram telling him his wife has died in the sanitarium, and Cottard freaks at the departure of the plague and starts shooting people out of his window.

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

Drove to the South Hills Village where I parked at the Food Court.

Took a walk outdoors, circumnavigating the parking lot.

Then drove to Riverside Park on the South Side on the Mon and parked in the shade of a tree with a view of the road, the river, and the Birmingham Bridge.

Read for a bit more than an hour, Camus, La Peste.

It was Tarrou's autobiographical speech about his rejection of killing and his bonding swim with Doctor Rieux.

Well, that was an afternoon

Proteus:

"O, how this spring of love resembleth

The uncertain glory of an April day;

Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,

And by and by a cloud takes all away."

The Two Gentlemen of Verona (I, iii, 84-87)

A few lines from the end of Act I we get the passage that suggests April is the month to read this very short play. So I did. Today.

The poetry is wonderful, the language supple, beautiful, and fluent, and the thing is stuffed with contests and sallies of wit from start to finish.

To the point of tedium, actually.

There is no action to speak of and the plot, such as it is, doesn’t begin until the top of Act III.

Between Acts II and III I went for a walk at the Bridgeville upper mall, the one with the Longhorn Steak House, the LA Fitness, and the Big Lots whose main entrance is across Washington Road from an Arby’s my late wife used to like.

Just wanted to walk around a different parking lot.

Afterwards, went for an extended drive before going home.

70 degrees F and beautiful, it was, in the burbs of Pittsburgh.

Anyway, finished the play in not much more than two hours or so and had supper, too, after that.

And I must say I agree with Harold Bloom the plot and main characters make this play too slight and silly to even be absurd, morally as well as otherwise.

It is what it is and not everything in Shakespeare is really much good.

Oh, racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny, too.

But those three are everywhere in Shakespeare.

More shallow than a sidewalk puddle, this play.

Not a moment too soon, but maybe not soon enough

About halfway through Middlemarch, Casaubon dies.

Just in time to not issue personal orders to control the rest of wife Dorothea's life after his own death, as he intended, but not soon enough to predate a codicil to his will disinheriting her utterly if she ever marries Will Ladislaw, his young cousin to whom marriage would very likely make her happy.

Oh, what will she do, this sympathetic and brilliant but nevertheless absurdly self-sacrificing young woman, so unaccountably accepting of political, social, and even sexual male dominance in ways and to a degree that our author, George Eliot, was not?

Eh?

Three Love Problems

About halfway through the book there is an excellent, charming scene in which Will and Dorothea speak alone in the library.

Eliot's insight, beautiful prose, humor, and lightness of touch are nowhere better.

Reading Middlemarch.

Lynne Schwartz reports she has been often called the greatest of 19th Century British novelists.

Maybe she is.

Her work is very fine.

What a line

"A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it."

Samuel Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare alludes to the Bard's Antony and Cleopatra, and to Antony's content.

What love.

Update.

Just as I do not expect all real people to think, feel, and act as I would in like circumstances, I neither expect nor demand that of characters in a play.

Come to that, characters in any play are never so monotonous as to think, feel, and act always all alike.

On that point, Johnson is just silly.

About seeking the opinion of someone we trust about someone X

If I don't trust my own opinion about X why should I trust my opinion of who would be a good judge of X?

Just asking.

Journal of the Plague Year

I have abandoned this book out of boredom and irritation at the narrator's annoying, though entirely believable and appropriate to the time and place, rather Calvinist Protestant Christian piety.

I have turned to a volume of Dickens, whose books, Pickwick Papers aside, have never bored me and whose first person narrators have never displayed annoying forms of piety.

Every disorder of the appetite they turn to sin

Canto 6, The Gluttons, the third circle.

Reading The Divine Comedy, Inferno.

John Ciardi.

The second circle was for people caught up in excessive erotic passion.

Dido, for example, and Helen.

No connection is asserted in these cantos to tie these appetitive extravagances in any necessary way to violations of the ten commandments, or indeed any others.

Or to tie them thus to harm to others.

The first circle was for unbaptized innocents, from infants to virtuous pagans.

People seen as morally quite OK.

Clever Alice

Some of the stories are just bizarre.

Reading Grimm.

Fathers and Mothers

Fathers are weak and cowardly, seems to be the lesson.

Mothers - well, step-mothers, anyway - , though strong, are madly evil.

The Handless Maiden.

Reading Grimm.

A developing pattern

A foolish or wicked wife dominates a sensible or good husband, and it doesn't work out well.

So far, three or more tales like that, among them Hansel and Grethel, The Fisherman and His Wife, and Cinderella.

Not one with a foolish or wicked husband dominating a sensible or good wife.

In more than one story a girl finds a prince to marry.

Oddly, it is too blatantly, crudely, even shockingly mercenary to be somehow an offense to feminism.

Reading Grimm.

The Fisherman and his wife

It's the voice of Edward Everett Horton.

All fairy tales are fractured, it seems.

Reading Grimm.

Why do they return to their father?

Twice, at the behest of their bitch stepmother (the editor says their mother in the original version), he has abandoned them to die in the forest.

He would have done better to abandon her!

Ah, when women wear the pants.

How awful things get!

Hansel and Grethel, in B&N's Grimm's Fairy Tales.