incandescens | ah, sweet post

The day was adequate, but it really perked up when I got home from work to find that post had arrived, and that said post included a copy of the latest WARD from shiny_monkey. Who is a very, very, very nice person indeed. Did I say nice? I understated. Gaiden so pretty.

Also a scan of the latest Saiyuki Reload from flemmings, who is also a very, very, very nice person indeed.

Also, incidentally, a page from the TLS (Times Literary Supplement) that my father forwarded, with a review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Analytical but clearly having enjoyed. ". . . let us simply state that there is something perversely cruel about a writer who begins her story with an orphan finding a surrogate family, then spends five books killing this new family off. [. . .] As a series writer, J.K. Rowling is learning from previous mistakes: where the last two Potters were in danger of becoming flabby, this one feels lean; the story-telling is efficient. And the writer's weakness for expository dialogue -- in which large amounts of back-story are explained to Harry -- is less in evidence here; Rowling is using new, inventive (and, naturally, magical) means to dramatize information. This is a children's writer at the height of her sadistic powers. Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince is taut, witty, effortlessly engaging, and very, very nasty. How we yearn for more." (Peter Lambert)

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THERE is no clearer sign of the absence of originality among modern poets than their disposition to find new topics. Really original poets write poems about the spring. They are always fresh, just as the spring is always fresh. Men wholly without originality write poems about torture, or new religions, or some perversion of obscenity, hoping that the mere sting of the subject may speak for them. But we do not sufficiently realize that what is true of the classic ode is also true of the classic joke. A true poet writes about the spring being beautiful because (after a thousand springs) the spring really is beautiful. In the same way the true humorist writes about a man sitting down on his hat because the act of sitting down on one's own hat (however often and admirably performed) really is extremely funny. We must not dismiss a new poet because his poem is called 'To a Skylark'; nor must we dismiss a humorist because his new farce is called 'My Mother-in-Law.' He may really have splendid and inspiring things to say upon an eternal problem. The whole question is whether he has.

Introduction to 'Sketches by Boz', GK Chesterton