I did something stupid to my settings this morning or yesterday evening and made everything vanish from my site. Sorry. Hopefully by the time I publish this it will all be restored.
Metablogging: May 2006 Archives
Because of the enormous flood of spam comments of recent date, I am chaning my commenting policy. There will now be a short (or perhaps lengthy) delay (all depends on when I can get to it) before any comment will be published. I apologize for the inconvenience, but I am spending more time editing out spam than I would do approving the few comments I get.
If you make a comment and it doesn't show up here, simply fire off an e-mail and I'll get to it.
One who stops by on occasion wants to know, "Why do you insist on posting those incredibly obtuse and needlessly complicated bits from poets no one really cares about anyway?" (I paraphrase.)
I answer: Why, if I were to wait to post about a poet some one did care about, I'd have a sum total of zero posts. And by definition aren't most poets incredibly obtuse and needlessly complicated compared to the purveyors of flaccid and rank prose who grace our local news media?
. . .in a nutshell.
from Four Quartets: East Coker V
T.S. EliotSo here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
It was the underlined section that first led me to post, but reading more carefully and more closely, it seemed that the remainder might also serve as comment on the blogosphere.
