Isy Mc > Recent Status Updates

"What is honour compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms ... or the memory of a brother's smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy."

For ARTT1106 - but I think I'll read the other two essays while I'm here, just for fun. Love the start of 'The Painter of Modern Life', but trails off towards the end. Interesting nonetheless. "By 'modernity' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable." "[...] genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered at will"

Wow. This suddenly got really compelling in Act 3 out of nowhere. I guess Shakespeare just woke up halfway through? Absurd comedy juxtaposed with unrelenting, gruesome tragedy. Fascinated by how quickly Titus changes, from cruel victor to grief-stricken father to mad revenger. Lavinia, Aaron and Tamora are so interesting, and I love the rich intertextuality. Collapsing binaries! Human/animal, civilisation/wilderness!

Nothing like a natural disaster to catch up on my reading for uni, I guess.

Book V is so complex that it's taken me three days to finish it. Not complaining though, as it has two of my favourite "spots of time" so far - the Dream of the Arab and the Boy of Winander. Love the former's intertextuality with Cervantes, Descartes, Josephus - a "semi-Quixote", another double for the poet, seeking to save art from the apocalypse; and the sublime, classically Wordsworthian simplicity of the latter.

Why does this feel more and more like a 5 star read as I go on ... truly going to be the most embarrassing rating of my reading life. Anyway. Just finished Book IV, and I'm still obsessed despite myself. Favourite parts: the epic simile of The Prelude as a boat "incumbent o'er the surface of past time", the endless paradoxes and general complexities, and the haunting episode of the Discharged Soldier. Amazing!

I'm actually starting to love The Prelude... Wordsworth hero and bard alike, an epic poem about failing to write an epic poem, crippling imposter syndrome, lovely/aching nostalgia for childhood, fragmented subjectivity juxtaposed with the ultimate assertion of the mind. The boy creates nature, the boy is created by nature! Can't believe that this stupid poet is Stockholm Syndrome-ing me from beyond the grave.

Finally making my way through the ex bane of my existence. Surprisingly, Wordsworth's autobiographical epic is growing on me - hatred turned love-hate. Maybe by the end I might even love it straightforwardly. I still think he can be an egotistical twat (if a self-aware, self-loathing one), but when he gets it right - wow. "But huge and mighty forms that do not live/Like living men moved slowly through my mind [...]"