Tag Archives: book-reviews

POETS Day! William Makepeace Thackeray

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I was chatting with a guy from New Jersey yesterday. It was cold and glum in Alabama. He was making fun of me for acting as if temperatures in the thirties were Armageddon-ish and I shook my head and mumbled something like “…wouldn’t last a second around here in August… humidity.”

He showed me an amazing foul weather trick so epoch shaking I might deign to call it a life-hack. “If you are ever bothered by the weather,” he said, “take out your phone, pull up your weather app, and bring up Iowa City, Iowa.” He demonstrated. It was 9° with a blue subscript that read “feels like 7°.”

According to Wikipedia, there are 171,000 people living in the greater Iowa City Metropolitan Area. I don’t know how that’s possible. It’s POETS Day. Look outside. Now look at your phone weather app, type in Iowa City, Iowa, and look outside again. There are 341,000,000 people in this country, and in comparison, no matter what it looked like out that window, 340,829,000 of you just realized what a beautiful day you’ve been blessed with.

It’s Friday afternoon. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Have at it.

First, a little verse.

***

I usually come across one or two odd and interesting facts when looking into the lives of poets for these posts, and want as I might, I can’t shoehorn or wrestle them into sense with even the loosest narrative, and I can get pretty loose. I found two this week while reading up on the life of William Makepeace Thackeray and I like them too much to discard. I don’t know if it’s still an aside when you haven’t begun anything to momentarily distract from, but a couple of quick asides if you… whether you mind or not, I guess.

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POETS Day! The Other Side of James Hogg

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Allan, William; James Hogg (1770-1835), Poet (The Ettrick Shepherd) (The Ettrick Shepherd’s House Heating or The Celebration of his Birthday); National Galleries of Scotland

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

It’s almost another work week gone and there’s no sense in waiting for the official end. Call it a POET’S day and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. There are books to read, people to meet, shows to catch. Shave a few hours off a Friday and enjoy.

First, a little verse for you.

***

I didn’t know he was a poet.

Until yesterday I knew James Hogg only as the author The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and I don’t know… a lack of curiosity or preoccupation with whatever shiny thing served as a diversion after reading that novel led me elsewhere. I’ll say that his book came to my attention in the first place when I was reading and reading about Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a book that if you’re unfamiliar, either so fascinates you that a third or fourth reading still reveals something new, or you don’t like it much at all.

The mystery writer Ian Rankin wrote his thesis on Miss Jean Brodie and in an interview he said that the main character claimed to be a descendant of Willam Brodie, a respected 18th century cabinet-maker who socialized with all the right sorts of people and spent his evenings burgling Edinburgh. Apparently, locksmithing was folded into the expected duties of a cabinet man in Scotland during the Age of Enlightenment and he kept key copies. It was a scandal when he was caught and chattering about living a double life commenced. The affair was among the inspirations for Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. According to Stevenson, another was Confessions, a book he said “has always haunted and puzzled me.”

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