Cumulus

 

Cumulus

 

Or stratocumulus I can’t …

The way they seem just

To hang there unmoving

 

White and gray in a bright blue sky

 

Then the distant mountains bluish

The fields a shift of green then

Autumnal yellows toned oranges

Move your gaze back up

Life's renewals

 From a photo taken some years ago in Viladrau

 

Buncrana revisited

 This photo is from a morning trip we took to Buncrana, Ireland on August 9 2019. Some of the landscape we saw on our walk along the river path. Buncrana is in Donegal, on the Inishowen peninsula. The high temperatures in and around Barcelona today make me yearn not only for the the views but also, obviously, for cooler weather. 

The water is Lough Swilly, the town 23 kilometers northwest of Derry, 43 kilometers north of Letterkenny. Hopefully we'll get back there again soon. And with temperaztures down worldwide.

Dalloway Day 2023 correction

 

Woolf and Eliot

 Clarifying briefly, my observation yesterday that discussing good and bad writing takes us to more complex questions will, I’m sure, seem simplistic. Obviously, a large part of literary studies and other disciplines for that matter are “about” such complexities. The essay by T. S. Eliot I mentioned in fact implies some of these matters in terms of whether or not the critic/poet “of our own time, with its elaborate equipment of science and psychological analysis, is even less fitted than the Victorian age to appreciate poetry as poetry.” Virginia Woolf—and a great many people along with her and with Eliot—was asking herself some of the same questions. By 1927, when To the Lighthouse was published, these two Anglo-Modernist writers had developed rather different answers. However a longer commentary on this will have to wait as I am currently outside Barcelona and unable to consult the source books needed to do it proper justice. 

 

 

Dalloway Day 2023

 

I intended to post this salutation closer to this year’s Dalloway Day celebration, in mid-June. Excuses follow, but perhaps it will be of some interest as it stands.

 

More ideas about the poetic aspect of Virginia Woolf’s fiction have come as I’ve gone on with re-reading The Waves. Poetic obviously has different meanings. Poetry or verse, as we might also call poetry that isn’t prose. T. S. Eliot, in a short article titled Poetry in the English Century uses both words. He is writing there about the Augustan writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (depending on how one defines that period). But notably for my short comment here Eliot emphasises the fact that good poets can also write good prose and good prose writers can also write good poetry,

 

One thing that strikes me about this topic in general is that it leads us to other considerations about the successful/unsuccessful features of what we consider to be good writing.

 

And when we start on such additional considerations we are bound to go into ethical questions, political issues, and such. The conversation then becomes longer. But especially in times of crisis like those we face today it is a worthwhile one. Happy Dalloway Day!

three words

 

three words

 

sun hammers my

craniocervical junction          takes

a mallet to say out                  of here

all the while the                      rain

forest is going while while while

Kitchen repñairs

 

Kitchen repairs

 

Try to take it like a vac—time

elsewhere while the builders

undo past cooking oil foils, our

faux marble counter and a

toaster’s antique failings.

 

Time to score a point, dream away.

Elsewhere, you know, have

a think, gild stuff. Purr.