![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Aug. 1st, 2017
Reading Life
Aug. 1st, 2017 05:46 pmI am happy to report that I got prose back into my reading life, and have picked back up Burlingame's biography of Lincoln, and I even have a new book on Erika and Klaus Mann, "In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain". As sublime as poetry can be, it can actually be narrowing to always be looking for eternity in a grain of sand. There is much meat and potatoes in the prosaic realities. Reading the discussions between Lincoln and his fellow politicos is at least as worthwhile as any poem.
As it happens, I also had a serious wank session today, taking my laptop to my room and giving my bedding a pretty passionate pounding. It had been awhile. I mention this now, because I do not believe it is a mere coincidence that this is also the time that I got back into prose. I suspect I had been experiencing a new mood of depression, with its own colors of despair, and had simply lost a lot of my appetite for life as I have known it. And now I seem to be a little hungry again - more facts, more porn!
Nevertheless, I picked up something on these travels. Poetry is now a much closer friend of mine than it had been before. I continue to keep a little stack of poetry books on hand, and I still dip into them through my day. I am ready to shift gears at a moment's need. I have even begun another trip through the bracing and claustrophobic world of Oceania and Big Brother. Yes, I am again hungry for everything that I can get, like I am trying to collect the vast sea in my little kid's pail, despite how it mostly just seems to flow in one ear and out the other and back into the sea again.
* * *
A few days later...
I was not able to get back into "1984" after all. At first, I thought, maybe I was not going to get my appetite for novels back. Fortunately, that is not the case. I have been able to get into Jeff Shaara's novels on the American revolution. Maybe I just know "1984" too well, so that there is not any of that hunger to turn the page to see what happens next, and as much as I bow to Orwell, it must be admitted when it comes to literary qualities that he is hardly on par with Nabokov or Thomas Mann, whose paragraphs I can get lost in forever, as "Lolita" and "Magic Mountain" seem to have a lot of the DNA of poetry.
As it happens, I also had a serious wank session today, taking my laptop to my room and giving my bedding a pretty passionate pounding. It had been awhile. I mention this now, because I do not believe it is a mere coincidence that this is also the time that I got back into prose. I suspect I had been experiencing a new mood of depression, with its own colors of despair, and had simply lost a lot of my appetite for life as I have known it. And now I seem to be a little hungry again - more facts, more porn!
Nevertheless, I picked up something on these travels. Poetry is now a much closer friend of mine than it had been before. I continue to keep a little stack of poetry books on hand, and I still dip into them through my day. I am ready to shift gears at a moment's need. I have even begun another trip through the bracing and claustrophobic world of Oceania and Big Brother. Yes, I am again hungry for everything that I can get, like I am trying to collect the vast sea in my little kid's pail, despite how it mostly just seems to flow in one ear and out the other and back into the sea again.
* * *
A few days later...
I was not able to get back into "1984" after all. At first, I thought, maybe I was not going to get my appetite for novels back. Fortunately, that is not the case. I have been able to get into Jeff Shaara's novels on the American revolution. Maybe I just know "1984" too well, so that there is not any of that hunger to turn the page to see what happens next, and as much as I bow to Orwell, it must be admitted when it comes to literary qualities that he is hardly on par with Nabokov or Thomas Mann, whose paragraphs I can get lost in forever, as "Lolita" and "Magic Mountain" seem to have a lot of the DNA of poetry.