Let me tell you a story.

[constance]

Once upon a time, there was a wondrous traveling singer whose songs
made grown men weep and grown women huddle together in wary
enthrallment. He sang for kings and impoverished college DJs alike,
and this man, of prodigious acoustical and electric power, was known
to the world as Robyn Hitchcock.

And then there was an ordinary woman, an ageing and increasingly
musically disoriented fan, who, when newfangled trends in music
threatened to overwhelm her, turned to songs such as "I'm an Old
Pervert" and "Uncorrected Personality Traits" for comfort, and,
inexplicably and perhaps somewhat disturbingly, found it there.

This is a true story, and it is, strange to say, also a love story.
The two of them lived in harmony together with their specters and
creepily funny imagery, and things were good, and the woman in
question has been singing the aforementioned two songs in her head,
separately and sometimes mixed together, for the last week and it
makes her happy.

The end.

:::

This morning I got to work and there were pancakes with maple syrup
and orange juice. And there is a new laptop wending its way to me to
replace my old laptop which (like Kevin Costner in Message in a Bottle)
died tragically in a terrible storm a few weeks ago and to also replace
the new old laptop which turned out not to be such a good idea and
which I will now maybe have to resell, and I am wearing blue jeans and
a hoodie and I am sitting in a cubicle with sunshine warming the back
of my head, and I got, for once, an entirely adequate amount of sleep
last night, and I got my tax refund too, and I am in a lovely mood and
I hope you are as well.

Kisses to you are being sent out over the airwaves. I hope you get them.

Comments

[alkaloid.livejournal.com]

It's like having a wife and a dead wife. :-*

:-*!

[tofty.livejournal.com]

AHAHAHAhahaf;kiujrpoi934u09y

Or getting run over by the cars she used to drive.

Re: :-*!

[alkaloid.livejournal.com]

He must have a strange love life, now that I think about it.

Re: :-*!

[tofty.livejournal.com]

He is strange all the way around! That's what I love about him.

I had to share your letter to your client to a RL friend of mine who's in advertising. I hope you don't mind! I checked to make sure the post was public before I C/Ped it.

Re: :-*!

[alkaloid.livejournal.com]

:) I had a tape of a concert he did in San Francisco that I played until it got stuck in my old car's tapedeck and had to be disemboweled. :< I do like his acoustic/single instrument accompaniment stuff better than the commercial recordings. They show off the wonderful lyrics. :)

Oh, that's no problem. :) Share away.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I'm so so happy to see you back on LJ. I went to visit you occasionally when you lived in that other neighborhood, but it kind of felt like conversations you have with people in your dreams, where you feel you've made some sort of contact but it certainly isn't the normal kind.

I owe you two e-mails, though I will probably only send you one.

[tofty.livejournal.com]

My other neighborhood is kind of dreamlike? Sort of like walking in a fog and encountering another person every now and then in the featureless landscape.

email! :D:D:D:D

Also, I saw the question you posted in beth's journal. Did you get the answers you were looking for? Because I'm a Regency/Heyer aficionado myself, and if you ever wanted some historically accurate author recs, I could give you some.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I didn't get recs and I would love some. There are so damned *many* regency books, and since I don't know all that much about the period, I can't always tell if a book is reliable or not (unless it has a tell like the one I mentioned whose heroine was named Lynette).

This may be more than you ever really wanted to know.

[tofty.livejournal.com]

Well! :D I'm happy to be of service, and also to talk about one of the few things in the world about which I have slightly more than a layman's knowledge.

First of all, do you want only fiction, or would you like some nonfiction? Not history books exactly. Like, How-People-Lived-In-The-Regency kind of stuff. There are quite a few of them, and some are geared specifically to Regency novelists.

As for fiction, no one, really and truly, is better than Georgette Heyer for social milieu--the language especially is meticulously accurate, and she's also really good for details of the Napoleonic Wars (see Arabella and Cotillion for the former, and An Infamous Army and A Civil Contract for the latter. Hahahahah, and The Unknown Ajax and Sylvester, besides being two of my very favorites, have the most wonderful examples of dandies gone awry, if you want Fashion in the Extreme. And I'd also read Frederica while I was at it, because it's such a complete delight, and also because one of the boys in particular is like a little dictionary of early 19th-Century science. (One rule of thumb to follow: Heyer wrote over half a century's worth of books, and her early ones are heavily mannered and sometimes hard going. The later her books are written, the more accessible her writing style is.)

But there are some modern writers who do their work carefully and thoroughly. They aren't quite as much fun to read, and of course the heroines and heroes are having sex all over the place which is just not done, but they're all fine and trustworthy writers. I'd look for Mary Jo Putney's Fallen Angels series--see the list here (http://www.maryjoputney.com/completebooks.htm)--as well as The Rake and The Diabolical Baron. Any of Mary Balogh's books, since I think almost all of them are Regencies. Jane Feather's V series (Virtue, Vixen, Velvet, Valentine, Violet, Vanity, and Vice). Ooh, and see Edith Layton's Love in Disguise, The Game of Love, and Surrender to Love for accounts of life on the fringes and in the Regency underworld. Carla Kelly's books aren't quite in the same tier, I don't think, but she's accurate and does her homework, and her Miss Grimsley's Oxford Career is a nice encapsulation of women's educational options and Oxford life during the Regency.

(A caveat, though. I don't know what it is about modern historical novelists who feel the urge to purposefully make their characters "revolutionary" by putting ideas in their heads that weren't actually articulated until years later--Patrick O'Brian is guilty of this, and so are a lot of the above novelists--so beware any sort of breakthrough perpetrated by a main character.)

And a lot of the books above might be out of print, since they were written over a period of years, and so, you know, if you make it over to alibris, you should search for Clare Darcy, who wrote (I think) in the seventies and who comes closer in spirit to Heyer than anyone else I've ever read.

That should be enough to get you going, yes? I can give you more authors if you like, and if you just want to be entertained, there're authors who're thrilling reads, but whose research is not so obviously thorough.

If you'd like those NF books or further details, just let me know; and I'd love to hear about your project if you ever feel like talking about it!

[tofty.livejournal.com]

Huh. That first ? should be a !

[miraminx.livejournal.com]

This term I'm teaching trying to teach literary analysis to undergrads. Last week we began the dreaded poetry section. Hit any undergrad and you get the knee-jerk answer, "I hate poetry." "Why?" "It's hard. I don't understand it." (There's a point to this story, really. Just bear with me).

In an effort to liven things up, I brought in a couple of poems in English. The first one begins,

Blinking on and off it's the Queen of Eyes
With her carapace shell and her black lace thighs
I don't know why she never gets anywhere with you

[etc.]

So we talked about the imagery in the poem, the use of metaphor and allusion, the use of repetition, etc. and then I said, "I've got the poet reciting this on CD. Would you like to hear it?" "OK," they said numbly.

Three minutes later: Prof. Minx is yelling, "Look! Poetry is all around you! But you call it MUSIC! You're surrounded by poetry in your daily life! Pay attention to it!" And the students are sitting there thinking, "My God, she's really gone right round the twist now."

The kicker? Today in class a student said, "I don't like poetry. It's hard and I don't understand it."

You know all the students in that class are posting angsty song lyrics in their livejournals.

[tofty.livejournal.com]

Robyn Hitchcock, avant-garde poet! I love it.

And this is thing about teaching that would just get to me: standing up and talking about things I love and want other people to learn to love also, and meeting that enormous wall of indifference, and nothing I say makes the slightest bit of difference or the shallowest impression.

Man, I have nightmares about this. I don't know how you do it, I really don't.

Re: You know all the students in that class are posting angsty song lyrics in their livejournals.

[miraminx.livejournal.com]

Robyn Hitchcock, avant-garde poet! I love it.

I did have lots of fun picking out a song that would work as a poem. It helps that "Queen of Eyes" is one of my all-time favorites.

As for the wall of indifference, in my optimistic moments I think about the students who come back a year or two or five years later and say, "That class was really important to me" or "I didn't realize it at the time but I learned a lot".

Plus, you know, they pay me.