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Monday, June 24, 2019

heroics



heroics

no i don’t want the job
two decades & all those close calls
you’re kidding
detained by the queenly nymph Kalypso
as Lattimore translates     sound cozy
think it over
here’s the half hollow sound
of a windblown cold drinks can
rolling along the street
how long’s it been

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Pride month and Dalloway Day


Pride month and Dalloway Day

In Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway the lead protagonist Clarissa Dalloway is described by a previous suitor, Peter Walsh, as “the perfect hostess.” It is, as I think most readers of the book would agree, an apt description, for throughout the fictional day in June Woolf created, Clarissa’s is the character whose openness to celebration drives the social element and expresses lamentation for the death of “that young man”—her vision of Septimus Smith, the person who symbolizes so many war dead. The fact that the novel, in typical lyrical fashion, takes place in summer appears to me as another of its important life positive features. Obviously the tragic aspect of death is called up—in relation both to war horrors and to the symbolic individual portrayed there as dying—but the social importance of creating peace takes precedence. Hence, one might add, the emphasis on the party that Clarissa aims for at the outset of the book and hosts at its conclusion. Polyphonic novels (almost all novels to some extent, but especially satiric ones) stress celebration by invoking what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as “carnival”, the discourse of everyday life and especially the life of the popular festival as opposed to that of officialdom, especially dictatorial officialdom.

But Dalloway Day as a single day coincides with June, the beginning of summer and now the month when many of the world’s cities celebrate gay pride or just pride in loving as one chooses, that hard won right which Modernist art and the art of today work to present and preserve. 

So, happy Dalloway Day to all and happy pride years! May we continue to present and preserve in peace….!